Korean Noir Drama 'My Name' Is a Liberal Feminist Fantasy Bordering On Comedic
120 lbs female protagonist is a killing machine who physically takes down every male that stands in her way—suspend your disbelief, and the advancement of women’s rights.
Let’s get several things out of the way: To begin with, My Name, which was written by a woman, predictably, is not a superhero story with supernatural elements. If it was I wouldn’t have bothered with this review. It’s a classic revenge story that sees the female character Yoon Ji Woo/Oh Hye Jin, played by Han So-hee, as the archetypical angry young woman with unfinished business, knife in hand in a male-dominated world.
Secondly, I can respect the context of South Korea at the heart of the story. The current culture war between feminists seeking to correct the extreme gender inequality within historically patriarchal Korean society and those (generally men) vehemently trying to obstruct progress is something to empathize with—Korea ranked 115th out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2018 report on the global gender gap, making it one of the worst for gender discrimination among developed nations.
It’s not hard to understand why storylines like My Name come about. Injustice tends to elicit extreme reactions from certain fractions of society who try to champion those consistently denied basic humane treatment for being who they are. In this case, it’s being a woman in a male-dominant world. The narrative becomes skewed to serve a specific feminist agenda, a liberal one that, besides being riveting, undermines the struggle for gender equality not just within South Korea, but all around the globe—wherever Netflix is available and fans of Korean dramas can be found.
Image stills: Netflix
All the male characters in this show—while strong and captivating in their own right—are created for specific purposes to justify and intensify Hye Jin’s (I’ll refer to the female lead by the persona she goes by for most of the show) rage and violence: they’re psychopaths, useless, gang members, criminals, or mean. The few good men are killed off or relegated to a hospital bed because good men usually are—good people, in general, are sacrificed to highlight the viciousness of the world, and to advance a situation or plot—but also because Hye Jin is a female warrior that can’t depend on any man.
Not even after becoming a cop, under the guidance of drug lord mentor Choi Mu-jin, played by Park Hee-soon, who, as it turns out (because no one anticipated it) was exploiting her the entire time. Criminals don’t exactly have a reputation for being beacons of truthfulness, but neither do cops. Hye Jin is emotional, naive, and intent on carrying out vigilante justice…as an officer in the police force.
The selling point for me in watching the show was learning that Park Hee-soon was playing a lead role. After seeing him play bit parts in the films Age of Shadows and 1987: When the Day Comes (highly recommend, by the way), I appreciated the quietness in his demeanor as a mostly action-heavy actor. That quietness is what makes Choi Mu-jin the psychopath so compelling. Mu-jin takes Hye Jin in and brings her to his gangster-training base, placing her amongst a pack of brawny young males so she can demonstrate her capabilities.
More deluded liberal types would celebrate the fact that Mu-jin comes off as a socially-progressive character who extends equal treatment to Hye Jin by allowing her to train alongside and fight his male henchmen. Hilariously, his egalitarian methods are invalidated once the gullible viewer realizes it was all just mere exploitation of a naive woman from the start.
That is, if Hye Jin being the only female and rookie participating in a martial arts cage fight against a pack of males and defeating the best fighters despite being significantly smaller didn’t make you raise an eyebrow. Or laugh.
Biological male Alana McLaughlin defeats biological female Celine Provost.
Contact and full-contact sports are divided by gender and within that, weight classes for a good reason. Allowing men to fight women gives the former an unfair advantage. The controversies surrounding transgender fighters in the MMA, for instance, highlights the insanity of disregarding human biology when it comes to allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports. You can’t justify it, no matter how delusional you are. Because that’s a biological male beating up a woman…for sport.
From The Daily Mail
A woman trained in martial arts could no doubt take down a smaller-built or untrained male. But taking on a larger trained male and defeating him requires pretense. The guy would have to withhold his true strength and agility, knowing that his opponent is clearly not his equal, physically.
Pretense is rife within certain liberal circles, especially where it concerns women in privileged positions who consider themselves champions of equal rights or female empowerment. They believe themselves to be paragons of leadership but are quick to play the helpless victim when they’re challenged by men or superior women for any questionable behavior.
You see, men are supposed to pretend not to notice when such types of women reveal any sort of inadequacy. They’re supposed to withhold criticism, soften their stance on moral rectitude, lower their standards and allow those women to thrive unimpeded because, funnily enough, those women also want you to see them as the emotionally and intellectually weaker, inadequate sex when they come under scrutiny. They want the fantasy in their minds they believe to be real, to be accepted by all, no questions asked, for the inconsistencies to be ignored. Please pretend to be blind to them — pretend being the keyword.
Don’t just encourage their fantasy. Impose it on people who live in reality and force them to accept it.
We’re meant to buy that all of these males see Hye Jin as a physical threat, when it would’ve made more sense if Hye Jin defeated them via more reasonable methods, like psychological ones. After all, psychological manipulation was what she was truly a victim of from the start. Or just had her use a gun to shoot down her male opponents, as she had resorted to with one opponent near the end, realizing his skills were on a different level than hers. Guns are too easy all the time, though, when you’re trying to create a completely contrived situation that’s laughably illogical.
It makes more sense, and is apparently less laborious, to have a young woman train herself until she has the strength of ten men and the martial arts skills of Ip Man.
Hye Jin is meant to symbolize the invincible female force who gets stabbed repeatedly and beaten down throughout the show but can’t be defeated. We’re meant to believe that Hye Jin lives in a world surrounded by men and that she’s constantly at psychological and physical war with them, but other women who pose a similar threat are almost non-existent in that world, except for some mean bitches back in high school that had bullied her.
The show is thus better taken as deliberately lazy arrangements of lightweight symbolism to emphasize the underestimated female plight—the devastation and impediments just one significantly smaller woman has to endure in a society of traditionally dominant males, where other women exist quietly in the background, doing as they’re told or suffering through their own muted battles. In this story of victimhood, the “bad guys” are exclusively male. In reality, there are females who ruin other females every single day, and many of them use weak, pathetic males as pawns to set women back.
A certain variety of liberals do things in the most counter-productive ways. They are always victims, easily played by others due to their own naïveté, roll with the wrong people, and then try to make others—or, in the case of extremist liberal feminism, all males—pay for it.
Attacking men and trying to make them feel like they should all feel guilty, fearful, and yielding to women for everything women have endured as second-class beings throughout history exacerbates the conflict, because no one likes to be accused of shit they didn’t do.
No one likes to be told “this is what you are” simply because they belong to a specific group. It’s combative, antagonizing, and irrational. You’re looking for a fight instead of attempting to find more reasonable solutions.
I have every reason to root for Hye Jin, and I do at her worst moments of being disrespected, humiliated, underestimated, belittled. A lot of women have endured such treatment, myself included—from males and females alike. I’m 5'4 and skinny and brown to boot. I’ve also never known a male I could rely on, and so learned to defend myself (not physically, as I have no intention of ever attempting to get into a physical fight with anyone) instead of relying on others. Physical details matter in this world populated by superficial, predatory types, many of whom are fueled by a desire to dominate others, especially those they believe to be smaller, softer, and weaker, and thus more inferior than they are.
For the sake of fiction and entertainment, and in this case, the feminist agenda, the message communicated is: get emotional and violent and kill dudes who you have no business going up against physically. Attempting to scare males into respecting women, or not even respecting, but fearing toxic female predators who wear different masks, is an extreme and counterproductive solution. It gives sanction to psychotic females, even young girls, to get away with abusing anyone.
I've personally witnessed and experienced the repercussions of the Me Too movement and Western feminism in the US. It's created a culture of fear and acrimony among men, including good men who aren't out to get women.
It's not an ideal reality to live in, where feminists want to punish all males for the ill-treatment women have endured for centuries and wrest control of power and control—this is terrifying. I, for one, balk at the idea of women holding complete power, because women can be psychopaths as well.
My Name is a great show, though, and worth a watch. The cast brought their A-game, the fight sequences are dope and in terms of quality of entertainment, it’s easily a 5/5. Just don’t go in expecting logic, or a gain to the onerous women’s rights struggle.
