Eagerly awaiting Christine Ahn’s reaction to North Korea’s sexism and homophobia

Now that North Korea’s state media have called South Korea’s female president a “whore,” a “prostitute,” a “crazy bitch,” and a “comfort woman,” no one will ever have to invent sexism again to deflect criticism of North Korea’s crimes against humanity, and whoever does will, from this date forward, have to argue her away around real, vicious, state-sponsored misogyny.

What Park did before Obama this time reminds one of an indiscreet girl who earnestly begs a gangster to beat someone or a capricious whore who asks her fancy man to do harm to other person while providing sex to him. [….]

She fully met the demands of her master for aggression, keeping mum about the nukes of the U.S. and desperately finding fault with fellow countrymen in the north over their nukes. She thus laid bare her despicable true colors as a wicked sycophant and traitor, a dirty comfort woman for the U.S. and despicable prostitute selling off the nation. [KCNA]

Separately, the Rodong Sinmun called Park a “political whore” who had “oil[ed] her tongue on Obama.” In the last month, North Korea has also called Park a “crazy bitch” and “human scum,” and overflown her residence with reconnaissance UAVs. It called her (admittedly implausible) reunification plan “a psychopath’s dream” and told her to “keep[] her disgusting mouth closed.” And as I noted at the time, North Korea called Park “a political prostitute” last November.

Where to begin? I suppose equally statesmanlike ideas can heard at police booking desks anywhere, from men who have been arrested for violating restraining orders, although in every “Cops” episode I’ve seen, the censors left a bit more to the imagination. (Also, those men didn’t learn their English in Pyongyang.) In any event, it’s safe to conclude that the charm offensive and that anti-“slander” deal are both over.

No self-described feminist can ever overlook this language without forfeiting either her claim to feminism or her credibility. In case you wonder, this is not an empty hypothesis. I can name at least one self-described feminist (and maybe one more) who has overlooked this, will almost assuredly continue to do so, and is occasionally invited to appear on broadcasts whose audiences must number in the hundreds (also, Al Jazeera). Something tells me Pyongyang’s latest isn’t a deal-breaker for her. Or, for that matter, for Al Jazeera.

Now, unlike the reporters at AFP, I didn’t find where KCNA allegedly called our African-American President a “pimp,” but “fancy man” suggests as much, and invokes crude racial and sexual stereotypes of pimps in purple leisure suits that even North Korean propaganda writers can’t be ignorant of. Only North Korea could get away with language like this. (I wonder what Dennis Rodman thinks about it. No, on further thought, I suppose I don’t.)

I offer no opinion as to whether these words lower KCNA’s own bar after last week’s homophobic slurs against Justice Kirby. But I do hope Stephen Bosworth and Robert Gallucci read this part:

The outcome of Obama’s south Korean junket clearly proved that the DPRK was entirely just when it judged and determined that it should counter the U.S., the sworn enemy, by force only, not just talking, and should finally settle accounts with it through an all-out nuclear showdown. 

Oh, and North Korea is saying that it’s done with South Korea as long as Park is President.

There is no remedy for Park and there is nothing to expect from her as far as the inter-Korean relations are concerned as long as she remains a boss of Chongwadae. [….]

Genes remain unchanged. Needless to say, her present behavior suggests that her fate will be just the same as that of her father Park Chung Hee who met a miserable death after being forsaken by his master and public while crying out for “unification by prevailing over communism” and “unification by stamping out communism”. 

The DPRK will never pardon anyone who dares challenge its dignity, social system and its line of simultaneously developing the two fronts, the statement warned. 

On a related note, North Korea, which was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, also threatened a preemptive attack and to obliterate South Korea this week. Discuss among yourselves.

Oh, and North Korea’s Deputy U.N. Ambassador, Ri Tong-il, enlarged the definition of diplomacy recently by saying that “Pyongyang has drawn a ‘red line’ for the U.S.,” accused arch-neocon Barack Obama of being “hell-bent on regime change,” and said that “[t]he U.S. itself may be in danger if it keeps denying our self-defensive military measures.” (Ri also said that there “are no [human rights] abuses” in North Korea, and that North Korea has “best social system in the world.”)

It’s sad to consider that somewhere in this world, the composition of such language is deemed a talent that qualifies a person for high diplomatic office. But these are, after all, just words. The more important feminist grievances against North Korea ought to be against petty despotisms like forbidding women from wearing pants or riding bicycles, or telling them what hairstyles they can wear, or the greater despotisms that deny them their life’s aspirations and force them into sexual slavery instead.