"The enemy is not the enemy": Discussion Highlights from Weeks Two and Three

Your thoughts on Parts Two and Three of "Flowers of Fire"

Next week will be our dialogue on the last section of Flowers of Fire, and the following week, we’ll have our live zoom chat with readers. As we near the home stretch, here’s a roundup of reader comments on Part II (“Where Did All the Girls Go”) and Part II (“My Life is Not Your Porn”).

A major question for readers was: how can you respond to terrible injustice without hardening your heart? A.J. wrote:

A theme in each chapter and story Jung presents is a sense of the shared pain and resentment that women in South Korea felt over their awful mistreatment by men in their society, especially online. This communal pain and anger creates the kind of solidarity necessary for effective social change, but it can easily perpetuate the desire for revenge. Those emotions need some sort of outlet individually and collective. Can this be done in a healthy way at such a large scale, when the group that is mistreated is so large (ie all women)? I think addressing a group’s shared sense pain and anger is one of the difficulties of contemporary gender discourse. How can men and women acknowledge the fraught dimensions of their present and historical relations to the other without falling into the snares of revenge and contempt?

Elizabeth offered a guess at the desired mindset:

A phrase comes to mind: “The enemy is not the enemy.” (That is, the problem is, or should be, the common enemy.)

At no point in these sections does it seem like women and men share a common project or agree on what the problem to be solved is. Without that shared desire, it’s hard to unify.

In the next section, focused on spycams and sextortion, many readers were shocked at how prevalent these abusive acts were.

Serena Sigillito

wrote:

Somehow, I think I had gotten the impression that the rise in young male anti-feminist incels in South Korea was a reaction against the South Korean feminist movement in the wake of #MeToo. I hadn't realized how incredibly misogynistic (and truly, truly so--not in the flippant way that word is so often used) the culture was. I can't imagine growing up never, ever feeling safe from voyeurism and exploitation, even in my own home with the blinds drawn. It makes me so much more sympathetic to South Korean women who embrace 4B.

I was also shocked by the leniency that child pornography is met with in the South Korean legal system (and muted response from the culture at large). I often criticize the sexual culture in the US for seeing consent as the only determiner of sexual ethics, but at least we still uphold that bar, as low as it is, and still retain a broadly shared sense of repulsion at the sexual abuse of children.

Brendan Hodge

wondered how America has escaped this scale of problem:

I wonder if, despite the ubiquity of online porn in our own culture, that there was more of a lingering sense that it was depraved and not something you should be making yourself?

But then, there was some popular 80s movie that was basically about spying on girls in the shower, wasn't there? (Porky's?)

And there have certainly been plenty of high profile "sex tape" scandals.

I dunno, but this issue is clearly a massive betrayal of any sense of social contract between humans and between the sexes. I can see why South Korean feminism is so adversarial.

Sarah cautioned us against assuming we’re relatively free of spycams:

I do know that sometimes these things *do* happen on a mass scale in the US. Thousands of cameras at Airbnbs have been seized!

Melanie Bettinelli

connected the struggle in South Korea back to a much earlier advocate for women:

I was rather delighted to read this post in parallel with a post about medieval writer Christine de Pizan's defense of women:

"The Romance of the Rose was regarded as a comprehensive guide to courtship in medieval France and Christine saw the work and the attitudes it reflected as symptomatic of an abusive culture that allowed men to act with disregard for female wellbeing. In The Book of the City of Ladies and several earlier works, Christine describes what she sees as a widespread issue with male treatment of women. She laments the number of women who she has seen fall victim to deceptive and exploitative behaviour, abandoned thoughtlessly when a more appealing romantic prospect presented itself to their lover or even husband. She extolls the innate virtues of women, who she claims are by nature faithful, loving, and gentle: "Many times women are deceived, because they are simple, and do not think to assume the worst.” She then implores men to preserve these virtues by behaving chivalrously and protecting the weaker gender."

It’s a long long relay race to advocate for compassionate, complementary relations between the sexes.