Anonymous asked: Hi! You don't have to answer this *question* (it's not really a question); I just wanted to make a comment about your post about eatyourkimchi. You said that their videos contain racist, classist, slut-shaming content. Yes, I admit, I enjoy watching S&M's videos (please keep reading!); from what I've seen, they've made massive efforts to not be racist, with disclaimers and what not after lots of their sentences. Even if you don't think they succeeded, shouldn't the fact that they don't want to

be racist be taken into consideration? The slut shaming: this issue is very very complicated; while you may have your view of what is right and wrong, and think it is obvious/easy to see the logic behind it, others (like myself) still have a hard time with it. On one hand, I think women should be able to be/act/dress as sexy as they want; the double standard is ridiculous. On the other hand, I feel that there must be some line between sexy and indecent. My opinion on this isn’t decided,

 and it probably never will be. My point is, I don’t think it’s fair to hate on S&M for “slut-shaming”; it’s a thorny topic on which people have strong opinions, and misunderstanding happen easily. Lastly (wait. This is your second point. Sorry! argh. but anyways) you said they are classist. Um. I guess I’m not really sure what you mean by this, and of course you don’t have to explain to me if you don’t have time, but I’ve never seen them say anything about their social status or wealth.So, sorry for the super long *ask*, but thank you for taking the time to read it! I hope you have a wonderful day/night :D

Sorry, my criticisms sticks. Reread what I wrote to see how I feel about “there’s a difference between sexy and indecent” (surprise-there isn’t, that’s merely your opinion, making such a distinction is slut shaming and dangerous and entitled. No one cares what your opinion on indecent is, keep it to yourself and your body.) They perpetuate and say shitty nonsense with no thought to the consequence or care for the harm. They’re selfish, greedy, and exploitative. They’re ignorant and obnoxious. Seriously, their shit isn’t that great, they’ve just sort of got a monopoly on feeding biased nonsense to a (often equally ignorant and orientalist) young and impressionable audience and access to good filming material and time that others of us instead spend on work and school.

Intent does not matter. Intent does not change the harm done. Also, given that they’ve been faced and challenged and called out many times for their ignorance, hell, they responded to what I wrote, and still ignored the criticisms and still went about their way, shows that their intent is especially for shit.

It really isn’t complicated at all in the end.

Admin Briana

Anonymous asked: As much as I enjoy your site, I find that it lacks scholarly input. There is nothing wrong with providing a link to tumblr sites. However, I would like to see an argument that has been peer reviewed. People like Dorthy Smith or Melvin Tumin have written literature on topics like feminism and race. If you are able to state your argument and say "look so and so also wrote about this, so stop arguing with me unless you can find another person". Would you be able to provide things like this?

feminoonas has never claimed to be an academic/scholarly resource. this is a casual undertaking for us. however, if you have articles you think would be relevant or interesting, you can submit them and we will be happy to post them up.

Anonymous asked: I'm curious about your viewpoints on the JYJ hitting saesang scandal. When a woman is being abused, she has every right to defend herself but what about when the tables are turned? What if it is a man who's being sexually harassed, groped, and stalked? Thanks alot feminoonas and keep up the good work :)

Alright, I didn’t really weigh in on this yesterday on my personal blog even though I saw a lot of it going around. For the purposes of this, I’m going to address the most current scandal which involves Jaejoong specifically. The general consensus I was seeing seems to either be “violence is never justified, hitting a woman is always wrong!” or “She might have been a sasaeng fan so it’s okay!”

In an ideal world, yeah, violence would never be justified because it would never be necessary, but we don’t live in a utopia. I saw a lot of posts saying that it is never, under any circumstances, acceptable to hit a woman. And I understand the sentiment, because women have traditionally been more susceptible to abuse and violence with few legal recourses available to them. It’s unacceptable to hit anyone without provocation, but I do believe cases of self-defense are entirely different.

And that’s where it becomes murky. There’s no video to show context; some people are claiming she was a sasaeng fan but there’s no real evidence to back that up (that I’ve seen, if there is any please submit it); in addition I’ve seen conflicting reports about when he hit her. Did he hit her when she was next to him or did he go back and hit the fan? If Jaejoong went back to slap her, that does change things entirely. He could have continued on his way. If she was groping him (yes, groping is sexual assault even if the victim is male) and he slapped her, that’s also different. But I don’t know the true context as I’ve only been able to find transcriptions of the audio file. I don’t speak Korean, so I can’t translate it on my own, and I have been unable to find a video (again, if anyone has a link for this, please submit it). 

Regardless, I know for a fact that many people would not have had the same problem with a female idol slapping a male sasaeng fan. If male fans were aggressively stalking a female idol, sending her bodily fluids, breaking into where she slept, you know people would be angry and say that she was justified in physically defending herself. If even half the accounts of what sasaeng fans do is true, then I can see how it would wear on an idol and be a great source of stress and fear. Stalking is stalking, regardless of the genders involved, and it’s a serious crime that needs to be treated seriously. People, regardless of gender, are capable of being violent and dangerous. Women are capable of being violent and dangerous. In fact, the whole cultural concept of women as passive and defenseless is a misogynistic idea on its own. It leads to a larger attitude where crimes against men (especially when it comes to sexual violence) are not taken seriously, particularly when the perpetrator is a woman. 

Again, one problem is that we don’t know she was a sasaeng fan. I’ve seen people claiming she is, that it justifies it, but like I said, I haven’t seen any proof for that. So I’m not going to assume she is, because that makes me really uncomfortable in the sense that it gets a bit close to “well that means she was asking for it/deserved it” territory, which I also don’t think is the case.

Regardless, incidents like this shouldn’t happen at all. Security should serve as a barrier between fans and idols, and companies need to shell out for better protection for their artists. There should never be incidents of fans breaking and entering into homes, of groping and sexually harassing celebrities because it should never reach that point. If people slip through, then ideally they should be removed by security/body guards, but that should be an exception rather than the norm it seems to be. 

Basically, I don’t think he should have hit her. I think companies need to spend more for better security. But I think to take a black and white view of the larger situation as “never hit a woman” or “you can hit them if they are sasaengs” because they are both problematic stances to take. Especially since I know that many people would have no problem if a female idol slapped a male fan for something like groping. But I’m not going to take a hardline stance on this because I don’t know what the fan was doing, I don’t know what the context is, I don’t know if he went back to hit her (which if he did, that’s absolutely a problem in my view).

It’s complicated, is what I’m saying. But I have seen, on an individual level, the way men are not taken seriously when they are the victims of sexually aggressive behavior (including but not limited to sexual harrassment). And it’s unacceptable, regardless of the victim’s gender. Also, women still have a problem being taken seriously when they report crimes like this as well. 

I don’t know if this was really clear or not, or if I just made it more complicated, sorry!

tl;dr: Jaejoong shouldn’t have hit her; we don’t know if she was a sasaeng; sasaeng fans shouldn’t get away with what they do anyway; better security, restraining orders, etc.; non-violence is ideal but not always possible.

Anonymous asked: die, fuckers. you're embarrassing feminists everywhere. go to the kitchen and make sandwiches for the people who actually work.

troll harder

-Admin Anna

I’m actually disappointed that our trolls aren’t more creative. 

~Admin Danni

Hey there, buddy.

We are embarrassing feminists, yet you are using the stereotypical “make me a sandwich”? You sound a little pressed.

Do me a favor, go to Subway and order a Spicy Italian on wheat- Footlong. Put banana peppers, spinach, tomatoes, and ranch dressing on it. Then take said sandwich and thrust your sexist body off into a chasm, sandwich and all. As you free fall with your sandwich and shit yourself from fear I hope you realize how fucking stupid you are. 

SPOILER ALERT: it’s more than likely you won’t get to eat the sandwich…. you know falling in a chasm covered in your own feces and all. 

-admin; genesis.

Anonymous asked: I just recently downloaded some of Block B's stuff, and since I missed any discussions that would have been going on when it was new, can you tell me if any kpop fans of color responded to the line "black one's gonna lead you like Barack Obama" in LOL?

I haven’t seen anything, maybe our followers know?

Anonymous asked: Can I ask you your opinion on using the word "bitch" as an insult? For example: when a woman does something rude, degrading, insulting, etc. to another person, they immediately respond with "you're such a bitch".

It’s another example of gendered insults and used as a way to silence women. We’re told from an early age, not always directly but the larger cultural message is there, that women are expected to be sweet, passive, yielding. To call a woman a “bitch” means that she’s stepped outside of her gender boundaries and must be put back into her place.

I’ve also found it interesting that when a woman is called a bitch, the implication is that she is too aggressive, but when the insult is used towards a man, it means he’s too submissive.

-Admin Anna

Anonymous asked: you guys are really an inspiration. A lot of what you post has opened my eyes to the biases/ stereotypes we see everyday, but don't notice. I wonder, how have you come to form opinions on these types of things? I am an African-American female, so, you'd think that I would be the first to pick up on these types of things. But actually, your blog has made me realize just how ignorant I, and a lot of people I come in contact with, are.

For me it mostly came from reading, but I can’t speak for the other admins. There’s still a lot that I personally have to learn, and it isn’t always easy. A lot of it requires a fundamental shift in your world perspective. For example, I’m white. I benefit from white privilege. But it took me a long time to understand how privilege and oppression intersect; the fact that I don’t have gender/sexual orientation/class privilege does not mean that it negates the social benefits I receive purely for being white. And like I said, it took me a long time to really understand this, and it took a great deal of reading and talking to people about the structures of whiteness. Patricia Hill Collins’ matrix of domination was a huge help to me when I was working to educate myself on these issues, and so did feminist authors like bell hooks.

We’re socialized into internalizing many of these attitudes in ways that are so subtle (and yet prevalent), that it takes a great deal of work to try to shift our minds into viewing it from different angles. But because it is so prevalent, these things have become part of the cultural norm and it’s easier for us to accept them without really critically analyzing the culture around us. 

-Admin Anna

Anonymous asked: Ugh, thank you for pointing out the "English scale" in Simon and Martina's videos. I live in a Brazilian household and my mother struggles with her English because she has a heavy accent from living in Brazil for so long. I hear people talk behind her back about it and they think her intelligence is low because of that barrier. So I personally found that English scale offensive because I know that it's hard learning a second language.

The English scale bothers me for exactly that reason. I currently live with friends of my mother’s while I attend college, and they are from Puerto Rico. They are literally the two smartest people I have ever met in my life, and amazing human beings. They both attended Ivy League schools for undergraduate and graduate work (he is a surgeon, and she’s a lawyer), but the way people treat them because of their accent is atrocious. People assume that just because they have an accent that this somehow correlates with intelligence, which is just not true. And yet, you know that if those same people were learning a second language and a native speaker mocked them for their accent and mispronunciations, they would be highly offended.

It’s a very ethnocentric belief to have, and quite frankly it’s disgusting. I’ve noticed it tends to be very race-centered as well; I’ve never encountered anyone mocking Swedish or French accents - instead they’re considered “sexy”, but when the accent denotes origin from a non-Western nation, one primarily populated with people of color, it’s looked upon as a negative. It’s racist and ethnocentric, and quite frankly people like that really need to educate themselves on how to be decent human beings.

-Admin Anna

Anonymous asked: Anon, was your question more about the characterization of particular idols or about sex in fanfiction in general? I’m just a bit confused. --- I think that might be the better word to use... sorry. i'm very bad at expressing what I think.

I once tried to read a Big Bang fanfic, but the author turned Tabi into a rapist and GD into an abusive alcoholic. So there’s definitely problems with the way some authors characterize idols, but that isn’t limited to K-pop or smut fanfiction. Bad writers exist in every sphere of the internet, unfortunately.

Anonymous asked: i guess the "problem" is that people usually see sex as something dangerous or holy or dirty or anything other than "a normal thing that also happens irl", so they probably feel that imagining idols in a sexualized way and putting them in sexual situations just for the sake of your personal enjoyment is "wrong". idek what i'm saying, i just have this feeling.

A lot of that has to do with our socialization when it comes to sexuality, particularly with women. Women in particular are raised and taught to view sex as something that is tied to our morality - the idea of a “good” girl is equated with “virgin” (the whole concept of virginity is problematic as well). Our actions are not emphasized under this paradigm, but rather what we choose to do with our genitals. Which is fucking bullshit; how many people you choose to fuck or not fuck has nothing to do with what kind of person you are; you could choose to never have sex and be a completely awful person or you could choose to have sex with five hundred people and volunteer at a soup kitchen for all they know. The idea that sexuality has anything to do with moral value is ridiculous. And it’s clearly a patriarchal construct, as this is never extended to men; when we talk about what a “good” man is, we talk about strength, honesty, loyalty, etc.

-Admin Anna