”Squid Game is a threat to women”

 

 

 “If you’re a woman in Korea, misogyny is already a part of daily life,” she said. “I didn’t want to waste my time on the misogyny of Squid Game too.”

Boycotters like Lee, Park, and Kim believe the show presents a distorted image of women, irresponsibly depicting them as objects of violence, hypersexualisation, and sacrifice. “I’m boycotting to tell the world that women are not going to watch this type of content any more,” Lee said.

“We believe Squid Game is a threat to women,” said Haeil spokesperson Hae-in Shim. As “neither a representation nor a criticism of the reality of anti-feminism in Korea,” the show, Shim said, with its “exclusively male gaze” and “disturbing reproductions of violence against women,” reinforces misogyny and “is a clear support of patriarchy”.

Some specific points of concern, Shim says, which emerged from watching the series, include the naked women painted and used as VIP room props, the apparent absence of women from positions of power, and the many female characters never afforded the privilege of being identified by their own names, referred to instead as a male character’s ex-wife or mother. For Shim, what is particularly upsetting about Squid Game’s renderings of violence against women, she says, is that they are incidental, intended to advance male storylines, as opposed to being instrumental to their own. One unsettling example of this, she says, is when a guard of the game mentions gang-raping the corpse of an eliminated female player — after which point, this horrifying detail is never addressed again.

Not only did Shim find the sex scene to be unrealistic, but she also takes issue with how Mi-nyeo’s sexual bartering — and her subsequent quest for revenge after Deok-su’s betrayal — is treated as the central feature of her storyline, even leading to her own death, while largely ignoring her background of being a poor single mother

“Why are you being so sensitive,” male friends have asked her. “Isn’t its portrayal of women just like every other show anyway,” some female friends have likewise wondered. 

In one cybercafe on the popular Korean web portal Daum, a user reposted a list of feminist criticisms about Squid Game that had originally appeared in a women’s community. Alongside it, the user posted a cartoon meme depicting such feminist critics as oinking pigs. In the Naver portal hosted cafe for New Men’s Solidarity, a men’s rights group in South Korea, users accused feminists of “persecution paranoia” and joked: “If you’re uncomfortable, you should’ve fixed the way you sit.”

　いかゲームは、女性を暴力、性の対象、犠牲者として浅薄な描写しかしておらず、女性蔑視、女性差別的であるとして、韓国のフェミから批判、ボイコットされているが、 他の番組と似たようなものじゃない、自国の作品が世界的有名になるのが、そんなに嫌なのか、被害妄想じゃね、と反発も食らっている、と。

ーーー“persecution paranoia” 「被害妄想」という言葉を知っていたとは・・・・