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Kryptos
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The intentionally self-defeating nature of simplified right wing slogans
#27602687 - 01/01/22 04:54 PM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/01/world/asia/south-korea-men-anti-feminists.html
Quote:
The New Political Cry in South Korea: ‘Out With Man Haters’
After slow gains in women’s rights, the country is facing a type of political correctness enforced by young men angry at feminists, saying they undermine opportunity.
By Choe Sang-Hun Jan. 1, 2022 Updated 3:25 p.m. ET 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!”
On the streets, such rallies would be easy to dismiss as the extreme rhetoric of a fringe group. But the anti-feminist sentiments are being amplified online, finding a vast audience that is increasingly imposing its agenda on South Korean society and politics.
These male activists have targeted anything that smacks of feminism, forcing a university to cancel a lecture by a woman they accused of spreading misandry. They have vilified prominent women, criticizing An San, a three-time gold medalist in the Tokyo Olympics, for her short haircut.
They have threatened businesses with boycotts, prompting companies to pull advertisements with the image of pinching fingers they said ridiculed the size of male genitalia. 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 one of the most delicate issues in South Korea, a nation with deepening economic uncertainty, fed by runaway housing prices, a lack of jobs and a widening income gap.
“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.”
The group spearheads the street rallies and runs a YouTube channel with 450,000 subscribers. To its members, feminists equal man haters.
Its motto once read, “Till the day all feminists are exterminated!”
The backlash against feminism in South Korea may seem bewildering.
South Korea has the highest gender wage gap among the wealthy countries. Less than one-fifth of its national lawmakers are women. Women make up only 5.2 percent of the board members of publicly listed businesses, compared with 28 percent in the United States.
And yet, most young men in the country argue that it is men, not women, in South Korea who feel threatened and marginalized. Among South Korean men in their 20s, nearly 79 percent said they were victims of serious gender discrimination, according to a poll in May.
“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.
The wave of anti-feminism in South Korea shares many of the incendiary taglines with right-wing populist movements in the West that peddle such messages. 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 represents a split from previous generations.
Older South Korean men acknowledge benefiting from a patriarchal culture that had marginalized women. Decades ago, when South Korea lacked everything from food to cash, sons were more likely to be enrolled 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.
As the country has grown richer, such practices have become a distant memory. Families now dote on their daughters. More women attend college than men, and they have more opportunities in the government and elsewhere, though a significant glass ceiling persists.
“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.
If older men saw women as needing protection, younger men considered them competitors in a cutthroat job market.
Anti-feminists often note that men are put at a disadvantage because they have to delay getting jobs to complete their mandatory military service. But many women drop out of the work force after giving birth, and much of the domestic duties fall to them.
“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 gender wars have infused the South Korean presidential race, largely seen as a contest for 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.
But Mr. Yoon also recruited a prominent 31-year-old leader of a feminist group as a senior campaign adviser last month, a move intended to assuage worries that his party has alienated young female voters.
By law, Mr. Moon cannot seek 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 fans have watched his stunts livestreamed online, sending in cash donations. During one online talk-fest in August, Mr. Bae raised nine million won ($7,580) in three minutes.
Women’s rights advocates’ fear is that the rise of anti-feminism might stymie, or even roll back, the hard-won progress South Korea has made in expanding women’s rights. In recent decades, they fought to legalize abortion and started one of the most powerful #MeToo campaigns 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 fixated, in particular, on limited cases of false accusations, as a way to give credence to a broader anti-feminist agenda.
Son Sol-bin, a used-furniture seller, was 29 when his former girlfriend accused him of rape and kidnapping in 2018. Online trolls called for his castration, he said. His mother found closed-circuit TV footage proving the accusations never took place.
“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, who spent eight months in jail before he was cleared. “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!”
This was a very interesting article, for me. And one that caused me to think about the situation that young asian men are in. This is not something that was explicitly mentioned in the article, but I think there is a lot of overlap between what the article talks about and the incel movements spreading across the internet and the world.
Right now, after a period of severely patriarchal society in past generations, there is a massive demographic imbalance in asian nations. This was caused by a series of rational decisions in a fundamentally irrational society. A society that heavily favored men, rationally, led to a long history of sex-selective abortions. After all, each individual family has limited resources, and so they would prefer children that have a better chance of being successful (not to mention the one child policy, which is becoming a demographic disaster for China, and is the biggest threat to China's future). This is why in many asian countries, there is now significantly more marriage-age men when compared to marriage-age women. There were just not enough women being born.
Now, there same young men, who usually have (also for "right wing" reasons such as fiscal austerity and tradition) very few desirable characteristics, such as education and therefore career, are being used as foot soldiers to push the same exact right wing patriarchal narrative that is responsible for their plight and anger.
The fact is, unfortunately, that there is a significant population of men who will not get married, will not have families, and will die alone. This is the fault of the previous generations. They are absolutely paying the price for the failures of their fathers. They are also being told that they can avoid paying that debt with more of the same. But that is not the case. Short of having a social policy where multiple men share a single wife (which they will obviously find unacceptable), a mass extermination of those same men to get rid of the excess, or importation of sex slaves from other countries, they cannot avoid paying that debt. Yet they can still pass it on.
Now, one thing that I find to be, not exactly healthy, but by far the best of many bad choices, are tendencies towards femboys/hikkikomori/etc. Young men who, essentially, accept their future as sexless losers, become socially withdrawn from the society that failed them, and take what little solace they can about the future from that acceptance. It's absolutely not healthy, but it is the way by which society can recover the demographic balance required for it to thrive in the future.
However, recent Chinese policy to ban "feminized" men from the media, by censoring public personas that present an ambiguously gendered, or not traditionally "masculine" persona, means that this route is being closed off. For relatively good reason, as loser shut-ins aren't exactly productive workers.
Where else can you send a bunch of angry and lonely young men who have no hope for a "traditional" future family and are energized by authoritarian populist messaging focused on blaming others for their problems?
War.
EDIT: I will also add, what I think is a relatively obvious point: The women being born in these societies were being born to generally wealthier and more tolerant families, which meant they had access to better resources and more education. So they are obviously doing better. I think there is some truth (emphasis on SOME) to the incel idea that women try to marry up (again, due to patriarchal ideals of the man being a provider), which only compounds the problems.
Edit2: Another thing I failed to consider up front: the feminized male may, actually, be more attractive to a woman who was raised in a society of traditional toxic masculinity. And I mean specifically the kind that says boys don't have emotions other than anger and solve problems exclusively through violence. Fact is, most fans of the feminized male pop stars that wear makeup and jewelry are still women.
Edited by Kryptos (01/01/22 11:46 PM)
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Brian Jones
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Re: The intentionally self-defeating nature of simplified right wing slogans [Re: Kryptos] 1
#27603203 - 01/02/22 02:45 AM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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That article and your comments were interesting. But South Korea is not China. The sex ratio in South Korea is 100.5 males to 100 females and demographers project that to continue to 2060. There may be a tiny amount of sex selection going on there, but the numbers are the numbers. It is empirically normal for there to be slightly more male births than female in any society, without sex selection. Biologists view this as mechanism that balances the higher death rates for younger males through misadventure.
IMO the male backlash against feminism in South Korea is the same as any other industrialized educated country. The males see their relative advantages slipping away and they think feminism is being pushed in their faces by academia and media. Same as here.
-------------------- "The Rolling Stones will break up over Brian Jones' dead body" John Lennon I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either. The worst thing about corruption is that it works so well,
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Kryptos
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Re: The intentionally self-defeating nature of simplified right wing slogans [Re: Brian Jones]
#27603643 - 01/02/22 11:19 AM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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Numerically, yes. But I am also referring to a phenomenon described here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/
I think there is going to be an..."effectively" skewed sex ratio, from women simply rejecting their options as inadequate.
But, you are correct. The majority of the backlash in South Korea is simply that equality after a position of privilege feels like a loss of status. I did kind of combine it with an article on China from a few days ago (the one talking about banning feminine men).
I do think that the authoritarian movements in both countries overlap, with stuff like Bannon's global anti-globalist movement type ideas, where a few key figures support international authoritarianism to legitimize authoritarianism at home.
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Kryptos
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Re: The intentionally self-defeating nature of simplified right wing slogans [Re: Kryptos]
#27604106 - 01/02/22 04:10 PM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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Perhaps I should expand the assertion to one of a definition of freedom: there are, of course, two different kids of freedom. There is the freedom to do what I wish, and there is the freedom to impose my wishes on others.
I think these two definitions of freedom are what defines right wing and left wing politics. Left wing politics are often defined by the ability to do what I wish within reasonable limits, while right wing politics often define freedom as the ability to impose my wishes upon others.
Mask mandates are just a perfect example of this, I think. A mask mandate gives me the freedom to avoid viral exposure while I am, for example, shopping. A rejection of a mask mandate give me the freedom to expose others to whatever viruses I have.
Both are freedom, but they are two different kinds of freedom.
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Brian Jones
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Re: The intentionally self-defeating nature of simplified right wing slogans [Re: Kryptos]
#27604731 - 01/03/22 06:30 AM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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I don't know much about authoritarianism in South Korea, other than it being significantly less oppresive than China.
I edit English for Korean grad students. They are more defensive about criticizing their country than most Westerners.
-------------------- "The Rolling Stones will break up over Brian Jones' dead body" John Lennon I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either. The worst thing about corruption is that it works so well,
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catcake1
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Re: The intentionally self-defeating nature of simplified right wing slogans [Re: Brian Jones]
#27611315 - 01/08/22 07:05 AM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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christopera
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Re: The intentionally self-defeating nature of simplified right wing slogans [Re: catcake1]
#27611357 - 01/08/22 07:54 AM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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I babysat a Korean boy for a year or two. His mother was attending my university trying to get her PHD. She was absolutely getting owned as her english was pretty bad. She clearly over estimated her knowledge of English, and that's not something that works out well in a PHD program. Anyways, her husband was a rich industrialist in SK, and apparently it's common to send wife and child away whenever you don't feel like dealing with them. When I'd ask about the husband she'd always get kind of snotty with me, and the kid dearly missed his father. A couple of things that I noticed while hanging out with them for that year or two was that 1), the man of the household was basically unquestionable, like 1950's US style. 2) the husband wife relationship seemed to be nearly professional and not particularly romantic, but having never met the husband it was hard to get a good read on it. 3) getting a PHD in the US was solely a practice used to increase the knowledge of SK, there was no intention of ever practicing in the US. 4) SK is a good year or two ahead of the US as far as elementary school mathematics, this kid was bored out of his fucking mind doing basic arithmetic, he was already doing low level algebra in the third or fourth grade when he left SK.
Eventually I ended up editing her papers and helping her out as much as I could, and over time I grew to really like them. The kid taught my how to use chopstick like a fucking champ. Overall it was a good time. Finally, SK definitely has strong male/female gender roles, or at least they did 15 years ago when I did this. The Incel stigma will probably be real strong as a result.
-------------------- Enjoy the process of your search without succumbing to the pressure of the result. A Dorito is pizza, change my mind. Bank and Union with The Shroomery at the Zuul on The internet - now with %'s and things I’m sorry it had to be me.
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Kryptos
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Re: The intentionally self-defeating nature of simplified right wing slogans [Re: christopera]
#27611753 - 01/08/22 01:57 PM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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Re:
2) This seems to be common in a lot of Eastern societies. Middle east, all the way to the coast. Very patriarchal. I wonder how that developed? Middle East, you got the whole Abrahamic religion thing, and all three teach that the man is in charge, but I am never sure how it developed further out. Especially since Mao was pretty progressive when it came to women's rights, openly saying that women are equal to men.
That's not to say that Western societies are not patriarchal, they absolutely are, but not to the same extent. I guess that's because the modern western societies are less heavily influenced by religion, so we aren't full Saudi anymore.
3) That's a simple question of prestige. Even now, when the US has dropped behind China for scientific output, US higher education is still considered the best in the world. Undergrad, less so lately, but graduate programs are absolutely considered the best, still. I don't think anybody goes to the US for a PhD thinking "HAHA! I will steal this knowledge for the glory of South Korea!"
Matter of fact, I'd go so far as to wager that the wife would not be using her PhD at all. She would simply remain a trophy for her husband, but the Dr. in front of her name made her look better. This is kind of tied to the above patriarchal nature of the society. This is just a guess, though.
4) Most of the world is ahead of the US on elementary education. My old Russian textbooks had me doing basic algebra in 4th grade and trig started in 7th grade. US higher education is still considered the best, but this, much like the supremacy of the US overall, is less a function of effectiveness and more a function of inertia. We were ahead once, and we're being overtaken.
That being said, a major flaw that I found in my Russian education was the lack of focus on critical thinking skills and practical applications. For example, when I first came over, I could do the straight math better than basically any of my classmates, but word problems were entirely foreign to me. The ability to turn reality into math and vice versa was a skill that was lacking in my Russian education. I guess they just kind of assumed we would figure it out. Interestingly, I think this is why Russia produces a lot of well respected theoretical mathematicians, chemists, and physicists, but not as many biologists and engineers and such.
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