This weekend’s binge watch was Love to Hate You, which dropped in full on Netflix just in time for everyone in the known world to watch it at the same time. The opposites attract, enemies-to-lovers, pride-and-prejudice-esque romance about an arse-kicking lawyer and her romance with a woman-hating actor was a slick, eminently watchable piece of fun.
Which is why the narrative forming over the weekend went something like this: yes this is really problematic and we’re not happy about it but how churlish would it be to, like, say it. Should I write that blog post on it? Maybe just let this one slide, enjoy it for what it is and wait for the next really problematic one to come by.
Also it’s 2023 and we’re all kind of tired of making these arguments over and over. “Oh sure this drama is a ridiculous sexy romp but seen through a feminist lens…” and suddenly we’re fun-killing wowsers. Maybe.
But there is also a thought bubble following me around that instead says, “hey, if shows like this start pretending to be feminist then isn’t that kind of worse?” to which the warring tiny version of me on my other shoulder noted that almost none of us were fooled here. Certainly not anybody I talked to about it in my usual drama spaces.
But there were enough comments about this quite dated Korean romcom being “modern”, “progressive” or other similar epithets (whether complimentary or pejorative) to give me some concern. Spoiler alert: it is neither of these things. Yes a female lead was both not a virgin and got to have sex. Welcome back to 2005.
Anyway, here I am. For better or for worse. This is the blog post. I’m doing it anyway.
Sorry. For being that person. For my permanent feminist lens. And for being such a wowser. It’s not like I didn’t enjoy Love to Hate You. I mostly did.
But Love to Hate You has a thin layer of feminist critique over a huge body of internalised misogynism. And, like most narratives underpinned by the concept of Not Like Other Girls, it tends to pull its punches on systemic sexism by essentially blaming its victims. Love to Hate You walks obliviously past Korea’s structural gender issues and starts punching down on individual women instead. And yes, this is a problem. But is it a huge problem? A deal breaking problem? A blog-post worthy problem.
I guess we’ll see.
Please note: there is actually a lot more to unpack in Love to Hate You around sasaeng culture, parasocial relationships and privacy but I’m going to try to stay on topic. This is entirely about the show’s feminism.
If there’s one thing Korean writer’s love, it’s their oppositional romances. Lining up two characters with different personalities or experiences (at least on paper) and exploring the opposites attract, yin and yang of that dynamic. Opposing forces coming together to maintain balance.
She can’t remember anything, he can’t forget. He’s immortal, she’s terminally ill. He believes in rationality and science, she’s deeply superstitious. And of course the timeless: he’s rich and she’s poor.
On the surface Love to Hate You embodies this dichotomy: a woman who hates men and a man who hates women (I should note that the trailers for this show refer to him as being anti-romance rather than anti-woman, although the ongoing misogynism of this particular character starts in the first episode. He’s not against romance, he clearly just hates women).
Yeo Mi-ran (Kim Ok Bin) is an energetic and athletic woman who’s clearly felt limited and even suffocated by the grinding sexism and double standards of Korean society, starting with her very patriarchal father who treats her mother as an emotional (if not physical) punching bag. Although the show’s first scene implies that Mi-ran is just a healthy woman with a normal sex drive who refuses to pander to the restrictive gender roles placed upon her, this is quickly jettisoned. We soon learn she’s angry at the double standards underpinning the world she lives in and refuses to abide by them. All men are cheaters who will break your heart if you let them. Best to get there first.
Promised a romcom about a woman who just liked men and dating and wasn’t ready to settle down yet – or possibly at all – I admit I wasn’t ready for the female lead’s crippling cynicism. None of what she does is because she likes men, dating or sex. It’s done because she’s making a point. If men insist on positioning sex as a battle in which there is a loser, then she will be the winner. Nothing in this is about a woman enjoying sex. It’s about reflecting patriarchy back to itself.
Yeo Mi-ran is not having a good time at any point in this drama. Yeo Mi-ran is pissed.
Really what this character needs isn’t a love interest, nor to have her edges dulled so she can accept love and her male co-workers for their inadequate selves. What this character needs is to burn the fucking patriarchy to the ground.
This is not what Love to Hate You is about. Just so you’re aware. I mean I know it’ll be a surprise. But it’s not.
No, Love to Hate You is a love story! Because that’s absolutely what Mi-ran needs. Who needs systemic change when you can have nookie?
Nam Gang-ho (Yoo Teo) is a popular romantic lead with an active fan club and a reputation for being Dramaland’s best kisser. But he is hiding a dark secret. After his girlfriend dumped him for her acting career and he realised his mother never loved his father, he’s decided that all woman are conniving gold diggers who use men to advance their social status. This belief mysteriously dovetails into wider societal misogynism, a fact that nobody on the writing team or in the drama seems to notice – except for possibly Mi-ran herself.
Just the thought of being intimate with a woman nauseates Gang-ho and he has to take medication to get him through love scenes in his dramas. Having seen the dearth of skinship scenes in modern Korean dramas, this doesn’t seem to be too much of a burden but Gang-ho nonetheless has to keep this aversion a secret. Gang-ho’s dislike of physical intimacy is the kind of conceit that too neatly separates him from the other cheating men in the drama. See he’s not sleeping around like everyone else. Not because he doesn’t want to, mind you, but because he physically can’t. How this qualifies him as being somehow superior to the other men eludes me. Surely choosing not to be a cheating scumbag would be better than having it forced upon you.
Nonetheless, Gang-ho is pure as the driven snow apart from his extreme and violent hatred of women as insincere social climbers who are only motivated by money.
Ironically, this leads to one of the drama’s most head-scratching scenes (for me at least). Mi-ran overhears him parroting standard sexist and misogynistic things about his drama co-star and leaps to the conclusion that he is a woman-hating jerk. This early drama scene is classically one of eavesdropping leading to a misunderstanding that drives the first half of the plot but is then resolved later on. Except, in Love to Hate You there is no misunderstanding here. These are his genuine beliefs. She heard him correctly. They’re an accurate reflection of who he is and what he believes.
Gang-ho is a woman-hating jerk. What misunderstanding is there to resolve here?
Well, of course, these would be his super special snowflake reasons for being a woman-hating jerk.
From the beginning, Love to Hate You acts as though the male lead’s trauma from his break-up and Mummy issues is equivalent to the female lead’s trauma from systemic lifelong differential treatment. In doing so, it claims a commonality between personal experiences that ignores a larger societal framework.
The fact the male lead’s opinions on women reflects wider social attitudes towards woman is seen as some kind of unfortunate coincidence leading to the female lead’s ‘unfair’ prejudice against him. We’re asked to accept that the male lead’s hatred of women is somehow different or unique to broader misogynism because its causes and intentions are personal and different.
This kind of humanised bigot is in the same vein as, say, high profile TERFs like J.K. Rowling. Sure they sound exactly like far right groups and violent Men’s Rights Activists but that similarity is merely some kind of coincidence. To which one would usually respond with something about ducks and quacking. Or birds generally. Flocking.
If you sound like a misogynist and act like a misogynist then you are a misogynist. Your special hurt man feelings then become irrelevant.
In comparison, the female lead’s anger and hatred towards men is again framed as an entirely personal thing rather than as a reaction to systemic issues. “The misogynist and the misandrist” sounds good on paper but it ignores the larger society in which the two are living. The male lead’s stated views on woman just make him an average man. The female lead’s ‘misandry’ is instead rational self-defence.
The problem here is that at no point does the show gun for wider social commentary or explore the way in which the male lead’s views on women are created and reinforced by societal structures generally. For many women in even the not-too-distant past, marriage was their job and the only one they could get that paid a decent wage. Women were forced to marry for money and then condemned for doing exactly that. But the drama is never interested in the way in which society forces women into certain roles and then judges them for being there.
Instead it works hard to carve out a special niche for our female lead where she can dare to be different while changing nothing about society itself. Because Yeo Mi-ran, you see, isn’t a rational actor responding to a lifetime of patriarchy that applies to other woman both within the text and outside of it.
No, instead she is Not Like Other Girls.
Now at this point you’re probably thinking you agree with me but also the text is a lot more nuanced than that and in this I completely agree. Like most rants, the above is slightly reductive as it attempts to convey the problem while possibly sweeping past all the ways in which the text is more subtle about these things. There are several moments in the show that seemed to suggest a different framing and possibly it’s the place the writer started.
From the first episode, the drama is interested in how women and romance are portrayed in traditional Korean film and television versus the real lived experience of both men and women. On these points, the drama is on firmer ground. But its scatter gun of reproachment doesn’t stop with the passive and useless female leads of the average action film or the giddy simpering nitwits of romance dramas. It expands outwards to include women who embody these caricatures.
There are women in this drama who play the characters in the fictional dramas that the show is going after. The aforementioned romcom lead or the male lead’s girlfriend in the action drama. But these women are the same as those characters. The co-star Gan-ho hates really is a simpering nitwit who is out to get him. His film costar and ex-girlfriend really is that passive and useless. So how does that critique those tropes and caricatures in any way? If anything, the show lambasts women for not rebelling enough against the system: blaming them for being weak or manipulative and for not demanding better. It reinforces the idea that most women really are like this and our female lead is, once again, Not Like Other Girls.
This means the male lead’s personal growth is not contingent on realising that he’s wrong about women. It’s instead about realising Mi-ran is an exception to that truth.
The problem with Not Like Other Girls is that the niche it carves out is just as exclusive as the one that men occupy. It’s not quite equality but a special treatment card because you’ve been deemed to be superior to others. It’s not that he and the rest of society have decided that woman are people who deserve better. It’s that they’ve decided that you are a person who deserves better.
In this case, not only do we discover that Yeo Mi-ran is a capable fighter and stunt artist who risks her life to save her colleagues on set, she also only did all that dating with other men as revenge for their treatment of women. See she wasn’t really promiscuous, she wasn’t really dating around. She was just pretending to for the greater good.
So where does Love to Hate You‘s Not Like Other Girl’s feminism leave women who aren’t vigilantes and action heroes? Ones who maybe do actually like sex, want to date a lot before marriage, or have had a lot of boyfriends?
It leaves them exactly where we found them. Nothing has changed.
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