Thread by @KingBaeksu

On Monday evening, I met with a Korean doctor I know who runs her own small clinic in Gangnam, in southern Seoul.

She’s in her forties and lives alone with her daughter, who currently studies Sociology at Ewha Womans University [sic], the top women's university in South Korea..

"She’s very interested in feminism, but I’m not sure what kind of job she she can get with that," she laughed.

I was curious about her views on the topic of discrimination against women in South Korea these days.

Before starting her own clinic around fifteen years ago, she had worked at a large hospital in Seoul.

At the time, she said, female doctors had less freedom to enter the department of their choice, but these days that was no longer the case.

"Are there any other forms of 'systemic discrimination' against female doctors these days?" I asked.

"There are so-called '3D' (i.e., 'dirty, difficult and dangerous') departments for medical doctors, such a cardiac surgery, that many doctors don’t like."

"So women have to do that more than men?" "No, no," she replied.

I was confused as to why she had mentioned this in response to a question about "systemic discrimination" against female doctors.

"Anything else?" I asked. "Such as salary, for example?"

She said that when doctors start out, there is no salary differential based on gender. However, if female doctors have children and have to take time off, that can affect their salary when they return to work due to an "experience gap."

"Well, they get a two-year head start on male doctors since they don't have to do military service, right? So if they have one child and take two years off, wouldn't it basically even out?"

In my experience, the issue of military service is always a touchy topic when dialoguing with Korean feminists, and tone of our conversation became somewhat cooler after this.

"Anything else?" I asked.

"Women doctors don't experience much discrimination these days, but there is still a lot of gender discrimination in Korea."

"Such as?" I pressed, but received no clear examples.

After this, she discussed divorcing four years ago. Fortunately, her daughter was fully grown at that point.

I mentioned that my own mother had divorced my father when I was still in diapers, and that I had had a sucky childhood as a result, but according to feminists she was a "strong and independent woman."

My own view was that she had been quite selfish.

"Traditionally, the Korean family is very strong," I continued by way of contrast, and was immediately cut off.

"Because of women's sacrifice!" she retorted, and then laughed to take off the edge of her comment.

I suggested that many Korean men worked like slaves at their jobs, and that this was a form of "sacrificing" for the family as well, but she was unimpressed by this comparison.

I made it clear that if wives wanted to work outside the home, I fully supported that, but it was obvious that introducing the male perspective was unwanted.

"Actually, my daughter doesn’t want to marry," she said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because there are too many people on this planet. She thinks we need to decrease the world’s population."

"Then your family line will end. Is that OK?"

"It’s fine," she said. I agreed that overpopulation was a problem, but noted that the response of elites in the West to declining birthrates was to ramp up immigration, and as a result the population there was growing, not shrinking.

I suggested that South Korea was likely to follow the same path, and that according to some estimates, the percentage of non-ethnic Koreans here could be as high as 45% by 2050. "Is that OK?"

"Sure," she said. "There’s nothing to be done. Korea is already 'global.'"

"What happens if foreigners here don't care so much about preserving Korean culture, customs and traditions? In a hundred years, Korean culture could be completely unrecognizable."

"Nobody knows."

"So if Korean culture disappears, you don't mind?"

"No, I don't. I think 'humanity' comes first, and 'culture' is second. If Korean culture and society are the most important thing, then we have to 'sacrifice' for it. I don't like that."

The notion that we're all just "human" sounds nice, and is easy to practice at the individual level, but in a mass society it seems naïve to say the least.

Certainly Muslims, for example, do not place the individual before the religion or the culture in many cases.

"I think a more serious problem is the environment,” she continued, unwilling to consider the implications of changing demographics.

"I agree," I said, "but elites just want to make money, so they need more consumers, more workers and more taxpayers. They don't care about the environment."

"Actually, I don't care about this society," she said. "I don't follow the news nowadays. I don't watch television or listen to the radio."

Here we were really getting to the heart of the matter. Is feminism in Korea about improving society and male-female relations, or about "rebelling against the father"?

Why preserve something that you resent or even deeply hate?

My last question was about the "spycam epidemic" in Korea.

In her spare time, she was studying to be a psychoanalyst, and was a keen reader of Carl Jung. In her view, the root of the problem was Christianity, which "separates" men from women, because it "lacks a female god."

"Is this your theory?"

"No," she laughed, "it's Jung’s theory. You know, Christians traditionally hated women. During the Middle Ages, they burned women as 'witches.' They saw women as 'possessed' by the devil."

I found this theory unpersuasive. Christianity has a very short history in Korea, and when the country was liberated from Japan in 1945, only 2% of the population identified as Christian.

Today, less than 30% of the South Korean population is Christian, and obviously the percentage is far lower in the North.

Later, I sent her a message noting that shamanism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism had much longer traditions in Korea.

I suggested that she was imposing an overly Western perspective on Korean society that could be somewhat limiting when viewing male-female relations here.

I received no reply. Her mind was already made up, it seemed.

When I studied feminism at UC Berkeley in the early nineties, it was understood to be one perspective among many.

These days, it seems, feminism is often held up as a "truth" that must not be questioned, especially by men, and if you do, you become something of a heretical "witch" who deserves to be set on fire yourself.

However, society is comprised of men as well as women. If we are to ignore the perspective of men, how can we possibly understand society in its totality?

I fear that gender polarization in South Korea will only increase, and if it does, it may very well help accelerate the decline and even disappearance of Korea itself.