RAMPAGE

Anonymous 

POETRY

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femi

 

“He had never met the victim before. Apparently, security footage suggests that he passed over six men who entered the unisex toilets before singling her out, simply, it seems, because she was a woman."

– The Economist, 2016, on the Seocho-dong public toilet murder case

 

maybe it’s a microscopic malfunction, those missteps of outliers

not all men, not all women – say it on a loop.

feminist, in the form of its cruel abbreviation, femi

but under the same umbrella of ethnicity, we can’t ignore

she who bled in the dim yellow flood of the subway bathroom at the feet of a stranger

she who ate tears in the bathroom from comments that degraded but could not hit back

she who needed to act cute for the men and pour the drink with two hands, just because

she who took home ⅔ of money, equally earned as a male colleague, but could not tell

she who was pockmarked with bruises and smoked in cigar stench of her violent husband

she who was a woman, and had to thrash with weights on her legs in a swamp of no-nos.

they shout under the canopy of ads and shows that flash images of empowering women that we are here in a flipped society of equality that emerged from the shell of misogyny, that we should be grateful. it’s an odd sight how in a modern society plastered with pride, the highlighted sticker of a first world country, the vines of condescending and violent discrimination is strangling, glorifying the notion of an inferior gender to the point of an undoubted fact.

we are bred to be unsuspecting and submissive.

tapping the line of opportunity, suggesting a doubt for the existence of those lines, squeaking voices of rebellion, are crimes.

we live in a country where calling someone a is bestowing a slapping insult soaring beyond the rate of vulgar language. dare you say that you are a feminist, brace for the buckets packed with the branches of such defamation, designed to naturally tag the word nyeon, a version of bitch. girls in constricted uniforms, cornered due to expected body images beckoning anorexia and commonplace desires for plastic surgery, will never face a drought of these in public schools with the faintest hint of feminism. in doing so, they are branded mae-gal-nyeons, kimchi-nyeons, doenjang-nyeons, or a customizable mix. odorous, pretentious, men-hating, out-of-mind women are framed in an instant.

wash out the talks and traces, but 115th in the world for gender equality is a fact.  

showers of shame under eyes are hanging over my head, but I stand. we must stand.

it is a manual, a cycle that narrows in with the hand-me-down manacle of prejudice:

mothers still sigh and sob, accompanied immediately by the parents-in-law, for the newborn babies in their arms barely with a gasp or two from the world, by looking at their chest, their genitals. it’s missing, they say. the family line is severed, they say. not again, they say.

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