Gender Colors Outrage Over Scandal Involving South Korea’s President

SEOUL, South Korea — A popular South Korean singer, Lee Seung-chul, recently posted on Twitter what he called a sad joke that reflected public outrage over a scandal involving the country’s president, Park Geun-hye.

“If Hillary is elected, the United States will have its first female president. If Trump is elected, it will have its first crazy president,” went the joke, which was widely shared online. “South Korea got both in 2012.”

Ms. Park’s 2012 victory was hailed as a milestone for South Korea’s deeply patriarchal society. But four years later, pressure is mounting across the country and even from within her party for Ms. Park to step down or face impeachment. This week, she became South Korea’s first sitting president to be accused by prosecutors of a criminal conspiracy.

The scandal surrounding Ms. Park has left many South Korean women infuriated with the president and fearful that it could be used to argue that women are unfit to lead. They worry that the country, already among the lowest in global gender-equality rankings, could become even more resistant to elevating women to positions of power.

“We have had more than our share of outrageous male politicians,” said Kim Yun-jeong, 22, who had a placard that said “Park Geun-hye, OUT!” at a recent demonstration in Seoul, the capital. “But I feel men now saying, behind our back and with a smirk on their faces: ‘See! This is what we get when we have a woman president for a change.’”

Ms. Park’s troubles stem from her decades of ties to Choi Soon-sil, a daughter of Choi Tae-min, the founder of a fringe religious sect who befriended Ms. Park in the 1970s. Ms. Choi was indicted Sunday on charges of using her influence with Ms. Park to extort millions from businesses. Prosecutors said Ms. Park was an accomplice of Ms. Choi, but she is protected by the Constitution from criminal indictment.

Ms. Park has agreed to submit to an inquiry. But on Tuesday, her lawyer, Yoo Yeong-ha, tried to use Ms. Park’s gender as a shield, saying that she was “a woman before being president” and that her “privacy as a woman” should be protected from prosecutors who sought to question her.

Women’s groups were having none of it.

“They are not investigating her privacy as a woman but her acts of destroying constitutional order as president,” a group of women’s advocacy organizations said in a joint statement. (Mr. Yoo declined to elaborate on what Ms. Park’s privacy had to do with the investigation.)

South Korea’s women have been just as loud as its men in denouncing Ms. Park. Recent polls have found her to be deeply unpopular among both men and women.

And in the huge protests that have filled central Seoul over the past four weekends, women have often led peaceful marches — an unusual sight in South Korea, where anti-government demonstrations often feature men clashing with riot police officers.

During a Nov. 12 rally that attracted one million people by some estimates, a student from the Sacred Heart Girls’ High School in Seoul, Ms. Park’s alma mater, took the podium. “You have become an object of shame for us,” the student said of Ms. Park, prompting wild cheers from the crowd. “We can no longer tolerate you representing our nation.”

Although Ms. Park is often called South Korea’s first female president, that label fails to capture the complicated ways in which people here regard her presidency.

Ms. Park has never been considered a champion of women’s rights, either as the president or as a legislator before that. According to Kim Young-soon, a leader at the Korean Women’s Associations United, gender inequality has actually worsened under Ms. Park, with sex crimes on the rise and a growing wealth gap taking a harder toll on women.

Her presidential campaign was aimed at securing the support of older conservatives who still revered her father, the military dictator Park Chung-hee, for leading the country out of poverty in the 1960s and ’70s. Many saw in Ms. Park a modern version of her charismatic father.

South Koreans like to say that they see Ms. Park not as a female president but as Park Chung-hee’s daughter. That places her in a peculiar and precarious position in South Korea, where patriarchy rules the political and corporate worlds.

A widely shared Twitter post last year summed up the challenges Ms. Park has faced in the shadow of her father’s legacy and with the cultural misgivings over female leaders: “When President Park Geun-hye does well, she wears the clothes of Park Chung-hee. But when she does badly, she becomes a woman.”

So far, Ms. Park’s gender has not been an outright issue in the scandal, but it has colored the outrage. Older conservative men who have turned against Ms. Park since the scandal often disdainfully refer to her as an “unfilial daughter.”

Online, men have attacked Ms. Park and Ms. Choi by invoking an old Korean diatribe against assertive women: “If a hen crows, the household collapses.” (When a man used that phrase at a recent protest, it set off both cheers and boos from the crowd.)

In the local news media, photographs have emerged that show urinals painted with images of Ms. Park and Ms. Choi. People have derided Ms. Choi, who has no background in government or policy making, as an “ajumma,” or homemaker, “from Gangnam,” a Seoul district often associated with affluence and moral weakness.

“President Park is taken as evidence that women are not qualified for politics,” a feminist group said last week, protesting what it called gender prejudices tainting the campaign against Ms. Park.

Ms. Park has seldom spoken of her gender. But she has styled herself after her mother, Yuk Young-soo, who is seen as a symbol of feminine sacrifice among older Koreans. The former first lady was fatally shot in 1974 by a pro-North Korean assassin who had targeted her husband. For decades, Ms. Park’s hairstyle has reminded people of her mother.

She has also built a muscular political reputation in what some analysts have called an attempt to dispel the notion that a female leader would be weak on security issues. She has been hawkish on North Korea, predicting its collapse and promising military retaliation if provoked. At home, she has been a disciplinarian, stressing national order and calling her critics “unclean forces.”

Her upbringing and manners have led critics to accuse her of acting with a sense of entitlement. Those accusations have carried a powerful punch in South Korea, where many have grown disillusioned with so-called imperial male leaders in politics and in the corporate world, and expected a less rigid style from the first female president. Many of the most bitter criticisms have come from other women.

Ms. Park once sat motionless in the rain, waiting for an aide to step forward and pull her hood over her head, according to the aide, Jeon Yeo-ok, who later parted ways with Ms. Park and caused a sensation when she recounted the tale. “She is the kind of woman who would wear her crown to a nightclub,” Ms. Jeon said in 2012.

It is not the only time that Ms. Park, who once named Queen Elizabeth I of Britain as her role model, has been accused of behaving like royalty.

During a presidential debate in 2012, Lee Jung-hee, the head of a small left-wing party, accused Ms. Park of trying to become “not a female president but a queen” and denounced what she called her “disconnectedness and arrogance.”

After Ms. Park came to power in early 2013, her government disbanded Ms. Lee’s party on charges of being pro-North Korea.

Many, including members of Ms. Park’s Saenuri Party, now find Ms. Lee’s criticism to have been prescient.

“We have been living in a monarchy,” Kim Sung-tae, a Saenuri lawmaker, said during a recent party meeting. “And our party has been loyal vassals for Queen Park Geun-hye.”