The Heavy Unnies

Feminism.

The word names a theory, and a movement: a push against the male-centered ideology that has held for ages, and a demand that women's rights and women's agency be widened and strengthened in every corner of society.

The first time I learned what feminism was, I thought of my mother. Second of seven in a poor house, she had been told that a girl had no business at a university. The discrimination stuck. High school was the end of her schooling, and the day she graduated she went straight to work. My aunts fared no better. My uncles, every one of them, went to college. And later, when the talk turned to inheritance, my maternal grandfather—a rigid man of the old school—declared that a daughter, once married, was an outsider to the family, and announced that most of the property would go to his sons.

Watching that as a child, I thought my mother must have had a brutal time of it, and I assumed a movement like feminism had to have something good in it. In a modern society that preached fairness and equality, how admirable a cause was it, even on paper?

But communism and socialism did not collapse ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠for nothing. Ideologies that look magnificent in theory have never been in short supply. They were simply too ideal, and they looked past human desire and human selfishness. I think the feminism of the present day is the same.

The theory is fine. Equality of the sexes—what a good phrase that is. But let human greed and self-interest wedge themselves in, let the interests of organizations and political factions get stirred through the mix, and the original decent purpose disappears. What gets born in its place is an ugly, filthy monster.

And this is not true of feminism alone. Charities, religious groups, public-interest organizations, environmental groups—they run the same course. How many bodies founded to help the unfortunate have been warped, and warped badly, by human greed? They embezzle the donations. They dodge the taxes. They spend the money however they please.

Which was why I could speak with confidence about the Women's Era Cafe, then in the middle of something just short of a raid on my YouTube channel. They were wrong. And the public was not going to throw its weight behind desire and selfishness that rotten.

"Ooh, nice. This is good. Today's footage came out exactly right."

When I first laid the plan out, worry had been Yoon-jae's first reaction. He knew perfectly well how high the feminists rode online, and how loud their numbers were. But where there is an action, there is always a reaction. They had crossed the line. The endless refrain of do this for me had finally scraped people's patience down to the floor.

"Public opinion's shifting. A lot more people are starting to see, clearly, just how many problems the feminist groups in this country actually have."

"Now that you say it, yeah. These days there are quite a few YouTube channels saying the anti-feminist part out loud."

And with that in mind, I was aiming in earnest. They had thrown the first punch anyway. I might as well say outright that I couldn't stand feminists, lock my line in that direction, and climb all the way aboard the anti-feminist coin.

"We'll go with the third video and what we just shot. For the fourth, film something on the military-service bonus points, and on the argument that expanding the female police force is pointless. I've been interested for a while, so I know the rough shape of it, but still—give me about three days. I want to study it properly before I record."

"Want me to dig up the statistics and some material you can reference?"

"I'd appreciate that."

At the start, I had been at a loss. The road to a hundred thousand subscribers was already long enough, and now I was catching tackles on top of it. But that was then. A crisis is an opportunity. High risk, high return. Play it right, and a chance I had never even pictured might come walking in.

"Unnie! I heard everything from the editor."

"Hm? Ah—don't worry too much. I can handle it."

Yerin had just come back from a three-day, two-night school trip to Jeju. I had deliberately not told her, so she could enjoy the trip with an easy mind... but the tone she came back with was hurt, and badly.

"Why didn't you tell me? If something like that happened, you should have said so right away."

"Huh? No, I... that's..."

"I know. You were being considerate, so I could enjoy the trip properly. So I'm going to do my best for you, too, Unnie."

"Th-thanks. Yeah. I'll be counting on a good thumbnail."

"That goes without saying."

The point of the conversation seemed to have slipped a little sideways, but either way, that was how things with Yerin got settled.

And that afternoon, the third video went up on my YouTube channel.

Good. They're reacting faster than I expected. Uneasy, I slipped into the gallery for a lurk. Fortunately, young men's anger at the feminists ran deep—immediate reactions, immediate feedback, immediate movement.

As the afternoon wore on, my channel began, slowly, to change. The likes started catching the dislike count, a little at a time. Dislikes hammered into the false rumors, the malice, and the sneering comments the Women's Era members had left behind, and one by one, comments praising me showed their faces.

The subscriber count jumped from the fifteen-hundreds to 5,723 in a single day. No—not even a day. It was only three in the afternoon. Four or five hours, at most.

The response ran hotter than I had expected, and it carried straight over onto the Shindaeryuk TV livestream. Viewership was up by more than three hundred from the usual. Fan-club sign-ups came in thick, and the Water Balloon donations climbed with them. Barely a day had passed since I reset the mission, and the bar was already more than two-thirds full.

To the new viewers who said they had come to cheer after watching the YouTube video, I explained, in a soft and steady voice, everything that had happened over the past few days. The argument with the strange viewer who had announced they were a feminist. The malicious rumors and frame-ups spreading out of the Women's Era Cafe. The organized comment raids and the dislike-bombing.

"The truth is, I'm not anyone special. I'm just an ordinary person."

I made sure they understood I had been wronged one-sidedly, and I drew on their sympathy. Then I hinted at the rest. Don't expect too much from someone as ordinary as me.

"There's a lot I don't know. Which is why, I suppose, 'those people' told me to go study."

"So I'm going to give them what they asked for. The issues they're turning into social problems—I've been studying those hard lately. I'll cover that material in the next video."

Word of my counterattack must have gotten around, because those people seemed to have swarmed in. They weren't worth hearing out anymore, so I told my manager to ban every one of them. But they sprouted in clumps, like mushrooms. Ban them and another popped up every two or three minutes anyway, and the mood of the broadcast went completely to ruin.

That was not all. I had been struggling along in that atmosphere for about an hour when an administrator suddenly appeared and requested a private chat. I asked the viewers to wait a moment, opened it, and heard something I had not expected at all. Protests about ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the broadcast I was running were flooding the site's customer center and the phone line.

Dumbfounded, I asked which part was the problem. The answer was that the broadcast contained material hostile to women's rights, and that the cam shows I ran now and then were too provocative and encouraged the sexual commodification of women. I was past disbelief. I asked the administrator what the other female cam BJs were supposed to be, then, if my cam shows counted as provocative. On that point he had nothing to say. He only told me he was sorry, and asked me to understand.

He drank the water of the personal-broadcasting world himself. He had almost certainly already caught the shape of my situation. Even so, setting one lone BJ on one side of the scale and the protests of those notorious heavy "shes" on the other, and treating the two as equal weight, must have been more than he could manage. I remembered being ground down in real time as a grunt at a black company, and I decided to allow for his position. I told him I would run the broadcast more carefully from here, and I ended the chat.

Back on stream, I apologized to the viewers and said that was all for today.

I soothed the viewers grumbling their complaints, and I ended the broadcast.

"...This is pissing me off."

I had not even managed a proper counterattack, and right on the heels of the raid on my YouTube channel I had taken another hit. It felt like forcing down one dry sweet potato after another, each one sticking in the throat. The time had come to go looking for the cider.