Daily Life (2)
"There are definitely going to be women who hit the kids. Or who look at them and see nothing but a bank account that prints money. So even if we're making selfish choices for our own benefit, shouldn't those choices at least point in a direction that serves society as a whole?"
What a load of bullshit.
Since when had Korea ever been that kind of society?
This little country had always been a place where you clawed your way up by dragging down the people above you, kicking aside anyone climbing up from behind, and feeding on everyone else's sacrifices to fatten yourself.
"Hey. That's complete nonsense. Since when has Korea been some romantic, idealistic society?"
"Ah, come on... I know that. I know, but can't we at least try?"
"No, wait. I was being too negative. The way you're talking, you've already got a method in mind, haven't you? Let's hear it."
"Just the usual stuff. Psychological tests, aptitude tests, interviews, background records — that kind of thing."
"You think you can measure someone's character with a test or an interview? Just look at university admissions. The place is overflowing with shameless bastards who don't just talk a good game with a straight face — they live the lie."
I would never forget that girl from my year. She wanted to go to Itaewon for Halloween, so she took menstrual leave on Friday, told the professor she had family business on Saturday, dumped the project we'd been working on in the lab, then spent Thursday through Sunday partying her ass off and immortalized the whole thing on her Instagram and profile picture. And she had the gall to run this plan by me — her own lab partner — for advice. I genuinely wanted to go back in time and cave her skull in.
Ugh, fuck.
Still pissed me off just thinking about it.
"So what aspect of character are you even trying to screen for?"
"I want to see whether they have the sense of responsibility to raise children with love."
It'd be faster to just legally weaken parental rights and put more weight on social responsibility.
"There's no way you'd be able to tell. You know what these girls are thinking right now?"
"Out of nowhere? Uhh... how they're going to make a living?"
"Wake up. Every single one of these girls is drowning in a massive sense of loss because something they were supposed to have just vanished. You know what that something is? An easy-mode ticket for life."
It had been a society where the entire culture shared the conviction that women must be protected. Capital accumulation and technological progress had lowered the physical requirements of productive labor. A glass floor of bonus points and generous evaluations had been laid beneath their feet. All of it had made possible a comfortable entry into public life, in a world prosperous enough that a woman could live perfectly well on the wages of her own work alone.
Through the culture of free love, she could select the best man available, then bind him with a traditional marriage that obligated him to provide. And if she realized her choice hadn't been the best one after all, she could cancel it — backed by countless organizations that had spent years cultivating an atmosphere of boundless generosity toward women.
Women who had lived that easy life were now suddenly expected to work across every industry in the economy. They could no longer borrow someone else's productivity through the institution of marriage. They had to survive on their own output alone. Life, in other words, on hard mode.
"The society men built — the social consideration that was treated as a given, the extremely stable career path, the comfortable life plan — all of it just blew up in their faces."
People are a cunning species, or so the saying went. They can endure being denied something they never had. What they cannot stand is having something they could have had taken away.
"I guarantee you, at the national debate coming up, you're going to hear every flavor of bullshit imaginable. The PC zealots, the feminists, every dumb woman in the country will say something like this:"
"Korean women's rights have been suppressed for so long that after the Great Upheaval, we must oppress men in turn, purge children of their toxic masculinity, and build an ideal society!"
"That kind of complete garbage is going to be everywhere."
And of course all those women's organizations — the whole female cartel — would throw a fit to protect their own interests.
"Then the clever ones will go crazy trying to get that easy-mode ticket back through pregnancy, so they can ride out the hardest stretch — the next two or three years."
People who would use any ideology, any method at all, so long as it benefited them. People vicious enough to climb over any obstacle you put in their path, if that's what it took to get their hands on a new right and cash it in for an easy-mode ticket.
"And you're sitting here talking about romance, Hyeongcheol?"
"Yeah... that's depressing."
What could you do? This was the world we were in.
The coffee in my mouth tasted even more bitter.
"Still, I get what you're thinking. Let's find a way. Let's try to stop people from using kids as a meal ticket — legally, institutionally, however we can."
"Yeah... let's finish the coffee and head down."
"Yeah. Let's go."
After that we kept our silence, staring out at the ashen sprawl of the city as we drank.
That night, at the discussion, I started by soliciting ideas from the other guys on how to screen for the character issues Hyeongcheol had raised, and how to actually restrain the ones who failed. Then we reached an agreement on changing one of the worst parts of Korean law: parental rights.
Legislation was the National Assembly's authority, but so what? The country's only male civic organization had already agreed. If they didn't go for it, we'd just emigrate as a group. Plenty of countries would take us in.
In the Korea that existed before the Great Upheaval, there was generally no way to stop a parent from abusing or beating a child in the name of education, all under the cover of parental rights. They'd pick spots that wouldn't show, then claim it was discipline. When the abuse was that cunning, it didn't matter if you were the neighbor next door or a cop responding to a call — all you could do was mutter something like, "Look, even so, isn't this a bit much?" and leave it at a warning. And then the child went right back to that hell of a home.
Of course there were ways to handle it. Ways that ordinary people like me never knew about. But what could children — the truly vulnerable class in any society — actually do if their own parents wouldn't do it for them? They started at a disadvantage in everything, beginning with the information gap of not even knowing those methods existed. And even if they somehow used those methods and escaped that hell of a home, a new problem was waiting: they had to build a life from the very bottom of society. No guardian to protect them, no sponsor to support them, nothing but a meager welfare system — and from there they were expected to catch up to the average citizen of modern Korea, the most prosperous era in the history of the Korean people. Just thinking about it was pitch black.
So some kids, knowing all this, simply endured until they could strike out on their own. These things happened especially often in single-parent households. Statistically, when I was a kid it was one in four. Now it was one in three. The point was, the problems had been enormous.
It left a bitter taste, remembering that parent from when I was a kid — the one who showed up drunk at the elementary school, claiming he was there to pick up his daughter, then beat the girl and the teacher who tried to stop him.
So we wrote it into law: if a parent was found to be abusing or beating a child, their parental rights would be stripped. The woman would be locked in a forced labor camp. The man, by a private agreement among ourselves, would be quietly locked in a forced extraction facility. Any child left behind would be adopted and raised as a child of all five hundred of us.
In other words, the men had agreed on this: the current situation meant we were all being forced into Duty Sex, forced to become fathers without ever having chosen it, and that was a miserable reality — but any bastard who didn't have it in him to act like a father should keep his hands off the kids entirely. If you didn't have the guts to live as a father, then don't even take a wife. Just have all the Duty Sex you want with whatever woman is asking for it.
And if you broke that agreement? You wouldn't be punished by law. But per the pact among the men, we'd lock you in a forced extraction facility, force-feed you Viagra, and make you have sex with women nobody wanted — or make you provide extracted semen every day, restricted to IVF use only.
And we would raise even the children born that way, and raise them well.
Amen.
We shared the results from Seoul, explained the national public debate scheduled for April 1st, and brought the discussion to a close.
After that heated debate wound down, I lay in a quiet room with nothing but the ticking of a clock, turning over everything we'd talked about.
Could I even be a good father? What was a good father, anyway? Was taking full responsibility for a child what made you one? Then could I take responsibility for every child of mine that was going to be born?
And what was I supposed to do about the women who would come at me with their eyes on the subsidies you got for having a child, and on the child support I would pay? Treat it as Duty Sex, keep it transactional, and just check whether they were raising the kid properly? I'd already drawn a line between wives and concubines — did I need to draw one among the children too? Then how did you divide the inheritance? Fine, I'd split my own estate equally. But what about the mother's?
One after another, all the details I hadn't thought through came flooding in, turning my mind inside out.
"This is so fucked. Shit. Why does it feel like I'm the only one worrying about this?"
Yeah, no. I wasn't sitting with this alone.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Right. This was what collective intelligence was for.
Almost ended up worrying about this all by myself.
A moment later I saw the KakaoTalk notification that I had unread messages, tossed the phone aside, and lay back down.
Yeah. This was fine. Someone else would figure it out. Or the government would.