https://twitter.com/Vipe_R_18/status/1193051918072856576?s=09
(Image contains digital sexual assault)
“Yes, the sentencing of illegal filming cases is too lenient. It’s because there are just too many cases. Because it is so prevalent they [the courts] don’t take it seriously. And they don’t take it seriously because men do not experience it.” -Lawyer Ahn Seo-yeon
It all started from a simple accident. Apparently, someone from the Kookmin Graduate School of Education was not familiar with shortening URLs. Or maybe he or she did not check the link twice after copying and pasting the shortened link. In a message sent from Kookmin Graduate School of Education, the link which should have contained information about the recruitment of new students turned out a link for a naked fanart of the character ‘AN-94’ from the anime ‘Girls’ Frontline’ on twitter. This happened just because the link was missing a single ‘u’ at the end. Three minutes after sending the wrong message, Kookmin Graduate School of Education subsequently sent a new message containing the right link. The link for the fanart went viral around anime fans, and the person who drew the fanart later stated on twitter: “I heard about what happened with AN-94 through my Korean friends. I’m glad (about people seeing my fanart) but it should not harm other people.”
Then the incident took a strange turn- fans of ‘Girls’ Frontline’ started to call ‘AN-94’ the ‘Kookmin University goddess.’ Imagining AN-94 as a student of Kookmin University whose nude photographs were leaked on chatrooms with her university colleagues, fanart with this female character crying, embarrassed, or even listening to vulgar language (you slut!) started to spread on the Internet, especially in Internet communities that are predominantly male. This fanart with AN-94 trembling and crying because her photographs are leaked, and people are madly calling her (text on the phone says: Message- Oh my god answer the phone/ 132 calls from AN-12/ 7 calls from Student representative M4A1) is one of these examples.
Another post is perhaps more blatant in its desire to see a pretty girl ruined.
This dialogue is made with a program that allows you to make dialogues in Kakaotalk(a messenger app) style. In this fake chatroom snapshot, AN-94, a university student, accidentally uploads her nude photograph in a chatroom for her department colleagues.
The user uploaded this image under the title: “Someone screwed up in our college chatroom lol.” Here is the content of this post:
“There’s this super pretty girl in our freshmen this year. She’s nice and has this pure vibe and was really popular but she ended up dating with her handsome colleague in April. I was fxxking jealous of that guy.
And she uploaded the wrong picture in her chatroom lol she was probably gonna share that with her bf
Bitch acted as if she never knew about men and she turned out to be a fxxking slut.”
And I’m left here wondering what’s so funny.
“The Korean Women’s Development Institute interviewed more than 2,000 victims of illegal filming and other sexual crimes. Among them, 23% considered taking their own life, 16% even planned their suicide and 23 women actually attempted suicide.” -BBC News
Working notes:
I wrote this assignment as a non-fiction narrative because as the situation was so absurd, I felt that writing the narrative as it is would do justice to what I wanted to express. It honestly made me sick to see that some people enjoy imagining women traumatized because their sexual photographs are distributed. I guess this made me annoyed because this happened in 2019, when illegal filming and digital sexual assault was a big issue in Korea. Victims of digital sexual assault often commit suicide (because it is hard to track down the images or videos and erase every one of them), and the perpetrators are seldom punished harshly. Aside from the problem that digital sexual assault is not taken seriously, writing about this made me wonder about whether people should consider morality when they are creating fanart. Is displaying violence okay as long as it is done towards a fictional character? Or am I being hypersensitive about an anime fanart?