What the hell is wrong with men in South Korea?

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Current Events » What the hell is wrong with men in South Korea?
https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/1onww4d/the_state_of_comments_left_by_korean_men_on_a/

I'm aware that there's a major "battle of the sexes" going on over there, but this and various comments detail a misogyny epidemic.
"Be good to yourself, because everyone else in the world is probably out to get you." - Dr. Harleen Quinzel
I've heard something similar is happening in Japan too.
I've always said South Korea is still stuck somewhere in the 1950s societally.
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Post #4 was unavailable or deleted.
Hate to tell you this, but this isnt just a Korean thing. Ive seen the same sort of comments on English-speaking sites.
The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
I didn't actually click on the link yet, but its this about south korean men's extreme rage every time they think that one gesture is being used? The crab-hand gesture I think it's called?

I went down a youtube rabbithole of a video explaining this gesture (and the vast majority of the time the things these people are accusing is intentionally doing that gesture actually aren't) and the supposed battles with feminists and the whole thing was a trip.

EDIT: The "jibgeson" gesture. Some wacky stuff.

Ah ok I clicked on the article now. Yeah forever online south korean net denizen dudes are waging a huge battle of the sexes war over there for awhile now.
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Asherlee10 posted...
It certainly isn't unique to SK, as a notable amount of men in western countries also think the same dumb shit.
I'm having Nam flashbacks to the topic about Uber giving women the option to avoid riding with men.
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Asherlee10 posted...
It certainly isn't unique to SK, as a notable amount of men in western countries also think the same dumb shit.

We (women) still have a long way to go in many different area of societies. Not directly related to this, but in the same vein, women's health is still a black box of unknowns. I am 42 years old and just learned today that perimenopause can cause extremely short period cycles. Like every 14 days.

Yep and it can fuck up your sleep and libido. And then when you bring it up with a gyno they just kinda shrug their shoulders (yeah mine sucks).

As for the SK thing, theres a reason a lot of women use mens names for the DoorDash orders. Too many dashers otherwise ignore the note to leave at door or claim they cant find the place and to come outside.
A_Good_Boy posted...
I'm having Nam flashbacks to the topic about Uber giving women the option to avoid riding with men.

And that whole thing about choosing the bear.

So many men just really dont get it.
The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
It's slowly starting to happen everywhere. Men avoiding mental health whether through social stigma or personal bias is really set up to be a fucking massive problem for the entire world.
These are the same type of MFers talking about "Male loneliness". Some people deserve a lifetime of unhappiness.
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Reading these comments is sickening

Im half-South Korean, and I dont condone these sorts of actions at all.
Cheese
Mad-Dogg posted...
I didn't actually click on the link yet, but its this about south korean men's extreme rage every time they think that one gesture is being used? The crab-hand gesture I think it's called?
No, it's about comments left on a rape victim's video.

The hand gesture thing is insane, though. Insane and pathetic.
"Be good to yourself, because everyone else in the world is probably out to get you." - Dr. Harleen Quinzel
Post #14 was unavailable or deleted.
It's a pretty average comment section in any Korean media sadly. They're incredibly toxic, but the most worrying part are the sheer amount of upvotes on the most ridiculous comments. Kinda reminds me of the wild west of the internet days where saying the word gay in a derogatory way or using a slur got a bunch of lols and whatnot, but much worse.

The crazy thing is, it's always been that way since way back then. People say the absolute rudest thing imaginable about a situation, victim blaming more than half the time. Genuinely just go to any recent controversy where it's clear cut the victim wasn't at fault, and you'll still see the top comment be something like "I bet she was wearing something that exposed her body. She had it coming lol" I swear to you I've seen this more than once in places like Inven or Naver or whatever else
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legendarylemur posted...
It's a pretty average comment section in any Korean media sadly. They're incredibly toxic, but the most worrying part are the sheer amount of upvotes on the most ridiculous comments
This is why the "vocal minority/just people on the Internet/just ignore it" mentality is real fucking dated.

People see this behavior with no pushback and, well, damn is it easier to be a piece of shit than a decent person. You can spew hate all you want and no one cares! And anger feels so damn cathartic to boot in the heat of the moment.

You gotta nip that shit in the bud or it grows like kudzu vines.
We've all seen enough to know that no society has anything to feel superior about.

These repulsive sentiments bubble and boil in the blood of inadequate men everywhere.
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I read the comments before seeing the context behind them, but...yea, disgusting
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The entire world seems to be trending towards this. It sucks.
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LuigiChalmersJr posted...
The entire world seems to be trending towards this. It sucks.
The more young men that idolise toxic alpha males like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, Asmongold etc., the worse this situation becomes for people of the future.
Cheese
*reads the comments*

what in the goddamn fuck

jeez, no wonder the birth rate is cratering in SK.

What self-respecting Korean woman would want to be with men like that
http://i.imgur.com/vDci4hD.gif
Same shit as over here, only vastly accelerated. You, as a young man, live in a society that expects you to work yourself to death for scraps. Society also expects you, as a man, to have lots of agency, be ambitious, and be socially and sexually successful with women (which is hard to do in a socially atomized society where you don't have the free time or money to properly socialize with people). These two expectations are diametrically opposed. At this point, you are at a crossroads: You can blame the system itself for being unjust, or you can blame a group of people for corrupting thr way the system is supposed to work. Most young men (especially in a highly patriarchal society) believe they are owed a higher position in the "correct" version of the system, and so they will almost always go with the latter. Women are an easy target because, again, young men believe that they are owed a loving sexual relationship and while your paycheck and your hours are abstract and complicated, it's very easy to blame your inability to have a relationship or sex on the people who are traditionally seen as the gatekeepers of those things. It's also much more profitable and acceptable within capitalism to intentionally misdirect the anger at the results of capitalism onto things that are not capitalism.
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Garioshi posted...
Same shit as over here, only vastly accelerated.
I don't know.....like the part you posted is true when it comes to general young guy rage everywhere, but south korean men definitely have their own unique "wtf" issues that isn't being replicated nowhere else.

Like that thing I posted about earlier is a actual thing that sends the forever online types into a genuine rage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_pinching_conspiracy_theory

This leads them to shit up any comment section from articles made by women, or talking about issues women face.

Like these guy's rage when it comes to women is on another level that other countries isn't matching.
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Yeah, I do believe South Korea is on another level with this stuff, even if the world itself is trending this way.
http://i.imgur.com/vDci4hD.gif
Mad-Dogg posted...
I don't know.....like the part you posted is true when it comes to general young guy rage everywhere, but south korean men definitely have their own unique "wtf" issues that isn't being replicated nowhere else.

Like that thing I posted about earlier is a actual thing that sends the forever online types into a genuine rage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_pinching_conspiracy_theory

This leads them to shit up any comment section from articles made by women, or talking about issues women face.

Like these guy's rage when it comes to women is on another level that other countries isn't matching.
South Korea is pretty unique in how much of an absolute meat grinder it is.
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Hejiru posted...
Hate to tell you this, but this isnt just a Korean thing. Ive seen the same sort of comments on English-speaking sites.

History shows it is easier to exploit people when some of them feel they are exploiting the rest.
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What in the fuck
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My understanding is that some of the animosity comes from the mandatory military conscription for men that women are exempt from over there. There used to be more of a wage gap between men and women to "justify" it, but since the gap's been closing in recent years, they felt like women are getting the bonuses without having to deal with the draft.

I'm sure there's more to it than that, and I'm not trying to justify it.
sfcalimari posted...
I've always said South Korea is still stuck somewhere in the 1950s societally.

Yet you get extremely upset when people talk about the US going back to pre 1900s.
#BLM
MorganTJ posted...
My understanding is that some of the animosity comes from the mandatory military conscription for men that women are exempt from over there. There used to be more of a wage gap between men and women to "justify" it, but since the gap's been closing in recent years, they felt like women are getting the bonuses without having to deal with the draft.

I'm sure there's more to it than that, and I'm not trying to justify it.
I mean it's some of it, but I don't think the gender gap was that big when the military service was taken a lot more seriously. Nowadays they're treating it like a brief 1.5 yrs workout vacation, and most of the harsher military traditions have been phased out. They still need to do it cuz of NK, but most of them don't think the war is happening, so they're basically being a lot less strict.

There's no real reason for all of that animosity stemming from this now.

Snip-N-Snails posted...
Yet you get extremely upset when people talk about the US going back to pre 1900s.
Yeah what that guy is saying has a tinge of racism to it, considering half of US is stuck even further back. Korea in the 1950's when it was war torn is so much more different, but also modern Korea is so much more advanced than US in many different ways. For starters, their education isn't in shambles, and they don't have a literacy problem. I suppose Americans back in the days didn't have a literacy problem, so maybe he's got a point.
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I've heard some damn horror stories about South Korean men
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The entire history of the world has been full of this. They just have a platform now
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Good lord, that was way worse than I expected. What a bunch of horrible people.
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A_Good_Boy posted...
I'm having Nam flashbacks to the topic about Uber giving women the option to avoid riding with men.

And this forum is massively progressive compared to the general population, so let that sink in.
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VeggetaX posted...
What in the fuck

"knowledge is power, but only if power has knowledge; otherwise it wouldn't be power."
I hope she gets counseling. Involuntarily orgasming during a rape can be even more traumatizing than the assault itself.
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Yikes
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A_Good_Boy posted...
I'm having Nam flashbacks to the topic about Uber giving women the option to avoid riding with men.
I mostly remember that topic because I used it as an example of a topic about a woman-focused intervention that didn't go to shit in a topic that did. Can't remember what offhand.

Then like twelve hours later that topic went to shit and stayed there.
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Moon Channel goes into a great deal of of this in greater nuance than a GameFAQs post can articulate. He gets a few finer points wrong in some of his videos but nothing so wrong that it detracts from the main points.

What's going on in Korea is a mixture of things; some familiar to us in the US and some not.
To start with stuff that USians can easily understand; and that is currently happening in America:
  • A society that expects men to be a certain way, tells men that they are the masters of their own destiny, and then denies that destiny to them. A society that wants to devour all in its path for increased capital and declares you a failure if you cannot live up to the pressure.
  • A society that is so hungry for capital it happily co-opted feminist movements to get more women into the work force, and then ground those women to dust the same way it did men. Many Women are no longer are able or willing to start families with men. Leading to a male loneliness epidemic.
This is ultimately just what Late-Stage Capitalism looks like. America is rapidly getting there if we aren't already. Japan has been there for a while, Korea is speed-running it, and China will probably start to get there if they aren't there already (I dunno, I'm not super well-versed on China's economic policy, it's an area of new research for me).

Anyways, this blend of career women unable to star families even if they wanted to and a culture that tells men they can have whatever they want; but then refuses to give anything to them, is a hotbed for sexism and male loneliness. A significant part of this problem can be solved by simply reducing work hours so that everyone has more time to relax and party and start families. Since China exerts more top-down pressure than the most other nations; maybe they'll actually do this. Japan and Korea are too shackled by business executives ruling the country to make significant headway on this issue. At least not without economies collapsing first to weaken the power these companies have.

As for some considerations unique to Korea. For one, when Korea was looking for ways to expand their economy they looked to their neighbors to see what they were doing. They saw a Japan that had just lost the miracle when their bubble burst, and a China that was at the time still doing extremely cheap industrial labor. China was doing fine even if it's citizens weren't exactly well-off then, and Korea had a bone to pick with Japan anyways, so they decided to more or less copy Japan wholesale. For every Mitsubishi there was now a Hyundai. For every Sony there was now a Samsung. J-Pop? Well we have K-Pop. In all of these fields Korea sought to emulate Japan, and not just copy them. Be better. Do it harder. And explicitly try to cultivate foreign markets. (Japan during this time tried to focus on domestic sales to recoup the lost decade).

What this translated to was longer hours, tougher competition, and just. Full-tilt speed-running of capitalism. So all of the problems that late-stage capitalism creates, especially wrt to sexism went off the rails really fast and internet culture was ripe to take advantage of that newfound space. This is the main reason why Korea has gotten so bad so fast, relative to other countries which are taking a more scenic route to get to this point.

And there's some of the cultural touchstones. A lot of the east-asian cultures are, to be frank, at least a little sexist right now. This is a super complicated and nuanced topic and it wasn't always true during these country's histories. But at least in modern-day certain cultures of sexism were being established and reinforced. Idealized women in Japan went from being Samurai's warrior-wives wielding weapons ranging from bows to naginata to firearms to... You can have a ceremonial naginata and only that. You know to remember the good old days, but we're going to ignore all the other weapons and talents you used to profess, and now we're going to say that the ideal women is not a warrior but actually a subservient home maker. (the reason they reduced the weapons associated with women was to remove the image of women actually fighting on the battlefield, and instead tried to paint the idea of women defending homes; and thus the modern woman's role should be as a home-maker.)

Anyways. So you take this relatively modern pressure to put women beneath men, and combine that with cultures that nearly worship social hierarchy. Like, to the point that airplanes have been crashed because a copilot and and engineer could not directly challenge the authority of the pilot whose social-standing outranked them. When you have a society like this, and then put women lower than men in the hierarchy, any amount of feminism now seems like a direct challenge to natural order and a perversion of the country's culture. It's not, but that's how it started being seen thanks to efforts to systemically oppress women.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Also unironically Otaku / Anime Culture. It's another can of worms that's too long to get into here but the short version is that anime found marketability in women, created idealized version of women that were safe to package into mainstream media, and Otaku whose only experience with women is through anime internalize that that's the way that women should be. Combine that with all the stuff above and you'll start to understand why Hayao Miyazaki hates anime (specifically otaku) so much. Korea even has some "fun" terms. They call women they don't like Kimchi-Women. and women they do like Sushi-Women.

I could probably rant about this for more; but yeah. It's a unique blend of the normal things wrong with capitalism being magnified by specific elements of their culture and media being taken to insane extremes.

If you'd like to know more, and know more about the nuance I have to leave out here, and know more about how a lot of this is actually (at least partly) the US's fault: here's some Moon Channel videos on the subject.

  • Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War
  • Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War Pt. 2 - The Grim Reality of Korea
  • Kawaii: Anime, Propaganda, and Soft Power Politics
  • Can Cake Teach Gamers to Respect Women?
  • Why Do So Many Gacha Games Pretend to Be Japanese? || The East Asian War for Soft Power
Yes I'm aware that's over 5 hours of videos and most of it is ostensibly linked to gacha games. Gacha games serve as a useful point of reference because all of the problems outlined above are extremely present in gacha games, especially gacha game communities.

And ftr Moonie doesn't condemn Gachas, he plays many himself. But it's one of those things that when you play these games you need to safeguard yourself against the malicious actors who want to exploit these spaces to make you hate something or someone.
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Post #42 was unavailable or deleted.
Uta posted...
Moon Channel goes
Excellent write-up, thank you.
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Seems like a problem with men in most parts of the world tbh.
http://i.imgur.com/x04tPRZ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/t7T392I.jpg
Also sort of significant that they seem like the first country in decades to come (remotely) close to the US in terms of creating shows/movies that are popular around the world.
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Smashingpmkns posted...
Seems like a problem with men in most parts of the world tbh.
Sexism is probably the most widespread flaw in humanity currently being exploited by endgame capitalism.
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EPR-radar posted...
Sexism is probably the most widespread flaw in humanity currently being exploited by endgame capitalism.
Doesn't make sense to me.

Anyone who can withstand the pain of forcing another human through an opening which is usually only about one-quarter that wide is tougher than I'll ever be.
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legendarylemur posted...
I mean it's some of it, but I don't think the gender gap was that big when the military service was taken a lot more seriously. Nowadays they're treating it like a brief 1.5 yrs workout vacation, and most of the harsher military traditions have been phased out. They still need to do it cuz of NK, but most of them don't think the war is happening, so they're basically being a lot less strict.

There's no real reason for all of that animosity stemming from this now.

Yeah what that guy is saying has a tinge of racism to it, considering half of US is stuck even further back. Korea in the 1950's when it was war torn is so much more different, but also modern Korea is so much more advanced than US in many different ways. For starters, their education isn't in shambles, and they don't have a literacy problem. I suppose Americans back in the days didn't have a literacy problem, so maybe he's got a point.
Thanks for the context, I've only heard about those issues in passing, so it's not something I'm knowledgeable on.
As others have said, I think the difference is only in self-moderation. American men know if they say this theyll be punished for it.

That said, I think even the misogynists I know arent dumb enough to think that something like this would be the womans fault. But Im sure some American men do.
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Current Events » What the hell is wrong with men in South Korea?
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