Feminists protest double standard

A feminist group protesting a double standard in police investigations of sex-related crimes by men and women warned Thursday that it will stage an online rally to protest the investigation of the female manager of a radical feminist website called Womad.

“Some 70,000 women have been protesting police sexism, yet here are the police and government committing another act of sexism,” the manager of Inconvenient Courage, an online community on the Daum internet portal, wrote Thursday. “We will unleash our wrath and stage an all-out attack by lodging civil complaints.”

The post included links that could help people lodge complaints with the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission, the minister of the interior and safety, the commissioner general of the Korea National Police Agency and the Supreme Court of Korea.

“If you need to, just copy and paste this statement we’re issuing here,” read the post.

The statement titled, “Min Gap-ryong, commissioner general of the National Police Agency, must step down,” and accused Min of “spearheading a sexist investigation into Womad’s manager.”

Weeks ago, a local court issued an arrest warrant for the 30-year-old female manager of Womad, a radical feminist website, for allowing spy-cam footage of naked men to be uploaded on the site.

The manager appears to be abroad, and police have not revealed her alleged whereabouts but said they were communicating with authorities in that country for help.

“There have been numerous cases where illegal footage of women have been spread online, yet the police have not cracked down on them,” read the post. “They are focused on Womad only. The government is violently oppressing the voice of women, which is a violation of the Constitution’s Article 11.”

Article 11 states, “All citizens shall be equal before the law, and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic, social or cultural life on account of sex, religion or social status.”

Investigations into Womad began earlier this year, when footage from hidden cameras in a men’s shower of a public sauna ended up on Womad, a website that professes to upturn gender norms by “mirroring” practices they deem patriarchal.

One example is uploading spy-cam footage of men to protest the very widespread problem in Korea of spy-cam footage of women that end up on pornographic websites.

BY ESTHER CHUNG [chung.juhee@joongang.co.kr]