SEOUL — North Korean women are being targeted for humiliation by the regime for the “anti-socialist” sins of getting surgeries to become “more voluptuous” and “voluminous,” and for chatting “idly” in supposedly grueling self-criticism sessions.

A South Korean website tracking North Korea, Daily NK, reports from sources inside the North that “medical complications from cosmetic surgeries by private practitioners have spiked as demand among women for breast augmentation procedures skyrockets.” The North’s social security ministry, it said, issued an “emergency crackdown order” targeting the capital of Pyongyang.

“Breast augmentations have grown trendy among women in their 20s and 30s seeking more voluptuous figures, particularly those in Pyongyang’s upscale central neighborhoods,” one of Daily NK’s sources inside the country said in a message to the website, presumably via an illicit cellphone tied to a Chinese system. “Demand for such surgeries has notably increased during summer vacation season, driven by women wanting to show off their figures in bathing suits.”

South Korea’s leading newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, on its English-language website reported that “a trend favoring voluminous figures has spread, leading to a surge in breast augmentation surgeries” despite “side effects and accidents.” It said such “non-socialist acts” are banned “in formal medical institutions.”

North Korean surgeons use “silicone imported from China,” ignoring “high risks of complications like infections,” Daily NK reported. A private doctor was arrested at Pyongyang, it said, after a woman “suffered severe complications after receiving two breast augmentation procedures.” The doctor, it turned out, was merely “an oral specialist” – a dentist.

Threatened with imprisonment, women caught with breast implants face public pillorying. Two women and a doctor were tried before “a crowd of residents” at which “surgical tools, imported silicone implants and bundles of cash” were presented as evidence.

“In North Korea, public trials often serve as tools for political propaganda and social control rather than purely judicial proceedings,” according to another leading South Korean newspaper, JoongAng Ilbo. “They are designed to instill fear among residents and label targeted behaviors as ‘antisocialist.’”

In the case of the two women, neither the judge nor the prosecutors were moved by their stated desire to “improve their appearance.” Accused of “bourgeois customs and rotten capitalist behavior unfit for women living under socialism,” they had to undergo “a public examination” of their bodies, leaving spectators “shocked.”

“The women were humiliated and could not lift their heads,” Daily NK reported, before the judge said they were “driven by vanity and became poisonous weeds corroding the socialist system.”

The arrests coincided with an investigation of the North’s leading women’s organization for skipping “mandatory criticism sessions,” according to JoongAng Ilbo.

In the northeast industrial city of Chongjin, the Socialist Women’s Union of Korea was accused of having “failed to regularly hold mandatory criticism sessions,” the paper quoted Daily NK as reporting. In one neighborhood, “they’d only held one criticism session in the first half of the year … even though they’re supposed to happen once a week without fail.”

Just as bad, the party’s guidance department said, they had used sessions merely “to chat idly or share personal information instead of conducting self-criticism, mutual criticism, or performance.” Worse, they copied previous reports as “a ploy so they could reuse this year’s logs next year, too.”

It was the breast implants, though, that most upset authorities. 

Women “with enlarged breasts” faced intensive “questioning and physical examinations,” Daily NK said. Female “strike teams in civilian clothes … infiltrate places performing illegal medical procedures by posing as women seeking breast augmentations.”

Punishment can be drastic. The Daily NK’s source said “women and private doctors face forced labor or other criminal punishments for engaging in dnon-socialist behavior.”