A British Man Blogging About Feminism in Korea: Sex, Gender, and the Elephant in the Room

"Middle-aged, white, male, straight — I'm basically part of the most hated group of people on the planet."

Nearly 20 years ago, when the Englishman James Turnbull had just begun his life in Korea, shuttling between cities for work, he rode in his boss's car past an empty stretch of countryside. "It came out of nowhere — suddenly, in the middle of a field with nothing around it, there was an inn."

Like anyone new to a foreign culture, Turnbull blurted out a question about what it was. His boss told him it was an inn that worked much like a love hotel.

He soon found that such places are everywhere in Korea. Far from the cities, these unremarkable buildings serve as venues for sex work and as meeting places for young couples, since Korean society still frowns heavily on premarital sex. But unlike in Japan, Korea's love hotels have no neon signs and no themed suites — and if you ask people about them, they hedge and change the subject.

"Everyone pretends they're not there, but you can feel that they carry a dirty reputation. In short, it's something you're not supposed to talk about."

Eighteen years into his life in Korea — settled, married, two children — Turnbull looks back and sees that every contradiction this culture holds around sex and gender is like that little inn in the field: abrupt, conspicuous, and yet somehow invisible to everyone.

In his seventh year in Korea, Turnbull founded The Grand Narrative, a blog that unpacks sex, gender, and pop culture inside Korea from the vantage point of a writer working in English.

Outside the blog, he kept his full-time job at Dongseo University in Busan, pouring huge amounts of spare time and energy into keeping the site updated — close to volunteer labor. Over time the blog won mainstream recognition, cited as a reliable source by English-language media including CNN, where Turnbull appeared as an expert on Korean feminism and pop culture. In that role he has also been invited several times to give guest lectures at Korean universities, Seoul National University among them.

But more often he is in a corner of his own garage, typing quietly at a screen. Over the past 11 years he has written hundreds of posts on subjects running from sex and K-pop to the politics of body image, from gender in advertising to abortion and contraception. Outside the garage, Korea's feminist movement has been producing social change at startling speed.

"This has been my life's work for more than a decade. Maybe it's time to spend a little time talking about it," Turnbull told QDaily.

The Grand Narrative's first article on women's issues went up in 2007. Turnbull had many Korean women friends at the time, and as they graduated from university and entered the labor market, the problems came one after another. One of the sharpest: they were fired the moment they got pregnant.

"Once women have children, they're forced out of work, and coming back a year later is almost impossible. Korean companies have extremely rigid hierarchies — years of service give you enormous say and a much better shot at promotion — so if a Korean woman marries and has a child, her career simply falls behind," Turnbull said, speaking about the country's falling birth rate. Because every woman has to face this choice, many in the younger generation decide not to have children at all.

According to the BBC, this has produced a new social phenomenon in Korea: the Sampo Generation. "Sampo" means giving up three things: relationships, marriage, and children.

Long before he graduated from university and came to Korea, Turnbull was used to moving between cultures. Because of his family, he went from the UK to New Zealand, then to Australia, then back to the UK, attending six different high schools in three countries. "It was pretty crazy."

The cultural distances between those countries were smaller, but each still had its own values and way of living. Whenever Turnbull asked the adults around him about it, the answer was usually, "That's the local culture." The phrase worked like a cure-all, good for any situation and any question — but when he thought about it seriously, he saw the adults were mostly using it to shut him up. "I got sick of it," he recalled.

So when he arrived in Korea, he did not reach reflexively for "culture" to explain everything. "It's not like a fish that can't notice the water it's in. Some things are obviously wrong."

Talking with people, Turnbull found that many Koreans carry a strong nationalism and so keep quiet about the country's darker sides — which does not mean they are happy with everything happening around them.

"If something about Korea makes you uncomfortable, chances are a lot of Koreans don't like it either."

This is also what mainstream media usually miss. Much of the discussion starts on social networks, which English-language outlets find hard to follow, so they end up judging Korean sexual culture from its surface.

"When you report on cultures outside Asia, if a writer doesn't understand the local language, people generally don't grant them much credibility or authority. But in Asia — China, Japan, Korea — plenty of media outlets have a very limited grasp of the local language and culture, and the public seems quite tolerant of it. It's a strange double standard."

Turnbull offered an example. In 2013, some Korean parking lots introduced "pink women's parking spaces" — larger spots reserved for women. The story went around the world's mainstream media within days, and most of the coverage explained the policy as a bias against women drivers: the assumption that they need more room to park.

"That was completely invented by reporters," Turnbull said. The pink spaces were introduced because women are usually the ones looking after children at home, and the extra room makes it easier to get a stroller through when they go out shopping.

"There's a problem in that too, of course — the assumption that women are naturally the ones who raise the children. But it clearly isn't the problem the media described."

In the gaps left by these misunderstandings, Turnbull saw his opening. He had been teaching English all along and was eager to prove himself with something, to open up more career options. That is what first got him blogging about Korean culture, and a short while later he turned entirely to sex and feminism.

Ten years ago, when the blog was just starting, and right up until five or six years ago, nobody else was doing the same thing. "That doesn't necessarily mean I wrote well. It's just that I was the only one writing about this stuff — pretty much the only person on the entire planet writing about Korean feminism online in English." For a long time, a Google search for "Korea" and "feminism" put Turnbull's blog at the top of the results.

Turnbull says he comes from a very "weird" left-wing family and grew up in piles of his father's psychology and sociology textbooks. At university he also worked on projects in women's studies and sociology.

Being a foreigner opened a window for conversation, too. "The truth is, if someone is genuinely interested in your culture and society, you get curious about where that interest comes from."

In a Korea where sex is still treated as taboo, Turnbull was something like a man standing outside the web of conventional opinion and personal obligation. People around him were readier to share their views on the subject with him, without minding his age or social standing, and without worrying much that he would pass it on. "Precisely because you're a foreigner, people don't carry that psychological baggage. They can open up to you."

All of this made the path look easy. But what really fixed his attention on women's issues seems to have been that the problem was too urgent to ignore.

"A colleague once came up to me out of nowhere and asked whether abortion could damage her body." Pressing further, he learned she had already had eight abortions, because she neither used contraception nor knew it existed. "I was completely shocked. Even today, the general absence of sex education is staggering."

Turnbull is not an academic researcher, and his reading of social phenomena comes largely from what he has felt himself. His posts are always told in the first person, yet compared with news stories built around a single event, he is far keener on citing sources and precedent.

As he sees it, feminism has never stood on its own. Sex and gender matter because they run through everyone's daily life.

Before he became a university English teacher, Turnbull spent about two years working at a company, and the culture of humiliation between ranks in Korean corporate life shocked him. "Every week our department head would make everyone else stand up and scream at each of us about everything. In a way he had to do it — angry or not, that's how things worked."

The pressure between ranks seeps into daily life, and in a society this hierarchical, standing up for yourself becomes much harder.

Turnbull says that even when he did not want to, after arriving in Korea he found himself thinking constantly about rank and rebellion. It shows up most clearly around sexual harassment. "(In Korea), if a family member wants to hug you as a child, you can't refuse even if you don't want to. All through childhood and adolescence, plenty of people can order you around, even to do things you don't like."

Later this becomes a gap of power between men and women. "If a boy likes you, you're supposed to accept it, not complain. So men don't understand what 'consent' means, and women feel guilty for turning someone down."

The result is bitter emotional retaliation: violence between partners and revenge crimes by exes have become an enormous problem in Korean society. In a 2017 survey by the Korean Institute of Criminology, 80% of the men questioned admitted to having abused a partner.

"That's why I've been so surprised and so proud that in the past few years so many young women have come out to demonstrate — because in Korea it is that hard to do," Turnbull said. Many of them have had to cover their faces, but the effect has still reached far: Korea is going through dramatic change on gender equality and on the rights of sexual minorities.

According to QZ, the watershed for Korea's women's movement came in 2016, when a woman was murdered in a public bathroom near an exit of Gangnam Station, one of Seoul's busiest subway stations. After that, women began taking to the streets against gender-based violence, and feminist groups pushed harder online. As the #MeToo movement picked up speed worldwide this year, Korea's feminist wave has moved with it.

At the same time, Turnbull has watched a so-called "gender war" heat up, with social pressure and frustration shoved onto women.

Korea has one of the highest rates of higher-education enrollment in the world, which means most young people go to university — but there are nowhere near enough jobs to match. Youth unemployment is close to 10%, three times the national average. Many graduates can only find shift work at convenience stores or cafes, living on the minimum wage, and a large group choose to delay graduation even though they have no courses left to take.

Against that background, young men blame women for taking all the opportunities, and arguments have started over military service — that it is unfair to men, and that they deserve compensation.

In 2014, Statistics Korea released figures showing that over the previous four years the employment trend for men and women in their twenties had reversed for the first time in history, with women's employment rate passing men's. The phrase "women's tornado" became a hot topic for a while.

Turnbull sees the phrase as deliberately inflammatory: the gap between women's and men's employment rates was only 2.1%. Yet men in Korea suddenly acted as if under siege, with a fierce backlash, and some men's rights groups called for abolishing the government's Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. In fact, in the World Economic Forum's 2015 Global Gender Gap Report, Korea ranked 115th out of 145 countries — and 125th in the "economic participation and opportunity" category.

Gender equality has always been argued over, and the economic slump has poured fuel on the fire. It is not only about drawing lines between the sexes: in a mood of general anxiety, people tend to invent a common enemy for whatever group they belong to. Turnbull gives an example. In the middle of this year, more than 500 refugees from Yemen were stranded on Korea's Jeju Island, setting off a huge public outcry. In most other countries, opposition to refugees comes mainly from older people. In Korea it was the reverse — young people, unexpectedly, drove the conversation.

"Middle-aged, white, male, straight — I'm basically part of the most hated group of people on the planet." Turnbull came back to this joke at his own expense again and again during the interview.

When people first found his blog, not everyone was glad to see it. "They hated me, mainly because of who I am."

"Nobody wants to hear about Korean feminism from a middle-aged white man."

The suspicion is not baseless, Turnbull admits. In the first few years he was confident he had understood everything about the place and could explain it to others. Usually it did not take long before he found he had gotten it completely wrong. "By now I've deleted about half my posts, simply because what I wrote no longer reflects my views."

But the internet remembers. Just over a month ago he got an email running more than 3,000 words, furiously denouncing a piece he had written ten years earlier and already taken down.

Another group unhappy with him is second-generation Koreans overseas. Turnbull mentions the slang term "yellow fever," meaning white men with a marked sexual preference for Asian women. Many Korean-American women have to deal with that prejudice from white men in daily life, and so assume that a man writing about sex in Korea must be up to no good. Some started posting attacks on him, or photoshopping his pictures and putting them online.

Turnbull's blog once offered a good space to argue, where people spoke their minds in the comments and readers around the world traded views and sometimes quarrelled. Then the social-media age arrived all at once, information came through every other channel, and the blog's traffic and comment counts fell sharply — including from the readers who had attacked him personally.

Today Turnbull seems to sit in an awkward spot. He will occasionally join an LGBTQ march or a feminist protest, but he rarely shows his face: "I don't want people's attention pulled onto me, a middle-aged white man."

Even now he has not won, through the blog, the recognition he once imagined — persuading the world that a foreigner here could do something other than teach English.

He jokes ruefully that a good share of his site's traffic now comes from people searching for pornography by keyword. They don't stay long.

Cover image source: documentary still