Forget the butt-wiping, let's talk about sexism on EVA (and other airlines in Asia)

Gotta say, dudes, I don't want to write about this. I just don't.

I tried to avoid it - like, okay, this was pretty gross and could be a post about sexism in the Taiwanese workplace, especially as it relates to flight attendants (one of the most sexist work environments in Asia, to be frank, and EVA Air is known for specifically hiring beautiful flight attendants). But...do I have to? Maybe it'll just go away as some sensationalist garbage and I can write about something that doesn't make me want to gag.

But, as the story progressed, I realized that, gross-out factor and tabloid-like sensationalism aside, it was a real story of sexist workplace culture, and therefore...ugh. FINE.

So, as I'm sure you all know because we're all news bottom-feeders at heart (myself included), earlier this week news broke that an EVA Air passenger with mobility issues requested that a flight attendant help him lower his underwear, keep the door open and wipe him after using the restroom onboard. She initially refused, but he insisted he could not do these things on his own. He also, according to Focus Taiwan, made some disturbing comments at the flight attendant, which I won't publish here but you can read about literally everywhere else. While the passenger did have mobility issues, frankly, if he is going to fly but can't use the bathroom on his own, he needs to be traveling with an assistant who performs these duties in an official capacity, or not at all.

That's not what I'm here to gawk at, specifically. This should be open-and-shut: passenger harasses flight attendant (this surely counts as some form of sexual harassment, given his comments), flight attendant complains, airline intervenes, supports their employee, and at a minimum, the passenger is banned for life.

But no, of course that's not the end of the story, because the world is a horrible place and really it ought to just burn.

According to the Focus Taiwan article linked above:


Moreover, it was revealed that the passenger in question defecated in his underwear on a previous flight in May 2018, after which the airline did not place him on a blacklist, but rather left frontline flight attendants to deal with the man every time he flew with the airline, the union said.


CNN reported that EVA Air is insisting his previous flights were without incident, but that:


At the Monday press conference, the flight attendant was accompanied by a representative of the local flight attendants' union and fellow EVA employee. The union representative told reporters the man had flown EVA from the US to Asia numerous times. He had defecated in his seat during a flight last May after the crew rejected his demands, causing a foul smell in the entire cabin for over 10 hours, the representative said.


Taiwan News provides some potential background to previous incidents, so although they're not a source I care to link to, I will here.

So, this isn't an issue of a one-off incident in which a passenger made an unreasonable request, and the flight attendant was too flustered to forcefully refuse him (after all, her job is in customer service). It's entirely likely that this passenger has a history of such behavior, and that EVA Air, in the past, has not protected its flight attendants from it.

Like I said, working as a flight attendant one of the most sexist work environments in Asia. While I have said that of all the countries in Asia, Taiwan has the best gender egalitarianism (and meant it, and will defend it), that doesn't mean it's perfect, or even particularly good. Just better than other countries in the region, and that's not a particularly high bar to clear. And in this particular sector, the company culture is a throwback to the 1950s.

What's more, the same article reports that he has another flight with EVA booked this May, with no sign from the airline that they are intending to blacklist him or refuse to let him fly. It's quite likely that the company will, yet again, "leave frontline flight attendants to deal with the man".

EVA also noted that:


Later Monday, EVA issued a press statement saying flight staff are perfectly entitled to refuse passenger's requests they consider inappropriate. They also pointed out that the male cruise captain also helped the passenger in question during the flight.

The company also said it backs the flight staff completely and are prepared to offer assistance, if needed, to sue the passenger.


Translation:

"You've spent your entire career being told you have to do whatever it takes to please customers, and you know on some level you were hired mostly for your looks anyway. Our official rules state that you may refuse passenger requests, but let's be real. If the passenger complains, you'll be in trouble for not providing good service. However, we will be sure to tell the media that you could have refused the request, even though we both know you couldn't, really."

I don't expect every reader to understand this, but many of us who's held a customer service job have dealt with this tacit set of rules. There's the rule the company touts as official policy (you may refuse the customer), and the rule you know you are actually expected to follow (you'll be in trouble if the customer complains). If you're a woman, there's a whole new layer to it in which official policy may state that sexual harassment is not allowed, but everyone knows the real rules are "if a customer gets angry because you shut down their harassing behavior and complains, it's going to be a problem for you."

Note, for instance, that EVA is essentially saying here "we back our staff....buuuuuuut we're still going to let this man fly again and they'll have to deal with him". And, of course, "we'll help you sue him if you want, buuuuuuut we're not going to take any action ourselves."

That, readers, is how you know there's a tacit set of rules in place. If the rules actually were the rules, this guy would've been blacklisted already.

And that's what makes Asia such a frankly difficult place to work. Laws typically prohibit gender discrimination and sexual harassment. If you file such a complaint (especially a gender discrimination complaint to the government), they will take it seriously. I would know - I looked into doing so once, to a former employer who had sexist work practices, but ultimately chose not to as had no documentary evidence aside from one contract with some vaguely sexist guidelines, only eyewitness testimony.

But...good luck getting your employer to back you. And you know that men who target women at work tend to be quite good at making sure not to leave a paper trail or even witnesses. It's one of those rights that women in Taiwan often call "看得膽吃不到" - you can see it, but you can't eat it. You know you have the right, but good luck actually exercising it.

And this is gearing up to be just such a situation, with EVA continuing to take a weak position on the customer's behavior and not doing much to actually protect its employees. Or as CNN put it:


Supporters of the cabin crew have also blamed the corporate culture of many Asian service-sector companies that insist the "customer is always right" while, according to critics, ignoring employees' welfare -- especially after it was revealed the passenger appeared to be a repeat offender.

This post wouldn't be complete without a tirade about why, if this is service culture in Asia, it's no wonder there are so many creepo Western guys here looking to get off on their fetishes with Asian women (who, as in this case, may not be consenting). When employers in all manner of hospitality industries take this attitude (or, in some cases, cater specifically to it, but at least at hostess bars/KTV you know what you're getting into), men who think they can treat women like garbage come here and, well, get away with treating women like garbage. It's no coincidence that this man had repeated incidents on Asian airlines. He knew he could get away with this, and it looks like that just might happen.

There is something we can do. We can write to EVA and let them know that as potential customers, we expect them to treat their flight crew better. This is one time when voting with our wallets might have an effect: not buying EVA tickets in solidarity with the flight attendants would surely get the airline to reconsider its weak-kneed response. When we see behavior like this in public, we can stand up and say something, even if it might be awkward or uncomfortable.

And I don't just mean Westerners. I know I have plenty of Taiwanese readers. We - all of us - can do this. Because the treatment of women in these positions has got to stop.

Sexual assault: Taiwan's great under-reported problem - my latest for Ketagalan Media

My latest piece for Ketagalan Media takes this previous post of mine as a starting point, and investigates an important issue in Taiwanese politics further. In short, it seems as though the reason why there are so few sexual assault scandals in Taiwanese politics is not because they just don't happen, but because if they do, they are likely not reported. On the other hand, in the US, women are beginning to speak out more, but the powers that be just don't care. We're not taken seriously - not even to the point of meriting a real, serious - not a joke of a circus show - investigation. 

Some numbers for you, from the piece: 


The US population in 2015 was 321 million, and reports of sexual assault in the US in 2015 totaled 431,837 (male and female). That indicates a per capita reported assault rate of 0.00134. Taiwan’s population in 2015 was 23,485,755, with 10,454 reports of sexual assault in Taiwan 2015 (gender not specified), for a per capita rate of 0.00044.

This is a massive disparity: even considering differences in population, the US still has a far higher report rate of sexual assault than Taiwan, by a factor of three.

Does it make sense that people in Taiwan are three times less likely to be sexually assaulted than in the US? It is unlikely that there is simply less sexual assault in Taiwan overall (although crime in general is on a down swing and Taiwan remains a very safe country). The picture for comparison is clearer when we look at the gap between estimated sexual assaults and the number reported for the two countries: in the US it’s estimated that about 2/3 of sexual assaults are not reported, or around 70 percent. In Taiwan, it is estimated that the number of actual sexual assaults compared to those reported is seven to ten times higher.

Estimating the actual number of cases, Taiwan’s number of actual assaults per capita is somewhere between 78% to 111% of America’s.


Sources for these numbers are linked to in the piece itself. 

And there's this, a point that cannot be made often enough: 


Having spent twelve years in Taiwan, I have encountered “cultural” excuses for gender-based violence here, generally along the same refrain of “it’s Taiwan’s traditional culture” or an appeal to outdated views of gender which are common across both Asia and the world (one need only look at many American conservative views to see how such sexism plays out in the West). There is no truth to these “cultural” excuses: Taiwan has undergone a seismic shift in how society views gender for several generations, yet culture and traditions in Taiwan, regardless of changing attitudes towards gender and sexual power relations, remains robust. The United States has been evolving in its views on gender since the 19th century, and yet I would argue culture in America remains identifiably “American.”  Cultures can embrace gender egalitarianism and still retain their essence.


Anyway, enjoy! 

Every single woman has feared for their life around a man - in Taiwan, or anywhere.

Hold up while I relate two personal stories in service of a larger point.

Years ago, before I married, I went out on a date. I didn't know the guy very well, but felt relatively safe meeting him in public. As I often did, I planned a later meet-up with friends so there'd be a clear end-time to the date, no matter how well we got along.

Conversation flowed, there was maybe a small spark - but I hadn't liked the somewhat insistent way he'd asked for the date (yet was too young to know that really ought to mean an immediate rejection). Despite myself, I kind of liked him and thought I'd see him again, even though I knew straightaway our life goals were not compatible (I was going to be returning to Asia at some point in the middle future; he was Asian, but had no interest in this.)

I was young and stupid enough to think it would be safe to take him up on the offer to drive me to my meet-up with friends rather than taking the Metro and being a little late.

He drove a little too fast through DC. I was about to say something when he started asking me which streets we were passing and where he should stop, and I couldn't answer him because he was going so fast I couldn't read the street signs. I said as much and he snapped at me: I don't remember what he said, because I was so taken aback with how suddenly his personality had turned, and how inappropriate it was to snap at someone for that reason. He asked me again which street we'd passed, I said again that I didn't know because he was driving too fast for me to read. He sped up and snapped at me again for 'telling him how to drive', at which point I finally found my voice again, and said "stop here", even though we weren't there yet.

He didn't. He went even faster. I said, 'if you don't stop now I'm getting out at the next red light'. I almost added '...and calling the cops', though I knew it wouldn't have done any good. He came to an abrupt halt and waved me out of the car without a word.

I was still several blocks from my destination, but I felt like my life depended on my not being in that car anymore. Later he sent me a text message calling me a 'psycho bitch', and of course I never contacted or saw him again.

It wouldn't be the last time I was attacked for criticizing, disagreeing or rejecting a man, however. Not long after that I met a guy at a bar. He was visiting from a city a few hours away, but after a few effervescent chat sessions, he said he'd be back in town one weekend. Two days before, I was about to buy us tickets to something and told him so, when he said in fact he'd decided he wasn't coming, because he should attend a job fair in his own city. When I decided I just didn't want to deal with that kind of distance dating - the kind where you don't even know the person well and never know if travel plans will be scuppered at the last minute - I said as much, that it wasn't about him, and maybe the next time one of us happened to be in the other's city we could meet as friends but we would not be dating.

Cue a long tirade about how I was a stupid fat slut psycho bitch (oh, there's those words again! I know this song!) who obviously has serious mental issues and will always be alone because I'm such a slutty fat bitch psycho (I guess his vocabulary wasn't as impressive as I was looking for in a partner anyway). Blah blah blah, bitch slut psycho fat, yadda yadda, mental problems slutty bitch fat psycho, fat mental psycho problems bitch...you know, like magnetic poetry for assholes.

I wonder if men have figured out that these words literally do not mean anything to women anymore, because their illocutionary force is merely men wanting us to know that we should never disagree, criticize or reject them for any reason. "Fat" doesn't mean "a doctor would say you are overweight". "Psycho" doesn't mean "I am genuinely concerned about your mental health". "Bitch" doesn't mean anything at all. They all mean "you criticized me and I don't like that waah."

That second guy was nothing: just words on a screen. I didn't even read most of them. The first one, though? He could have refused to stop the car. He could have grabbed my phone if I'd tried to call 911. He could have killed me. He'd probably be infuriated to hear me say that, but from my perspective, he could have. 

What's the difference between him and a guy who actually kills a woman for rejecting him?

Not as much as you'd like to think.

And what turns the man who is just words on a screen into the man who won't let a woman out of his speeding car? Not a lot.

What turns other exes (not just dates) of mine, who probably wouldn't even admit their sexism was a part of what broke us up, from casually sexist remarks into the kind of guy who does either of those things? Again, not much. 

So, when I read about a wave of murders in Taiwan by men against women (more now than when this story came out) - many of which are over women rejecting men - I do agree wholeheartedly that the issue is the normalization of violence in Taiwanese (and frankly, every) society. However, I don't immediately jump to "it's the media" or even that there are dissectable, removable, examinable 'causes' or 'roots' in society that can be excised while keeping society otherwise intact.

It's a whole system of beliefs that starts with very mild behavior - men talking over women, interrupting them, attacking them for speaking out, trying to tear them down when they stand publicly for a privilege and sense of entitlement many men don't realize they have. This escalates to acting as though they have primary decision-making powers in a relationship and can "allow" a woman to do or not do something, to that same sentiment in a family (that a male family member can "allow" a female one to do something or not), to controlling/manipulative behavior, to violence right up to murder.

Violence, then, isn't normalized in Taiwanese - and every - society. The whole spectrum of this type of men's behavior is. In this way, I agree with New Bloom: it's intrinsic to toxic masculinity. Not all masculinity is toxic - my husband and male friends are plenty masculine without ever acting like this, and it is possible to raise boys into men who don't act this way - but it is normalized as male behavior for a vast swath, if not the majority, of men. The vast majority of men are not murderers, but this behavior is on one end of a spectrum with a very deadly other end. And it's so normal that women who want something better spend ages dating man after man who displays some of the milder behavior, often to simply compromise and stick with a guy who is only kind of mansplainy or kind of talks over her, or is nice to her but kind of an asshole to other women.

And every man who lets other men get away with it, or holds women to far higher standards than he does other men, is a part of the problem. 

(I am sure some dipclown is going to distort this argument into "mansplaining = murder!", but that is of course not what I mean. Let me make that clear now, although it won't matter to the trolls.)

What I'm trying to say is, the media in Taiwan is sexist, but their so-called 'reporting' and other commentary isn't what drives this. Sexism in society drives sexist media. It's the other way around. People watch because it's that combination of unacceptable yet already normalized - they don't normalize it because of what they watch.

And the 'wave' of murders...I'm not even sure it's really a wave. Men murdering women seems to have been a pretty regular thing in Taiwan in the past: the only difference I really see now is that people are talking about it more, and the stories get a little more airtime. (In this way it reminds me of India: everyone seems to think India is dangerous "now". But frankly, the crimes which make international news now don't seem to point to an actual uptick in violence against women, though I wouldn't be surprised, with the sweep of male entitlement that seems to always ride along with voting in a religious fundamentalist/nationalist government like the BJP - or Republicans in the US - if there actually was one. It just seems like problems that have always been there in India are finally getting more media time, and more discussion.)

Although Taiwanese media has many, many (many) problems and faults, and media coverage in Taiwan is without a doubt sexist, that society is discussing these types of murders more - and they are getting more media time - in Taiwan isn't one of them.

And we can't just 'find the root causes' of male-on-female violence in Taiwanese society and reflect on them, as though they can be destroyed as something separate from the whole. They are the whole, and trying to cut a surgical incision that takes out only the violence won't work.

That will still leave all the men who shut women out, who talk over them, who are so sensitive that they can neither bear to be criticized by a woman nor criticized in any way that implies, despite being otherwise good men, that they, too, carry some of these traits. It leaves all the ones who write mental fat psycho problems bitch slut slutty bitch problems fat slut bitch psycho mental (or whatever) to women who reject them, who won't let them out of cars, who follow them home and wait outside their apartments for them (as happened to a friend of mine in Taiwan).

In short, it requires upheaval of an entire social order.

I could go in here about patriarchal blah-blah Confucian society blah-blah Asian Beliefs blah-blah-whatever, but I won't. It wasn't that long ago that Western nations had just as much patriarchy, if not more so, and in many cases they haven't actually improved far beyond Taiwan. In my mother's own lifetime birth control was difficult to get in the US, let alone an abortion. Hell, a bank account in a woman's own name was hard to get, let alone a credit line! Marital rape was legal in the US until frighteningly recently. It wasn't that long ago that domestic violence was not necessarily grounds for divorce. Let's not pretend we are somehow perfect or untainted.

So I don't mean to dump only on Taiwan - this is a global problem, and the night I feared for my life was in the US (I have feared for my life on other occasions - notably, once, in India - but they weren't the result of a date gone wrong or my 'rejecting' a man). And I don't mean to say that all of Taiwanese culture must change to fit my Feminazi SJW Penis-Mutilating Manhater Agenda. A pretty awesome Taiwanese society - or any society - can be re-imagined and move forward on more egalitarian foundations.

But first, we have to admit to ourselves that the current foundations are rotten, and always have been.

Book review: Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan

When talking about Taiwanese history, it's quite common to come across a belief that modern Taiwanese beliefs have their roots in the 1970s, and did not really exist before that. From "there was no real sense of Taiwanese identity or a Taiwanese identity movement before the 1970s/the Kaohsiung Incident" to "there is no history of feminism in Taiwan before the 1970s/before the end of the Chiang Kai-shek era" and more, it surprises me how many people truly think this is the case.

Of course, when it comes to Taiwanese identity, this is manifestly false. There are records of autonomous rule movements as early as the late 1800s, and several sources reference similar autonomous movements in the Japanese colonial era. When it comes to women's movements, the same applies. While several feminist pioneers did bring ideas of gender equality to the mainstream in the 1970s, the first stirrings of modern autonomous (that is, not connected to, supported or funded by the government) women's movements in Taiwan have their roots in the Japanese era, although there's no evidence to suggest that the 1970s feminists were directly influenced by them.

It seems to me that misrepresenting both of these movements as originating in the 1970s rather than several decades earlier is an intellectual sleight-of-hand meant to create the idea that both are new, "Western" notions that have no natural roots in Taiwanese culture or history (therefore creating a platform from which to criticize modern Taiwanese identity and feminism). In both cases, such notions are disingenuous.

This is just one of the many things I learned from Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan, a slim volume (for an academic book) by Doris Chang. And, for an academic title, it reads surprisingly smoothly.

As an individualist feminist, I appreciated being challenged on the different notions of what feminism could be. I am not a relational feminist - I don't believe my equal place in society comes from the fulfilling of my different but complementary duties vis-a-vis a family or collective society - but as Chang makes clear, this is indeed a form of feminism, and one of two strands that continues to exist in Taiwan (and, arguably, the one that can strike the best compromise with traditional notions of role, duty and family in Taiwan). Chang further clarifies, however, that this is not the only strand of feminist thought present in Taiwan, as many would believe: radical feminism, woman-identified, X-centric and individual feminism also exist.

If I took one thing from this book, it's a reminder that Taiwanese society is not so simply categorized as traditional/collective/Confucian/whatever adjective you want to describe your idea about ~*~The Mystic East~*~. It's far more complex than that, and there is a place in public discourse for ideas that don't fit neatly into this narrative.

Chang makes other important points as well: for example, until fairly recently, the story of women's movements in Taiwan was once controlled by a China-centered narrative which began not in Taiwan, but with the founding of the Republic of China in, well, China. Taiwan only enters this narrative after 1945 (you can guess why), with women's history under Japanese rule being erased: non-existent, foreign or irrelevant to the story that the Sinicizers want to push.

Hmm, that sounds similar to Taiwanese national history as a whole, doesn't it? Not so different from teaching schoolchildren that their country was founded in 1911 (nevermind that that happened in China, and nothing important happened in Taiwan on that day) and then erasing Japanese era history in Taiwan to cover the Republic of China's Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 instead, no?

Chang also provides short histories of notable women in the early and mid-twentieth century, and devotes entire chapters to scions of the movement such as Annette Lu and Lee Yuan-chen, showing that the only reason we believe history to be full of notable male characters but few notable women is because we've constructed it that way, not because it always happened that way.

She also discusses the ways in which autonomous women's movements differed from government-affiliated ones. You won't be surprised to learn that the Japanese and ROC-affiliated women's movements promoted not feminism, but the fulfillment of traditional gender roles (shocking, I know.) She covers Soong Mei-ling's use of women's organizations mid-century to work toward national goals with very little concern for the actual issues facing middle-class and poor Taiwanese women.

I was interested to learn about the origin of those "Model Mother Awards" as well (you won't be shocked to learn they began in the worst years of the ROC dictatorship, because doling them out supported national goals), and her touching on the ways in which women's labor helped catalyze the Taiwan Miracle, although I think she could have made that point more forcefully than she did.

And, of course, she covers the ins and outs of elitism in women's movements, the relationship of women's movements to democracy/pro-Taiwan movements, Awakening and the Taipei Women's Rescue Foundation, the cooperation and rift between liberal feminists and lesbians, domestic abuse hotlines and more, finishing up with the ways in which the pioneers of the 1970s were able to really flourish (as well as separate into different groups) with the lifting of Martial Law, and the bevy of women's rights laws that were passed between the mid-1980s and the end of the 20th century.

I have one abiding criticism of Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan, which is that it follows a bluer narrative than you would expect. That is not to say it doesn't criticize the KMT, the Republic of China or its leaders (it absolutely does, often viciously and entirely rightly), but that it includes certain problematic historical constructions that if anything are surprising. Here is just a taste (underlined emphasis points are mine):


In 1987, the Kuomintang lifted martial law and ushered in Taiwan's democratization. 

(No, the Kuomintang was forced by the Taiwanese to do that.)


The Dutch colonized the island....the government of the Qing dynasty incorporated Taiwan into the Chinese Empire.

(You already know how I feel about this.)


With the defeat of Japan in World War II, the Allies transferred the governance of Taiwan to the Kuomintang government.

(Nope. And the KMT knew this - scroll down).


The Taiwanese duality of both sameness and with difference from mainland China has contributed to the Taiwanese people's unresolved national identity since the 1940s. 

(While identity has absolutely been a core question in Taiwan, the origin of ambiguity in Taiwan's national identity comes from colonial regimes from China - first the Qing, now the ROC - who insist on promoting a Chinese-centered national identity. If they had not pushed that point from their foreign perspectives so forcefully, Taiwanese national identity would not be in question. In fact, these days the question is mostly resolved, but the book was published in 2009 so I can forgive this.)


There are a few more examples, including many jarring uses of that horrible word "mainland", implying a territorial connection that simply isn't there - the current PRC government of China has never ruled Taiwan - but you get the point.

In any case, it was a worthwhile book if you can look beyond the odd blueness of the language used - as engaging as an academic text can be (though a bit heavy on the 'thesis statements' as though someone is grading it), full of lots of knowledge drops. Despite one or two confusing narrations of timeline (I'm still not sure when and why the New Life movement moved away from May Fourth Movement ideals and toward more traditional precepts, and the section on that did not clarify), I learned a lot and am happy I read it.

If you are not already knowledgeable about women's history in Taiwan, I recommend you do, too.

Taiwan's defamation laws can silence sexual assault victims

Much has been made in the foreign community recently about Taiwan's insane defamation and personal insult laws, what with some guy who got flipped off acting like a massive can of Tender Pieces and suing over it, among other things that I won't write about here.

In Taiwan, you can get sued for flipping someone off, shouting a swear word at them (including "fuck"), writing something critical that the person criticized simply doesn't like, or less. According to this interpretation, telling the truth (or believing you are) is a valid defense, but to be frank, I've been privy to court cases where that didn't seem to play out as cleanly as the text would imply it ought to. 

I mean, I thought we'd gotten rid of authoritarianism and suppression of freedom of expression in Taiwan, but clearly not entirely. There have been times when there were things I know to be true that I would have liked to have published here, which I feel were in the public interest and have refrained knowing that being right isn't necessarily enough. Honestly, the implications for freedom of speech for this are horrifying - you can be telling the truth about some awful people or organizations that should be publicly known, and still have it come back to bite you. I have more than one gut-wrenching story that I will only share in private.

So, what to do if you are a victim of sexual assault? I've written about this elsewhere as part of a longer piece, and after much thought, still don't have a good answer.

Sexual assailants often strike where there are no witnesses or cameras. It's your word against theirs. Even if there are witnesses, they might not come forward for you. It's hard to press charges in such situations, especially when it's not the type of sexual assault that leaves physical evidence behind.

Leaving aside cultural taboos that prevent victims from coming forward (a different topic), let alone pressing charges, the law is not on the side of anyone assaulted in this way. In the US, if your goal is to warn others about someone's predatory behavior and see that there are natural consequences to their actions, but don't want to or can't press charges, you can still come forward. Your speech is protected by law unless it can be shown that it was intentionally false and malicious. The burden of proof is on the accuser.

In Taiwan, all you need to do is get flipped off or have someone say "fuck you" in your general direction because you did something to piss them off to win. If you sexually assault someone but they can't prove that you did so, the burden of proof is on the accuser-turned-defendant if they want to speak out.

What do you do in Taiwan, then, when you have been sexually assaulted and you want to #MeToo the hell out of it - warn other women, make it clear that there are social consequences for such actions - but cannot or don't want to (or can't afford to) press charges?

If you speak out, you could very well be slapped with a defamation lawsuit. Literally, some guy grabs your ass, you talk about it publicly (but don't want to press charges) and he sues you for defamation. He might not win the case, but he's cost you quite a bit of money in lawyer's fees even if it never goes to trial. There is no guarantee, however, that it won't go to trial and you won't lose. I've seen weirder, less well-argued verdicts handed down.

A reliable source of mine says the laws protect those who speak out about being sexually assaulted or harassed, but to be honest, I've looked and I can find no such explicit legal protection. If anyone does a better research job than I have, please feel free to let me know.

No wonder there is no #MeToo movement in Taiwan. Beyond the tendency to not report due to cultural pressures - don't rock the boat, you'll ruin his career over a pat on the ass, what were you wearing anyway, don't make waves, it will make things difficult, just let it go - one simply cannot report without fear of entirely unfair legal repercussions.

In this particular way, I cannot say that Taiwan deserves credit for having robust freedom of speech protections.

It doesn't.

The Real Taiwan Miracle

Look to the heavens, girl. You own half the sky or more.

I'll try to keep this short (for me) and sweet.

In my last post, I wrote about how hewing to outdated notions of women in Taiwan - "this is how it works in Asia", that sort of thing - leads to overgeneralizing about how gender roles really play out here.

In the days since, I've been mulling over the historical contexts behind the evolution of gender roles in East Asia. And I realized that what Taiwan has pulled off vis-a-vis women is nothing short of a miracle, if you look at it in a certain light. Asia is not a bastion of women's equality, but of all countries of Asia, I still contend that despite its problems, Taiwan is the best place on the continent to be a woman. How is it that Taiwan managed this, given its history?

For most of the 19th century, Taiwan was an underdeveloped and mostly ignored backwater, a far-flung defensive outpost. It would not be remiss to call it a colony of the Qing. Whatever liberal or revolutionary ideas might have been discussed among intellectuals - and I'm not sure much was before 1895 though I'd surmise that liberal ideas were not unheard-of - they didn't seem to have made it to Taiwan in any meaningful sense. (If I'm wrong about this, please correct me.)

As I noted in my previous post, the ideas that drove the feminist discourse of autonomous women's groups in Taiwan during the brief period when freedom of expression was tolerated under the Japanese came mostly from elite Taiwanese women studying in China and Japan. Therefore, feminist discourse clearly existed there.

However, Japan attempted to keep Taiwan under-educated: universities here preferred to admit Japanese students, and for much of the Japanese era, most Taiwanese never moved beyond a junior high school education, if not less. Some Taiwanese intellectuals did break this mold, but Japan remained a scholarly epicenter.

(That said, Japan did make an effort to establish schools teaching literacy and numeracy to Taiwanese, so despite the relatively low level of education in Taiwan as compared to Japan, it was still one of the more literate parts of Asia. Yet, to quote Jonathan Manthorpe in Forbidden Nation, the Japanese certainly did not want Taiwanese to "cultivate ideas of their own". This is what I mean by 'under-educated'.)

At the end of World War II, Japan would leave Taiwan and go on to rebuild a developed economy as well as a new era of liberal democracy following Western models. In China, this would be a time when Communism's emphasis on equality - including gender equality - would usher in a (temporarily) more egalitarian society for women.

What was happening in Taiwan? Brutal dictatorship. Autonomous women's groups, like all other social activist groups, were not allowed to form. Government-affiliated women's groups espoused traditional gender roles (though not necessarily condemning women working outside the home, these groups viewed women's income as secondary to her family duties and her husband's role as provider), headed by sexist-in-chief, Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Taiwan had neither the Communist egalitarian ideals nor the boost of liberal democracy to guide it toward greater gender equality.

Taiwan did develop - thanks to the hard work of its small-and-medium-size business owners (not KMT prescience, as some would have you believe). Of course, much of that work was done by women, who worked in 'home factories', did other jobs or helped run the family business. However, these women have gone mostly unthanked for their role in Taiwan's economic miracle.

So, of these three countries - China, Japan and Taiwan - you would expect that China and Japan would be years ahead of Taiwan when it comes to women in society. Taiwan just didn't have the same indicators.

And yet, what do we have today? Various strains of feminism exist in China and Japan, but neither can compare to the relatively better status of women in Taiwan. Taiwan is not perfect; it's rife with problems pertaining to gender and society, just like any other country. However, it doesn't have to contend with problems as bad as this (though the gender ratio in Taiwan still raises questions) this, this, this, this, this, or this (for that last one, while it would not shock me to learn that 'maternity harassment' happens occasionally in Taiwan, I have not heard of it being the norm.) Nobody is talking about how Tsainomics or Manomics "failed women", how Taiwan is "the worst of all developed countries for women", or recruitment ads for tech companies where female employees pole dance to entice men to apply. When talking about marital statistics, the issue isn't a gender ratio imbalance so much as women choosing not to marry.

That's the real Taiwan miracle - ignored, underdeveloped, at times barred from seeking higher education, brutally oppressed, sexist "traditional Chinese" thought piggybacking on KMT campaigns to Sinicize (and subjugate) the island, diplomatically isolated, seen as a backwater for much of its history (though not now). And yet, Taiwan has managed to do better by women than either China or Japan, which had much better odds.

I might explore some reasons for this in a future post, but for now, I just want y'all to ruminate on that.

The same "Mystic Orient/Confucian Values" nonsense that hurts Taiwan also hurts women

You think they're going this way, but they're going that way.

Something struck me as I read this clickbait-reconfobulated piece on women's expectations of salary, both of themselves (as mothers) and their husbands.

What jumped out at me - assuming the piece got the numbers right - was this:

Taiwan’s female workers will not consider entering marriage if their prospective husbands earn less than NT$51,872 (US$1,730)

and

Asked about the reasonable monthly salary for “mothers,” if to be paid, female respondents expected an amount of NT$53,031 (US$1,769) on average, NT$3,042 (US$101.5) higher than the 2017 figure of monthly income released by the government's Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, standing at NT$49,989 (US$1,668), reported CNA.

Note the discrepancy: women have higher expectations of their own salaries than they do of a prospective husband's salary.

This is awesome: women setting goals for themselves that exceed what they expect men to provide for them. Not only that, women expect to earn a bit more, as mothers, than they expect the father (traditional role: provider) to earn. That's huge! This wasn't academic research (it was a survey by a jobs website) but it indicates a fertile area for research and discussion.

There is a quote by someone from the website that did the survey talking about how women think mothers deserve higher pay, but it's impossible to really parse it, as it's never clarified if any questions are asked about women's salary expectations for themselves independent of marital/childbearing considerations. In any case, it makes little sense that women would expect a salary boost from employers when having children doesn't make them better workers (though it doesn't make them worse, either.)

Yet not only did the article get it wrong - it's not reported whether the survey included a comparison question on what women expect to earn if they are not mothers - but the headline did too:


Taiwan's female workers expect prospective husbands to earn NT$51,872 at minimum: poll


Why focus on that (except other than to create clickbait) when the aforementioned comparison is far more interesting? Why focus on the same old tropes of what women expect of their husbands when the more fruitful discussion is centered on what women expect of themselves?

These problematic and harmful stereotypes about what 'Asian values' are and what they mean, even when stated in the spirit of trying to be 'respectful' of the spectrum of Asian cultures, not only hurt Taiwan but also hurt women.
 
I've written before about how Taiwan's struggle for recognition in a world that seems determined to ignore it mirrors what women deal with as they struggle for equality and recognition in a world that seems determined to focus on male achievement. I've also talked about how so many Western liberals get it so completely wrong when talking about "Asian values" or their version of what it means to be a moral or cultural relativist who "respects cultural differences" and how that impacts Taiwan. This is a country that is best understood not through the lens of what Westerners believe Asians think, but through the lens of universal values: freedom, democracy, equality, human rights and self-determination. 

It's the same regarding women in Taiwan. It's easy to conclude from chaff like this that in Asia, women's expectations and ideas are focused on traditional roles or relational notions of family, role and gender when the discussion is framed specifically to make you think that. In fact, a great deal of wordage is spilled trying to make exactly this point: it's traditional. It's their culture.

This is mirrored in the way discussions on issues like Taiwan's sovereignty are framed in such a way that they often make Westerners, whom you'd think would be supportive of Taiwan's pro-liberal democracy message, see things from a pro-China perspective. China aggressively pushes and benefits from this whole 'we're Asians, we think differently, it's our culture'  worldview. Just ignore those pesky Taiwanese creating all those tensions with their determination to keep their freedom. This is Asia, don't call it dictatorship - call it 'Asian-style governance'.

Let me give you a glimpse of what is lost when we flatten the discussion this way. 

Under Japanese rule, there was a brief period when Japan tolerated some freedom of expression in Taiwan. This was also a period when a small number of elite Taiwanese women studied in Japan or China, and were exposed to feminist discourse there. Granted, many of the ideas originated in the West, but crucially, they were being discussed by Asian women in Asian contexts. They disseminated to Taiwan not from the West directly but via intellectual centers in China and Japan - Asian women talking to other Asian women. While not autochthonous, it was not impossible to conceive of Western ideas of gender equality and individualism in Asian cultural frameworks, though most of this discourse was confined to elite/wealthy social classes. Anyone familiar with the May Fourth movement already knows this.

This was eventually quashed - first by the Japanese and then by the KMT - and didn't return until the 1970s, when Taiwanese pro-democracy and pro-independence activism also experienced a rebirth (emphasis mine) and reanimating burst of activist vigor (if you think Taiwanese identity and independence rhetoric originated in the 1970s, you are wrong on that count, too.) It really took flight - just as Taiwanese activism did - in the 1990s with the democratization of Taiwan, not as a gift from geneous KMT benefactors (don't make me laugh), but at the insistence of the Taiwanese people.

So, please, let's spare each other the embarrassment of a gamut of well-meaning Westerners who flatten Asia and think by doing so, they have understood it. Let's end the implication of such discourse: that Taiwanese (or any Asian culture) are incapable of grasping concepts of equality, individuality and freedom. Of course they are. They're not stupid.

And let's stop pretending that everything in Asia - from Taiwanese identity to women's equality - can be explained, sorted and filed away under outdated assumptions of what "Asians" think. Both in terms of women's roles and beliefs, and in terms of Taiwan.

Nothing is ever that simple.


(Historical source: Chang, D.  - Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan)

In China, tech companies are blatantly sexist. In Taiwan, not even Hooters posts gender-specific job ads

I have no desire to translate the rest of this for you. It's just as sexist as it looks. 

For years, I have initiated or participated in discussions of the relative level of women's rights and equality across various countries in Asia. For years, I have posited that while Taiwan isn't exactly great when it comes to women's equality (I struggle to find a society that is), it is the best country by far in Asia for women. The problem is that "in Asia" is a low bar, even when you adjust your expectations of how feminism might look in Asian societies.

Along these lines, a spate of news and opinion pieces appeared recently on how badly women are treated - just how much they are objectified and male needs are prioritized - in the tech industry in China (and, according to Zhang Lijia, whose video op-ed is linked to below, in Chinese civil service recruitment as well, with a number of jobs listed as requesting male candidates).

Chinese Tech Companies' Dirty Secret (watch this one first, and be horrified)

Alibaba, Baidu and other Chinese tech companies post men-only job ads

Wanted at Chinese start-ups: attractive women to ease coders' stress

In all of these pieces, the biggest horror in my view is the ad that says "Finding a Job = Finding a Woman: Fuck What You Want to Fuck". I truly have no words.

Through those years, the biggest point of contention I've come across is a belief that Chinese women actually have it better - have more equality, get more respect from their society - than Taiwanese women. Talk about how in Shanghai, women rule and men do as their wives and mothers say (I haven't really found anything to corroborate this beyond what people say; I suspect it's an urban legend to some degree). Talk about how Communism sucks but at least one of its ideals is gender equality (maybe true under Mao, not so much anymore). Talk about how there are more female engineers and women in traditionally male fields in China - I saw 39-40% cited on a number of websites, but none I'd trust as a source especially given the links above).

But, you know what? I just don't believe that. I never have. I lived in China, I saw how women - in several unrelated examples where I knew the people involved personally - were treated as a matter of course. I saw, with my own eyes and through personal stories told to me, how many men in China really thought they had the right to "fuck what they want to fuck" - in some cases, literally.

In short, what I saw and heard didn't add up to this belief that "China is a gender equality leader in Asia" or that it somehow outpaces Taiwan in gender equality.

Now, I can say with confidence that I was right.

I set out to see if such job ads were common (or even rare but extant) in Taiwan, and while I would not call my look into the issue a feat of investigative journalism (it really wasn't), I did ask a wide range of people both online and off, including a number of female professionals that I know, to see if they'd even come across such an ad. I included questions not just about sexist ads targeting men (showing Zhang's examples in the vomit-inducing video above), but also ads stating explicit gender preferences or appearance requirements. I specifically did not include ads for foreign teachers, which are their own cesspit of sexism and general unprofessionalism (I'll discuss that topic below). I trawled 591 for a bit, but it's huge and I admit I barely made a dent.

Nobody - no-one on Facebook, no-one in real life, none of the professional Taiwanese women I asked - had seen anything like this in Taiwan, nor could I find any evidence of it. Every last one was positive that any company that even attempted these sorts of recruitment tactics in Taiwan would get sued so fast that the Apple Daily issues would still be literally hot off the press when the subpoena arrived.

The best I could find was one woman - a female programmer - who said there were rumors of the sorts of "engineer comfort women" (she did not mean the term in the way it is typically used in Asia, the point was to be more of an at-work hostess, not to actually provide sexual services) discussed in the third link above also exist in Taiwan. However, I could not find a Taiwanese ad for such a job.

On the contrary, I was alerted to several instances where gender discrimination in hiring in situations that might actually be open for debate were met with lawsuits: in one case, a "maid cafe" (where female servers dress up like maids - it's a subculture thing that I think is a bit tacky but is not worth my time to complain about - whatever) that would not accept a male applicant, citing its uniform of short skirts as awkward for men to wear, and was fined NT$150,000. (Link in Chinese). While I think it's relatively likely that the male applicant purposely called up the maid cafe to hear that he wasn't welcome to apply based on his gender so that he could complain, it doesn't matter: in Taiwan, it doesn't matter if you are explicitly a maid cafe. If it can be proven that you are discriminating based on gender, you are likely to lose any lawsuit that is filed. In another well-publicized case, China Airlines listed height requirements for flight attendants, saying they needed to be able to help passengers put luggage in overhead compartments. They also lost.

One of the women I asked pointed out that, as a C-level executive with hiring powers, she has to attend a workplace gender equality training regularly, and that it confirmed what the maid cafe link mentions above: the court ruled that very few jobs could restrict hiring based on gender, citing underwear modeling as one such exception (I dunno, I think an ad for boxers where the boxers are worn by women, implying that she's your girlfriend wearing your boxers the next morning, would actually do well).

This brought to mind a Hooters job ad that I saw once, which stipulated no gender. It is quite obvious that they would hire women to be "Hooters Girls" - I mean their Facebook page, predictably, is a parade of cute young women. If Hooters (Hooters!) knows it can't post a gender-specific job ad, then damn - you really can't post a gender-specific job ad in Taiwan, let alone a blatantly sexist ad touting your "beautiful women" to potential male recruits.

The hashtags include "#hootersgirl", but note that there is no gender specification in the ad itself. 

That is not to say that Taiwan is doing fine. I'm sure anyone reading this far is screaming "but there's still discrimination in hiring! They just don't tell you they're doing it!" And that's true. There absolutely is - I can't find anything proving it, and yet, I haven't talked to anyone who isn't fully aware it happens (part of the point is getting away with it by making it impossible to prove). I doubt a man applying to be a Hooters Girl, for example, would actually get the job. I personally know of a few instances when, without giving out too much information, people in charge of hiring debated female applicants based on their looks. I know of a few instances where a man got specific contracts because he was male, and at least two where women got them specifically because they were women (in at least one case, it was a situation where she'd be working mostly with men, who seemed to want some eye candy to go along with their work obligations - yuck). I don't think it's a coincidence that in Taiwan, flight attendants tend to be young, attractive women whereas in America they seem to be more average-looking women and men of a variety of ages. It can't be that only young, attractive women apply for those jobs in Taiwan (and if that is the case, something must be actively discouraging other potential applicants).

This is not right, but a lot of people come to the (wrong) conclusion that this means the law doesn't work, or there shouldn't be a law. "Isn't it better to know up-front whether they want you or not then to waste your time applying to a job that won't actually consider you?" "Why would you want to work somewhere you're not wanted anyway?" - yeah, yeah, yeah. A tempting line of reasoning, but ultimately wrong. If there is no law specifically forbidding gender (and other) discrimination in hiring, then it becomes socially acceptable to do so. If there is a law, that's step one to eradicating it. What people who think it's better that companies be open about it are missing is that these things take time to become social norms. Passing a law doesn't mean immediate amelioration of a social problem: it's just step one. But without it, we have no power when we do see blatant discrimination, and we will never make it to step two, which is reducing actual discrimination. Anecdotally, I do see this happening: the openness with which people accepted the existence of discriminatory hiring seemed far higher a decade or even 5 years ago. Now, people acknowledge it exists but are openly disgusted with it. Without the law, we never would have gotten that far. And if you break down the numbers intelligently as Brookings has, you'll see that this could well be affecting female participation in the workforce, especially in managerial positions.

In cases where discrimination can be proven, the law seems to be actually enforced, too. That's really something - China has a gender non-discrimination law too, but it's vaguely-worded, rarely invoked and almost never enforced (Zhang Lijia covers this in her video above). Zhang is wrong about only one thing: the issue isn't that companies can get away with this because the job market is competitive. They can get away with it because society lets them, and they know the law is ineffective. In Taiwan, society doesn't really let them - not anymore - and if they face the law, which they well might, they are likely to lose.

And of course, once hired, women in Taiwan may still face discrimination or sexist treatment in the workplace, a problem faced by women around the world. Taiwan still has a wage gap - it's narrowing, but still entirely too big. I don't know any Taiwanese woman who has not faced sexism in the workplace. I have as well - it happened at a job I quit in 2014. That too is difficult to fight, but enforcing gender non-discrimination and slowly eradicating sexist beliefs in society is one tool we have in winning that battle.

Every screamer who's left is probably now shouting "but job ads for foreign teachers in Taiwan specify gender all the time!" That's right, they do. I wanted to focus on local job ads, because it does feel like different factors are at play, including that:

a.) Most of those jobs for foreign teachers are posted by dodgy recruiters and third-rate buxibans, hardly professional work environments. I do expect the average Taiwanese office at anything larger than a family-run company to be at least somewhat more professional. I have very low expectations for these sorts of schools and recruiters, who are - and I am not sorry to say this - the gutter scrapings of the English teaching job market. That doesn't make it right, but it does clarify why they think they can do this.

b.) They probably think they can get away with it, assuming foreigners don't know the law. I do not at all believe that these gutter-scrap jobs and the people who shill for them don't know the law - they do.  When it's pointed out to them - and I once got kicked out of a Facebook group for doing so - they get angry and defensive and show what kind of work environment they'd really provide. They're not stupid, they're just crappy people. There's a difference. (OK, sometimes they're stupid too.)

So, no, Taiwan is not perfect, but it's still the best in Asia. We have a lot of problems to face, but hiring managers (and men) here know they can't just 'fuck what they want to fuck'.

If you're a foreign working woman in Taiwan planning to have kids, you're probably going to get screwed

I'll be expanding this more in the coming weeks, but I feel like I need to say something now, however short and underdeveloped.

If you are a foreign woman working in Taiwan, and you are intending to have children here, there is a very high possibility that you're not only going to get screwed by your employer, but that it's already happening.

A huge percentage of foreign workers here - even the "foreign professionals" - work jobs that pay an hourly rate. The vast majority of these jobs are cram school/buxiban jobs (some of which pay a salary, but many/most don't.) (Most of these jobs are not remotely professional, even though they ought to be, and are poorly paid by real professional standards, but that's a different discussion.)

We're already getting screwed out of benefits we're meant to have, such as paid typhoon days and national holidays. Employers - private language schools, mostly - just don't provide them, and good luck leaving and finding another job that does.

Well, here's another benefit workers - even foreign workers on hourly pay - are meant to have: paid maternity leave. Your employer is meant to calculate your estimated hourly pay during your absence and, well, pay you that.

But how much you get paid for maternity leave depends partly on how long you've been employed there, and partly on labor insurance, or 勞保. To get the paid maternity leave benefit, you must be signed up for labor insurance.

And most private language schools that employ foreign teachers never do this.

I have heard varying accounts of whether labor insurance is required by law for foreign employees. Notably, however, it is absolutely not true that an employer can choose not to offer it. An employer telling you "we don't offer labor insurance", and then insisting they don't have to, even if you want it, is lying to you. They typically try to evade the issue by simply not telling you it's an option, hoping you'll never find out that if you ask for it, by law they have to register you.

If you do ask...well, results vary. I typically say good things about my various employers, save one really bad experience I had. They've been, for the most part, a cut above the typical clown academy here in Taiwan. But I'm going to go ahead and say a few critical words now:

At one school where I taught exam prep classes (I've since left for unrelated reasons), I was first ignored when I asked about labor insurance, then told they "don't offer it". I replied that they had no choice, they ignored me again. I said that if I was not signed up for it, I would report this issue to the government. I didn't particularly want to report anything to anyone, but I kept getting stonewalled when trying to access my rights. Then they acted as though this made me the "problem" or "high-maintenance" employee (it didn't - I just wanted what I was legally entitled to and kinder, more private entreaties were ignored.) I got my labor insurance. Others are not so lucky - I can handle being unfairly thought of as "difficult", because at least I won, but not everyone wins.

The problem is, most foreigners either don't know they are entitled to this, think it's something the company can "offer" rather than something that cannot be denied them, or don't realize that it matters. So most working foreign women here have a safety net they don't necessarily even realize they ought to have.

So if you're a foreign woman here, and you decide to pop out a screamer, whether or not you get paid maternity leave - which you are entitled to by law even if you are on an hourly wage - depends entirely on whether or not you signed up for labor insurance. If you didn't sign up, no paid vagina-healin', baby-wranglin' time for you. If you let the issue slide when your employer refused to sign you up, same deal. You just got screwed.

What's worse is that even if you are signed up for labor insurance, a huge number of schools underreport income (my former exam prep institute employer sure did). You might think this isn't a big deal, that "that's how it is here", but your labor insurance is based on your reported income, so if you get pregnant and take maternity leave, the pay you are entitled to matches the craptastic income that's been reported for you, not what you actually earned.

I have also heard stories of schools being reluctant to grant maternity leave even if their employees have labor insurance, although that hurdle can often be gotten over if you are willing to call (or threaten to call) some relevant authorities. They might try to screw you in other ways, though (e.g. extending your probation for vague reasons that don't quite make sense to justify paying you less).

Of course, Taiwanese women face massive issues accessing maternity leave too, something that seems to be rarely written about. Most of what I see in English consists of lavish praise of Taiwan's maternity leave policies - and at least compared to the USA (which is a legitimate horror show in this regard) - which rarely includes the uncomfortable truth that, while employers can't exactly deny their employees this leave, they can and do pressure them to take as little of it as possible and find other passive-aggressive ways to punish female employees who don't comply. Plenty of Taiwanese women don't feel they can access their full legally-entitled maternity leave either.

There is a difference, though: Taiwanese women know this is a problem. They are at least aware of what they are supposed to be getting. There is a foundation there for fighting back.

Foreign women in Taiwan? They may not even realize they're getting screwed. But chances are, they are.

Uncomfortable

Window of the Wen-meng Municipal Brothel

Over the years, I like to think that my knowledge of Taiwanese current affairs and history have both deepened, and as a result some of my opinions have changed. At times, these are changes in my entire worldview. At other times, they are small updates to well-worn beliefs that turned out to have less basis in reality than I had thought.

One such change in belief has been over the "comfort women" issue, although perhaps my feelings have simply become more nuanced.

At first glance, the issue seems fairly cut-and-dried: Japanese-era "comfort women" (a euphemism for women forced into prostitution for Japanese military officers during World War II - in fact they were sex slaves) have received neither an apology for their treatment nor any form of real justice. Obviously, they deserve this, although there are only two known Taiwanese comfort women still alive.

Also at first glance, it would seem to be a good thing that there is a women's rights group in Taiwan pushing for compensation and recognition from the Japanese government for its exploitation of comfort women in Taiwan (link above), and that a museum detailing their history was opened in 2016.

It might even pass the sniff test to the casual observer that the KMT, and former president and creepy mannequin rescued from a department store fire Ma Ying-jiu in particular, sure have a lot to say about the importance of justice for Taiwanese comfort women. After all, they are one of two major parties, and the DPP doesn't seem terribly bothered about the lingering historical injustices of the Japanese era. Besides, the KMT - thinking they are the One True China - still sees Japan as a historical enemy in a way the more Taiwan-centric DPP does not. 

But then the questions start piling up.

Why is the KMT so bothered about Japanese-era comfort women, but doesn't seem to have much to say about ROC-era comfort women, despite a movie having been made about this very issue?

In fact, is there more to the story of the Wen Meng Municipal Brothel than my slim volumes on Taipei's historical buildings let on? (Cue my "sarcastic surprise wow" - of course there is. The twin books were published by the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs.) How many of these 'licensed sex workers' were slaves - not by the hand of the Japanese government, but instead the ROC?

In fact, back when the whole kerfuffle over former sex workers being told to vacate the premises despite its having been named a cultural heritage site took place in 2012, the KMT was in power both in Taipei and nationally. Although the courts are of course supposed to be independent of the elected government because that's how an independent judiciary is meant to work, I doubt there's nothing the city government could have done to ensure the preservation of the building (which is still standing as far as I know as the dispute rages on). Why didn't the KMT-run city government care enough to do something, if they care so much about comfort women?

And why is it that despite this museum having been open for a year, I've never seen it advertised locally, although there are three reviews on TripAdvisor? Why does this museum to comfort women exist, while its founders ignore the pleas of activists trying to save the Wen Meng Municipal Brothel?

Could it be - and I know I'm about to shock you - that the people banging pots and pans over justice for Taiwanese comfort women...don't actually care about comfort women at all?

I'm not the first person to make this case, though I can't find a comparable redux of the issue in English. It seems likely that the conclusion alluded to on The View from Taiwan is correct: the 'comfort women' issue was likely devised as a political cudgel to attack the more Japan-friendly DPP (the KMT, thinking they are the bearers of the One True China, seems to take their assumed obligation to hate Japan seriously) and to try and push Taiwanese voters into hating Japan as much as they seem to hate the Chinese government. Of course, to them it is right and correct that we should spend all of our energy hating a democratic ally, freeing up more headspace to stop worrying and love our Chinese overlords, the Chinese Nation Which Is Rightfully The ROC Including Taiwan its and 5,000 6,000 years of Chinese culture.

Okay, so, case closed, the comfort women thing is fake news, it's all a ruse, time to wash our hands and go home, right?

Well...

First, I was curious about the background of the group that pushed for the creation of the comfort women museum, the Taipei Women's Rescue Foundation (formerly the Taiwan Women's Rescue Association or 台灣婦女救援協會). It grew out of the Awakening Foundation, whose most prominent founders were Lee Yuan-chen and former DPP vice president Lu Xiu-lian (Annette Lu) - known for being a vocal feminist but also for saying all sorts of problematic things.

I could go into this more deeply, but it's well after midnight and frankly there's no need. I was mostly curious if the opening of the comfort women museum was yet another political cudgel, meant to sow division between Taiwan and Japan to serve the KMT's interests. Yet as far as I can tell, the TWRF grew out of an association that did not have ties to a specific party - Lee was born in China, yes, but I can't find anything on her political affiliation. Lu is, of course, one of the greenest of the old-school greens.

Although I should point out this passage in Doris Chang's Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan, just as something to chew on:

Most of the Rescue Foundation's members were middle-class professionals from the ethnic Chinese majority. Like the Chinese gentry scholars of the traditional past, members of the Rescue Foundation perceived themselves as the moral-intellectual elite that should offer assistance to the less fortunate members of the society (p. 121). 

I don't know what to make of that vis-a-vis the comfort women issue, though my instincts tell me that the members of this society either come from 1949 diaspora backgrounds and therefore don't want to center the treatment of women by the government they came with (the ROC), or they are from upper-class stock with a longer Taiwanese history who just don't want to rock that boat, because it would seem too "political" to take up this kind of issue while it's still strongly in living memory. Japanese-era comfort women are a safer topic. 

Secondly, I can't just let it go at "this is a purposefully-designed KMT political wedge and you'd best ignore it" - as a woman who cares about justice issues for women...I just can't.

I can't help but think that as much as this issue is being flapped around like an limp puppet by the KMT - who don't actually care enough about the issue to add a little padding to their argument or do anything meaningful - that as a result of it being shambled around by one side, it is being purposely ignored by the other.

A case could reasonably made that Taiwan needs all the allies it can get - even perhaps historically problematic ones like Japan - and as such, that pursuing the comfort women issue is far from the highest priority. It is also notable that even when Japan has "apologized" for its treatment of comfort women, that the agreements are more for the political gain of certain groups or parties and are not really for the comfort women themselves: those who survive often remain dissatisfied. It could be argued that an issue being used for political gain by one side ought not to be touched by the other.

I agree with all of that, and yet...

It feels once again as though women are getting screwed.

One side is using a women's issue for their own gain and doesn't seem to care much at all about the actual women involved, and the other side wants nothing to do with any of it, and will prioritize other matters over justice for less than a handful of extremely elderly women.

It stings because "other matters" always get prioritized over women. We always get told our issues are not the most important ones, if they are acknowledged to be issues at all. Both the Japanese-era and ROC-era comfort women get cheated.

The KMT - the closest thing Taiwan has to a 'conservative' party although the label doesn't fit perfectly - can't be expected to do much better. After all, they are who they are. The DPP - the closest thing we have to a liberal party and yet it's not really despite having "progressive" in their name - is failing us just like every other liberal group seems to. We're important, sure, but never quite important enough. There's always something more pressing. Someone else always needs justice first.

So yes, Ma Ying-jiu is once again being a douche by using an issue neither he nor his party actually cares about to advance some other political agenda. But by then pretending as though the issue is therefore unimportant, the other side is failing women as well. A tool used by one side, ignored by the other. 

As it always has been and as it feels like it always will be.