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On the surface, there is little to distinguish the Woolf Social Club from any other hipster hangout in Seoul, South Korea. Customers perch on wooden stools at formica tables, tapping on laptops while they sip their coffee. Records and cds line the walls, soft jazz trickles from speakers. On the white wall above the bar, in big black letters, is the statement: “More dignity, less bullshit”.

It is only on closer inspection that you realise this is more than just another coffee shop. On the mugs are cartoon drawings of Virginia Woolf, an angry wolf roaring from her shirt. A bookshelf contains South Korean feminist novels and works of self-help (titles include “Lessons on Being Unmarried”) alongside “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir and “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. On the wall is a poster for an exhibition of feminist art at a nearby gallery.

“I wanted a space for like-minded women to meet and talk,” says Kim Jina, a 47-year-old former advertising executive and politician who founded the café six years ago. Kim was inspired by Woolf’s dictum that in order to write fiction, a woman needed “five hundred [pounds] a year and a room with a lock on the door”. That is, financial independence and a place to think. The café’s casual vibe is deliberate: she wanted to avoid creating barriers to entry for women who were merely curious, rather than fully committed to the movement. Besides, she adds, “If I limited myself to feminist customers, I could never make a living.” 

South Korea, even its trendy capital, is a difficult place to be a woman. The wage gap between the sexes is the highest in the rich world. Traditional expectations about gender roles, beauty standards and the way women should conduct themselves remain pervasive. “Misogyny surrounds you so naturally that you barely even notice it,” says Kim. “I had no role models, so my idea of how a successful woman should be came straight from ‘Sex and the City’.” For much of her 20s and 30s, she spent most of her money on make-up and expensive handbags, partying every weekend and dreaming about meeting her version of Mr Big, the rich, smooth-talking love interest of the show’s main character, Carrie.

“I never worried about misogyny because I thought being sexually attractive was a form of power,” says Kim. “But eventually I realised that men with real power don’t wear make-up and expensive dresses.” Her epiphany came when she was passed over for promotion in favour of a male colleague. “My boss said, ‘He needs it more than you because he has a wife and a child to take care of,’ and I realised that I had been wrong to think that all I needed to do was work hard and be good at my job.” 

Kim’s burgeoning feminism crystallised in the summer of 2016, after a woman was murdered in a public toilet in an upmarket part of Seoul. The killer initially claimed that he had done it because he had been ignored by women. “I lived right around the corner, and I thought: that could have been me,” says Kim. Like many other women, she was upset by media coverage that ignored the misogynist motives for his crime and blamed it entirely on his mental-health problems.

The murder prompted South Korean women to come together, initially in online communities, and discuss how to fight back against sexism. Then they took to the streets. In 2018 there was a series of protests against the widespread practice of recording illegal footage of women by hiding small cameras in public toilets or changing rooms.

Kim founded the Woolf Social Club in 2017. “I thought, we talk to each other on the internet, but it would be good to have a physical space in which to do that,” she says. “If you walk around Seoul, you see all these cafés aimed at couples, where women look pretty and lower their voices. I wanted a space where they could raise them.”

[Fonte: Lena Schipper. “Virginia Woolf is inspiring South Korean feminists”. In: The Economist, 09/05/2022,<http://www.economist.com/1843/2022/05/09/virginia-woolf-is-inspiring-south-korean-feminists>. Adaptado. Data de acesso: 27/08/2023.]