There was an infamous flasher who lurked around the school gate. He was a local who’d been showing up at the same time and place for years…On cloudy days, he would appear at the empty lot that directly faced the windows of the all-girls’ classroom eight. Jiyoung was in that class in the eighth grade.
— Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo
The recent Jeffrey Toobin “incident” of his masturbatory penile exposure during a work call with colleagues at The New Yorker enraged me. And while it was welcome news that The New Yorker has fired him, though not citing a reason—the lack of professionalism during a work call should be obvious. His other employer, CNN, where he serves as head legal analyst, said that following the “Zoom incident,” Toobin “asked for some time off” and that the network had granted it. He will be just fine.
My anger has to do with not just the incident itself but also the subsequent jokey “there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I” responses from the pundit lad-o-sphere, steamrollering over the fact that most women first involuntarily encounter the weaponized penis as children. I was 11 in rural Minnesota when first exposed to a flasher on the street who also threatened me with a broom handle. The response by the male adults in my life to my tears and upset were gales of laughter. The flasher, a drifter, lurked around our small town for days, unbothered by police or other authorities, until he tried flashing a well-built woman who got in a physical altercation with him and he was driven from town. Just a few years later, when I was barely an adolescent, I tried to place an ad in our town newspaper to sell my horse. My parents grabbed the phone out of my hands when they heard me shouting, “I don’t know how long a horse’s penis is, my horse is a mare!”—me not understanding that the man with the trustworthy, inquiring adult voice was not interested in purchasing my horse but was assaulting me via phone. A quick survey of friends suggests my experience is not unique but rather very typical, how this hostile atmosphere begins when girls are still children, continues with everyday misogyny (including impossible standards set by advertising), and proceeds when the weaponized penis enters the workplace. Working for years at an investment bank, a call asking a trader about price/earnings ratios would often devolve into the equivalent of horse-penis talk. For example, when pictures of a colleague’s a new baby were met with a vulgar observation by our section chief about how big the newborn’s penis was. Or when an announcement of new female analysts featured Playboy centerfolds instead of employee pictures. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hang up. Instead I had to endure this just to do my job—and it was clear I was being docked invisible points for being “overly sensitive.”
In economics, this concept of negative collateral effects of an action is called “disutility.” The poisoning of the environment and climate change would be a disutility of the energy sector. Which is why disutility is often never looked at. And when it is, it is relegated to less-than exciting (to the self-described “alpha” trader), marginalized fields like economic sustainability. It’s something I encountered only because of my interest in global developmental economics—because it comes up as a lone STEM-voice of dissent in discussions of why not just send all our old toxic iPhone trash to undeveloped countries and pay them (minimally) for the inevitable cancer they will get (See also: Theory of Competitive Advantage).
I was struck, then, at a number of recent novels set in Korea looking at the cost of sexism baldly and directly. In fact, what has been described as the Korean #MeToo movement began as a grenade that went off in the insular Korean literary community: in 2017, the Hwanghae Literature ran a feminist issue; in it a poem, “Monster,” by Choi Young-mi accused “En,” a fictional character of sexual misconduct. The details of “En” match up directly with Ko Un, arguably Korea’s most famous poet and novelist, oft-cited as Korea’s best hope for the Nobel Prize and whose work appears in most middle school and high school textbooks. Other Korean women quickly reified this accusation, suggesting Ko had gone decades unpunished for such conduct, for using his stature to sexually harass young female writers . Ko responded in a nuclear fashion, suing Choi for one billion won ($886,500) for defamation. But now that Pandora’s box has been opened, the spotlight has also shined on the movie and K-pop industry as well. Even the mayor of Seoul, who received unequivocal praise for his handling of the Covid crisis, became embroiled in his own sexual harassment scandal, and committed suicide after the allegations were made public.
The novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, translated in its elegant minimalism by Jamie Chang, tells a story of a young housewife who seems to be going through a nervous breakdown and extreme depression. But, in some ways, when we see her extremely typical but psychologically and physically violent coming of age, in a dispassionate narration that not only makes the horror more total, it seems less a breakdown than a normal response to being a girl and then a young woman dealing with everyday misogyny. In the case of the flasher in Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, when the adults brush it off, some bolder girls jump the flasher, tie him up, and bring him to the police station. Jiyoung is a tentative person and it doesn’t escape her notice that the girls who rise up to defend themselves are then punished by their school. She manages to get into college, gets a boyfriend, but overhears her male friends describing her as “spat-out gum” because her boyfriend broke up with her. She is similarly dismissed when seeking employment. It seems clearer and clearer to her that taking a stand or resisting societal norms doesn’t get the rebels anywhere. She is cognizant of and frustrated by her lack of options, and half decides, half falls into marriage and childbearing, holding out hope the conventional route will get her some modicum of satisfaction. She even gives up her job, which gave her a level of independence and self-actualization, even though she didn’t like the job per se, which she realizes only once she’s quit. But she finds out later that even work was sullied: shortly after she’d left, a scandal erupted when it was discovered that the male security team set up spycams in the bathrooms, uploading images to a porn site and to male coworkers. Thus, the routes of possible escape or alternatives fade away.
Cho, a television scriptwriter, said in an interview that she wrote the book in two months because her own life, basically, provided the entire backdrop she needed. The book hit a nerve in Korea and became a bestseller—not just in Korea but internationally; it’s been translated into 18 languages.
Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (translated by Deborah Smith) is another bestseller with a wide audience in the English-language world. More atmospheric than plotted, it centers around a Korean housewife who suddenly stops eating meat after having a disturbing dream. Her indifferent and unloving husband tries to adapt, but at a family gathering her refusal to eat meat becomes insulting to her father, who goads her husband and brother into force feeding her meat. She fights back and ends up institutionalized; her husband, the narrator, is left pondering her putative delusions and the mental instability of a woman who won’t submit to the behavior men want to see from her.
If I Had Your Face by Korean American author Frances Cha follows a group of young women who happen to live in the same building as they navigate lives in Seoul, a glittery place of neon and high-rises, and a place that is widely known as the plastic surgery capital of the world. A place where an estimated one in three women will elect to have a procedure before the age of 30, and where it is impossible to merely take the subway and not see ads promising life transformation—for men and women, but more for women—everywhere). The exquisitely beautiful, cosmetically enhanced Kyuri works at a “room salon,” a fancy place where men pay a premium to consort only with the “prettiest” women. Her roommate is a natural-faced artist dating the rich son of a chaebol family. Down the hall is Ara, a mute hairdresser, whose plain-looking roommate Sujin has a dubious dream to undergo expensive and painful plastic surgery to achieve Kyuri’s looks and work in a similar salon. Sujin’s quest for a beauty she feels will make her happy and financially stable is long and painful. Somewhat more peripherally, the women are aware of the young mother Wonna, on the first floor, who is swimming against not just impossible standards of beauty and sexism but also a cutthroat economy, which was memorably limned in Bong Jun-Ho’s award winning Parasite. These obstacles may make the college dreams she has for her children just an illusion.
Looked at it one way, these novels share a depressing commonality of women ground down or driven “crazy” by an unescapable patriarchy where misogyny is not just baked in, but baked into older women’s (i.e., the in-laws) non-support of the younger. Adding to the collection of fiction, Choi Seung-ja‘s newly released poetry collection, Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me (translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong), declares poems “short as a shriek,” both witness and battle cry that reminds us that canons full of male authors gloss over societal structures that have kept women largely silent in literature as well as politics and culture via a strict and narrow set of rules of what is “acceptable” behavior–and art–by women. Korean poetry is often marked by the pastoral, and poetry by women comes with expectations to be lyrical and decorous in subject. Choi, then explodes that idea. For instance, Korean culture reveres the seasons, autumn is often considered the most attractive season for its vivid colors infused with melancholy because of the nearness of winter. Choi’s “Dog Autumn” begins with:
Dog autumn attacks.
Syphilis autumn.
And death visits
one of twilight’s paralyzed legs.
Spring, the season of renewal, is also considered an attractive, tender season, with flowers like azalea and cherry blossoms representative of its beauty and ephemerality. In Choi’s hands “Spring” is
…of the lonely, unmarried thirty-three-year-old woman…
In the spring, plants and grass bloom,
and even garbage grows fresh.
The trash pile grows bigger in my mouth.
I cannot swallow it or vomit it up.
Readers would be shortchanging themselves to think of these books as a kind of anthropological look at a Confucian society that favors males. These books fit in perfectly with contemporary English-language narratively inventive novels looking at women’s lives, recent examples that come to mind includes the comedic (but ultimately serious) Fleishmann Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a novel that also uses the wife’s absence to make points about the structures of matrimony and sexism. There is also a hard-to-classify novel about motherhood, Helen Phillips’s The Need that uses tropes of horror (a great choice) to examine motherhood and female agency.
These works, however, tend to not overtly reference the structures of patriarchy and misogyny the way the Korean novels do, drawing straight lines from these societal structures, that are largely out of women’s controls, and showing that even recognizing and resisting them isn’t a clear path to equality (or even equity). In the end, withdrawal, absenting one’s self from normal existence in the most disruptive way possible, is one of the few “effective” strategies to draw attention to these women’s stories. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 in particular unselfconsciously emphasizes its themes, unafraid of seeming didactic. With mini essays about gender statistics and rates of labor force participations, embedded with footnotes referencing Pew and Guttmacher type statistics, this is a novel through its narrative inventiveness fusing fact and fiction (not unlike Melville’s digressions on the whaling industry), we can see Kim Jiyoung’s story placed within a context of an entire country, for what are individual data points, but actual individuals?
In the end, Ko Un’s billion-won suit against the poet Choi Young-mi was dismissed, for, as the Korea Herald reported, Choi’s consistent testimony and that of other witnesses convinced the Seoul Central District Court that she was telling the truth. Choi thanks the judiciary for “bringing justice,” but the truth is, while fending off Ko’s power-play of a public lawsuit, she was still charged the disutility of the damages she suffered from Ko, to her career, her time and peace of mind. Similarly, for every woman who’s had to put up with a hostile workplace—like a man masturbating during a work meeting in front of his female colleagues—this is a kind of tax that, like gender pay disparities, should be reconsidered and compensated. But as Cho Nam-Joo writes in her novel with men continuing to hold the reins of power, it’s no surprise what women do continues to be undervalued. Kim Jiyoung gives it all up to be the best mother, only to be called a “mom-roach” by some young office lads having coffee in the same park where she, buckling with fatigue, is taking her baby out in the stroller, the damages she’s undergone woefully and forever unacknowledged: “Probably because the moment you put a price on something, someone has to pay.”
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