ALL BARK NO BITE | SADISTIC BEAUTY SPINOFF

Chapter 12

~ Larrox Cyber Café, near Sinwan Publishing House, Inui-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul

What you wrote is worse than trash, if you tore it up and tossed it in the city dump, even the garbage there would divide itself into a class hierarchy with yours at the very bottom. I don't know from where you found the guts to get something like this published but on second thought, link me to your publishing house, if they can publish this then they're going to love my grocery list.... zzz..jlkj...

Minho hung sleepily over the keyboard as he drew halfway close to the finish mark on his book review. He was supposed to approach it with snake-like critique but his mind was too sluggish, eyes too bleary to write well so he just took to roasting it halfway.

That explains how he forgot his laptop at home, otherwise, he could have saved time on travelling and finished up at college itself. The book review was due in another 6 hours but his subjects were paper-intensive this semester so he needed to work as much in between classes as he could.

He wanted to talk to the Dean about it but he clearly had other plans. Aside from the mystery around securing of possible tenures, the Dean, Mr. Park, had started staying holed up in his office more often. Even his unwelcome flirting with the female adjuncts had gone down a notch.

He was a notorious golf fanatic so it was especially curious what he was up to if not romping around a green course. It was safe to say that the green court saw him more than the office or atleast not as happily so. Minho's head buzzed a little with excitement. But fell back glum onto the text at hand.

He wasn't enjoying writing this critique... it seemed like some sort of treatise on radical feminism and he wasn't impressed by it. Although it had already garnered rave reviews by other critics, he felt pressured to do the same. It's wasn't as if he didn't wish to laud a given piece of work. A thousand critiques are no match for a book well written.

Minho knew this better than anyone else.

Writing took endless creativity, hard work, consistency and boldness. But for this author, in particular, he felt she cut too many corners and wasn't true to her own sermon. The so-called heroine was a hate-spitting, smoking and drinking virago who assaulted men who criticized her poor behaviour as some sort of fantasy fulfilling power-play.

This irked Byun Minho. He reasoned that if the protagonist exploited a power dynamic to put down men, it didn't mean that she despised inequality, she just despised men and as far as he knew, from the writer's prologue too, the textbook rubric of feminism is equal treatment for all.

He had been seeing such pieces more often and understood them as an acid reflux of inherent patriarchy. It was an understandable reaction but not a helpful one. Unfortunately, a few women did see it as empowering. An earlier review on a similar theme had brought him some hate as many readers felt he was targeting women.

"Some people just don't want to see a strong woman" one had scorned and Minho caved. He wasn't going to jeopardise his novel critiquing side job over irate Feminists. He had made the necessary additions that contradicted his original review, spouting the same Google presented comments praising the brave and fearless female author.

It was a still a wonder to him. How was reverse patriarchy the solution? Was hatred the solution? And was this author just pandering to the angry women to make an emotional buck? He wasn't really targetting the person, he decided but he wasn't going to overlook her writing that was all over the place. It was that simple. She was a bad writer.

Women can be bad writers too. Who even was this trash pen wielder... he had forgotten in his sleepy haze. He googled the name anyways.

Chun Duna. It read in bold on the cover page under the abstract cover and title. "Oh" he short-circuited internally unable to connect the work with the writer. Wasn't she the winner of the New Writer's Award even before she joined University? Her works included urban realism and mature fiction.