How to Build a Low Trust Society
Week three of Flowers of Fire bookclub
On February 24th, I’ll be speaking at AEI as part of their symposium on Dignity and Dynamism: The Future of Conservative Technology Policy. If you come, please introduce yourself, I love meeting Other Feminisms readers in person.
Last week, I appeared on CBS 24/7 to talk about my “Pro-Lifers for PEPFAR” op-ed. You can check out the clip here.
When I started reading this week’s section of Flowers of Fire for our
-sponsored bookclub, I texted my co-leader to say my Dworkin-sympathies were spiking.[If you haven’t read this week’s section yet, it contains disturbing descriptions of sextortion of young girls and self-harm. I won’t discuss those elements in detail in this post]
I think this is the section that really drives home the dissimilarities between South Korea’s feminist movement and America’s. The prevalence of spycams and horror that every bathroom might be peppered with tiny cameras streaming you peeing to vicious, paying men makes the 4B movement seem like a proportionate response. South Korea described by Jung feels more analogous to Latin American countries plagued by femicide than it feels like my home.
Both Patrick and I talked about how this kind of spycam predation went sufficiently mainstream for men to be selling video of their sisters to other amateur pornographers. All the same tech exists in America, but we’ve escaped this being a thing ordinary men consider doing.
By luck or some other protective factor?
Leah: In the coming years, I think we’re going to run into more arguments about deepfake pornography as a kind of “safe and ethical” pornography. If the women are artificial, can you experiment with more violent, more degrading material and say it’s ok because no real women were harmed in its making? I’ve heard arguments already for artificially produced child sex abuse material working from the hypothesis that pornography saps men’s drive to experience their desires if they can fantasize in 4K detail.
Patrick: No, I cannot imagine it will perform a great service for gender relations when every college freshman in America has the ability to upload the face of the cute girl he can’t stop thinking about in English Lit onto a AI-powered personalized porn video, even if she never finds out.
Leah: Well, and I don’t think the excerpts we see from molka [spycam] forums bolster that view. A number of men are upfront that this is much less about desire for women than hatred of women
[a disturbing quotation from a perpetrator follows in the full conversation]
The prevalence of spycams leads to a rational paranoia among South Korean women. If you or your friends have been taped in locker rooms, bathrooms, even your own apartment, how can you move through the world feeling safe?
If ordinary men are capturing and swapping these videos, then how can you live alongside them, when any man you meet might have a camera on his shoe, nudging it under the table to take a video up your skirt?
Women act like US Embassy staff in Cold War Russia, doing periodic electronics sweeps in the privacy of their homes, trying to establish a single space as safe (for now) (until you next invite someone over) (or until a man in a neighboring apartment building aims a zoom lens at your window).
But you can’t be at home while living like a foreign service officer in a hostile country.
It’s a level of danger and dread that makes it hard to imagine what it would take to change South Korea into a high trust society. A simple cessation of hostilities doesn’t seem like it would be enough. There would need to be some dramatic reparation or acknowledgment to begin again.
It’s left me wanting to reread Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past, which has some of the best (and most unusual) ideas I’ve seen for what a lynching memorial could look like and how it could age alongside the wound it marked.
This is a little tangential perhaps, but I was rather delighted to read this post in parallel with a post about medieval writer Christine de Pizan's defense of women:
"The Romance of the Rose was regarded as a comprehensive guide to courtship in medieval France and Christine saw the work and the attitudes it reflected as symptomatic of an abusive culture that allowed men to act with disregard for female wellbeing. In The Book of the City of Ladies and several earlier works, Christine describes what she sees as a widespread issue with male treatment of women. She laments the number of women who she has seen fall victim to deceptive and exploitative behaviour, abandoned thoughtlessly when a more appealing romantic prospect presented itself to their lover or even husband. She extolls the innate virtues of women, who she claims are by nature faithful, loving, and gentle: "Many times women are deceived, because they are simple, and do not think to assume the worst.” She then implores men to preserve these virtues by behaving chivalrously and protecting the weaker gender."
https://open.substack.com/pub/weirdmedievalguys/p/the-coolest-medieval-woman-youve?r=6loo5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I'm not reading along with the book club, but I do know that sometimes these things *do* happen on a mass scale in the US. Thousands of cameras at Airbnbs have been seized!
Here's a 5 min clip from CNN via youtube on the investigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQJ2FxB988