“M Y LIFE IS not your porn,” read one poster. “We should be able to live, not survive,” declared another. The women brandishing…
“M Y LIFE IS not your porn,” read one poster. “We should be able to live, not survive,” declared another. The women brandishing them in the centre of Seoul, South Korea’s capital, wore red clothes and large sunglasses. They had covered their heads with baseball caps or broad-brimmed hats. The headgear and glasses serve partly to ward off the sun, but mainly to make the protesters unrecognisable to men who might be hostile to their cause: the fight against molka, videos which are filmed using cameras hidden in public toilets, school changing rooms or even women’s homes, and then posted on the internet. The cameras, disguised as clocks, pens or light bulbs, are bestsellers. Police register thousands of cases every year, but perpetrators are rarely caught and punished. The protesters (pictured) believe that this is because officials do not take women’s concerns seriously. “Stop the unfair sexist legal system,” runs one of their chants.
The red-clad women, who have turned out in their tens of thousands on several occasions since the spring and are planning their final protest of the year in late December, are the most visible part of a wave of activism against sexism in South Korea, where spycams in toilets are not the only problem vexing women.
Despite its material wealth, South Korea was ranked 118th out of 144 countries last year in the World Economic Forum’s measure of equality between the sexes. The average South Korean woman makes only two-thirds as much as the average man. Several cases have come to light recently in which companies deliberately and systematically discriminated against female job applicants, even though that is illegal. A group of male executives at KB Kookmin Bank, for instance, lowered women’s scores and raised men’s on a recruitment test, to ensure more men were hired. The case wound up in court, but the executives received only suspended sentences; the bank was fined a mere $4,500. Although young women are better educated on average than their male peers, many of them are pushed out of the workforce after having children, either for lack of good child care or because companies simply will not take them back.
In terms of appearance and behaviour, women and men are held to wildly different standards.
