Ms. Jeong’s behavior can be partly explained by the peculiarities of Korean culture. Korean women are accustomed to being dominated by men. Not patronized, condescended to or exploited, but straight up dominated.

Men who don’t behave as expected are subjected to what Roissy would call “shit tests,” which involve insults, deprecation both subtle and overt, and psychological emasculation. Korean women even go after their sons in this manner, which goes some way toward explaining the volcanic rage that has led a number of young Korean men to go on shooting rampages.

My bet is that Ms. Jeong has had some intense but dysfunctional relationships with white men that have left her cultural expectations unfulfilled. The problem being that Western men don’t dominate so much as they patronize women, which to Koreans is weird and aggravating.

Her response has been to hurl insults at white men in order to goad them into a properly wrathful and dominant attitude toward her. This is to be expected from Korean women. The only way to get them to stop is to give in and treat them like a doormat.

It sounds worse to Westerners than it really is. For the most part it involves ritual submission; one Korean woman I worked with in China proudly described how she washed her husband’s feet every day when he came home from work. I found this puzzling, but she insisted that she really enjoyed serving him in this manner, and I didn’t detect any hint of resentment in her expression, but rather the opposite.

There is a darker side, however; apparently wife-beating is common among Koreans, but they take that in stride and most agree that it is usually due to wifely misbehavior or rebelliousness.

So, as academics would say, one should view Ms. Jeong’s outbursts “through the lens” of her native culture and try to sympathize. All she really wants, after all, is for the objects of her affection to treat her the way a proper Korean lady ought to be treated.