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North Korea slams 'venomous swish' of South leader's skirt in sexist outburst

North Korea blamed President Park Geun-hye’s “venomous swish of skirt” this week for tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Image: Park Geun-hye
South Korean President Park Geun-hye salutes during a military ceremony on March 8. Her promise to retain a tough stance on any North Korean threats was a major factor in her election victory.Ahn Jung-Won / AP
/ Source: The New York Times

When North Korea blamed President Park Geun-hye’s “venomous swish of skirt” this week for tensions on the Korean Peninsula, it brought up an issue that had been mainly unremarked upon in South Korea: Would their leader’s gender color the latest confrontation between the Koreas?

The North Koreans, masters of outrageous propaganda, no doubt picked their phrase carefully for the South’s first female president. “Swish of skirt” was long an insult in Korean culture, directed at women deemed too aggressive, far from the traditional ideal of docile and coy.

“North Korea is taunting and testing her,” said Choi Jin, head of the Institute of Presidential Leadership in Seoul. “It’s an important test for her at home, too. People supported her for being a strong leader, but they also have a lingering doubt about whether their first female president will be as good in national security as she sounds.”

The sexist barb is one small piece of the early challenge the North has posed for Ms. Park, who came into office just after Pyongyang detonated its third nuclear test and has spent her first three weeks in office managing increasingly fraught relations between the two countries.

Amid a torrent of threats, the North this week said it nullified the armistice that has helped keep the peace since the Korean War ended in a stalemate in 1953. On Thursday, the North Korean news media reported that its leader, Kim Jong-un, supervised a live artillery drill near the disputed western sea border, the site of recent skirmishes.

So far, Ms. Park has been steely, meeting one verbal volley from the North about a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Seoul with her own government’s threat to wipe the North Korean leadership “off the face of the earth,” an unusually blunt warning from Seoul targeting Mr. Kim by name.

Fan of U.K.'s Thatcher
For many in South Korea, Ms. Park’s gender has long been a secondary concern, even as vestiges of the country’s patriarchal past remain. She was elected in good part because she is the daughter of a dictator who is rated South Korea’s most popular former president.

And Ms. Park has a reputation of her own as tough-minded. Her promise to retain a tough stance on any North Korean threats was a major factor in her election victory. (She has named her father, President Park Chung-hee, a former army general and a staunch anti-Communist, and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain as her role models.)

Although Ms. Park has also promised to seek a reconciliation with Pyongyang if Mr. Kim’s conduct earned South Korea’s “trust,” there was a widespread belief that she would be far stricter in dealing with North Korea than her liberal rival, Moon Jae-in.

Image: Park Geun-hye
South Korean President Park Geun-hye, third from left, pushes a cart to a counter to pay for her purchases at a retail store in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, March 13, 2013. North Korea's first public, senior-level mention of South Korea's first female president ended up being a sexist crack. The body that controls North Korea's military complained Wednesday about the \"venomous swish\" of her skirt. (AP Photo/Yonhap, Ahn Jung-won) KOREA OUTAhn Jung-Won / Yonhap

Several analysts said that the North Koreans — who have held on to their patriarchal traditions even as the South has rapidly become more egalitarian — are aware of Ms. Park’s reputation. The North got a direct glimpse of her in 2002, when she traveled to meet Kim Jong-il.

“I don’t think her gender is a disadvantage,” said Yoo Ho-yeol, a North Korea specialist at Korea University. “The North Koreans know that she is not an easy woman, or an easy female leader, to deal with.”

But Andrei Lankov, a North Korea scholar at Kookmin University in Seoul, is less convinced. He called the North “a deeply patriarchal culture where women are believed to be generally unsuitable for any position of power and influence.”

“Hence,” he said, “they might assume that President Park is weak and irrational.”

To her conservative supporters, Ms. Park’s steadfastness in the face of adversity is legend. In 1974 a Communist tried to kill her father, but killed her mother instead. He was later assassinated by his own spy chief, in 1979. In an episode she liked to cite during the campaign, the first thing she said when told of this was: “Is everything all right along the border with North Korea?”

'Dirty prostitute'
And during her time in the legislature, to which she was first elected in 1998, her stern language prompted political commentators like Mr. Choi to call hers a “neuter leadership.”

Mr. Yoo, the North Korea specialist, said that by Pyongyang’s standards, the skirt reference was relatively restrained because her name was not mentioned. He viewed that as an indication that North Korea was allowing room for future dialogue.

Over the years, North Korea had heaped worse epithets on others, calling former President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea a rat. And North Korea was harder on Ms. Park when she was still an opposition leader; in 2006, a North Korean Web site carried a poem that called her a “dirty prostitute” for the Americans.

Some analysts say that Ms. Park appears sensitive to any questions raised by her gender in a country where men still dominate politics and business. She formed her own cabinet mostly with men, and filled her national security team with hard-line former generals. Her top national security adviser, the former Defense Minister Kim Jang-soo, is remembered for skipping the Korean custom of bowing when he met Kim Jong-il, then North Korea’s leader, in 2007.

“She seems to surround herself with former generals to cover herself from any doubt that she might be weak in national security,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korean expert at Dongguk University in Seoul.

The test of her resolve would come if the North Koreans, vexed by tough new international sanctions, launch some limited strike on border islands or South Korean naval ships, as many analysts suspect might happen.

But few believe she will hold back from a strong but limited response, because she knows her history. Her predecessor was criticized for what many considered a weak response to the artillery barrage of a South Korean island in 2010 that killed four people.

This article,"Sexist Taunt From North Korea Raises Gender Issue for the South’s New Leader," first appeared in The New York Times.

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