BTS member Namjoon's history with misogyny and feminism, because I personally want this all in one list just for me:
(if you screenshot this to share anywhere, PLEASE source and/or link me. i'm sick of writing BTS posts and it going viral on twt when someone else steals it)
Oct 2014 — Namjoon writes lyrics for the misogynistic song "War of Hormone," including a line about how women are "the best gift."
March 2015 — Namjoon writes lyrics for his misogynistic song "Joke," including saying he's going to tell people that a "bossy" woman he doesn't like has gonorrhea (in Korean, “being bossy” and “gonorrhea” rhyme/are off by one letter). He then writes that he wants this woman to blow him.
June 2016 — Namjoon gets criticized for his misogynistic lyrics in "Joke" and "War of Hormone," and he says:
“The most controversial things came from what I wrote. I thought, ‘I was so ignorant.’ I wanted to study a lot. Since then, I have been taking women and gender studies classes at a university. […] I do contemplate a lot even as I write lyrics now. I read the newspapers a lot, and read books a lot, and study current society a lot. And now when I write lyrics, I get professional opinions from those like a feminist professor.”
He later shares that he still sends all of his lyrics to this women and gender studies professor, for them to "analyze objectively."
July 2016 — Korean feminist eAeon shares a thread on Twitter:
“Recently, Namjoon and I met privately and had a serious long talk about the issue of misogyny. Namjoon felt shame and guilt because of the controversy and revealed to me that he is distressed and unable to sleep due to it. So I said that misogyny is not a label or stigma that cannot be erased, but rather an obstacle in the right path that can exist within anyone. Rather than feeling like it’s unfair or painful, it’s a matter of deciding to fix it or not after discovering it within oneself. I talked about how I am also in the process of continuously fixing myself whenever I discover something I am lacking. Namjoon listened attentively and understood better than other people I have spoken to about similar topics.”
Oct 2016 — Namjoon writes the lyrics for the song "21st Century Girl," which includes (somewhat generic) uplifting lyrics such as “Tell them that you’re strong / Tell them you’re enough” and much more, with the whole song being along those lines. It’s fun, it’s cheesy, it's cute, it's entry level feminism, etc
Jan 2017 — Namjoon says in a live vlog:
“I’d never thought that my behaviors or words could hurt others. As I went through the year 2016, I started to think about that. My words or behaviors, regardless of my intentions, can cause trouble or hurt others feelings. I thought, I need to hold myself responsible for that and I need to think about such things. What I said and did can not be undone. I learned how to admit that to myself. It was hard to admit that I could hurt others’ feelings even if I don’t mean to. Now, when I start to do something, I think, how would people feel about my actions? Now, as I said, I feel much better about my feelings and emotions. Now when I hear something about myself, even if it’s criticism or condemnation, I think, what caused them to say this about me? What did I do wrong? What did I do to cause others to feel uncomfortable? I need to know how to change my way of thinking if it’s wrong.”
Jan 2017 — Namjoon posts a picture of a stack of books on his side table, and one is Breaking Out of the ‘Man Box’: A Call to Men, a book by Black male feminist and human rights activist Tony Porter, about “empowering men to create a world where men and boys are loving and respectful, and a human race where women and girls are valued and safe.”
Feb 2017 — BTS releases the music video for their song “Not Today.” The song is about the "underdogs" of society rising up and fighting back, and features a line about “shattering the glass ceiling that holds you down.” When asked if he knew what the phrase meant, Namjoon, who wrote the lyrics, said that he was fully aware of its meaning in feminism, as well as: “I wrote the lyrics to say let us, including BTS, not stay silent on social issues.” (Unrelated fun fact: the song is also heavily inspired by Aragorn's "but it is not this day" speech in Return of the King).
Sept 2017 — Namjoon shares a selfie where you can see he has a Marymond phone case. Marymond is a charity that financially supports former "comfort women," Korean women and girls who were abducted before and during WWII by Imperial Japan and forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers.
Japan has refused to actually apologize to survivors, one Japanese politician said in 2014 that comfort women were "necessary for soldier morale," Osaka ended its sister city designation with San Francisco over a comfort women memorial in SF's Chinatown, many right-wing Japanese people view comfort women as lying sluts, etc. South Korea and Japan officially entered into an economic/trade war in 2019 due to Japan's refusal to give reparations to Korean comfort women.
March 2018 — Irene from Red Velvet says she read the book Kim Ji Young, Born 1982, which is about “the subtle hardships women endure” and is said to have “a clear goal of enlightening those oblivious to the gender discrimination that takes place everyday.” This caused a huge controversy, where Irene’s male fans burned pictures of her, said they now hate her, and essentially threw big temper tantrums because of her support of feminism.
Two days later, Namjoon does a live vlog just to say he also recently read Kim Ji Young, Born 1982, which he praises and calls “thought-provoking.”
(CONTEXT: Starting in the late 2010s and continuing now, incels and MRAs are a rising movement in South Korea, while feminism is viewed as evil and corrupting. In 2022, South Korea elected a proud anti-feminist as president, who ran on a platform specifically appealing to incels.)
July 2021 — Namjoon is seen reading the book Ways of Seeing, aka the book where the term “the male gaze” comes from. The book “criticizes traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images,” and it is the origin of a famous quote about male artists and the male gaze: “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and called the painting ‘vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.”
Aug 2021 — Namjoon is put on a “feminist watchlist” by Korean incels — they made a list of “suspected,” “verified,” and “vanguard” feminists in Korean pop culture and politics, and put celebrities, politicians, and activists on their list accordingly, so they would know who to hate. Namjoon was listed here as a “verified feminist” and the incels said men should all boycott him due to his support of feminism. Namjoon is the only male idol included on this list.
Sept 2021 — BTS does an interview with South Korea’s then-President Moon (not the incel, but the guy before him), in conjunction with their UN work. BTS is asked to comment on misogyny, as they have a lot of female fans, and only Namjoon answers. He says:
“Personally, I received a lot of criticism regarding misogyny in 2015 and 2016, which led me to get my lyrics reviewed by a women’s studies professor. That experience, in turn, was an opportunity for me to self-reflect and question whether I’d been insensitive to gender equality. I want to do the best I can to take interest in this topic, learn, and make improvements.”
Him speaking about women's studies professors (some of the most controversial people in Korea right now) in a positive way, even just using the word "misogyny," and saying all this literally in front of a world leader caused quite a stir in South Korea.
Sept 2022 — Namjoon is asked to narrate the audio guide for the first-ever exhibition of modern Korean art in the West. Namjoon got to personally choose ten artists to feature in his audio guide, and for the first one (the most featured one), he chose Rha Hye-Seok, a painter who was also a writer and the founder of Korea’s feminism movement. In his narration, Namjoon describes how Rha died alone and in poverty, shunned by Korean society for advocating for women’s rights during Japanese Imperial rule.
Other artists he chose to include were Japanese Imperialism-era Korean resistance revolutionaries, as well as communists and North Koreans who were blacklisted in South Korea.
Mar 2023 — Namjoon talks about his love of art in an interview, and is asked if he invests in any art (“investing” in art collection = buying paintings just to sell them in the future when they’re worth more), and he says he just collects art for himself, but if he were interested in "investing and supporting," he would choose “Black artists, women, and emerging Indonesian artists.” (Namjoon chose to add the “support” part, turning the phrase around to mean uplifting instead of profiting off of.)
July 2023 — The members of BTS release a book describing their careers from pre-debut until now. Namjoon writes about the misogyny controversy from 2016, saying:
“I think it was something I needed to go through. About this kind of concept and awareness, I have come to think that as someone living in the 2020s, it’s something you come up against at least once. And because I was criticized early on, I could recognize the problem sooner. […] This was because I’d received clear comments and criticism about the raps I’d written as well as my views. The Gangnam Station murder [a misogynistic hate crime/femicide] happened around that time, and so from a woman’s perspective I think there was no choice but to speak out even more."
About the positive impact the misogyny controversy had, he also said: "If it wasn’t for that process, we wouldn’t have made it this far."
The book then mentions: “Gender sensitivity training is now obligatory for all HYBE artists before they can debut.”
PS, he's trans inclusive, so any terfs reading this can die I guess:
Sept 2018 — Namjoon speaks in front of the UN and says that all people “no matter who you are, where you’re from, your skin color, your gender identity” deserve to be able to “speak themselves,” something he defines as having confidence in and loving yourself.
May 2019 — BTS creates little animal cartoon characters to represent themselves, and then makes a video talking about them and answering fan questions. Hoseok is asked what gender his character Mang is, and Yoongi says: “I kind of want all of them to be gender neutral. I don’t want them to be classified into two gender groups.” All of the other boys nod and agree, particularly Jimin and Namjoon, who are verbal and enthusiastic/excited.
The video then has a short animation of Mang looking back and forth between the doors to two bathrooms, each labeled with traditional gender symbols, and then Mang bursts through the wall between the doors instead:
Aug 2022 — Namjoon shares a picture of a glass sculpture he bought for his home, made by Roni Horn, a "neither male nor female" queer activist and artist.
March 2023 — Namjoon shares a song rec, “Parody” by Yves Tumor. Yves Tumor is nonbinary and goes by they/them and he/him pronouns, and Namjoon chose to share this specifically on Trans Visibility Day.
April 2023 — Namjoon shares a picture on his IG story of the cover of the photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin, a bisexual Jewish activist and photographer who first rose to fame during the AIDS crisis. Her photobook is about humanizing addicts, drag queens, queer and transgender people, HIV positive people, etc.
Bonus stuff I wanted to include, because this is my post:
March 2017 — Namjoon and American rapper Wale release a song together, called “Change.” From Billboard’s review of the song: “In this unrestrained hip-hop track, the duo criticize the ‘alt-right,’ ‘racist police,’ and declare they have ‘no faith in the government.’”
May 2018 — Namjoon recommends the book Das Kapital by Karl Marx in a live vlog. That book is over 3,000 pages long and is about the importance of communism and socialism, capitalism's oppression and exploitation of the working class and all marginalized groups, how capitalism and imperialism go hand in hand, and more. Namjoon also says he wrote the BTS song "Paradise" about his views on capitalism in South Korea and how it leads to people overworking themselves to death.
May 2018 — Namjoon says in a press conference that he’d rewritten parts of BTS's song “Fake Love” for their performance at the BBMAs, to not include the words “I am” (nae-ga in Korean) or “you are” (ni-ga in Korean) specifically because they sound like the English n word, which he says is offensive and that Koreans shouldn’t say it.
He went on to say: “There are many people hearing the song for the first time, and when you are hearing parts like that as English, there is potential for misunderstandings to occur. To prevent that, we edited the lyrics.”
Oct 2018 — Namjoon has a million songs about mental health awareness, the suicidal thoughts and panic attacks he used to have in late 2015 and 2016, and his depression, but I especially recommend his album "mono," where every song marks a different place in his recovery and struggles with mental illness. In the live vlog for this album, he also became one of the only Korean celebrities to ever say he sees a therapist.
Feb 2019 — Namjoon shows off some of the art pieces he owns in a live vlog, including multiple pieces specifically about Free Palestine (all of his Palestine-related art is pro-Palestine). When talking about the art, he calls the country "Palestine."
Jan 2020 — Namjoon and the rest of BTS reveal “Connect BTS,” a global art project bringing attention to diverse visual artists around the world. BTS sponsored five 100% free art exhibitions and personally chose the artists themselves, and interviewed them to help bring mainstream attention to them. The main artist in the Berlin exhibition was Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku, whose work is about European colonialism in Africa.
April 2020 — Namjoon recommends the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, the groundbreaking book destroying all arguments in support of white supremacy, “stunningly dismantling racially-based theories of human history,” and “arguing against the idea that Europeans have any kind of intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority.” Some people believe Europeans were able to colonize, enslave, and conquer the Americas/Africa because white people are superior, but this book says it was just luck, geography, the invention of guns, and immunity to diseases from Europeans not washing their asses.
Dec 2022 — Namjoon releases the song “Yun” featuring Erykah Badu, about the painter Yun Hyong-Keun. Besides painting, Yun was also an activist who protested against Imperial Japan and the Korean war, and was arrested and tortured multiple times throughout his life for standing against colonialism and imperialism, and later for being a Communist sympathizer.
Jan 2023 — Back in 2021, BTS's company HYBE announced they were going to sell BTS NFTs, but then literally never mentioned it again. In 2023, it was revealed that Namjoon himself had gone to HYBE headquarters and "gave a powerpoint presentation to HYBE's executive board" about how horrible NFTs are and how he didn't want them associated with BTS.
Feb 2023 — Namjoon shares another picture of his Free Palestine art, coincidentally (or not) on the very same day Israel bombed Damascus and killed nine civilians.
March 2023 — Namjoon in an interview: “Music is really necessary for the world, but when it comes to my own music, sometimes I feel that I am producing something unnecessary. If I died tonight, I don’t think anything would change. Some people may care, but a farmer or street sweeper are more relevant to the functioning of society.”
April 2023 — Namjoon shares a picture from his home, and in the background, an original political sketch from Philip Guston’s Poor Richard series is visible.
Philip Guston was a Jewish Communist who did a series of political sketches about how much he hated US president Richard Nixon — for anyone who doesn’t know, Nixon was a fascist conservative, and sort of the Trump of the 70s. He was hateful, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, he spoke nonsense and most centrists thought he was insane and would never get elected, he literally started the War on Drugs, etc. Guston’s sketches portray Nixon in a very grotesque way and are all about him and his cronies being evil and fucking over the whole world out of hatred and greed.
So, Namjoon owns a sketch by a Jewish Communist about hating and mocking fascist conservatives.
and lastly, Namjoon's two best outfits:
(the sweatshirt in the second one features a picture of Rick Owens, an openly bisexual fashion designer, wearing heels)
