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Comment by tomphoolery | Hacker News Reader

This makes sense to me, because North Korea is still technically at war with South Korea. During WWII, when all members of the male-dominated workforce were overseas fighting, the propaganda posters were mostly centered around female participation in the workforce.

If your country has been at war for over 60 years, I suppose your society would develop a kind-of "gender-agnostic" workforce, or perhaps a total reversal of demographics from a country who is at peace.

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So why don't you see the same dynamic in South Korea?

Because, while North Korea is still at war, South Korea is not.

I don't know how you figure.

If only this explained, South Korea would also show its "gender-agnostic" face, but it doesn't happen. Imo the thing is in the difference of political/economic regime.

South Korea may technically be at war with North Korea, but very few South Koreans would tell you they live in a country in a state of war. In reality, the war is more a theoretical threat. Whereas in North Korea, people are constantly being conditioned to believe that, in fact, they are in a constant state of war.

This assumes a much higher level of complete acceptance of propaganda than I think is reasonable, especially considering the people driving labor policy are presumably in the more elite levels of society.

Surely if state's propaganda is intended to condition people to accept that they are at war, then propaganda is going to reflect the labour norms of a society at war, whether people accept the truth of the necessity to be on a war footing or not? And we're also talking about a country where it's widely reported that nearly every young man gets conscripted for an extended period of time and is regarded as a reservist when not on active service. I suspect the North Korean diplomatic service strongly selects against policy wonks who come up with cunning imperialist traitor ideas like "maybe if we disregard the Dear Leader's emphasis on the importance of maintaining the appearance of military strength we'd have more available able-bodied labour to make stuff"

So yes, it's likely actually true that in rural North Korea women actually do work the land (in common with many other poor countries, especially ones with food shortages and menfolk frequently conscripted or called up for army reservist drills) but are lower priority for enlistment into for resource extraction or front line military service, because North Korea needs all the farmers it can get but (in common with many other societies) doesn't see women as particularly suited to mining or guarding the country's borders. But even if that wasn't the case, it's likely the posters would still promote those gender roles. If anything, they might be downplaying the likelihood of women being drafted.

> And we're also talking about a country where it's widely reported that nearly every young man gets conscripted for an extended period of time and is regarded as a reservist when not on active service.

That more or less describes South Korea too.

True (and a whole host of other countries) though I don't think the South Korean service period is ten years!

Yeah, but my main point here is we spend so much time focusing on what's odd about North Korea that we start to act like they're not humans. They aren't morons. I remember reading an interview with a North Korean defector and he was talking about how anyone who lives there learns to read between the lines of news stories. So like the example he used was, if all the sudden the newspaper started talking about heroic Iraqi rebels fighting the United States, you'd learn "Oh, so the United States has taken over Iraq," even though none of that context would necessarily have been presented to you.

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