ESCAPE THE CORSET, SHRED THE PATRIARCHY
A Korean student activist is working to bring women’s studies classes to the standard PCC curriculum after fighting misogyny in her home country.
By Erin Kroncke
Haein Shim became accustomed to waking up in the morning, listening to her parents critique her stomach and study the state of her body. As a young girl in South Korea, Shim was taught to emulate an unattainable beauty standard that left her grappling with eating disorders while her weight teetered around 100 pounds. Even after being hospitalized 3 times, her family still focused on her figure, criticizing her small frame. But it wasn’t her family Shim blamed, it was a societal norm that legitimized such a heavy focus on women’s appearance, on her appearance. Whether it was the media or the traditional values within the Korean government, the reality she lived pushed her to adhere to a criterion that was impossible for anyone to achieve.
Shim became an activist in an era of extreme misogyny in South Korea, where females who identify as feminists become a target for harassment. Haein Shim is taking a stand for women who are so often silenced. From sharing her own story of sexual assault to standing up against traditional patriarchal values, Shim’s journey has led her to become an advocate for women and work towards reforming an educational system that largely leaves them out. Now she has brought her activism to the states as well as Pasadena City College.
“Feminism, the word itself is kind of like a bull horn,” she said describing the backlash of identifying as a feminist in Korea. “You can’t really describe yourself as a feminist right now but even [in the past] it was pretty bad but now it’s worse.”
Although South Korea is an advanced society the values are still heavily centered around gender roles that try to keep women in subservient positions. For instance, the gender pay gap is substantial in South Korea: America’s disparity is 17.7%, while Korea’s is 31.5%.
“Korean government is claiming that we have no gender discrimination in Korea, right?” Shim said. “When we have the thickest glass ceiling among the [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] nations. So we are getting paid worse than anyone else in the world.”
As a young girl in Korea, Shim felt the pressure of traditional values, being raised in a household that taught her to cater to the needs of the men in her family. Whether it involved serving them a meal or working three jobs, Shim was often left with a great deal of work at a young age. While she was still in school, Shim worked tirelessly her senior year so she could support her family while her brother attended college. With no days off, she was barely able to graduate herself. She did in fact graduate but had to miss her ceremony due to her obligation to work. As Shim got older she began to question these norms.
“Why do I, as a five year old girl, have to prepare dinner for my dad and my brother and my grandfather who were adults?” she said. “But as an activist, now you see that it’s not just you, when it comes down to it, this is systematic.”
When females are expected to be submissive within a gender role or when sexual harassment is something that is normalized, women can be subjected to harsh punishments or devalued as a human, according to a research study conducted by Oxfam International. As a survivor of sexual assault and rape, Shim seeks to share her story so other victims know that they are not alone and that it was not their fault.
“The very first sexual assault [that] happened to me was when I was four years old and I still remember,” Shim recounted. “And at that time, even now my family was not there for me, when I first confronted what happened to me to my parents, they were thinking that the perpetrators life, what about his life, we are going to [ruin] his life, instead of taking me to therapy or anything. So I had to stay silent.”
During the years that followed her assaults, Shim experienced body dysmorphia and eating disorders. She found herself being blamed for the abuse inflicted upon her as though it was something she had asked for; her family focused on what she was wearing or why she would be out at night. She described the experience as something that resulted in her feeling as though she should censor herself as well as feeling lost in misdirected accusations, as if she was at fault for the abuse that she experienced.
“[This is what] my whole activism is about, I don’t want anyone to go through what I went through and if I can speak out about this and if someone is actually reading my story, I want them to know that they’re not alone,” Shim said.
A culture such as South Korea’s that asks girls and women to focus on their appearance often leads to sexualization. Not to be confused with a healthy sense of sexuality, sexualization is as The American Psychological Association defines as “when a person’s value comes only from her/his sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics, and when a person is sexually objectified, e.g., made into a thing for another’s sexual use.” The sexualization of women and girls can lead to serious consequences in their overall well-being, according to the APA. Objectification can occur if girls/women are told to focus on their looks which in turn steers them away from their own personal development and sets them up to be a piece of property.
In 2015 the Korean government issued guidelines on how young girls can attract a partner by focusing on their looks. These sexist ideals that were created by the education ministry state misogynistic concepts. One of these specifically states that young men can sexually pursue as many women as they choose, while young girls should stick to one partner. It even goes so far as to say that men should seek sex with women they are only attracted to.
Considering the standard that has been set by the Korean government, women have been subjected to horrendous hate crimes and harassment that the government refuses to address. Shim explained how semen terrorism, in which a young man collects his semen and publicly places it on the woman or her things, is used to demoralize women who do not accept the advances of men.
“Them seeing women get humiliated or the fact that they did this to someone that they [cannot] have, it gives them power. It gives them the psychological satisfaction that, okay you said no but how about this?” Shim said.
Most women from any nation can relate to the atrocities that come with being treated as an object. This objectification shapes the view that a woman’s worth is rooted in her appearance. Shim explains that plastic surgery is commonplace in Korea and is promoted as something that will help women gain a partner. Currently South Korea is the plastic surgery capital of the world, with about 1 in 3 Korean women between the ages of 19 and 29 having had a cosmetic procedure.
As a result of the pressure to alter one’s body, a movement called Escape the Corset emerged. Escape the corset is a rebellion against the beauty standards that are set for women. Women are refusing to buy into beauty products and they even go so far as to say that they are not pretty, they do not want to be judged by their looks but for who they are as a person. The purpose is centered around escaping the figurative and sometimes literal corset that boxes women into a pretty package for a male gaze.
“When you have the society putting women’s beauty [before anything else], then nothing really matters in the society,” Shim said. “So that’s why escape the corset movement happened. Many women destroyed their beauty standard made by society and they [destroyed] their cosmetics. They’re just breaking it down, the cosmetics. Like we’re not going to wear this anymore.”
In 2017, Shim joined the movement by getting rid of her own beauty products and stopped wearing makeup. The following year she began wearing gender neutral clothes and then in 2019 Shim decided to cut her hair.
“Because we’ve been wondering, why do we have long hair and why are we afraid to cut it as short hair,” she said. “While [the] rest of the world as men, they’re doing it. When they wake up in the morning, they shower, they go out, they’re human. Why [do] women have to wake up, put on makeup, do the perfect everything and then go out?”
As Shim became more radical she attended a protest in 2016 to impeach Korea’s former President Park Geun-hye, daughter of the dictator Park Chung-hee. Geun-hye was found guilty and is currently in prison for corruption. She described male protestors sexually harassing and assaulting female protestors, even though they were all gathered for the same purpose, as well as Geun-hye being subject to expletives that pertained to her gender and not her capacity to lead.
“That really frustrated me because the whole point of the impeachment was not about her being a woman. It was about her ability, her father, she was not capable of doing her job,” Shim said.
After witnessing the events at the protest Shim and her spouse decided to move to the states. Although Shim had worked since she was in high school in Korea, she still struggled to find employment due to her lack of English fluency as well as having a work history from another country. Shim was finally able to find a job at Universal Studios Hollywood in the operations department in which she worked until the pandemic shut the park down.
In the U.S., she continued to remain involved as an activist for women’s issues. Working with the World Human Rights Forum as a translator for Anton Salman, the Palestinian Mayor of Bethlehem, Shim discovered that the issues she had experienced as a feminist were worldwide.
“I was able to have conversation with other panels from all over the world,” she said, “and that was a time I realized that the intersectionality in feminism is so important because we have so much to learn from each other. Certain [parts] of the world already achieved certain [parts] we always wanted to, like Sweden or [the] Netherlands.”
After Universal’s shut down, Shim found what seemed to be a dream job at a company called Kotra, which is a Korean trade center. Although, once she read the job description she noticed that she would be managing the sector that dealt with international students which led her to think about her own education.
“I don’t know how I‘m going to feel about working with the students, not having my [own] experience as a student,” she said. “So that was kind of a wake up call that I had to turn that offer down.”
During the same period that Shim decided to move forward with school, she joined a feminist group called Haiel, which means tidal wave in Korean. The origins of the group came after women’s mental health took a hit during the pandemic in 2020, which resulted in an increase in suicide for women in South Korea in their 20’s. Haiel’s founder Kim Ju-hee lost a dear friend to suicide which prompted the start of the group in the summer of 2021.
Haiel has organized protests in Korea to address anti-feminists and was met with extreme opposition. Many women in Korea who identify as a feminist were harassed into submission, they were targeted through their social media platforms and often received death threats from males claiming that feminists are spreading misandry. Shim works for the organization abroad as the senior director of translation and official representative of foreign media. She stated that she is better able to help them in the U.S. because of the harassment that many of them endure in Korea.
After enrolling at Pasadena City College this past fall, majoring in women’s studies and sociology, Shim began to search for a women’s association in hopes of joining.
“Feminist group, the name itself was so fascinating for me because right now in Korea female students association within universities are eliminated by anti-feminist students,” she said. “So at that time, when I was looking into feminist club, I wasn’t expecting it’s going to be feminist club. I [was expecting] female students association, more so like that and then I saw the Third Wave and I was thinking, I can say it, okay.”
The Third Wave Intersectional Feminist Club is a space on the PCC campus where all identifying women can share their experiences while having a safe environment to do so, as well as gaining a support system. Marina Gonzalez is the current faculty advisor while junior, Taylor Eacuello is the active president.
“This particular group [gathers to have] a safe space and really just to check in for everybody every week, talking about issues that interest them related to the issues that are concerning them in their lives,” said Gonzalez. “Of course feminist issues and intersectional feminist issues really are at the heart of the discussions. These students are also more interested in taking their ideas and bringing them to fruition at PCC.”
Shim has collaborated with the students in the Third Wave to formulate a proposition to add a gender portion to the College 1 course to help incoming students better understand issues that affect all identifying women.
“I considered adding Women’s & Gender Studies to COL 01, with a greater emphasis on reducing violence against women,” Shim said. “I assumed that not everyone would take the Women’s & Gender Studies course if they are in STEM or other areas that do not require sociology requirements, and I believe this is where another kind of gender discrimination begins.”
Using education as a tool, Shim wants to put an end to the normalization of rape culture and regularize hearing the stories of survivors to help put an end to the violence that women endure.
“Haein is an excellent member because of her experience organizing feminist groups in the past and she excells in executing plans to put her ideas into action,” Eacuello said of Shim’s membership in the Third Wave.
Shim is also the student organizer for a survey regarding gender studies, asking students to formulate their opinion on how they would feel about the development of more courses pertaining to gender at PCC.
“Everything, in my opinion, comes down to practice. Voicing our concerns, caring for others, and building a better society does not happen overnight,” Shim said. “That is why we need more individuals to combat injustice, and I feel that a school campus is an excellent location to experiment, fail, learn, and practice.”
Shim’s tenacity and perseverance has brought her to the campus of PCC for higher education. Although she is still in early stages of her educational experience, her activism on and off campus is something she plans to dedicate her life to. Inspired by the many women who have been taken from this world due to violence as well as the women who have been silenced within patriarchal societies, Shim plans to work with organizations that help prevent violence against women and sex trafficking once she has completed her schooling.
