There is a particular kind of confusion that seems to emerge every time a woman rises to power in a context that is otherwise defined by brutality, repression, and the systematic destruction of human dignity. The confusion goes something like this: a woman in charge is progress, therefore any woman ascending to any position of power is, at least in some partial and complicated way, a step forward for women everywhere. It is a logic that sounds reasonable until you apply it honestly, and then it falls apart almost immediately. The case of Kim Jong Un reportedly grooming his daughter, Kim Ju Ae, to eventually succeed him as the leader of North Korea has triggered exactly this kind of confused thinking in certain corners of the internet and even in some more serious political commentary. The suggestion that this development carries any feminist significance whatsoever is not just wrong — it is a profound misreading of what feminism actually is, what it actually wants, and what power actually means when it is inherited within a totalitarian dynasty.
Let us start with the most basic facts of what North Korea is, because they are easy to forget when you are looking at photographs of a young girl standing next to missiles and thinking about glass ceilings. North Korea is one of the most repressive states on earth. It has operated a network of political prison camps, known as kwanliso, for decades. These camps hold an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 people at any given time, according to various human rights organizations and defector testimonies, and the conditions inside them are documented as including forced labor, systematic starvation, torture, rape, and public executions. People are sent to these camps not just for political dissent but for the crimes of their relatives — a system called guilt by association, or yeon-jwa-je, that can condemn three generations of a family for the perceived transgression of one. The state controls every aspect of civilian life: where people live, where they work, what they watch, what they read, what they are permitted to believe. There is no free press. There is no independent judiciary. There is no political opposition. Citizens are required to participate in mandatory sessions of ideological instruction and self-criticism. Leaving the country without permission is illegal and punishable by imprisonment, forced labor, or death. The famine of the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands, possibly over a million people, while the regime continued to funnel resources into its military apparatus. This is the system that Kim Ju Ae would one day inherit. This is the machine she would one day operate.
Now ask yourself: in what sense would her operating it constitute a feminist achievement?
Feminism, at its core, is not about ensuring that women get an equal share of power in every existing structure regardless of what that structure does. It is a political and social movement rooted in the belief that women deserve dignity, autonomy, equality, and freedom from oppression. It is a movement that emerged precisely because patriarchal systems denied women these things. The entire premise of feminism is that power structures which oppress people are bad, and that women should not be excluded from the good ones and should not be the instruments of the oppressive ones. Celebrating a woman rising to the top of a machine designed to oppress millions of people — including millions of women — because she is a woman is not feminism. It is a shallow cargo cult version of representation politics that has lost the thread of why representation was supposed to matter in the first place.
Representation matters because when women are included in decision-making, when their voices and experiences inform governance, policy, and culture, the societies that result tend to be more equitable, more humane, and better for women specifically. The pipeline from representation to justice is real. But it depends entirely on the nature of the system being represented within. When a woman leads a democratic government, there is at least a structural possibility that her leadership changes something for women in her country — that policy shifts, that norms evolve, that women see pathways that were previously invisible to them. When a woman inherits absolute tyrannical control over a totalitarian state, the only thing that has changed is the gender of the person at the top of an unchanged system. The prison camps remain. The starvation remains. The surveillance remains. The executions remain. The ideology that crushes human agency remains. Nothing about the condition of North Korean women improves because the hand that signs the orders belongs to Kim Ju Ae rather than Kim Jong Un.
And this brings us to something that rarely gets said loudly enough in these conversations: North Korea is not just a brutal dictatorship in a gender-neutral sense. It is a deeply, structurally, and ideologically patriarchal society. The oppression of women in North Korea operates on multiple levels simultaneously. At the most immediate level, women in North Korea face sexual violence as a normalized feature of daily life under the regime. Defector testimonies and reports from organizations like Human Rights Watch have documented that women in detention facilities are routinely subjected to rape and sexual abuse by guards and officials. Women who attempt to cross the border into China — often fleeing poverty or to send money home to their families — are frequently trafficked, forced into marriages, or exploited in the sex trade, sometimes with the complicity of North Korean officials who profit from the trade. When these women are caught and repatriated, they face interrogation that includes invasive gynecological exams to determine whether they were in contact with Chinese men, and if found to be pregnant, they may be forced to have abortions or have their infants killed.
The Juche ideology that underpins North Korean political culture is not only authoritarian but deeply invested in traditional gender roles and a patriarchal social order. Women are expected to serve the state as mothers, producers of future soldiers and workers, and loyal wives. The celebrated image of North Korean womanhood is one of devotion — to the family, to the fatherland, and to the Supreme Leader. While women have always participated in the workforce out of economic necessity, this has not translated into political equality, social equality, or freedom from gendered violence. The very top of the political structure has been, until now, exclusively male: Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un. The military, the party, the security apparatus — these are male-dominated institutions. A Kim Ju Ae succession would put a woman at the symbolic apex of this structure while leaving the patriarchal foundations of everything beneath it completely intact.
There is also something worth examining in the nature of her path to power itself. Kim Ju Ae is not ascending through any process that rewards merit, that reflects the will of women in North Korea, or that emerged from any struggle for women’s rights. She is being positioned as a successor because she is her father’s daughter. She is an heir in the most literal, feudal sense of the word. The logic of her power is dynastic, not democratic, not meritocratic, not the product of any feminist movement or demand. The Kim family rules North Korea because the Kim family has always ruled North Korea, and now the dynasty may continue through a female line not because North Korean society decided women deserved more power but because Kim Jong Un may not have a male heir he trusts, or because he has calculated that his daughter is his most reliable vehicle for perpetuating his legacy. This is patriarchal power in its most naked form: a father deciding the fate of a nation by choosing which of his children gets to inherit it.
The comparison to actual feminist progress is instructive. When women fought for the right to vote, they were demanding inclusion in a democratic system that, however imperfect, derived its legitimacy from popular participation. When women fought for reproductive rights, they were asserting bodily autonomy against systems that sought to control them. When women fought to enter professions, to lead companies, to hold political office, they were expanding the space in which women could exercise genuine agency over their own lives and the lives of others in meaningful and accountable ways. None of these struggles have anything to do with ensuring that the next totalitarian dictator is a woman. Feminism has never been about that. Feminism has never needed to claim every powerful woman as a victory, and it should not start now.
There is a version of this argument that some will find uncomfortable: the claim that Kim Ju Ae becoming Supreme Leader would actually be worse, in certain respects, than a male successor, because the propaganda value of a woman in that role could be weaponized against legitimate feminist critique. Authoritarian states have long used the imagery of powerful women to deflect accusations of gender-based oppression. When a regime can point to a female leader, it gains a rhetorical shield that makes it harder to talk about the systematic abuse of women that occurs beneath that figurehead. This has happened in other contexts — not in situations as extreme as North Korea, but the dynamic is recognizable. Symbolic representation at the top becomes a justification for ignoring structural oppression everywhere else. Kim Ju Ae as Supreme Leader would give the regime a particularly potent propaganda tool: look, we have a woman running the country. How can you call us patriarchal?
The answer is that you call them patriarchal because the evidence is overwhelming, because the testimony of hundreds of thousands of defectors documents it, because the structure of the society and the ideology of the state encode it, and because putting a woman at the pinnacle of a machine designed to oppress does not change what the machine does. Marie Antoinette was a woman. Catherine the Great was a woman. Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties and declared a state of emergency that led to mass forced sterilizations. Isabel Perón oversaw the Triple A death squads. Being a woman does not automatically make a leader good, does not automatically make a system more humane, and does not automatically constitute progress for women as a class. History is full of women who wielded power in service of systems that oppressed other women, and sometimes in service of systems that oppressed everyone.
None of this is to say that the gender of political leaders is irrelevant, because it is not. Representation matters. The slow, grinding, difficult work of getting women into positions of genuine democratic accountability and power is important, and the evidence supports the idea that it produces better outcomes in contexts where the systems involved are accountable to the people they govern. But the keyword there is accountable. Kim Ju Ae would be accountable to no one. She would govern by hereditary right in a state that has never held a free election, that suppresses all dissent, that runs concentration camps, and that views its citizens as subjects rather than as people with rights. Whatever she does with that power, she will do it without the input of the North Korean people and without any mechanism by which they can remove her. That is not a feminist story. That is not any kind of liberation story. That is just dynasty.
The instinct to find feminist victories wherever women ascend is understandable. The world is still enormously unequal along gender lines. The glass ceiling is real. The barriers women face in professional, political, and public life are real and documented and frustrating and worth fighting against. The hunger to see those barriers fall, to see women in powerful places, to normalize female leadership — all of that is legitimate and good. But that hunger should not make us sloppy. It should not make us unable to distinguish between a woman breaking a barrier in a system worth being part of and a woman inheriting a machine of terror. These things are not the same. Calling them both feminism does not honor the real work of the feminist movement. It dilutes it. It makes the word mean less. It suggests that the goal was always just about putting women in charge of things rather than about building a world where women, like all people, are free.
Kim Ju Ae is, by all available accounts, a child. She did not choose the circumstances of her birth. She did not choose to be groomed as a successor to one of the most brutal regimes on the planet. Whatever she becomes, she will become it inside a system that has warped every relationship she has ever had, that has surrounded her with people who would tell her anything she wanted to hear, that has given her life a meaning and a destiny she had no part in constructing. In that sense, she too is a subject of the machinery her family built. That is genuinely sad. But it is not feminist. And when she is old enough to run the camps, to authorize the executions, to continue the famine policies and the nuclear weapons program and the surveillance apparatus and the trafficking networks and the forced abortions — none of that will be feminist either, regardless of her gender.
The women of North Korea who deserve our attention are not the one being groomed for a throne. They are the ones in the camps. They are the ones who crossed a river at night trying to find a way to feed their children. They are the ones who have been sold, abused, disappeared, and silenced. They are the ones whose stories we know only because a small number of them managed to escape and live to tell what happened to them. Feminism, if it means anything, means caring about those women. It means insisting that a system that does these things to them is not redeemed by who sits at the top of it. It means refusing to let a dictator’s daughter become a symbol of progress for women while the women her family has spent three generations destroying remain invisible.
That is the only honest feminist position available here. Not celebration, not ambivalence, not complicated nuance that ends up treating a hereditary tyrant as a glass-ceiling moment. Just clarity. Some things are not wins. This is one of them.