A Proper Lesson
"Unnie, this is the best I can do."
"What on earth…"
Early that morning, Yerin reached me through Discord, and a handful of files came along with her. The moment I opened them, I was more shaken than I had been on any day since the one that turned me into a woman — the biggest shock of my life since my sex changed.
"I told you. I'd do everything I could for you."
"…"
Yerin. What on earth are you? A golden touch, a golden spoon, a high-school girl — the three great titles weren't enough, and she was still sitting on some secret besides.
Even so, thanks to her, I had just been handed a weapon more powerful than anything I had imagined.
"I owe you big for this. How am I even supposed to pay it back…"
"A wish!"
"Huh?"
"Next time, grant me a wish!"
A chill raced down my spine.
In a flash I saw her as she had been at our first meeting, announcing that she had a wish while staring blatantly at my midriff. I had refused outright — absolutely not — and she had talked me down by swearing it wouldn't be that kind of physical contact, only some small, harmless wish.
"Fine. But I'm telling you now: if it's a weird wish, it's void."
"Okay!"
Once the call with Yerin ended, I went looking for Yoon-jae in a hurry. The video set to go up today was already finished — I had even done a final check the night before — which meant an urgent revision.
He was thrown by the sudden request, but the moment he saw the contents of the weapon Yerin had sent, he agreed at once. No. He cheered.
"With this, it's a total smash. A seriously powerful weapon — enough to shut that nuisance crowd's mouths for good."
"The timing's tight, but please push through the edit. If we drop it at the very end, I think the impact will be enormous."
"That's the same cut I had in mind. Okay. I'll do it that way."
The stage was set. Now it was time for the cast to walk on.
Five in the afternoon.
The fourth video on the Hani TV channel — the one that had drawn so many eyes — went up. Subscribers gained over the past three days had already hit twelve thousand, and the views on the new upload began to climb fast.
Haa… is this actually going to work?
I had checked it and checked it again, but the anxiety wouldn't leave me. I sat blank for a moment, then clicked the video without quite meaning to.
Given the subject, I appeared in a neat, restrained outfit and opened with a polite greeting. I spoke about how hard it was for young people to get by these days, citing one case and another to pull the audience in, and then went straight to the point.
"The military service bonus-point system. How much do you actually know about it?"
The military service bonus-point system. It was a system that granted discharged soldiers bonus points, within a range of five percent, when they sat hiring exams. On December 23, 1999, the Constitutional Court ruled it unconstitutional by the unanimous decision of every justice, and it lost its effect. From 2001 onward it was replaced by a system that extended the upper age limit for sitting those exams.
The people who drove the case were the Korean National Council of Women, five students from Ewha Womans University, and a disabled student from Yonsei University. They argued that the system violated the constitutional rights to equality, to hold public office, and to freedom in choosing one's occupation, and they filed a constitutional complaint.
I understood their position. You sit an exam, and even if both of you score a perfect mark, so long as the other side holds bonus points, there is no method on earth by which you can win. But it was also endlessly selfish. They spoke of equality and fairness while turning their backs, for their own benefit, on the two years a young man was dragged off by the state and made to suffer.
Yes. People are selfish animals by nature. So I accept it. They were selfish. They made that argument, and by the logic of politics and the letter of the law, the system was abolished.
Still, this is what I think. It doesn't have to be bonus points. Bonus points are not the only way to compensate for those two precious years of a young life.
If this had been the sixties or seventies, when the country was poor and far from prosperous, I could have understood it to a degree. That was an era when every ounce of the nation's strength went into economic development, and there simply was no slack. But not now. We have become a considerably wealthy country, ranking near the top of the world, and the national finances have room to spare — so long as politicians stop wasting them on nonsense.
So why bind young men for two years to a monthly wage that, even then, came to barely twenty thousand won, and then abolish the bonus-point system on top of it? If there were women and disabled people who found that system unfair — if they went so far as to abolish it — then the thing to do was compensate those men by some other means. Had they been treated with any real sincerity from the start, instead of this election-season garbage about handing thirty million won to discharged soldiers, young men would not be this furious at the reality they live in now.
"Of course I understand. People are selfish. The politicians of the time probably looked the other way too, since it wasn't their problem. Their own children were going to slip out into public-service duty or get exemptions anyway, so why would they care."
In fact, if you looked at public opinion, people were more in favor of the military bonus-point system than against it. A 2007 poll showed 66 percent in favor; 2008 showed 63 percent; 2009 showed 60 percent. Of the remaining 34, 37, and 40 percent, not all were opposed — about half answered that they didn't know, and only about half of what remained was actual opposition. In practice, it was nearly a two-to-one margin.
"Looking at how things run these days, it was probably the same back then. Feminist forces in bed with political power, flexing their muscle. Anyway, here's my conclusion."
I brought up how other countries run their militaries. There are nations where men and women bear equal military duty as a matter of course, and Switzerland — which, like us, maintains its forces through conscription — taxes those exempted from service at three percent of their income for ten years, as a military-service tax. That money goes to the welfare of soldiers on active duty. I think the sense of deprivation each side feels toward the other would ease, at least somewhat, if we did the same.
You don't like that? There is no perfect method in this world. Satisfaction itself is an emotion you can feel only when a desire is met, and where, exactly, is the situation in which both sides' desires can be fully satisfied? A person can clear a million dollars in the stock market and still burn with envy the moment they hear the one beside them cleared ten. In the end, we have to live by yielding to each other at some reasonable line.
"I'm no expert on social systems, and I'm not a genius who can invent something overnight. I'm just an ordinary person living in this country, and instead of this endless conflict, I hope we can yield a little and walk toward the future together."
The military bonus-point system infringes on the freedom to choose an occupation? Then fine. We don't need it. Compensate them some other way instead — not with the false pledges politicians bark out as favors every election season, but with something true.
That was my short opinion on the subject that came first.
And next. This next subject was, in truth, the real point.
I think opinions on the military bonus points can reasonably split, depending on where you stand. My own view is that it would be better to solve the problem by some method other than bonus points on the existing hiring exams. But the share of women in the police, the military, and the fire service keeps growing — expanding under the name of a quota system — and inside it, every kind of corruption, discrimination, and incident keeps bursting into the open.
Inside the video, another video plays. A clip that had recently gone viral: a middle-aged male officer subduing a drunk, while the female officer beside him does nothing but film it on her phone. After that, similar footage and materials are laid out.
Female officers are almost never posted to remote corners of the provinces, or to islands like Ulleungdo. The hard work falls mostly to the male officers on the front line, while female officers usually take desk work or internal roles such as public relations. Even the ones who do step out to a scene, as the footage shows, spend their time taking pictures from the side or offering "support." People don't call them sideline cops for nothing.
That side makes its claim. We aren't barbarians — in the twenty-first century, do we really hire police on physical ability alone? The fields where female officers are needed, they say, are endless.
Fair enough. There clearly is work that needs a female officer. In cases of sexual harassment, for instance, and other matters that are hard to tell a male officer, a woman might speak more easily to a female one. But outside of that? No matter how I turn it over, I can't make it make sense. Setting that kind of work aside, does a job exist that actually requires a female officer?
This isn't a question of gender. It's a question of efficiency. There is a physical difference to begin with. In professions meant to protect the lives of the public and keep them safe — police, soldiers, firefighters — can a woman carry out that work better than a man? If there is work that needs women, then hire a small number of people for that work and stop there. So why chant their empty slogans of equality and fairness, and force an inefficient female quota — something anyone with half a brain could tell was wrong — even into these critical professions, manufacturing conflict as they go?
I think the military bonus-point issue still leaves room for discussion. This one does not. Not a bit of room. This is wrong.
There is recent statistical data. Take the 2020 rate of special promotions per ten thousand officers, women and men separately: eighty-one female officers, sixty-seven male. Women overwhelmed men. 2019 was no different — 76.2 female officers to 57.5 male. And in 2013, the year the gap yawned widest, it was 59.3 to 29.4, more than double. From 2012 through 2020, the male rate of special promotion never once surpassed the female rate.
In truth, the ratio isn't the problem. If female officers really were that outstanding at the job and produced that many special promotions, then by all means their numbers ought to be expanded. But analyze the official merits cited for each gender's special promotions, and you end up clutching the back of your neck.
For the men, the merits read "arrest of serious criminal offenders, including robbery-murder," "arrest of a ring involved in confinement and forced prostitution," "distinguished service in apprehending major suspects, including armed rampages." For the women, the records are stuffed with things that amount to wordplay, their substance unclear: "strengthening education on gender equality and the prevention of sexual harassment," "proactive administration, including budget savings in building an electronic visitor log," "contribution to higher satisfaction through equipment support and distinguished management of major events."
Is this normal? They scream equality and fairness, demand that the share of women be expanded among public officials — female police, female soldiers, female firefighters — then chase only the easy work, and enjoy perks like these even when it comes to promotion. Isn't this exactly the kind of case in which a man can't help feeling relatively deprived?
"As statistics like these keep piling up, and the forced arguments they push stop working, they drop the act entirely and show their true colors. Men enjoyed the benefits and the profits for so long, they say, so now it's women's turn to enjoy them. I don't agree."
A brief pause. Then the me on the screen, voice settled, speaks in a hard tone.
"Even if women were discriminated against, it wasn't the women of this generation. Even if men did the discriminating, it wasn't the men of this generation either. So I can't understand why young women of this generation — women who were never discriminated against themselves — show up wearing the mask of feminism and demand compensation. The people who actually deserve to be compensated are our grandmothers' generation. Our mothers' generation."
After that came a short thanks for hearing out my thoughts and my personal opinion, and the video faded out. But about three minutes still remained.
The screen brightened again, and there I was, changed into comfortable clothes. I was smiling brightly. I lifted my right hand and pointed lightly toward the top of the frame, where bold letters had taken their place before I even noticed.
"Hello, this is Hani. I'm sorry to have to bring up something this unpleasant at the end of a video. But you all know. You know how badly I've been hounded and harassed all week by that cafe of their persuasion — Women's Era Cafe."
Here, a slight dip of the head, eyes and voice trembling with unease — that was the point. I was the weak one, and I drove home just how vicious Women's Era Cafe was for tormenting someone like me for no real reason.
"But heaven must have been on my side! An insider from that cafe made a declaration of conscience and decided to help me. Thanks to them, I received the secret posts slandering me, the internal chats, and the rest of the materials — and based on those, I'm going to file charges."
I gestured once more, and eight usernames rose on the screen. The me in the video looked down at their outrages, printed in advance on sheets of paper and held in my hands.
"If I read just a few of them — KoreanMenOut posted something like this."
"That's what the post says. I'll give my answer in person, when we meet at the police station."
I read out every post and every line the eight of them had written, not leaving a single one behind. Revenge really does taste sweet. I could already picture Women's Era Cafe going up in flames, and that only made the satisfaction sweeter. The eight about to be charged would shake with fear, and the ones who had only joined in for fun, throwing stones at me, would scramble to delete their comments and cover themselves.
"…That's all. The eight of you who posted things like this."
I slid the papers aside and brought my gaze back to the center of the frame. A mask covered my face, but the me on screen was smiling brightly.
A small, neat bow. The head lowered, slowly. And the screen going dark.
The video ended.