Seoul, South Korea
Last September, the Korean edition of Maxim, a men’s magazine, ran a cover showing Kim Byeong-ok, an actor who starred in cult favorite film “Oldboy,” posing with a cigarette in his hand next to a car. A pair of woman’s legs, bound at the ankles, was sticking out of the trunk. The headline read “The Real Bad Guy.”
A newly-formed online feminist group called Megalia immediately shared the cover with media outlets and feminist groups around the world. The ensuing uproar forced Maxim US to issue an apology.
Megalia’s online activism was a bold step in a country where women continue to face discrimination at home, in the workplace, and on the streets. Yet as more women push against deep-set conservative attitudes in Korea, the backlash has been vicious. Young Korean men, who no longer enjoy the same economic security and position of power in society, are virtually, and literally, taking their frustrations out on women.
“The gender war in Korea is quite bad, especially among the younger generation,” says Katharine Moon, a professor of political science at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. “Men feel that they are swallowing water, that they are just flailing in a sea that is changing upon them.”
A matter of economics
Like social change elsewhere, the war between the sexes in Korea has its roots in economics. As Korea’s economy grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, many men had stable, well-paying jobs. Women were expected to stay at home and, with husbands in good jobs, they could afford to do so. That allowed the hoju system, which by law stated that a man was the head of the household, to survive–it wasn’t abolished until 2005 (paywall).
In the late 1990s, the Asian financial crisis upended the stability of the Korean “salaryman.” Many men who lost their jobs started to compete with women for work. “A lot of the negative stereotypes about women, a lot of very gendered labels, started appearing in the early 2000s,” says James Turnbull, a long-time resident in the southern city of Busan who writes about feminism.
Today, Korea’s economy (paywall) is floundering once again. A global economic slowdown has hit the country’s export-driven economy hard, in particular the shipping and shipbuilding industries, which are massively important to Korea. Giant conglomerates called chaebols are also troubled, and hiring fewer people. Household debt is growing and as a percentage of GDP, is among the highest in the developed world.
Meanwhile, Koreans in general have become overqualified for the available jobs. With a higher proportion of people going to college in Korea than in any other OECD country, many well-educated people are in dire need of work, and many who do find work are only able to secure temporary jobs. Youth unemployment is running at close to 10%, about three times the national average. Young men and women, who might cooperate and marry in more plentiful times, instead fiercely compete for the few good positions available.
“Young people are very frustrated, especially men, if they compare their lives to that of their parents’ generation,” says Lee Mi-jeong, a research fellow at the Korea Women’s Development Institute. “That frustration is projected onto women.”
A new feminist movement
Much of this antipathy simmered below the surface until Megalia appeared on the scene, and the story of its creation shows how extensive and bitter tensions in Korea have become. The group has its roots in the May 2015 outbreak in Korea of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, a disease which was first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012. The outbreak was linked to two Korean women, who apparently contracted it while traveling on a flight from Seoul to Hong Kong for a holiday.
After they refused to be quarantined in Hong Kong, critics on a popular Korean message board called DC Inside (similar to Reddit in the US) viciously attacked the women, calling them selfish and saying they damaged Korea’s reputation abroad. While the women were later led into quarantine, the online chatter devolved, with many calling them “Kimchi bitches,” for women who are obsessed with wealth, and “doenjang girl” or “bean paste girl,” a reference to young women who save for luxury goods by skimping on essential goods (doenjang being a cheap kind of stew).
Angry at the MERS accusations, some women responded by posting messages on the same message board, adopting a controversial practice female activists call “mirroring,” or mimicking the language men use against women. They called men “kimchi men,” among other epithets, and mocked them for having “6.9cm penises.”
These women broke out of DC Inside to create their own site and Megalian.com was born. It was an instant provocation: The logo of the site shows a hand with the thumb and index finger close together to suggest a small penis.
Many, including some feminists, say Megalia’s tactics have opened the group up to accusations of misandry, and exacerbate the gender wars. Controversial Megalia beliefs and actions include outing gay men who are married to women. Megalia members are referred to by men online as “crazy bitches” who are “completely dedicated to hating the opposite gender,” and some men even compare to Megalia to ISIL.
But members of the group are embracing the upheaval. “Before that, feminism was very boring and academic in Korea,” says a Megalia activist, a graduate of the elite Ewha Women’s University in Seoul who works for a foreign company and who spoke to Quartz on the condition of anonymity. “2015 was an incredible year.”
Murder, Gangnam style
Online activism by Megalia and others has been, to some extent, a response to the reality of increasing violence against women. In May, a 23-year-old woman was stabbed and killed in Gangnam, a district home to some of the country’s biggest and swankiest office buildings, stores, and nightclubs, as she was leaving a bathroom in a building near Gangnam subway’s exit 10, an area as busy as New York’s Times Square or London’s Oxford Street.
The killer, a 34 year-old man, told police he committed the crime because he had been mistreated by women in the past.
Women swarmed to the subway exit in the following days to pay tribute to the victim by sticking Post-its with messages on walls and holding discussions about misogyny. Men’s rights groups staged counter-protests, according to women who had attended the memorials, declaring that labeling the crime as a misogynistic act simply encouraged discrimination against men.
The Gangnam murder highlighted the deeper problem of sexual violence against women, which government-backed KWDI defines as rape, non-consensual touching and taking intimate photos or videos without consent. KWDI statistics show that rates of sexual violence in Korea have shot up in the past few years—the data does not distinguish between male and female, but the group says the victims are overwhelmingly female. Lee, the research fellow, says the increase can only partly be explained by the fact that more women are prepared to come forward about abuse than in the past.
A growing men’s rights movement
While women have gained some power and independence in Korea, a preference for male children in the 1970s and 1980s has resulted in an excess of men–and the disparity in numbers contributes to tensions. In 1990, thanks to the availability of selective abortion, Korea’s sex ratio at birth was 116.5, meaning 116.5 boys were born per 100 girls, a ratio that since has evened out (paywall). Many of those 1990 male babies are now grown men unable to find girlfriends and wives, says Turnbull. At the same time, more Korean women are choosing not to marry at all.
Speaking up for men’s rights isn’t a fringe idea in Korea—it has become mainstream. “What’s striking about the current situation is the extent to which… men seem to be feeling very comfortable in saying that women’s demands for greater rights or greater protection are misguided,” says Koo Se-woong, a former university teacher and managing editor of liberal news site Korea Expose.
In one extreme display of men’s rights, in 2013, the heavily indebted founder of men’s activism group Man of Korea (link in Korean), Song Jae-gi, decided to jump off a bridge to raise money for his group. TV cameras were present as he readied to throw himself into the Han River. Among the goals of Man of Korea was the abolishment of the government’s agency the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, and compensation for Korean men who served in the military (all Korean men must serve two years in the army). His body was found a few days later.
Song’s group is now known as NGO for Gender Equality (link in Korean), whose Facebook page has 35,000 likes. One representative from the group, interviewed after the Gangnam murder, said that while the economic situation for men has worsened compared to that of their fathers’ generation, women are getting ahead because of “reverse discrimination,” even as men are still expected to assume the role of breadwinner.
Other members also support abolishing the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, because they say its support for single-parent families is promoting divorce. “The divorce rate is so high these days… women usually get child custody rights, and then they will get money from the government as well as from the husband,” Jong Chan Lee wrote in May on the group’s Facebook page (link in Korean).
No country for working women
Despite protests from men that women’s progress in society is usurping their traditional economic role, women are nowhere near parity in the workplace. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Gender Gap Report, Korea ranked 115th out of 145 countries—below Liberia, the Maldives, and Burkina Faso, and just above Zambia. In the “economic participation and opportunity” category, Korea ranked just 125th. College educated women make about 66% what college educated men make on average each month, according to data from the KWDI. The median wage gap between men and women in Korea is the worst among OECD countries, at 36.7% in 2014.