SEOUL — They have shown up whenever women rallied against sexual violence and gender biases in South Korea. Dozens of young men, mostly dressed in black, taunted the protesters, squealing and chanting, “Thud! Thud!” to imitate the noise they said the “ugly feminist pigs” made when they walked.
“Out with man haters!” they shouted. “Feminism is a mental illness!”
These rallies are easy to dismiss on the streets as fringe rhetoric. The anti-feminist sentiments are amplified online, reaching a large audience that is increasingly imposing their agenda on South Korean society.
These male activists have taken aim at anything that smacks or resembles feminism. They forced a university to cancel a lecture of a woman they said was spreading misandry. They have attacked prominent women, and criticised An San, a threetime Tokyo Olympics gold medalist, for her short haircut.
They threatened to boycott businesses, prompting them to pull ads featuring the image of a man pinching his fingers. And they have taken aim at the government for promoting a feminist agenda, eliciting promises from rival presidential candidates to reform the country’s 20-year-old Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.
South Korea is reckoning with a new type of political correctness enforced by angry young men who bristle at any forces they see as undermining opportunity — and feminists, in their mind, are enemy No. 1. Inequality is a delicate issue in South Korea. The country is experiencing deepening economic uncertainty due to high housing prices, a lack jobs and a widening income disparity.
“We don’t hate women, and we don’t oppose elevating their rights,” said Bae In-kyu, 31, the head of Man on Solidarity, one of the country’s most active anti-feminist groups. “But feminists are a social evil.”
This group organizes street rallies and has a YouTube channel that has 450,000 subscribers. The group believes that feminists are equal to man haters.
Its motto once read, “Till the day all feminists are exterminated!”
The South Korean backlash against feministism may seem a bit strange.
South Korea has the highest gap between the genders among the wealthiest countries. Only one-fifth are women in South Korea’s national legislatures. Only 5.2 percent of board members of publicly traded businesses are women, compared to 28 percent in the United States.
However, most young men in South Korea feel that they are being marginalized and threatened by the country’s women. According to a poll conducted in May, almost 79 percent of South Korean men in their 20s said they were victims or serious gender discrimination.
“There is a culture of misogyny in male-dominant online communities, depicting feminists as radical misandrists and spreading fear of feminists,” said Kim Ju-hee, 26, a nurse who has organized protests denouncing anti-feminists.
Many of the incendiary taglines used by right-wing populist groups in the West to promote anti-feminism in South Korea are shared with the wave of antifeminism in South Korea. Women who argue for abortion rights are labeled “destroyers of family.” Feminists are not champions of gender equality, but “female supremacists.”
In South Korea, “women” and “feminists” are two of the most common targets of online hate speech, according to the country’s National Human Rights Commission.
The backlash is a break with previous generations.
Older South Korean men acknowledge benefiting from a patriarchal culture that had marginalized women. In South Korea, where everything was scarce, decades ago, men were more likely to enroll in higher education. In some families, women were not allowed to eat from the same table as men and newly born girls were named Mal-ja, or “Last Daughter.” Sex-preference abortions were common.
These customs are becoming less common as the country grows richer. Today, parents care for their children. Women are more likely than men to attend college, and they have greater opportunities in the government and elsewhere. However, there is still a significant glass wall.
“Men in their 20s are deeply unhappy, considering themselves victims of reverse discrimination, angry that they had to pay the price for gender discriminations created under the earlier generations,” said Oh Jae-ho, a researcher at the Gyeonggi Research Institute in South Korea.”
Older men viewed women as needing protection. Younger men viewed them as competitors in a competitive job market.
Anti-feminists often mention that men are at a disadvantage due to the fact that they must wait to get a job to finish their military service. Many women leave the workforce after giving birth, and they take on a lot of the household duties.
“What more do you want? We gave you your own space in the subway, bus, parking lot,” the male rapper San E writes in his 2018 song “Feminist,” which has a cult following among young anti-feminists. “Oh girls don’t need a prince! Then pay half for the house when we marry.”
The South Korean presidential race has been dominated by the gender wars. This is largely because it is seen as a contest between young voters. With the virulent anti-feminist voice surging, no major candidate is speaking out for women’s rights, once such a popular cause that President Moon Jae-in called himself a “feminist” when he campaigned about five years ago.
Yoon Suk-yeol, the candidate of the conservative opposition People Power Party, sided with the anti-feminist movement when he accused the ministry of gender equality of treating men like “potential sex criminals.” He promised harsher penalties for wrongfully accusing men of sex crimes, despite concerns it would discourage women from speaking out.
Mr. Yoon also hired a prominent 31-year old leader of a feminist group to be his senior campaign adviser last month. This was in an effort to calm concerns that his party may have alienated young female voters.
Mr. Moon cannot run for re-election. His Democratic Party’s candidate, Lee Jae-myung, has also tried to appeal to young men, saying: “Just as women should never be discriminated against because of their gender, nor should men suffer discrimination because they are men.”
Mr. Lee sees the gender conflict largely as a problem of dwindling job opportunities, comparing young South Koreans to “chicks struggling not to fall off a crowded nest.” “We must make the nest bigger by recovering growth,” he has said.
It is hard to tell how many young men support the kind of extremely provocative and often theatrical activism championed by groups like Man on Solidarity. Its firebrand leader, Mr. Bae, showed up at a recent feminist rally dressed as the Joker from “Batman” comics and toting a toy water gun. He followed female protesters around, pretending to, as he put it, “kill flies.”
Tens of thousands of people have watched his stunts online and donated cash. In three minutes, Mr. Bae raised ninemillion won ($7.580) during an August online talk-fest.
Women’s rights advocates fear is that rise of anti-feminism might stymie, or even roll back, the hard-won progress South Korea has made in expanding women’s rights. They have been fighting for legalization of abortion in recent decades and have started one the most powerful #MeToo campaigns anywhere in Asia.
Lee Hyo-lin, 29, said that “feminist” has become such a dirty word that women who wear their hair short or carry a novel by a feminist writer risk ostracism. When she was a member of a K-pop group, she said that male colleagues routinely commented on her body, jeering that she “gave up being a woman” when she gained weight.
“The #MeToo problem is part of being a woman in South Korea,” she said. “Now we want to speak out, but they want us to shut up. It’s so frustrating.”
On the other side of the culture war are young men with a litany of grievances — concerns that are endlessly regurgitated by male-dominated forums. They have focused on specific cases of false accusations as a way to support a wider antifeminist agenda.
Son Sol-bin was a used-furniture dealer when he was 29 years old. He said that online trolls had called for his castration. His mother discovered closed-circuit TV footage that proved the accusations were false.
“The feminist influence has left the system so biased against men that the police took a woman’s testimony and a mere drop of her tears as enough evidence to land an innocent man in jail,” said Mr. Son spent eight months in prison before he was released. “I think the country has gone crazy.”
As Mr. Son fought back tears during a recent anti-feminist rally, other young men chanted: “Be strong! We are with you!”
Source: NY Times