Feminism: Korea VS Bilbao

By Young Bang in BIlbao

(Dec, 16, 2018)

According to the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals, it becomes sustainable society with gender equality. So, it is interesting to relate our goal and feminism issue.

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5 Gender Equality:

Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

Text and photo Courtesy of United Nations (un.org).

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To make a sustainable society, the equality between members of society must be a premise. As you know, every human is equal. Color of skin, ages, economic status, and genders are not important. They are factors that constitute individuals, not the measures of levels.

However, it is obvious that human society had been hierarchical society for thousands of years. It was getting better by passing ‘civil revolution’ in 18C, ‘emancipation of slavery’ in 19C, and finally ‘woman suffrage’ was first approved in the New Zealand in 1893. (The most advanced democracy country US approved woman suffrage in 1920.)

As you noticed, the history of gender equality is short and imperfect. Generally, female was declined to participate major activities in society like economic activity. Even though now it is possible to female to participate that activities and seems to enjoy equal status with male, all the problems with gender are not solved at all.

For example, it is way easy to find cases that woman is raped, violated, and killed by man than the opposite cases. Women are always regarded as existence of protection because of their weakness. Also, economically, average wages of female are less than male’s, even if they are in the same job.

All of these discriminations are the reason why all of us should be a feminist. The meaning of word ‘feminism’ is that ‘a range of political movements, ideologies, and social movements that shard a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal, and social equality of sexes.’ (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Being a feminist is not difficult and restrict. Not only direct acts like participating on movements but also having proper perception of gender issue makes you a feminist. Also, feminists never argue the superiority of women. They are acclaiming same position with males and shouting for their forgotten rights. Therefore, we all need to be feminists.

In Korea, feminism was not a big issue since 2015. In 2015, at the main street of Seoul, a man murdered an unknown woman because she is a woman. After this case, many women get angry and it made them to be feminists. People noticed the problems of gender inequality in Korea and finally gender inequality became the biggest issue in these 3 years.

One of other examples of Korean typical sexual offenses is taking candid pictures. It is easy to find in internet, the pictures of woman’s body taken in metro, pictures of lady’s room, and sex videos taken by hidden cameras. Even though, there are millions of illegal pictures in internet, the numbers of criminals who taken those photos are just a few of them. What was worse is that they are not in a heavy punishment. Almost of them are fined or suspension of prosecution.

Many feminists were in revolt against this situation and they came out to streets shouting for proper punishments, as well as abolishment of female discriminations. However, many people, especially men, are blamed, suppressed feminists. And as a result, it made another discrimination.

The place of Korean feminism is this. More and more women become aware of gender inequality in the society, but many people still regard feminism as female chauvinism.

What I realized after I arrive Bilbao is that, feminism in this city is much matured than that of my city. Almost every local people I met here revealed themselves as feminist. And it was cool and envious.

Feminism movement in Bilbao 26th September, 2018 -Photo by. Young Bang

One example that made me think that this city pursuing gender equality is the movement in 26th of September in front of the Arriaga theater. Many women were in the street to argue to stop violate women and cherished a dead woman who was killed by her husband. All of the street was in violet, which is the symbol of feminism. People made applaud even though they are not involved in the movement. It is impossible to expect this attitude in Korea. It is fortunate that passerby just pass the scene without blaming them as social misfits.

Watching this movement became a chance for me to think about feminism and gender equality more seriously. I asked to people how they think about gender equality in Bilbao. All of them answered me there is some progress for being equal nowadays, but still they think citizens in Bilbao needs to make other progresses.

Similarly, I also think that status of female in Bilbao is much higher than that of Korea. Both societies are trying to be more equal society. Yet, all of us need more pay attention and awaking attitude toward gender issue until many discriminations like wage gap between gender, criminals for women are completely solved.