"To Object For the Objectified" by Eju Ro
One spring day in 2016, in a public bathroom of the bustling Gangnam area, a young woman was stabbed to death by a man she had never met before.
“I did it because women have always ignored me.” Despite these chilling words, the murder was not ruled a hate crime, revealing a disheartening truth about Korean culture: for centuries, women have been considered mere subordinate objects that should serve men.
The historical source of these values lie in the culture’s Confucian roots. The hierarchical “Five Relationships,” including parent/child or husband/wife, are fundamental to Korean culture. The husband/wife hierarchy, therefore, strictly enforces that women today should still fulfill a servile role; this is evident with the lingering effects of female infanticides from the late 1900s, as well as the tens of thousands of women who have been forced out of the workforce after marriage to fulfill traditional familial duties. Other Confucian values like yin-yang emphasize the gender dichotomy, in which the man (yin) is dominant over the woman (yang), who is in turned restricted to compliance or chastity. The synthesis of such Confucian virtues constructs the cultural fabric of modern South Korean society in which women are vulnerable to misogyny, discrimination, and objectification.
Today, Korean women struggle with the persistence of those old values with the added challenges of new technologies. The KPop industry, which Korea often boasts as a modern success, heavily exploits the society’s objectification of young women. With young female groups trained for years by their employers to act “sexy” and “cute” that either hypersexualize or infanticize, they are coached to perform sexually provocative dances that showcase their bodies. A recent female idol audition program, Produce 101, displayed 101 smiling, forcibly “cute” girls in short skirts, appealing to the male audience as objects to be selected and “picked up” in a song titled “Pick Me.” The inherent structure of this industry worth nearly 5 billion USD is led by powerful male executives who promote these misogynistic cultural values, using the internet to reinforce these cultural beliefs that women should be viewed in a purely sexual, submissive manner.
In addition, new technologies have created new ways to further objectify women, as illustrated by the recent “spycam” phenomenon. In over 30 hotels across the country, footage of women was live-streamed without their knowledge. Thousands of tiny cameras were found in public women’s bathrooms, hidden in stall walls, in coffee cups on toilets, in the mirrors of hotel bathrooms. As a result of these technologies, women have been exploited and denied control of their bodies, particularly in locations that should provide bodily autonomy and privacy. While women have been objectified and dominated by individuals such as fathers and husbands for centuries, today they are exploited by strangers to be viewed, shared, consumed by thousands on the internet.
Despite the enduring misogyny, however, many women now protest against normalized cultural values. Following the Gangnam murder, I noticed the colorful wall of post-it notes covering the entrance to Gangnam station, near where the murder occured. One of them caught my eye: “If she was killed for being a woman, I could have been her. I’m just lucky I survived.” She was an innocent, nameless woman. She could have been me. The post-its’ raw emotional ability to elicit my anger, and their refusal to shrink in the face of deeply ingrained misogyny, demonstrate a key for the future of female empowerment in
Korea: communication between women, and platforms like these that facilitate increased solidarity, are crucial for fundamental shift in perception.
Shortly after the spycam epidemic broke out, women took to the streets and social media in a “#MyLifeisNotYourPorn” movement, utilizing social media to connect individuals for solidarity that can challenge overlooked misogyny. Similarly, notable KPop female idols like Irene from the group Red Velvet began actively identifying as feminists on social media, sharing her interest in feminist books despite backlash. While these modern protests are emerging, to propel the movements forward requires greater supportive groups and tighter connections between women via the internet. The empowerment of women requires increased awareness and education that recognize the urgent need for a departure from certain Confucian roots. Rather than allowing modern technologies to become reinforcements of normalized female objectification, technological platforms should be utilized as a tool for amplifying the opinions and experiences of the marginalized to raise awareness. To shatter the long-established Confucianist oppression—and to ensure that the woman murdered in the bathroom will be remembered as a call for change.