[creakingstairs]

People are knee-jerking at “anti-feminism” part of Lee which I admit would look pretty off-putting to anyone who is not familiar with what’s going in South Korea.

“Feminism” in Korea has taken on a different meaning sadly. I’ve commented in HN before at how abhorrent women’s right has been in Korea, especially up to my mother’s generation. It really has drastically improved last 20 years. However, many young men feel like the pendulum has swung too much to the other direction. Society still expects men to do “manly things” (mandatory army service, physical labour etc) but girls around their age get policy benefits instead. I’m not going to into whether this feeling is justified or not. But wanted to point out most don’t want women’s right to regress to their mom’s generation. They just want to feel like they are treated equally in society.

[skavi]

You caution against a knee jerk reaction to Lee’s anti-feminist views but the background you provide does not actually justify your implication that South Korea may be a special case.

A feeling that “the pendulum has swung too much in the other direction” characterizes pretty much any modern reactionary anti-feminist movement in any country. And like in other countries, these feelings aren’t really borne out by the stats [0].

As far as I can tell, the only unique element of the South Korean anti-femenist movement is how mainstream it is. But that doesn’t mean whatever (knee jerk) reaction one might have to an anti-feminist politician at home wouldn’t apply to one in South Korea.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_South_Kor...

[creakingstairs]

> your implication that South Korea may be a special case

Well, I genuinely think the word "feminism" means different thing in Korea to the places I've lived at. It has much more inflammatory undertone there whereas in NZ, its just a term. When I see "anti-feminism" for Korean politician, I construe it to be "anti radical feminism". That's what I was trying to get at.

> these feelings aren’t really borne out by the stat

Those stats you've linked are pretty controversial: one says 10th and the other says 118th.

> Due to the various methods of calculating and measuring gender inequality, South Korea's gender inequality rankings vary across different reports. While the 2017 UNDP Gender Inequality Index ranks South Korea 10th out of 160 countries, the World Economic Forum ranks South Korea 118th out of 144 countries in its 2017 Global Gender Gap Report

I think there are still gender inequality in Korea. The reason I'm defending them is that I just don't want people to label fair bit of young Korean men to be misogynist and write them off. Their struggles are real and if we keep marginalising them I don't think it would get any better.

[skavi]

> Well, I genuinely think the word "feminism" means different thing in Korea to the places I've lived at. It has much more inflammatory undertone there whereas in NZ, its just a term. When I see "anti-feminism" for Korean politician, I construe it to be "anti radical feminism". That's what I was trying to get at.

Any active, non-historical example of feminism is likely to be considered radical. I think for us to have a reasonable discussion, you’d need to define what radical feminism means to you.

Otherwise what you’re saying is practically equivalent to “Koreans are fine with good feminism, but draw the line at bad feminism”. Which, besides being tautological, is just a rephrasing of the pendulum thing.

> I think there are still gender inequality in Korea.

It seems we agree the issue that feminism aims to solve still exists in South Korea?

> The reason I'm defending them is that I just don't want people to label fair bit of young Korean men to be misogynist and write them off. Their struggles are real and if we keep marginalising them I don't think it would get any better.

I think it’s very possible to point out actions and beliefs rooted in misogyny while also recognizing that the people expressing those beliefs have real struggles. I think people can change and even if they won’t, you can still be empathetic.

I don’t see any inherent marginalization in noticing misogyny. These men are facing real problems. But a lot of the blame for these problems is likely misdirected.

[creakingstairs]

You are right. I don’t think I should have used the term “radical feminism” here.

I’ve also been reading some of the replies and I think I should learn more about this from other perspectives. Thanks for chiming in.

[mock-possum]

> However, many young men feel like the pendulum has swung too much to the other direction. Society still expects men to do “manly things” (mandatory army service, physical labour etc) but girls around their age get policy benefits instead. I’m not going to into whether this feeling is justified or not.

Oh that’s okay I’ll say it - privileging women over men, and enacting a double standard where men are expected to comfort to a gender role whole women aren’t is NOT FEMINISM.

Feminism is not ‘the pendulum.’ If every aim of feminism were realized, men and women and all people would be equal. The goal of feminism is not a retargeting of supremacy, it is the destruction of supremacy in the first place.

There is really only one kind of person who throws around terms like ‘anti-feminism’ and ‘the pendulum had swung too far’ and I don’t think I need to waste my breath describing them, because every single one of us reading is intimately familiar with them.

[yongjik]

Yeah, I'd express doubt. I do agree that South Korean feminist movement contains some batshit crazy elements, but those anti-feminist young Korean men aren't much better.

Both sides love to fixate on crazy crime stories to make themselves feel like victims. If a Korean man murders a woman, that's femicide and an example of how Korean men behave in general. If a bunch of Korean women share nude photos of men in a website, that's how they're wannabe rapists and an example of how Korean women behave in general. Yada yada.

The young men also opposes any kind of DEI, whether it's for women, rural provinces, or people from poor families, thinking that they are the competent people oppressed by the society. They also denigrate older men in their forties (who happen to be much more left-wing in general), thinking that those oldies were the lucky generation because when they were young jobs were plenty and there were less competition.

Never mind that those old men started their careers with 6-day weeks and horrible safety conditions. Such jobs are still plenty as they were in 1990s, it's just that they're so comparatively shitty that only migrant workers would be willing to fill those positions.

Funnily enough, it looks like fewer and fewer young men are supporting Lee Jun-Seok in recent months. It looks like Yoon's political suicide (via martial law) for the conservative faction did affect Lee in the long term. (It didn't help Lee Jun-Seok that the new president, Lee Jae-Myung, is more politically savvy and is publicly willing to talk about whether young men are feeling the "reverse discrimination" and what the government could do about it.)

[pessimizer]

It really reads as exactly the evil victim mentality of the people wildly overrepresented at the top that we get in the US. The military service thing is obviously a real issue, though, but I don't know why that wouldn't be solved by forcing women into mandatory public service in the same way a man with a disability would be. Is it just that Korea doesn't have the social services to absorb the manpower?

Military service is also a benefit that women don't get, too. They don't get to make the connections in the military that would help them along in their careers.

> They just want to feel like they are treated equally in society.

Shouldn't you wait until your country is half run by women before claiming oppression? Until your boss and CEO are as likely to be women as men? I feel like this stuff it bought into by marginal men who are oppressed by other men of a higher class, and average women catch all the flack because they're simultaneously accessible and denying marginal men what they want on a daily basis. They don't see upper-class men as enemies because they don't ever see upper-class men; when they hear about upper-class cruelty, they fantasize about the revenge they would take if they were in power, especially on the women who say no.

In Korea, the anger about conscription just gives them a semi-legitimate gripe that seems like it should be taken away by conscripting women.

[creakingstairs]

> Shouldn't you wait until your country is half run by women before claiming oppression? Until your boss and CEO are as likely to be women as men?

Well boss and CEO's generation _were_ heavily discriminated and no one disputes that. For younger generation who are working, they go through 2 years of military service, then sees women in their generation go on a trip to find herself instead, then gets "preferential treatment" at work (e.g. woman police officer goes up 2 rank for giving a person in distress their jacket). Meanwhile, men are expected to financially contribute more for marriages. So now you get this explosive cocktail of resentment: it's hard to get well-paying jobs + have to go to the army + other societal expectation for manhood.

Disclaimer: I don't think it's _that_ bad but I don't live in Korea, and I have lost friends for claiming this.

> I feel like this stuff it bought into by marginal men who are oppressed by other men of a higher class

Yes, there is some truth to this. Korean media is actively fuelling this outrage but I don't think you can't generalize it to everyone who supports it. Funnily enough, latest social discourse is around "Young Forties" (so older men with more social status), so now they are trying to stir up some discourse between generations.

> In Korea, the anger about conscription just gives them a semi-legitimate gripe that seems like it should be taken away by conscripting women.

I do think they should conscript women even for social services and that would quench most of the frustration from young men. But man suggesting this would get mocked for being so petty i.e. "not manly". Politicians also stay well away from this as it would be a political suicide. So where do these marginalised men go? To Lee and anyone who'd listen to them.

Edit: Once you delve deeper into this topic, Korea's abysmal birthrate of 0.68 will really make sense :p

[samdoesnothing]

> It really reads as exactly the evil victim mentality of the people wildly overrepresented at the top

The people at the top don't have a victim mentality because they're successful. However, there are a lot of people who aren't at the top, who aren't doing great, but on the basis of their gender are told that they deserve dispreferential treatment because there's more of their gender at the top of society. I don't see how that makes them evil. Perhaps I'm just totally misunderstanding your point though.

> Military service is also a benefit that women don't get, too. They don't get to make the connections in the military that would help them along in their careers.

They can volunteer if they wanted those supposed benefits. Seems weird to try to make conscription sound like it has positives when it's just purely negative.

> Shouldn't you wait until your country is half run by women before claiming oppression? Until your boss and CEO are as likely to be women as men?

This is an overly simplistic view of "oppression". Do you think that men as a whole somehow benefit from there being an over representation of their gender at the top of society? That despite struggling to survive, because we share the same gender that we aren't suffering or that we can't be oppressed?

It's like people blame all men for the actions of our ancestors and want to take revenge or something. It's really weird.

[erxam]

Men don't know what oppression is. It is as simple as that.

When we get attacked on our privilege, we feel as if it were a mortal wound.

I completely agree with you. Men pull out the victim card like it was the easiest thing in the fucking world. Of course, if anything happens, it's the fault of those weaker than us.

That's because we aspire to be them. To be the oppressors. There won't be any liberation, just a change of guard.

I fucking hate men and masculinity. This is the poison that will lead to humanity's extinction.