Caution: The review below contains significant spoilers and might not be suitable for young adult readers

Like products, countries too have their own brandings. For instance, Malaysia brands itself as ‘Truly Asia’. Thailand brands itself as a gay haven and a global destination for queers. And South Korea has K-pop, BTS and K-drama.

A big reason Korean content has reached global success is because they are loved by women. And they often receive just as much flak from the heteronormative, sexist male audience.

By now, everyone knows South Korea’s reality is exactly the opposite. Social media destroys the image Korean films build on screen every day.

To really know just how bad it really gets for a woman in Korea, it is advisable to totally forget everything Korea shows on showbiz. There are documentaries available on the 4B movement. Apart from that, Korean feminist filmmakers are always trying to reach out to the audience.

And without South Korea being a strictly religious fanatic country that would draw global attention, now it is hard to ignore.

Yonghoon Lee’s “Social Class” (2018) is a short film that lays it bare.

The Lonely ‘Slut’

It is not enough to describe it as a story of workplace sexual assault. It goes beyond and explores female sexuality and even beyond to show how women are forced to survive in order to earn their living.

And like every other patriarchal society, here, too, the protagonist is slutshamed. It somehow becomes more outrageous at the final scene, when her own students start slutshaming her.

This is not an exclusively new subject that was never explored before. Films on school bullies are a dozen a dime in Korea. The hidden cam epidemic is well reported in the media. And big budget productions like Marionette (2018) previously dealt with juvenile crimes involving sexual assaults on minor girls—usually blackmailed with videos taken without their consent.

The difference is, in “Social Class”, the audience watches a fully grown woman becoming the victim. Whatever authority she might have as a teacher on her students is gone. And no one, not even her female students, spared her.

She ends up becoming the only ‘slut’ in the entire school and fighting alone in her class just as much as in the teacher’s room.

It is relatable to the Asian audience through and through. It is nowhere an exclusively Korean experience and could have easily been made in India or Pakistan.

And probably this is what makes it so strong and boosts its shock value. Because it leaves the Asian audience from the lower, less developed, less well off parts of Asia asking: why is this happening in Korea?

The Assault

The story starts in the principal’s room. He is an old man who likes to call the younger female teachers in his room to have sex with them. He usually lures them with offers of promotions, bonus and increments in salary.

Going against him might as well mean losing those privileges. Except the protagonist, nearly every other female teacher obeys the principal in the story. None of them tries to escape. And some of them willingly give in.

As the very misogynistic saying goes, a woman’s way to climb the ladder of success is sleeping around with men, seems to be the only social norm in place here. Everything else, including respecting the elders, universally known and advertised as a core value of Korean culture, has already fallen.

The double standards don’t take very long to reveal themselves. The protagonist repeatedly escapes the principal, but falls for a student. And it ends up in disaster.

The story doesn’t go more than this. But here, it does something different. Instead of portraying her as a woman who knows how to ‘stay in her lane’, she decides to feel desire. She has an object of desire just as much. And she keeps meeting him secretly, at the backyard of the school.

Her sexual and emotional needs weren’t portrayed very vividly, but it gave away all the hints. Ultimately, she discovers one of her colleagues in the principal’s room. He tells her to ‘get out’.

Soon after, she herself is discovered with her student by the principal and the teacher he was having sex with.

They both smirk, and the principal asks, ‘so, you too like young, don’t you?’

His hypocrisy doesn’t wait for no shame. Just as it goes in reality.

Class, Power, Gender and Other Struggles

In many ways, it is a classic textbook feminist film. The plotline is something every feminist can relate to on a universal scale. And we’ve heard of many similar stories since the dawn of time everywhere, again and again.

The only difference is, Lee’s backdrop is South Korea. She might have not done anything new, but she still exposed Korean society for what it is.

As both the director and the scriptwriter, she made her own creative choices. She did not offer the delusion of ‘sisterhood’ in the story. No other woman was coming to save her protagonist.

Once her protagonist became a hot topic, they’d rather click her picture and post it on Facebook right in the middle of the class. Ultimately, what it becomes is a brutal power play. She loses almost every power, except what a feminist narrative allows her.

But the plot did not have any more room for her to use her victimhood as her empowerment and turn it against her abusers. The topic of religion went unmentioned, too.

What makes her disenfranchised is a combination of factors—which morphs into a gender, class and power struggle. She is powerless in front of the principal when it starts and ends up being at the mercy of her students.

When all this might not be very new or one of a kind, “Social Class” weaves the very basic text of feminism into scenes very neatly. It is available both on YouTube and the OTT platform Viddsee for free.

And sometimes, racial identity is what makes a world of difference. It tells the entire world,  women from the much darker, ‘savage’ parts of Asia are not alone. Their Korean sisters, in the ‘civilized’ and ‘enlightened’ country of Korea, suffer the very same, too.