The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
It’s about 6:30am. I’m up earlier than usual. In a little while, I’ll have to set the laptop aside and make breakfast, get today’s bread (a second attempt at sourdough rye, which I am determined to perfect) in the oven after its all-night rise. But right now there’s a nice patter of rain and a cool breeze, a hot cup of coffee and today’s news.
I’ve had to take a break from blogging for a few days. This blog is different from my old blog, where posts like this were more common, but I feel like I can’t continue posting photos of food and information about where to buy a decent steak without first addressing something that’s been going on here this past week. A lot of people reading this will already be familiar with the specifics, but some will not, so forgive the minor rehashing while I outline the backstory.
In the early hours of last Tuesday morning, a man stabbed a woman to death in a unisex bathroom near Gangnam Station here in Seoul. The man stood and waited as the CCTV captured six different men coming and going from the bathroom without harm before the woman entered and was attacked. He later told the police he wanted to kill a woman because he was tired of being belittled by women.
The larger public response to the situation has been heartening, with hundreds to thousands of people gathering at Gangnam Station and other major stations across the country to leave flowers and notes of support and mourning. The media, predictably, has been eager to point out that there have been men there, too. Despite the fact that the movement to call the murder a hate crime and to commemorate this woman as a victim of misogynistic violence has been overwhelmingly put into motion by women, every news article I’ve seen has been sure to include a mention of a male supporter, to lend the issue a little more credence. Subtext: It isn’t just women who are upset — men are upset, too. Subtext: Might be a real issue. Subtext: Not all men are bad.
And thank god for those male allies, because this, unfortunately, is why they are important.
The Gangnam police, with their longstanding reputation for stellar responses in cases of violence toward women, especially rape committed by entertainment big shots and male celebrities, have determined that the murder was not a hate crime and have been attempting to justify this announcement with statements about how the murderer suffers from schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, an extremely smart and calculated move on their part.
Men’s groups and forums (especially Ilbe, a conservative extremist forum generally loathed by sensible people already) and other, milder mainsplaining members of the public have latched on to the mental illness in order to avoid coping with the murder’s meaning in the larger context of society.
Women don’t have that luxury. It hits too close to home, and the truly terrifying thing about this murder is that it was both random and not random at the same time.
The woman had no personal relationship with the man who killed her. She was out with her friends having a few drinks and minding her own business. Women think, it could’ve been any one of us. It could’ve been me. But six men came and went from the bathroom unharmed.
Ilbe says, it wasn’t a hate crime — she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The CCTV footage says it wasn’t the wrong place at the wrong time for those six men.
And that’s the crux of the issue that detractors don’t seem to understand. Women victims of misogynistic violence are always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Women rarely expect to be in the line of fire when a man’s rage and hatred for women explodes outward. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t targeted rage and hatred, that we all suffer from the same risk, or that women aren’t constantly aware of the threat.
The theme of mourning that has emerged on the internet through social media is, “Because you’re a man, you live. Because I’m a woman, I survived.” It is a poignant phrasing, one that cuts to the heart of the problem.
Not all men are violent toward women, but all women are affected by violence toward women, so in the end, it doesn’t matter if it’s all men, most men, or some.
On Sunday morning, a post appeared on Ilbe, with photos for proof, by a man who bragged that he had gone to Daejeon City Hall Station and torn down nearly all of the notes placed there in support of the murder victim. A rally of mourning and support held on Saturday, in Gangnam, was interrupted by masked men snapping photos of rally participants while threatening to “expose” them online.
When your defensiveness has pushed you to the point of rallying against a murder victim and those who are mourning her– when you find yourself on the side of a murderer– it is time to reevaluate. But how shocking is it, really, when even the police, who are sworn to protect and defend, are doing their damnedest to not call this crime what it was?
I’m not a man, and I don’t claim to understand what lies behind that instinct. Surely the idea of members of your gender being held accountable for their atrocious actions can’t be terrifying enough to justify the desecration of the memory of an innocent woman who was brutally killed “for no reason”?
But then, women are used to being held accountable for all kinds of gendered issues. Like, for example, being stabbed to death by a random man in a bathroom because other women weren’t nice to him, by his own mentally-ill reckonings.
Maybe that’s why I don’t get it.
But there’s something else there, hiding behind “not all men” — a small cry, unspoken in more moderate circles and blurted outright in more extreme ones: “Well, we are tired of being belittled by women. We are tired of not being treated like the kings of the family, like we used to be. We are tired of women getting a say in whether or not they will marry or date us, whether or not they will rely on us to provide for them, whether or not they will sleep with us. We are tired of being expected to do the dishes and the laundry, of not having our dinner on the table when we get home, of being expected to change diapers. We are tired of being told ‘no’.”
I guess for some the murderer had a point. And maybe that’s the scariest part of this whole situation.
