[Opinion: Letters to the Editor]Men's work
To the Editor:

Recently both your editorial writer and a female contributor to In My View
expressed utter dismay and disbelief that Korean veterans have gotten so
angry over the constitutional court's decision to strike down a policy to award
bonus points to the test scores of former soldiers who apply for low-level
government jobs.
The anger of these men makes perfect sense to me. Korean men must give 26
months of their young lives to an army that neither pays them for their efforts or
offers them anything in the way of comfort or perks. Military service in Korea,
according the hundreds of Korean men I have spoken to, is a tedious period
of social and physical deprivation. And it is dangerous. Every year scores of
young Korean men are killed while performing tasks such as serving in flood
rescue operations and fighting off rabid demonstrators on the streets of Seoul.
Yet these fallen heroes receive no tribute. No monuments are erected in their
honor. Their deaths are footnotes in the news.
What makes the front pages of newspapers and the top stories in TV news
shows in their stead? Feature stories about young women at elite officer
training academies and their "bravery" in being women trying to make it in the
Korean military.
Always in these pieces, which seem to dominate the media now every
Veteran's Day the same way the several dozen American nurses who served
in the Vietnam war now own that holiday in America, there is some feminist
expert holding forth on the natural right of women to get the top prestige jobs in
the military. It never ceases to amaze me how the expert never mentions
requiring women to share in the hardships of the rank and file. The only
conclusion to be drawn from such blatant omissions is that Korea's feminists
believe that the dangerous and thankless service of Korea's half a million
grunts is "men's work." 
In her In My View piece, Sohn Jung-min displayed classic feminist reasoning:
Men should not be compensated, Sohn claimed, for their military service
because women have such hard lives already. Sohn even went so far as to
say that the government should compensate women for doing housework and
having babies, but should not give men a single won for their 26 months of
military service.
Does this make sense to anyone with a brain not poisoned by radical
feminism? Does the government force women to have babies? Who benefits
more from having a baby, the woman who becomes a mother or the
government? Yet, how many young men would go through 26-months of
unpaid military hell if the law didn't force them to.
I am sure Sohn's absurd arguments brought cheers among all those horribly
disadvantaged young women at Ehwa University who were responsible for
initiating the lawsuit that killed the test bonus and subsequently destroyed the
morale of the nation's fighting men.
But how is it that some pampered Ewha princess with her cell phone and
European vacations has the gall to claim that some working class young man
fresh out of getting bottles and rocks thrown at his skull for 26 months of riot
police duty is more "privileged" than she in this society? Feminism would really
be good for some laughs if hadn't ruined the ability to reason in so many.
What truly amazes me in this whole affair is that Korean men have not been
more militant in their response to the court's decision to strip away the lone
benefit of their service. The Herald editorial writers were shocked that a
website got hacked; I am surprised there hasn't been a full-scale revolt of the
armed forces.
What are these men risking their lives for? A constitution and a nation that
doesn't forbid the use of young able-bodied men as slave labor (young
soldiers are called out to save the land of wealthy farmers in the rainy
season), but absolutely forbids the awarding of 3 to 5 percent in extra points
for veterans on a test for the lowest possible positions in the government
because it offends the sensibilities of Ewha princesses? Moreover, what is the
big deal about an extra three to five percent in points on a test. It seems to me
that such a miniscule gap could easily be closed with a little bit of extra study.
Oh, I forgot, feminism is not about giving women a chance to prove
themselves; it is about giving women things because they are women.
Were feminism worth the paper its manifestos are printed on, Korea's women
would be fighting to require that all women be drafted as well as men to serve
the nation for 26 months. But don't anyone hold his or her breath on that one.
The Ehwa princesses would absolutely die if they had to wear nothing but
green for two years, and the Korean courts, no doubt, would be sensitive to
their pain.