Published:
January 19, 2013
Translated
by Hwang Meeyoung
Editor’s note: In “My
Feminism,” a series planned in honor of Ilda’s 10th anniversary,
diverse individuals document feminism through their experiences and share the
meaning and social effects of these experiences with readers.
Lee
Chung-yeol, second author of this series, tries to to use art to connect
feminism, life and education. The series is supported by the Korea
Foundation for Women’s Funding for Gender-Equal Society.
Eight Years of Living Together
as an Unmarried Heterosexual Couple
The
sink is mangy with dishes that have been piled up in there since yesterday. The
time for my canine companions’ bath is already past. I want to write. But my
body won’t listen to me. I think I have to catch up on housework first before
doing what I want to do.
Though
I am 37 years old, I still have difficulty deciding what to do first between things
I want to do and those I have to do. The worst among the things I have to do is
housework. But again, I’ve wasted a few hours just agonizing over it today.
Unlike me, my partner is enjoying a peaceful nap. I hate him.
It
has been almost eight years since I started living with my partner. We live
together as an unmarried heterosexual couple. I do not agree with wedding
ceremony rituals of doubtful origin or the marriage custom in which women are
subordinate to their husband’s family. I also have concerns about a marriage
institution that allows only heterosexual couples and gives many legal benefits
to married couples. We do not care about what people frequently ask us: “When
will you guys get married?” Marriage is a matter of choice and what they
consider a “normal life” does not seem happy to us.
We
are often told that we are a perfect match. While I look very feminine, my
partner looks masculine. That is why people see us as a typical heterosexual
couple. But our real relationship is far from what it looks like.
The Days When I Tried to Be
Feminine
Many
people say that I am “feminine.” I have been developing my “femininity” since
puberty. However, you may think that the feminine ideal, which I used to act out
in order to be loved and recognized by others, and the femininity which I now
choose on my own, are similar concepts, but their impacts will probably head in
different directions.
 |
| Young and feminine women receive preferential treatment. But it did not mean that they recognized me as who I am. © Ilda |
For
a young girl, it was easy and fun to play the part of what people regarded as the
“feminine ideal,” which had simple and clear behavioral patterns. I practiced
smiling and spoke in a gentle tone. I wore my hair long and never failed to put
on makeup. Though I was taller than average, I stuck to high heels. Since my
innately small ribs pressed on my organs, I suffered from chronic indigestion. But
this was an advantage for me, because I could not eat much—not out of coyness—so
I had a slim waist. I was able to look like a “desirable” woman, as long as I
did not reveal what I was really thinking and listened attentively to others.
I,
as a young and feminine woman, received several types of preferential treatment.
Men carried my bag voluntarily, bought me food, helped me with my homework and spared
me from hard work—favors that unfeminine women could never get. I also had some
incidents where a strange man declared his love for me or paid for my meal or
drink. I did not have trouble finding part-time jobs as a private tutor or a
clothing store clerk. Even though I was not that pretty, my “feminine” physical
features and character appealed to men, as well as the older generation, and
saved me from social difficulties.
But
this kind of recognition apparently did not mean that they recognized me as who
I was. I was an active, energetic, adventurous and critically-engaged person,
full of drive, who liked to plan everything. People, however, refused to recognize
some aspects of me that were “un-feminine”, instead asking me, “Why are you being
like that?”
Society
wanted women who were passive like a doll. It was frustrating. The biggest
problem was that I began to forget what I had thought, dreamed and pursued. But
since acting like a feminine woman brought me more benefits, I devoted myself
to the acting. When I realized that I was increasingly trapped in the role of “a
desirable woman,” I found myself the stereotypical woman who had been
brainwashed into only caring about love.
When
I was dumped by a boyfriend for the first time, the pain was enormous. But even
while I felt like breaking down, I found myself playing the role of a tragic
heroine. I felt pity for myself. I became aware that the real me was gone and only
my acting was left. Also I realized that I was craving love from others because
I could not love myself. I decided to build inner strength so that I could
recognize and love myself. And I wanted to have an equal and honest true
relationship, not a calculated one based on acting to please each other.
Confronting my Fear and
Experimenting with an Honest Relationship
After
reflecting on the things I had considered desirable, I realized that they were all
vague, simplified and divided into the two categories of good and bad, or right
and wrong. I also realized that the price for the preferential treatment I had
enjoyed was suppression, and that consideration and discrimination were two
sides of the same coin. And around the time when I began to awaken to those
things, I met my current partner.
He
was odd. We met each other, along with others, for the first time at an offline
meeting hosted by an online community I was running. He casually took my arm
and chatted about himself like a girl. He was honest about his own feelings. He
was kind of picky and had high standards. He was more interested in personal
grooming than I was. He looked rather more “feminine” than “masculine.”
Although he was much older than me, I didn’t have to call him oppa. (Oppa literally means “older brother” but now it is used by Korean
females to address males older than them who they are close to. It is often
used in a romantic relationship when a girl refers to her boyfriend who is
older/same age as her.) It was novel and strange.
There
is a saying that love is all about timing. At that time, I had decided to study
art so I gave myself privilege to live freely as an artist. When I met him, I
was deliberating on the mold that constrained my freedom. So whenever I felt
that there was something about him I found odd or I disliked, I immediately
began to question that judgment. And I thought over why I didn’t like that
thing.
In
previous relationships, every time I had found something about my boyfriend
that I disliked, I had not let my feelings show and had pushed him away just in
my mind. If someone else showed interest in me when those unpleasant things
about him built up enough, I simply said goodbye to the boyfriend and went on
to the next relationship, as if I was crossing a stream on stepping-stones.
There was no reason for me to go through a hard time to maintain the
relationship. I had suffered enough maintaining my economic independence from a
young age. For me, romantic relationships were a kind of reward and I had no
energy to waste on fighting.
However,
I had fierce fights with my current partner. Of course, fighting requires a lot
of energy. But the real reason why I had avoided fighting was fear: that my
opinion would not be accepted, I would not be respected and, most of all, the
relationship in which I was loved would end. I wore the mask of a pacifist as a
way to ignore these fears. Since had I decided to stop acting and wearing a
mask, I made up my mind to go ahead and have fights with him. Though really,
there was no way for me to avoid fights, because he was great at expressing his
feelings, even strong ones, and, above all, he noticed whenever I was acting.
Conflicts Amplified by Communicative
Differences
After
we started to live together, I was always busy with school and work for a few
years. So my partner took care of almost all of the housework. I liked to do
outside activities and hang out with people. I, ignorant about the work that
should be done to keep a house clean and running properly, had no idea how much
effort he was putting into housework.
 |
| Our conflicts brought by the disagreement on housework were becoming aggravated because of language differences. © Lee Chung-yeol |
As
I was very happy with the pleasure and sense of accomplishment that I was
learning and growing, I did not see my partner’s hard work that supported my
happiness. He acknowledged what I was doing, whereas I did not acknowledge what
he was doing. Still, I was tactful enough to thank him from time to time. But
he finally noticed that I didn’t mean it, and, as a result, the conflict
between us caused by his disappointment in me and my selfishishness became more
frequent.
Petty
quarrels were aggravated by communicative differences. While I, who was direct
in my speech, wanted him to tell me his difficulties as he felt them, he wanted
me to notice and acknowledge them before he said anything. I couldn’t
understand his expressing his anger at me. That was because I grew up focusing
on language and reason, so whenever I felt anger I tended to think about and
explain the reason for it before I actually expressed it. Also it was not easy
for me to even recognize my anger, because I had developed my emotions in an
unbalanced way and repressed my negative feelings.
My
partner is a sensitive person, but he had been taught to be a “man” to get
social recognition. I had developed only positive emotions; on the contrary, he
was not good at expressing positive feelings. He had a loud voice and his
gestures were large. He never hesitated to insist that his own standards were
absolute. He preferred speaking to listening, but doing so more about what he
knew than about what he felt.
Since
I grew up in a language-oriented family, the way he expressed his feelings—mostly
emotionally and non-verbally—seemed too rough and violent to me. And I, who was
sensitive to what other people thought of me, often felt hurt as I took his
opinion as criticism of me. He, who was emotionally sensitive and whose mood
swung back and forth, felt stifled with me as I was rational and logical.
Discomfort increasingly outweighed affection. At the peak of the conflict, when
I was considering breaking up with him, I encountered a book titled Nonviolent Communication.
Getting to the Bottom of
Violence and Dominance
Violence
is not just about yelling, beating, destruction or force. The mindset where you
want your partner to do as you please or to live by your standards is also violence.
I
realized that I was more violent than him in some ways. I wanted him to be nice
to everyone because I was; I wanted him to work toward a goal because I did.
Then I learned that my wish that he would conform to my ways could be violence
and I finally began to understand little by little what a hard time he had gone
through.
I
also discovered that I, who had been always “exemplary,” had used the standards
that dominate this society to justify all my behaviors and efforts. Despite
this unquestioning acceptance of most of the values defined by the society, I had
deluded myself that I was a “feminist” just because I had been opposed to the
division of gender roles.
Before
understanding the true meaning of violence, I had not been able to distinguish
violence from masculinity. But thinking deeply about how relationships were
established, I realized that the problem was not the distinction between
femininity and masculinity, but the mentality where you tried to use that
distinction as a tool to dominate your partner. I also learned that the mindset
where you wanted to make your partner obedient to you and to hold a dominant
position in the relationship was not different from social violence.
Desires
to dominate the world and to establish standards to distinguish between “right”
and “wrong” and divide things into “normal” and “abnormal” categories in order
to dominate capital and people that just accept the standards instead of finding
their own values… I wanted to look into my desires to beat other people, to
become the only survivor, and to have everything my own way. Only then did I
realize that feminism’s role was not just to let people know how gender roles
were divided, but also to reveal the logic that dominates society and to embraces
deviations from it.
How to Coordinate the
Difference in Values and Language Between Two People
Now
we have divided up housework in accordance with our standards, values and characteristics.
 |
| My partner enjoyed growing these sprouts. © Lee Chung-yeol |
I,
who put a great value on health and never skip meals, am in charge of preparing
food. Also, I do the dishes and maintain the kitchen. My partner, who has high
standards for cleanliness, cleans up the house. And whoever needs to wash
clothes does the laundry. But he does it more often than I do, because he is
stricter about grouping types of clothes for laundry. Grooming and bathing our
four canine companions is my job; feeding them is his.
In
fact, I feel that I do more housework than he does. But considering the
unfairness that he endured in the past, I think I have to accept this
situation.
After
dividing up our roles clearly, we barely fight over housework. Now what we have
to do is understand and coordinate the difference in values and communication
styles between us.
I
need to practice keeping my distance from the old me, who, as a woman, was sensitive
to what other people thought of her, and also did not lend enough weight to her
partner’s opinion. What’s more, I have to take a close look at my perception
that housework does not have value (the reason for which is pretty obvious: as
a model citizen who has accepted the values defined by this society, I have not
considered housework a direct production activity by capitalist standards.)
I
wonder how I will handle the contradiction and conflict between the values I had
learned and those I want to pursue from now on. But since the contradiction and
conflict are inevitable, for now it is more important to pay attention to and
examine them.
Also,
for me, who has learned that only diligence is valuable, one of the principal
challenges is to have complete respect for my partner’s current choice—to do
less housework - without feeling resentful. In this respect, “feminism” is a
task to be undertaken. But it is a good thing that this task is something I
feel like doing, not something I have no choice but to do. Now I should catch
up on the dishes and think over this lifelong task.
*Original article:
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