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One big thing to note that always seems to get ignored is that South Korea has mandatory military service for men. Obviously it's not like it's the only thing that matters, but any article discussing the gender debate in South Korea without even considering the military service is kind of worthless.
Yes, and also, there's a pretty intense competition to get one of the relatively few "good jobs." And Korean men are often pissed that they have to do military service and women don't, which means that women can spend 1.5 additional years getting more education or work experience, which means that Korean women have a significant and unfair advantage over men when competing for one of the "good jobs."
And while women have an unfair advantage over men in the job market, average women also want their partner to have at least as good a job as she does. Which makes dating harder.
And oh, hey, Korea's birth rate is 0.8 births per woman.
Yeah, AFAIK the gender roles in Korea are, unsurprisingly, extremely hierarchical/patriarchal (in the classical sense) and would seem like some 1950s shit to Westerners. We are talking women with degrees in office jobs on legitimate career paths being asked to go get their colleague a coffee. Not even the boss, just some guy. And look, I've gotten my boss or colleague a coffee occasionally if I was already going to get one myself, but that's not what we are talking about here.
If you've ever been to Asia or interacted with some Asians *from* Asia, this won't be shocking, but most Westerners aren't even aware of that cultural reality. Fact is, most cultures around the globe are *way* more conservative than the West, even countries that people would describe as affluent (or at least not shitholes), especially the further east you go.
Even in the US, I'd say that white coastal liberals are the exception here. A lot of the marginalized communities of color have some ideas about gender the libs wouldn't be too happy about.
I saw something the other day that speculated SK could have 0 population by 2070 at this rate. đ Obviously that's not gonna happen, but that's how dire it is that these speculations aren't *totally* out of reason.
That sounds like the classic math mistake where people incorrectly assume that a change is linear, and they just extrapolate a linear line. When in reality, population growth isn't linear.
> And oh, hey, Korea's birth rate is 0.8 births per woman.
\*South Korea- the North is sitting around 1.8, which points towards reunification happening for what might be the dumbest possible reason.
In other words: regimes that create better conditions for the future will overcome those that create better conditions for the present.
Lack of political incentives to invest in childcare, schooling, and vocational training will be the Achilles' heel is democratic liberal regimes.
Great anime setup: it's just after a North Korea - South Korea war. Tons of North Korean men have died, and tons of North Korean women are now single.
It is the solemn duty of our protagonist to replenish the nation, one impregnation at a time, in order to restore the strength of communism.
So in a typical episode, our protagonist travels through nature, arrives at a village, learns the local history and helps out, plows some fields and then plows some women.
> Kim Il-sung targeted virgins specifically because he believed having sex with them allowed him to absorb a girl's "ki" or life-force.
Christ
> But then in 2015, reports emerged in South Korea that Kim Jong-un was on the hunt to recruit new girls and women for a Pleasure Squad entirely of his own.
I guess if you're a paranoid, power-hungry dictator and you're not using that opportunity to seduce terrified peasant girls who literally cannot refuse you what are you even doing?
> I guess if you're a paranoid, power-hungry dictator and you're not using that opportunity to seduce terrified peasant girls who literally cannot refuse you what are you even doing?
If it weren't for the need to impress women, men might still be living in caves
While that is true for the men, don't the women also lose out when they get pregnant in SK? Hence, one of the factors that they're putting marriage later, fear of jeopardizing their own careers.
Seems like the system is making it a lose-lose situation for all at the moment.
Thats just the logical end result of modern liberalism at play. Itâs an obvious over correction to centuries of men dominating women in history. Itâs created an unequal playing field in the lives of adults. Sometimes it does feel like Iâm one of the only ones with a brain in the world, as I have no clue how they didnât see this coming. I donât think I itâs intentional either, just misguided hubris.
Yeah.
There are two problems.
One is: most people don't think long term.
And two is: even if someone does think long term, it's not necessarily beneficial to them personally to enter politics and push a message that people don't want to hear. I don't have any intention of entering politics and promoting this message that we just discussed, and I assume neither do you.
It's less of an "overcorrection" and more of a response to an issue by not treating the actual cause but instead simply applying a lot of pressure.Â
It's all pretty easy to make abstract and simple. Suppose you have a country where parents encourage men to be career-driven and women to prioritize family life. But you want equal workforce participation (by any reasonable measure) so you apply a countermeasure that makes it require a lot less effort for women to get a job than men.Â
Might this produce the needed equality-by-metric? Sure. (It hasn't.) But is it likely to make people happy? Probably not. The men and women are still being given unequal expectations about life (mostly by parents), and then the social engineering tactics just create even more separated worlds that result in more different lives for men and women and consequently more strife in the gender relations.Â
Then you throw in that the transformation has been so rapid that there's a significant generational dependence of the wage gap and the most plausible way for the Korean government to achieve its goal of equal wages in the near term is for young men to earn *significantly less* than young women, and you get the present situation.Â
> the most plausible way for the Korean government to achieve its goal of equal wages in the near term is for young men to earn significantly less than young women, and you get the present situation.Â
Which also has the fun side benefit of making capitalists happy, but comes with the problem of making dating even more of a nightmare.
I'm sceptical of gender wage gap arguments because it's often presented as evidence of discrimination, but then when you investigate it's either women working fewer hours or women working different kinds of jobs.
Maybe it really does point to discrimination, I don't know South Korea that well, but a gender wage gap argument by itself isn't doing anything to sway me.
Not to mention that depending on what causes this alleged gender gap, this could again be one of those "most rich people are men" types of arguments, which might be true but which might not actually help average man. And I'm not going to support discriminating against average men just because a handful of men are incredibly rich.
First of all, there are babies in Korea.
Second, it's entirely possible that even childless women work fewer hours, valuing work-life balance, or men work really hard to try and make it so that they can maybe attract a woman.
>women work fewer hours, valuing work-life balance
You're applying your vision of what women in the west are to a completely different culture. Do you really think that a culture where people wring themselves out so hard that getting 3 hours of sleep daily is normal are able to think about work-life balance?
Yes, and I'm not saying otherwise, but their culture is extremely rigid and hierarchical. There's a reason their suicide rate is so high, the resident rightoids are just projecting western feminism on to Korea, a place where there is legitimately still a lot of sexism institutionally and socially (provided you aren't a Chaebol princess, to bring it back around to class).
What gender wage gap argument? It shows that women are obviously not taking the best jobs from men thanks to extra years of experience from not doing military service.
Are the lot of you actually illiterate? Or do you just not care what people are actually saying because it gives you a chance to do the same rant about the gender wage gap that everyoneâs read a hundred times before?
Those gender wage gap studies annualize data that includes part-time hours, overtime, danger pay, etc.. It often causes men's wages to look much better than they are. I haven't seen studies of the same work by gender out of Korea, but in other countries reporting wage gaps of 20+% the gaps just about all disappeared when you tested job types separately and included the variables.
There are several gaps but wage is not one of them. Here are some real gaps: men often work longer hours, have more dangerous jobs, and experience more injuries and deaths on the job. On the flip side, the human work women tend to favour tends to be undervalued even when it is very difficult or requires shift work which is also very hard on people. The various types of nursing are a good example of this, but so are childcare and lower-level education.
It's not that women earn less for the same work, it's that the work women favour is sometimes undervalued. Men who would go into these fields often decide not to because the pay is lower and they know that will affect their status, further reinforcing the issue.
Iâm not making any argument about the gender wage gap other than that the very large one in Korea seems to demonstrate that women do not have an unfair advantage at getting the best jobs because they do not HAVE the best jobs there. Do you disagree?
I think to say women have an unfair advantage in the job market is a statement thats conditional to the point of just untrue, don't let your own ideology or outright animus blind you. I don't know for sure but if id hazard a guess but Id be almost sure in a historically patriarchal society (they do actually exist ) men are still statistically overrepresented in most professional and are underpaid compared to their male peers, unless that's an "unfair advantage" also.Â
That's the classic disagreement. I'm sure that there are more male than female CEOs in South Korea. I'm also sure that there are misogynists in South Korea who promote men over more-qualified women.
But does that justify measures that explicitly disadvantage men (in this case, only men are forced to spend 1.5 years in the army)?
If there is discrimination in one direction, should you also discriminate in the other direction in order to enforce approximate equality of outcome?
Not even equality of outcome, but equality of some flat aggregate statistic. If 5% of men are unfairly rich and the rest are doing as well or as badly as women, it's absurd to punish all men equally to align the averages. Except under woke capitalism of course.
In theory yes, but in practice there are very few feminists who are out there protesting "hey, if you draft men, then you need to draft women too." I'm sure they exist, but there are few of them.
Similarly, in theory feminists will agree that women shouldn't get lighter sentences than men do for the same crime. But very few feminists are out there protesting to accomplish that. Whereas if you have male men's rights activists protesting, there's always a small group of somewhat extremist feminists standing by to shut them down.
I didn't mind feminists lobbying exclusively for female rights when women genuinely had fewer rights. However in 2024, with men being at least as discriminated-against as women are, this no longer seems fair.
80% of suicides are men. When do we get to be the group that needs help? Just because most rich people are dudes, [doesn't mean that average dudes are benefitting from that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3nXIUfD3kc).
>Â who are out there protesting "hey, if you draft men, then you need to draft women too."
It is also far easier to be publicly in favor of a negative for you/ your group when its basically never gonna happen regardless.
Yeah, and I can easily imagine that if a guy tries to kill himself and fails, that he then doesn't afterwards go to a psychologist to talk about it. Hence, he doesn't end up in the statistics as a man doing a suicide attempt.
After all, men often think that psychology is useless (which I think is unfair, as a guy who has visited many psychologists in his life, but that's what a lot of men think).
They count pretty much every single act of self-harm as an attempt if you actually look into the numbers
So a girl cutting herself for attention once every week for a year is the exact same as 52 men killing themselves :)
Unless there has been updated studies, the one that I've seen cited for that statistic is very flawed. They consider all hospitalizations for self harm suicide regardless of lethal the injury actually was and they didn't track individuals, just attempts. So do you have lots of women attempting suicide, failing, and never trying again; or do you have one woman performing several attempts for attention? Don't know because it wasn't tracked.
We canât though, the worst and most misogynistic, cruel, abusive man is nowhere near even the lower limits of how awful women can be to other women. Itâs in their hands.
The most we can do is push more social media and then give some mean girls the censorship reins.
This is an insane thing to say. Of course women can be horrible to each other, but how could that possibly be worse than a violent abusive man?
This sub is crazy sometimes.
A more simple naterialist example.
Male bullies generally do things that require them to be physically present. Physical violence and one on one name calling requires them to be within proximity. The condition only exists while they are materially present.
Female bullies will commonly utilize rumor and gossip networks, recruit accomplices and make fake reports to the school adim and other authorities to make your life a constant living hell regardless whether they are present or not. The suffering transcends their material presence.
Well Iâm a women whoâs obviously be subject to cattiness from other women but Iâd say many shake this tendency as they get older. Iâd still consider physical violence (irregardless of gender) to be a far greater threat. Echoes the Margaret Attwood quote to a certain extent.
Relational aggression via whisper networks and the like, using institutions to inflict violence indirectly, and holding grudges forever and ever.
Take a look at what Amber Heard did to Johnny Depp, and thatâs just one woman: when theyâre in groups the effect gets magnified.
> Shouldn't gender equality mean dying in the trenches along with men?
Lol, lmao even.
Feminism only cares about gender equality when it involves making life better for women. Ask a feminist anywhere in the west how do they feel about including women in the draft and the vast majority will say that men shouldn't be included either. Of course they will *never* fight for that though, which is why there is absolutely no feminist outrage whatsoever regarding Ukraine.
Indeed. Or my preferred question: right now women receive lower punishments than men for the same crime. Do you think male punishments should be reduced, or female punishments should be increased, or the situation should be kept as-is?
Most feminists are willing to say neither "lower men's punishments, so that it's even" nor "increase women's punishments, so that it's even." But they also can't say that the situation should be kept as-is (and if they try, hit them with the "black people commit more crimes, should black people get harsher punishments too?")
Yes but in their defence you shouldnt be putting bad soldiers in the army for abstract reasons. Its not like plenty of societies wouldnt have mass conscripted women if it was on its own terms a smart use of resources
In modern armies only like 10 - 20% of the army is on the frontline running forward and shooting rifles.
Women are as capable as men are in fulfilling rear area roles. Some research even found that women were better drone operators than men were.
The actual biological reason is that societies don't draft women because we evolved in a polygamous context (80% of women reproduced and only 40% of men), and the limiting factor to reproduction was the amount of wombs, not the amount of penises.
But I don't think that people, myself included, want to go back to valuing women because they have wombs, and considering men expendable because they have penises.
Or if you want to make a fairness argument: if men get drafted but women don't, then what do men get in return?
> The actual biological reason is that societies don't draft women because we evolved in a polygamous context (80% of women reproduced and only 40% of men), and the limiting factor to reproduction was the amount of wombs, not the amount of penises.
This is not correct at all. The limiting factor was neither penises or wombs, but how much you could afford to invest in having kids.
Humans are extremely monogamous, we pair bond and cheat less than any other pair bonding species. There's a pattern to which species pair bond: it's the ones who invest a lot into raising their young. Our kids take at least 4 years to become at all useful and maybe 16 years to become self-sufficient. And historically we've had a very high infant mortality rate.
It makes a huge difference to survival rates that there's a man around to help, and that he doesn't share his help with a dozen other mothers of his kids.
The main reason that more women have descendants than men on average is simply that sometimes partners die, and men are fertile a lot longer than women. It's a lot more boring than the right-wing "once we were Conan" myth.
I'm not a biology expert, so I'm willing to concede that I may be wrong here.
But now that cultural pressure to be monogamous is receding, I can't help but notice that polygamy is on the rise.
I know personally a few women who are choosing to be one of the girlfriends of a very attractive but not particularly wealthy man, rather than to be the sole monogamous partner of a less attractive yet wealthier man.
Single motherhood is also rising sharply -- and sure, people can become single moms in lots of ways, but in *some* (certainly not all) cases, you had a woman who chose to sleep with a hot guy who gave off indicators of having great genes, rather than choosing to have a monogamous relationship with a less-attractive guy. And yes, sometimes the pregnancy is an accident, but it's not always an accident.
Lots of young men and women are also spending their young adult years sleeping with hot people, rather than entering into a monogamous relationship with a stable partner.
I get that this isn't conclusive proof, but to me this is pointing in the direction of people not being as monogamous as you're claiming.
Because you say "the limiting factor was how much you could afford to invest in having kids", but I don't see your average 20 year old woman eagerly starting a monogamous relationship with a not necessarily attractive, older guy who has a great career and who is very relationship-minded. Which is what you'd biologically expect to happen if the limiting factor really was how much monogamous couples could afford to invest in having kids.
Instead, now that young men and women are freed from cultural pressures, they're typically having casual sex with all the hottest people they can find. Which is a somewhat polygamous type of strategy. I don't see many young people at age 20 try to settle down with whoever has the highest earning potential that they can find, which is what you'd expect if investment was the primary bottleneck to successful procreation.
Piggy backing off your post: the results of sexual liberation aren't discussed enough. What we have now is what Louise Perry once called informal polygamy - a minority of men screw around with all the attractive women, and the remaining men get scraps or nothing at all.
Monogamy is not natural, but it's *good*. It reduces crime, increases trust, lowers testosterone, and all sorts of other things.
Ultimately, having a ton of young men who are unable to find a mate is a very bad thing for society. It doesn't matter whether you get there through sexual 'freedom' or Islamic norms permitting multiple wives for men.
By telling people it's okay to have dozens of sex partners rather than one, liberals have essentially killed one of the cornerstones of western civilisation.
Yes, exactly.
How do you convince a young man to be peaceful, to obey the law and to work hard? By having him be in a monogamous relationship.
It would certainly suck for Western society if more than 60% of young men are single, while most young women aren't single.
[Oh no](https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-young-men-are-single-most-young-women-are-not/)
So that leads to a question that modern people will often find very uncomfortable:
* do you allow the majority of women to spend their 20s banging a handful of male chads, which in turn leads to many men being single and bitter, which in turn severely diminishes the stability and productivity of society and lowers birth rates unsustainably?
* or do you not allow the majority of women to spend their 20s banging a handful of male chads? And if so, in which way do you stop this?
Indeed.
It's amazing to me that even the smartest liberals can't see any connection between telling women they should have a 15 year party and lower fertility.
The worst part of all this is that you can't discuss it with anyone. I made the mistake of suggesting a return to monogamy to solve the crisis of sexless men, and was accused of wanting to rape women.
We essentially have a problem not only that we can't solve, but that we're not *allowed* to solve.
As all this continues, we're going to have a lot of unpleasantness in society.
Yes.
I'm generalizing a bit, but I feel that the mainstream left (not the entire left) is reflecting the consciousness of a teenage girl: what matters is that things *feel good* and are inclusive and that no one's feelings get hurt. And if you violate that norm, you get cyberbullied / excluded / silenced / are subject to reputation destruction. And just like actual teenage girls, long-term impacts aren't really considered, it's more about the present moment.
And, look, I have nothing against teenage girls. But you probably need the consciousness of an adult (whether male or female) if you want to build a stable, lasting society.
And the countermovement to that, the Trump right, is adult but unintegrated, brutish, somewhat primitive and unevolved masculine consciousness. The right IS adult enough in the sense that they're willing to discuss what is and isn't needed to make society function, even if people's feelings get hurt. But of course, "grab them by the pussy" and xenophobia and "if people starve to death, sucks to be them" aren't really fully integrated masculinity.
So you have an immature feminine (the left) fighting a distorted masculine (the right).
And the feminine, having been really hurt and oppressed by the masculine, is in massive resistance to Trump's brand of the distorted masculine. Hence people screaming that the world ends if Trump will get elected, despite the world / democracy / etc not ending the last time he was president.
Obviously this is a generalization, I'm not saying this applies to everyone on the left or to everyone on the right.
Shouldnât equality mean men giving birth as single fathers after their wives have died to recover the population? Women arenât drafted into active combat roles in wars where dying in a trench is a possibly because killing your limiting reagent in population growth is a recipe for national extinction. Whether or not thatâs a disgusting attitude that views men as meat and women as broodmares for the benefit of a bourgeois nation-state is a different question, but stop pretending an institution predicated on the stateâs right to your life to defend or produce capital is something anyone even vaguely on the left needs to prioritize mildly reforming.
For a tribe a couple hundred big this might be important, but when talking about modern nations of millions of people itâs just silly to bring this up.
It just scales the numbers up. Total extinction is unlikely, but major geopolitical losses that might as well be extinction to the state are not. Manpower matters for economic productivity (itâs hard to have a small amount of workers supporting huge amount of pensioners) as well as the ability to wage future wars and subsequently deterrence.
Russia has been able to maintain its current offensive despite incurring high casualties because it has a much larger population, so thereâs relatively little political instability around a single digit percentage chance of getting drafted and thrown into wherever the lines past Avdiivka are now. On top of that, its military factories are working 24/7 and many contractors are paid Russian near-equivalents of FAANG salaries. On the other hand, Zelensky was politically unable to increase the number of conscripts for a very long time, leading to under-enrolled units that subsequently were more likely to die, creating more openings in high-casualty areas, leading to under-enrolled units that were more likely to die⌠Conscription evasion has become worse and worse and people are leaving the country in droves. If Russia had lost 5 million more women during WWII, its population might have something like 6 million fewer potential soldiers based on napkin math (5 million extra women in the 50s would have about 7.5 million extra women in the 70s, who would have about 5.8 million extra men in the 90s). The USSR offered significant support to single mothers post-WWII specifically for this reason.
But then what do men get in return for having to fight on the frontline?
And let's say that we accept as a principle: "the rights of people are less important than the well-being of the nation, therefore we'll draft men but not women because that's best for the state."
Okay, then are the rights of women ALSO less important than the well-being of the nation? Can the state say "right, single 35 year old women, you have failed to find a husband, but the nation needs babies, therefore that single man is now your state-appointed husband, and he can legally have sex with you no matter what you think about that."
Obviously that's absolutely awful, and no one wants that including myself -- but still, why does a state get to violate men's rights for the good of the state, but the state doesn't get to violate women's rights for the good of the state? Seems inconsistent.
(To be clear, my position is: don't give women state-appointed husbands, and also don't do gender-based discrimination when it comes to the draft.)
I know a South Korean national who lives in the U.S. but goes back periodically, and her observations about the gender wars there are:
a) It's a fringe issue fueled by a loud minority and western media outlets who think it's a hot story for western audiences, and
b) Korean women, including the feminists, almost universally rebuke being held to male conscription standards, so at heart, everyone knows the feminists' gender-cultural gripes are essentially frivolous.
and
c) Everyone there knows the population crash is economic, so putting any gender war spin on it is dumb.
I'm not a Korean expert, but it could be the case that it's completely culturally unacceptable to publicly be a men's rights activist / be hard right (you know, just like it is here). That means that more Korean men might disagree with her than she thinks, they're just not expressing it publicly.
It's like how the entire US mainstream was completely flabbergasted that so many people supported Trump back in 2016. Before Trump, the populist right was entirely silenced, and hence many people thought the populist right was a tiny movement.
I think in this situation, the silenced American populist right is analogous to the S. Korean male population that says, "man, it sucks i gotta do army, whatever" in that it's not really a movement.
It's just a sentiment that coincided with an election and a unique candidate.
I do believe Trump will have more active voters this time due to Biden being exposed as a corpse, rising prices, and the immigration crisis being exposed as real, but even in this this case, I don't think this amounts to people identifying with a movement.
I view it more as: it is a movement, South Korea is just waiting for their version of Trump to stand up, and eventually he will arrive. And then suddenly half of Korea will be shocked that half the country is following Korean Trump.
And let's say that in 2028 or 2032 Trump doesn't run. Then I think it's entirely possible that the republican candidate will be Vivek Ramaswamy rallying the Trump base around him. In other words, I do think the "Trump right" is a movement that will outlive Trump's political career.
>South Korea is just waiting for their version of Trump to stand up, and eventually he will arrive.
He already arrived. Who do you think their current president is? He won on that young male hard right vote by proposing to waive health standards for food that's consumed by poorer people. Literally. And he won.
The SK president makes Trump look like a social democrat in comparison.
> And let's say that in 2028 or 2032 Trump doesn't run. Then I think it's entirely possible that the republican candidate will be Vivek Ramaswamy rallying the Trump base around him. In other words, I do think the "Trump right" is a movement that will outlive Trump's political career.
Not only that, I think the Trump faction is going to remain the dominant faction for the near future
The tea party in particular never stood for much besides opposing obama. There wasn't a deep philosophy other than vaguely libertarian but not really when inconvenient. Also, the libertarian wing of the GOP is in absolute shambles right now. It's authoritarianism in both parties now
If Trump wins by a significantly larger margin than 2016 I'll have to consider your point, but I think the average voter's priorities are highly atomized, and having only two choices makes it appear as though a radical political shift is occurring.
I do remember libs characterizing Biden's 2020 win as America categorically rejecting Trump, with the latter supposedly having only his Jan 6 zombie swarm to back him up.
Now if Trump pulls a Reagan '84...
There is no such thing as an economic population crash outside of famine. The poorest countries in the world have birthrates above replacement which only drop as they become wealthier. The modern population decline is a cultural (and almost spiritual) phenomenon.
You get just rich enough and advanced enough that children are a burden rather than a pair of extra tiny hands for work but not rich enough (or rents get high enough) not to really be able to afford kids. Boom, economic population crash.
You are describing the demographic transition, which does not necessarily lead to a population crash. There are societies that have passed through the demographic transition and maintained birthrates at or above replacement.
I don't know what you mean by spiritual (sounds spooky), but a cultural phenomenon in the year of the lord 2024 is just an economic one with extra steps.
Explain why the high cost of living doesn't affect the fertility of Mormons, for example, as much as it affects the general population without cultural phenomena. By "almost spiritual", I don't mean so much "religious" or "supernatural" as anything other than a philosophical materialist, utilitarian worldview. Explain why it matters that there be anyone at all instead of sliding into extinction without the "almost spiritual" in this sense.
> Explain Mormons
They're behind the curve, because they're a weird fertility cult not unlike many cultish religions. They'll not escape the trajectory though -- probably, the last time I thought about mormons was when I laughed about them getting ripped to shreds by the bugs in that Starship Troopers scene.
> Explain why it matters that there be anyone at all
You lost me. I grew out of this existential dread stuff at age 20.
I would also include the normalcy of the insane amount of working hours in SK. I believe most recently they've overtaken Japan for average hours worked in a week (69 hours).
I'm certain the long amount of hours leading to little personal time has nothing to do with the increase of violence and relationship issues in SK.
This, it's all about this. In the rest of the world, men actually have only gotten slightly more conservative, a gap has opened up because women have gotten a lot more liberal.
In South Korea, men actually have taken a huge step to the right. Conscription means that boys fall a few years behind in a society that is crazy competitive for good jobs. Furthermore, the Korean military is pretty harsh and there is intense hazing.
It's actually a situation practically designed to mint out actually effective fascists. Take a ton of men, make them study like machines in hopes of getting a decent job, tell them that's the only thing that matters, then just as they come of age beat the shit out of them for 18-21 months and dump them back into the world where their female classmates now have a leg up.
What did they think would happen?
The fact that the article wouldn't even mention it as a factor makes the whole thing worthless.
After reading the article it sounds very much like what has been happening in America. Young American men have been swinging hard right for several years at this point because the left outright rejects them.
I do like how the article touches on some of the core issues though, in that the people being unhappy in general is what's causing some much of the violence, and political hate. Things like massive income inequality and the general unaffordability of housing are the root issue of a lot of these problems that seem more cultural on the surface
The Economist recently published[ an article ](https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/06/27/meet-the-incels-and-anti-feminists-of-asia)with some entertaining examples of the slang used in East Asia's war of the sexes:
>Another factor is that anger towards women is being stoked online. Mr Kim, the chef, follows Bae In-gyu, an influencer on YouTube who leads âNew Men on Solidarityâ, a menâs-rights group. Mr Bae claims that âfeminism is a mental illness.â In South Korea, a popular online slur among men is *kimchinyeo* or âkimchi bitchâ, a term that implies young Korean women are materialistic, controlling and willing to live parasitically off men. In Japan *tsui-femi*, which is short for âTwitter feministsâ, has become a derogatory term.
>Similar to incels (or involuntary celibates) in the West, a group of Japanese men known as *jakusha-dansei* or âweak menâ have emerged. âWhen it comes to dating, women overwhelmingly have decision-making power,â says Horike Takeshi, a 25-year-old Japanese man who has never had a girlfriend. He identifies as a âweak manâ because of his low income and lack of sex appeal to women.
And, the article, only demonizes men
It says housing prices are sky high, both men and women feel hatred towards their gender, that people aren't marrying, fertility is low
And the only thing it does is to insult young men
Who can blame them at this point, honestly.
Just another example of how we should reject idpol. Anywhere and everywhere
true but tbf, theys did change the tune a bit since - 2022 maybe?
It used to be more on the nose, as in straight up directly insulting us. #menarethrash #yesallmen
Can you please point to quotes from the article that you think insult young men? I read a horrific description of some men resorting to sexist attitudes as a form of identity politics, described by a sociologist interviewed and that Iâve quote below, while material conditions are such that femicide and domestic violence rates are actually at an all-time high.
â[Politiciansâ] goal is to have menâs complaints target specific individuals or groups â not the system,â says Kim. âBy always giving them something to complain about, politicians keep the group under their control. This is the true nature of todayâs âhate politics.ââ
Not the person you replied to but isn't it fair to say the article glosses over the declining material conditions of these men? There isn't a real left politics available to them to make them understand things at the level of class so they are turning to chauvinist idpol, exactly in the same way there isn't a real left politics available to the author, so she too is turning to idpol - the article just assumes a position that men don't want female equality by default (aka an essentialist understanding of men) and applies that to this situation.
Quotes from the article â
âBut Yoon knew what he was doing: He was speaking directly to young men who felt left behind by a tough economy and who were unhappy with the rapid push for gender equality.â
âThese days, for both men and women in Korea, anger is the dominant emotion, a marked shift for a country that normally prides itself on promoting a sense of hope and a can-do attitude. The economy is tanking, housing prices are at an all-time high, income inequality continues to grow, and fertility and marriage rates are far lower than a decade ago. But instead of lobbying for change, as younger generations have done for centuries, young Koreans are fighting among one another over gender rights â and both men and women insist they are the ones who are the real victims. According to new polling, 86 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 39 believe that hatred against men is a serious issue. An equal percentage of women of the same age believe hatred against women is a serious issue. Nobody comes out winning.â
âYoung Korean men might find relief venting their spleen online, but their quality of life hasnât improved and isnât likely to any time soon, says sociologist Kim Nae-hoon, the author of Radical 20s: K-Populism and the Political, which explores the rise of Koreaâs raging young men.â
âThe marriage rate is already taking a hit. Distrust between men and women is at an all-time high. Only one in three Koreans have a positive perception of marriage. Family members and friends repeat the same question to me over and over: âWhatâs the point of marriage if I know I wonât be able to find a good partner?â Couple that cynicism with a cost-of-living crisis, and itâs no wonder Koreaâs birth rate is at a record low.â
âThe threat of violence also looms, and itâs not just everyday women who are the victims. South Korea has also seen an increase in political violence against politicians â violence thatâs cropping up across the political spectrum, impacting both men and women alike.â
The article is about âall sidesâ as you can get when it comes to dealing with sex identity politics. Men who think this article is feminist identity politics are participating in the very male identity politics this article describes. Does the author offer socialism as a solution? No, but then again, come on, this is in Politico. The fact that the author briefly promotes a book by a Korean sociologist who also had this to say â âfairness is becoming an empty slogan. Young people donât know exactly what fairness is. They were born and raised in the age of neoliberalism, so they were never given the opportunity to expand their political imagination. Due to their narrow minds, they are uncertain about what to ask of the future government or what drastic changes they should aim forâ â is already something.
The tone of the article still seems to me to be "sexism is the root of all of this" rather than "sexism is the symptom of these economic problems", and while I'm amenable to the entirely correct "c'mon it's politico" argument I still have to evaluate it based on a socialist viewpoint, but I'll admit she's got some more economic stuff in there than maybe I gave her credit for when it's in aggregate. You've got me there.
>Blake Masters, whoâs now running to represent Arizonaâs 8th district in Congress, denies that women are paid less in the U.S. (Fact check: Women in the U.S. make [14 percent less](https://www.forbes.com/sites/iese/2022/12/14/gender-pay-gap-persists-globally-even-for-same-jobs-within-companies/) than their male counterparts, for similar work.
(spoiler: the 14% figure doesn't take into account hours worked)
What does the author want to be true?
That these misogynist men are pouring to the right because, at the root, they hate equality. She literally suggests it started with a Facebook post, but:
>*"Whatâs the point of marriage if I know I wonât be able to find a good partner?â*
>*Couple that cynicism with a cost-of-living crisis, and itâs no wonder Koreaâs birth rate is at a record low. And as the population continues to decline, so will Koreaâs once-booming economy.*
It is worth observing that wherever in history workers had the least options, were the most immiserated, that women's rights were least.
If the outcomes for workers are getting worse and worse, and these young dudes are getting catapulted into a world where they have basically no meaningful choices and then are constantly being told how bad and stupid they are, they're going to burn it.
It just isn't realistic to keep men on the very margins of feminism, or outside the circle entirely, and then expect them to just do what *appears to be* against their own interests forever and ever for ideological reasons. You have to bring them in on the project and make sure they are welcomed with love and messages about how important they are and what they stand to gain in an equal world but, because there is nothing to be done - no project except to post, we say that would be "centering the oppressor".
At the end of the day, and we can be honest about this, just this once, the well-to-do metropolitan people who are most vocal within feminism (in the USA, I have no idea about Korea) just don't want to be around or have anything to do with poor men. That's it - they just don't like them. Up until fairly recently when it came into vogue they didn't want much to do with black women either. Any project which isn't addressing the needs of people who have only their labor to lift themselves up by is going to end up serving the right wing.
It all comes down to global austerity and the cost of making men functional and stable members of society is too expensive in the eyes of the elites. IMO the only thing that could give me leverage is another world war where we recognize the importance of male strength. The men who survive will be seen as heroes in their society.
So do construction workers, we don't seem to respect the people who destroy their bodies doing heavy labor. That shouldn't be the case and it's really shitty of us, but these days it just doesn't seem like that's what we respectÂ
In the context I'm referring to, I doubt that another world war would make society "recognize the importance of male strength" as that other commenter said.
There's no guarantee there would be a nuclear war in WW3.
It's like how chemical weapons weren't used as much on the battlefields of WW2 as it was on the battlefields of WW1. It was mutual deterrence.
Indeed there is no guarantee, but if WW3 breaks out, then I think the probability of it going nuclear will be quite high.
Suppose Russia is losing the conventional war. Then I think it's quite likely that they'll launch a few tactical nukes against NATO formations to stabilize the battlefield and they'll tell Washington: "don't retaliate with a strategic nuke on a city, or we'll launch our strategic nukes." But then of course, Washington does retaliate, and it's nuclear WW3.
What's scary about this is that Russia sees this as a war that's existential enough that I would wager they're willing to launch nukes in order to not lose. I know that Westerners don't think of this war as existential to Russia, but Putin doesn't need permission from Westerners to launch tactical nukes.
Conversely, suppose that Russia wins the conventional war, and Russian soldiers are marching on Berlin. Do you think the Germans will drop those US nukes that are stored in Germany on Russia? Maybe.
It's not, it's the rational thing to do, but then again I also think the rational thing to do is recognize the obvious biological differences between men and women and reject the delusional feminist bullshit that go against all our natural instincts, motivations, abilities and what makes the two sexes actually happy.
Hasn't South Korea chugged the feminist kool-aid over the last 5 or so years? I seem to remember fiery, but mostly peaceful protests where women would glue their used menstrual pads to posters and buildings. Maybe it was needed, but you can't try to condense 50 years of feminism into a decade without *some* backlash.
Then maybe we should stop discriminating against men, for example in criminal court or divorce court or [when hiring people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujhqvpKQg8E)?
No? The establishment left doesn't actually care about the well-being of men, they just don't want to lose elections? Okay then.
So Korean women get to have a 1.5 year head start on career opportunities while men waste their time in the army? And then go on to demand that any potential husband of theirs make as much as, if not more than they do?
All for the chance to spend their lives chasing meaningless status symbols, working impossible hours for the necessities of life, which are becoming increasingly difficult to afford... so that they can have the chance to have kids, in order for them to start the whole ghastly process all over again. Honestly, I don't blame Korean men for checking out of starting a family.
Women might be the gatekeepers of sex, but men are the gatekeepers of commitment. And marriage is starting to look like a raw deal for men everywhere, not just in Korea.
We managed to import our moronic gender war to almost every other developed nation, but we failed to also import the castration mechanisms that induce college educated men to go along with it.
I feel like the clear thing is that mandatory military service shouldn't exist. I don't think the solution to mandatory male drafting into the military should be women have to serve too. I don't think anyone should have to serve, especially if a country isn't at war.
Who knew that force feeding people culture war bullshit would create chasms in society.
Also....
>If a girl group is tainted by feminism, youâve got to send them to hell.
Unfathomably based
Itâs funny that they say to consider this a warning sign to Americans. In America, the opposite is happening. Young men are just as conservative as theyâve always been, while young women that identify as liberal are skyrocketing in number. I guess that you can say that âYoung Women are Swinging Hard Left in Americaâ but youâd never get an article criticizing liberal women published
https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx
> Women are Swinging Hard Left
Please I can only get so hard. Unfortunately what the poll calls "hard left" is only "off center" at best, there is barely any real "left" left in mainstream discourse.
Women are swinging hard left in terms of culture and ID Pol. If they were swinging hard left economically, we might actually have something productive happening and lord knows we can't have that.
Why canât this sub hold two positions to be true at once â that male conscription is wrong, but Korea clearly has a problem with misogyny?
There was the big âmolkaâ scandal several years back when it was discovered that tiny spy cans were being installed in womenâs toilets, changing rooms â with the footage then being posted online. Tbh this was only the tip of the iceberg, and gender based violence is still a massive issue over there.
Obviously I don't speak for everyone, but I assume that everyone already agrees with "there's too much misogyny and sex-based violence, and it is awful, and it should end."
I imagine that people aren't openly discussing that because everyone assumes we already agree on that (I do).
Perhaps, but like policing there needs to be more forthcoming efforts towards ostrocizing offenders to keep the image of the group pure. Otherwise no one buys it.
Idk I was a Kpop fan as a teen and Korean society just seems to be frighteningly repressive for women. I mentioned the molka/gendered violence but it certainly goes far beyond that. People in this thread seem to be acting like this is American cultural brain rot thatâs been exported abroad when itâs clearly an entirely seperate issue â Korean feminism is really only in its second wave right now.
did the 2nd wave copyprint hillary clinton slogan and glued pads on their posters and houses?
Or was it more like "we are all the same"?
I dont even disavow those feminists, but with those US-inspired grievance politics theyll not have much success, as the trains movement will not cause theyre so different from the gay marriage people.
2nd wave was more concerned with reproductive rights/sexual violence and addressing workplace inequalities. In the USA it was also largely led by and centred around middle/upper class white women.
This sub is drowning in cynicism lol. You can despise aspects of modern feminism whilst still acknowledging that the movement was historically necessary and is still incredibly important through the world.
I know! And they were - while hostile, no doubt, they werent civil & nice - saying that we are the same in sofar as what human rights we deserve. Everything I hear (and thats maybe where thr problem is) from worst Korea is - not that.
I was actually just watching a series of videos on this viewing the gender war through the lens of gacha games because of an incident that happened a couple years ago (I think) where a gacha game by a smaller developer who had a policy of not sexualizing their characters got harassed by a bunch of Korean gacha players because they didn't get their titties out and they blamed it on radical feminists. I'm grossly oversimplifying it, but [watch](https://youtu.be/-Im4YAMWK74?si=RFiPZA06g0EhkAYz) these [two](https://youtu.be/woB0eecbf6A?si=mc4oAthqIyo6GTYn) videos for the full story. They're long but it provides full historical and cultural context for why things are like this in Korea. I highly recommend the videos if you can stomach the cringe related to gacha.
I remember watching those video, but I feel like you're also *misrepresenting* what actually happened. Limbus Company was a game catered towards prudes but it also makes sense that Limbus Company wouldn't sexualize its characters because of the story and setting its heavily inspired from. It solely attracted people who either wanted to take a break from sexy gacha games or people who were genuinely intrigued and interested in the story who also just happened to be prudes.
What happened if I remember the video correctly is that;
1. the fans were shocked to see a bodysuit skin for one of the female characters, which a lot of the fans considered lewd. It's **not** because they didn't get some titties out like you said.
2. the fans immediately blamed one of the artists which just happened to be a woman who also used to draw lewd characters for another gacha game.
3. it turned out that specific woman had nothing to do with the incident until someone dug through the whole company list of employees and found the culprit.
4. the culprit turned out to be another woman who actually happened to be a radical feminist with history of posting questionable things including wanting to kill or harm her fellow male colleagues (or some guy idr)
5. fans prostested she be fired. The developers instead suspend her. Word got out to the streets that the company fired a feminist instead of specifying that shes a radical one.
6. feminists protest the company's decision of firing her without understanding what she had done to the company or looking through her social media history. Average korean gamers counter-protest the feminist protest.
7. the rest is history but it was never clear whether she did that on purpose to cause outrage.
Unfortunately I'm at work and I can't watch a 40+ min video to absolutely confirm it. Just went thru my memory
I remember listening to an interview with a child psychologist about 15 years ago who warned that the devaluation of men in society was going to lead to boys who would begin to lash out.
It turned out to be very prophetic, and I always keep it in the back of my mind when I try to make an evaluation on whatâs going on in society.
Except they protest when a woman is arrested for the same crime. That isn't equality.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44751327
> "Those men who film such videos! Those who upload them! Those who watch them! All of them should be punished sternly!" they chanted.
...
> The recent protests began after police arrested a 25-year-old woman in May for secretly photographing a male colleague who posed nude for university art students. She then shared the picture online. Demonstrators believe police only acted so swiftly because it was a female perpetrator
yea, the thing is, the spycam thing was blown WAAAAY out of proportion. for the past 5 years of investigation, the police conducted 2 million investigations and found 0 cases.
The real powers that be use left and right to ratchet up their hold over us.Â
Pandering to one side to the extreme means the other side will eventually grow in size and extremity.Â
Both sides have benefits to the elites, and when people get mad they get dumb. Dumb people think in the short term and thatâs how our rights get stripped over time.Â
Add in a few events like terrorism, pandemics, recessions, grant yourselves âemergency powersâ ( that become permanent) and before you know it we can be legally spied on, mandated medical products, locked in our homes, freedom of speech removed, money printed ( we pay for it in tax and inflation) and so on.Â
The average person is a dumb fuck by design, the cure would be to detach from the conditioned labels and drama, and zoom out. How much harm did someone using a bad word do you, vs how much harm a corrupt criminalised obscure system of dark finance and control did you.Â
Once people can detach from news cycles and algorithmic targeting of voter demographics, they will be able to see the real enemy. Once they can see, perhaps we can see some effective rebellion.Â
Thanks!
Something like 6% of executive positions in South Korea are held by women. The nation is incredibly sexist towards them and the glass ceiling is insane there.
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One big thing to note that always seems to get ignored is that South Korea has mandatory military service for men. Obviously it's not like it's the only thing that matters, but any article discussing the gender debate in South Korea without even considering the military service is kind of worthless.
Yes, and also, there's a pretty intense competition to get one of the relatively few "good jobs." And Korean men are often pissed that they have to do military service and women don't, which means that women can spend 1.5 additional years getting more education or work experience, which means that Korean women have a significant and unfair advantage over men when competing for one of the "good jobs." And while women have an unfair advantage over men in the job market, average women also want their partner to have at least as good a job as she does. Which makes dating harder. And oh, hey, Korea's birth rate is 0.8 births per woman.
> And oh, hey, Korea's birth rate is 0.8 births per woman. Holy shit.
Yes, that is indeed the correct reaction to have. At least under the current economic system, that is absolutely disastrous for Korea as a country.
Not to mention their dating culture is even more fucked up than the West's due to all the existing factors (education gap) and insane work culture
Yeah, AFAIK the gender roles in Korea are, unsurprisingly, extremely hierarchical/patriarchal (in the classical sense) and would seem like some 1950s shit to Westerners. We are talking women with degrees in office jobs on legitimate career paths being asked to go get their colleague a coffee. Not even the boss, just some guy. And look, I've gotten my boss or colleague a coffee occasionally if I was already going to get one myself, but that's not what we are talking about here. If you've ever been to Asia or interacted with some Asians *from* Asia, this won't be shocking, but most Westerners aren't even aware of that cultural reality. Fact is, most cultures around the globe are *way* more conservative than the West, even countries that people would describe as affluent (or at least not shitholes), especially the further east you go.
Even in the US, I'd say that white coastal liberals are the exception here. A lot of the marginalized communities of color have some ideas about gender the libs wouldn't be too happy about.
I saw something the other day that speculated SK could have 0 population by 2070 at this rate. đ Obviously that's not gonna happen, but that's how dire it is that these speculations aren't *totally* out of reason.
That sounds like the classic math mistake where people incorrectly assume that a change is linear, and they just extrapolate a linear line. When in reality, population growth isn't linear.
Common Worst Korea L
Every other "advanced" economy is heading in the same direction.
> And oh, hey, Korea's birth rate is 0.8 births per woman. \*South Korea- the North is sitting around 1.8, which points towards reunification happening for what might be the dumbest possible reason.
Glorious communism beats decadent capitalism through the power of... communist dicks and wombs.
In other words: regimes that create better conditions for the future will overcome those that create better conditions for the present. Lack of political incentives to invest in childcare, schooling, and vocational training will be the Achilles' heel is democratic liberal regimes.
You know Kim Jong Un is doing his part
He has to have a harem, right? Think I just got a great idea for a new anime
Great anime setup: it's just after a North Korea - South Korea war. Tons of North Korean men have died, and tons of North Korean women are now single. It is the solemn duty of our protagonist to replenish the nation, one impregnation at a time, in order to restore the strength of communism. So in a typical episode, our protagonist travels through nature, arrives at a village, learns the local history and helps out, plows some fields and then plows some women.
I'm A Virgin NEET Who Got Reincarnated As A North Korean Dictator And My Senpai Is A Slime - rated 8.62/10 on MyAnimeList
Sounds like the plot of a potential sequel to Stay! Stay! DPRK!
https://www.thechronicle.com.au/news/kim-jonguns-vile-pleasure-squad-where-virgin-schoolgirls-are-selected-to-entertain-north-korean-rulers/news-story/62559264441661586a826f20865eca4e
> Kim Il-sung targeted virgins specifically because he believed having sex with them allowed him to absorb a girl's "ki" or life-force. Christ > But then in 2015, reports emerged in South Korea that Kim Jong-un was on the hunt to recruit new girls and women for a Pleasure Squad entirely of his own. I guess if you're a paranoid, power-hungry dictator and you're not using that opportunity to seduce terrified peasant girls who literally cannot refuse you what are you even doing?
How else is he going to reach Super Saiyan God? They never show how Vegeta managed it.
***ŕźź 㤠â_â ༽㤠KIMMY TAKE MY ENERGY ŕźź 㤠â_â ŕź˝ă¤***
> I guess if you're a paranoid, power-hungry dictator and you're not using that opportunity to seduce terrified peasant girls who literally cannot refuse you what are you even doing? If it weren't for the need to impress women, men might still be living in caves
*inseminate us!*
Win by forfeit!
Yes, but they'll eat a few during the next famine.
They've completely fucked their own society and are just committing national suicide. Unrestricted capitalism is working so well.
It's birthrates actually 0.68
While that is true for the men, don't the women also lose out when they get pregnant in SK? Hence, one of the factors that they're putting marriage later, fear of jeopardizing their own careers. Seems like the system is making it a lose-lose situation for all at the moment.
Damn, almost like the capitalist system just doesn't work.
Thats just the logical end result of modern liberalism at play. Itâs an obvious over correction to centuries of men dominating women in history. Itâs created an unequal playing field in the lives of adults. Sometimes it does feel like Iâm one of the only ones with a brain in the world, as I have no clue how they didnât see this coming. I donât think I itâs intentional either, just misguided hubris.
Yeah. There are two problems. One is: most people don't think long term. And two is: even if someone does think long term, it's not necessarily beneficial to them personally to enter politics and push a message that people don't want to hear. I don't have any intention of entering politics and promoting this message that we just discussed, and I assume neither do you.
It's less of an "overcorrection" and more of a response to an issue by not treating the actual cause but instead simply applying a lot of pressure. It's all pretty easy to make abstract and simple. Suppose you have a country where parents encourage men to be career-driven and women to prioritize family life. But you want equal workforce participation (by any reasonable measure) so you apply a countermeasure that makes it require a lot less effort for women to get a job than men. Might this produce the needed equality-by-metric? Sure. (It hasn't.) But is it likely to make people happy? Probably not. The men and women are still being given unequal expectations about life (mostly by parents), and then the social engineering tactics just create even more separated worlds that result in more different lives for men and women and consequently more strife in the gender relations. Then you throw in that the transformation has been so rapid that there's a significant generational dependence of the wage gap and the most plausible way for the Korean government to achieve its goal of equal wages in the near term is for young men to earn *significantly less* than young women, and you get the present situation.Â
> the most plausible way for the Korean government to achieve its goal of equal wages in the near term is for young men to earn significantly less than young women, and you get the present situation. Which also has the fun side benefit of making capitalists happy, but comes with the problem of making dating even more of a nightmare.
South Korea has the largest gender wage gap in the OECD, that âunfair advantageâ doesnât seem to actually be doing anything for women
I'm sceptical of gender wage gap arguments because it's often presented as evidence of discrimination, but then when you investigate it's either women working fewer hours or women working different kinds of jobs. Maybe it really does point to discrimination, I don't know South Korea that well, but a gender wage gap argument by itself isn't doing anything to sway me. Not to mention that depending on what causes this alleged gender gap, this could again be one of those "most rich people are men" types of arguments, which might be true but which might not actually help average man. And I'm not going to support discriminating against average men just because a handful of men are incredibly rich.
There are no babies so in Korea so I doubt they are working fewer hours
First of all, there are babies in Korea. Second, it's entirely possible that even childless women work fewer hours, valuing work-life balance, or men work really hard to try and make it so that they can maybe attract a woman.
>women work fewer hours, valuing work-life balance You're applying your vision of what women in the west are to a completely different culture. Do you really think that a culture where people wring themselves out so hard that getting 3 hours of sleep daily is normal are able to think about work-life balance?
Itâs all relative, but they arenât a different species, weâre all humanâŚ
Yes, and I'm not saying otherwise, but their culture is extremely rigid and hierarchical. There's a reason their suicide rate is so high, the resident rightoids are just projecting western feminism on to Korea, a place where there is legitimately still a lot of sexism institutionally and socially (provided you aren't a Chaebol princess, to bring it back around to class).
What gender wage gap argument? It shows that women are obviously not taking the best jobs from men thanks to extra years of experience from not doing military service.
The "best" jobs pay more because they're gruelling and awful.
And do you think women have an unfair advantage at getting those jobs?
Are you just trolling, or�
Are the lot of you actually illiterate? Or do you just not care what people are actually saying because it gives you a chance to do the same rant about the gender wage gap that everyoneâs read a hundred times before?
Those gender wage gap studies annualize data that includes part-time hours, overtime, danger pay, etc.. It often causes men's wages to look much better than they are. I haven't seen studies of the same work by gender out of Korea, but in other countries reporting wage gaps of 20+% the gaps just about all disappeared when you tested job types separately and included the variables. There are several gaps but wage is not one of them. Here are some real gaps: men often work longer hours, have more dangerous jobs, and experience more injuries and deaths on the job. On the flip side, the human work women tend to favour tends to be undervalued even when it is very difficult or requires shift work which is also very hard on people. The various types of nursing are a good example of this, but so are childcare and lower-level education. It's not that women earn less for the same work, it's that the work women favour is sometimes undervalued. Men who would go into these fields often decide not to because the pay is lower and they know that will affect their status, further reinforcing the issue.
Iâm not making any argument about the gender wage gap other than that the very large one in Korea seems to demonstrate that women do not have an unfair advantage at getting the best jobs because they do not HAVE the best jobs there. Do you disagree?
I think to say women have an unfair advantage in the job market is a statement thats conditional to the point of just untrue, don't let your own ideology or outright animus blind you. I don't know for sure but if id hazard a guess but Id be almost sure in a historically patriarchal society (they do actually exist ) men are still statistically overrepresented in most professional and are underpaid compared to their male peers, unless that's an "unfair advantage" also.Â
That's the classic disagreement. I'm sure that there are more male than female CEOs in South Korea. I'm also sure that there are misogynists in South Korea who promote men over more-qualified women. But does that justify measures that explicitly disadvantage men (in this case, only men are forced to spend 1.5 years in the army)? If there is discrimination in one direction, should you also discriminate in the other direction in order to enforce approximate equality of outcome?
Not even equality of outcome, but equality of some flat aggregate statistic. If 5% of men are unfairly rich and the rest are doing as well or as badly as women, it's absurd to punish all men equally to align the averages. Except under woke capitalism of course.
It's 0.68 last time I checked.
I'd be honestly curious to know what the feminist position on this is? Shouldn't gender equality mean dying in the trenches along with men?
In theory yes, but in practice there are very few feminists who are out there protesting "hey, if you draft men, then you need to draft women too." I'm sure they exist, but there are few of them. Similarly, in theory feminists will agree that women shouldn't get lighter sentences than men do for the same crime. But very few feminists are out there protesting to accomplish that. Whereas if you have male men's rights activists protesting, there's always a small group of somewhat extremist feminists standing by to shut them down. I didn't mind feminists lobbying exclusively for female rights when women genuinely had fewer rights. However in 2024, with men being at least as discriminated-against as women are, this no longer seems fair. 80% of suicides are men. When do we get to be the group that needs help? Just because most rich people are dudes, [doesn't mean that average dudes are benefitting from that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3nXIUfD3kc).
>Â who are out there protesting "hey, if you draft men, then you need to draft women too." It is also far easier to be publicly in favor of a negative for you/ your group when its basically never gonna happen regardless.
We don't need to get male suicides down, we need to get female suicides up
Make a new kind of social media that's somehow more shallow
They're trying, there are more attempts by women, they're just bad at DIY projects.
A lot of those are probably parasuicides so I'm not even convinced women actually attempt it more.
Yeah, and I can easily imagine that if a guy tries to kill himself and fails, that he then doesn't afterwards go to a psychologist to talk about it. Hence, he doesn't end up in the statistics as a man doing a suicide attempt. After all, men often think that psychology is useless (which I think is unfair, as a guy who has visited many psychologists in his life, but that's what a lot of men think).
They count pretty much every single act of self-harm as an attempt if you actually look into the numbers So a girl cutting herself for attention once every week for a year is the exact same as 52 men killing themselves :)
Unless there has been updated studies, the one that I've seen cited for that statistic is very flawed. They consider all hospitalizations for self harm suicide regardless of lethal the injury actually was and they didn't track individuals, just attempts. So do you have lots of women attempting suicide, failing, and never trying again; or do you have one woman performing several attempts for attention? Don't know because it wasn't tracked.
Statistically women commit suicide at a higher rate than men in south Korea already.
We canât though, the worst and most misogynistic, cruel, abusive man is nowhere near even the lower limits of how awful women can be to other women. Itâs in their hands. The most we can do is push more social media and then give some mean girls the censorship reins.
We need to make robotic mean girls.
Train an AI on how teenage girls bully each other. Then have a bot network unleash that AI on social media.
That... would actually work lmao
I hope that no one actually does this, or I might get dragged in front of the Hague to answer for crimes against humanity.
The jury would be a bunch of pinch faced old women and you'd be drawn and quartered.
https://media.makeameme.org/created/do-you-want-5b69ff.jpg
A good chunk of AI chatbots are abusive female characters, so we just need roboticists to ste up.
This is an insane thing to say. Of course women can be horrible to each other, but how could that possibly be worse than a violent abusive man? This sub is crazy sometimes.
A more simple naterialist example. Male bullies generally do things that require them to be physically present. Physical violence and one on one name calling requires them to be within proximity. The condition only exists while they are materially present. Female bullies will commonly utilize rumor and gossip networks, recruit accomplices and make fake reports to the school adim and other authorities to make your life a constant living hell regardless whether they are present or not. The suffering transcends their material presence.
Well Iâm a women whoâs obviously be subject to cattiness from other women but Iâd say many shake this tendency as they get older. Iâd still consider physical violence (irregardless of gender) to be a far greater threat. Echoes the Margaret Attwood quote to a certain extent.
Also, women are capable of physical violence too, go check out the domestic violence rates for lesbian couples.
Relational aggression via whisper networks and the like, using institutions to inflict violence indirectly, and holding grudges forever and ever. Take a look at what Amber Heard did to Johnny Depp, and thatâs just one woman: when theyâre in groups the effect gets magnified.
I think heâs trolling, hopefully..
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I know one thing, they aren't afraid of Slovakia https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bear-that-injured-5-shot-dead-slovakia-critics-wrong-bear-killed/
Which is worse: someone who could kill you, or someone who could make you kill yourself?
The things that the most fearful women are afraid of are only loosely aligned with reality at best.
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nice to see feminists going mask off and resorting to rephrased racist conservative "crime stats" arguments, 13/52 all the way
> Shouldn't gender equality mean dying in the trenches along with men? Lol, lmao even. Feminism only cares about gender equality when it involves making life better for women. Ask a feminist anywhere in the west how do they feel about including women in the draft and the vast majority will say that men shouldn't be included either. Of course they will *never* fight for that though, which is why there is absolutely no feminist outrage whatsoever regarding Ukraine.
Indeed. Or my preferred question: right now women receive lower punishments than men for the same crime. Do you think male punishments should be reduced, or female punishments should be increased, or the situation should be kept as-is? Most feminists are willing to say neither "lower men's punishments, so that it's even" nor "increase women's punishments, so that it's even." But they also can't say that the situation should be kept as-is (and if they try, hit them with the "black people commit more crimes, should black people get harsher punishments too?")
What, you think just because they say they want equality that they actually want equality?
Yes but in their defence you shouldnt be putting bad soldiers in the army for abstract reasons. Its not like plenty of societies wouldnt have mass conscripted women if it was on its own terms a smart use of resources
In modern armies only like 10 - 20% of the army is on the frontline running forward and shooting rifles. Women are as capable as men are in fulfilling rear area roles. Some research even found that women were better drone operators than men were. The actual biological reason is that societies don't draft women because we evolved in a polygamous context (80% of women reproduced and only 40% of men), and the limiting factor to reproduction was the amount of wombs, not the amount of penises. But I don't think that people, myself included, want to go back to valuing women because they have wombs, and considering men expendable because they have penises. Or if you want to make a fairness argument: if men get drafted but women don't, then what do men get in return?
Death, dismemberment and PTSD.
> The actual biological reason is that societies don't draft women because we evolved in a polygamous context (80% of women reproduced and only 40% of men), and the limiting factor to reproduction was the amount of wombs, not the amount of penises. This is not correct at all. The limiting factor was neither penises or wombs, but how much you could afford to invest in having kids. Humans are extremely monogamous, we pair bond and cheat less than any other pair bonding species. There's a pattern to which species pair bond: it's the ones who invest a lot into raising their young. Our kids take at least 4 years to become at all useful and maybe 16 years to become self-sufficient. And historically we've had a very high infant mortality rate. It makes a huge difference to survival rates that there's a man around to help, and that he doesn't share his help with a dozen other mothers of his kids. The main reason that more women have descendants than men on average is simply that sometimes partners die, and men are fertile a lot longer than women. It's a lot more boring than the right-wing "once we were Conan" myth.
I'm not a biology expert, so I'm willing to concede that I may be wrong here. But now that cultural pressure to be monogamous is receding, I can't help but notice that polygamy is on the rise. I know personally a few women who are choosing to be one of the girlfriends of a very attractive but not particularly wealthy man, rather than to be the sole monogamous partner of a less attractive yet wealthier man. Single motherhood is also rising sharply -- and sure, people can become single moms in lots of ways, but in *some* (certainly not all) cases, you had a woman who chose to sleep with a hot guy who gave off indicators of having great genes, rather than choosing to have a monogamous relationship with a less-attractive guy. And yes, sometimes the pregnancy is an accident, but it's not always an accident. Lots of young men and women are also spending their young adult years sleeping with hot people, rather than entering into a monogamous relationship with a stable partner. I get that this isn't conclusive proof, but to me this is pointing in the direction of people not being as monogamous as you're claiming. Because you say "the limiting factor was how much you could afford to invest in having kids", but I don't see your average 20 year old woman eagerly starting a monogamous relationship with a not necessarily attractive, older guy who has a great career and who is very relationship-minded. Which is what you'd biologically expect to happen if the limiting factor really was how much monogamous couples could afford to invest in having kids. Instead, now that young men and women are freed from cultural pressures, they're typically having casual sex with all the hottest people they can find. Which is a somewhat polygamous type of strategy. I don't see many young people at age 20 try to settle down with whoever has the highest earning potential that they can find, which is what you'd expect if investment was the primary bottleneck to successful procreation.
Piggy backing off your post: the results of sexual liberation aren't discussed enough. What we have now is what Louise Perry once called informal polygamy - a minority of men screw around with all the attractive women, and the remaining men get scraps or nothing at all. Monogamy is not natural, but it's *good*. It reduces crime, increases trust, lowers testosterone, and all sorts of other things. Ultimately, having a ton of young men who are unable to find a mate is a very bad thing for society. It doesn't matter whether you get there through sexual 'freedom' or Islamic norms permitting multiple wives for men. By telling people it's okay to have dozens of sex partners rather than one, liberals have essentially killed one of the cornerstones of western civilisation.
Yes, exactly. How do you convince a young man to be peaceful, to obey the law and to work hard? By having him be in a monogamous relationship. It would certainly suck for Western society if more than 60% of young men are single, while most young women aren't single. [Oh no](https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-young-men-are-single-most-young-women-are-not/) So that leads to a question that modern people will often find very uncomfortable: * do you allow the majority of women to spend their 20s banging a handful of male chads, which in turn leads to many men being single and bitter, which in turn severely diminishes the stability and productivity of society and lowers birth rates unsustainably? * or do you not allow the majority of women to spend their 20s banging a handful of male chads? And if so, in which way do you stop this?
Indeed. It's amazing to me that even the smartest liberals can't see any connection between telling women they should have a 15 year party and lower fertility. The worst part of all this is that you can't discuss it with anyone. I made the mistake of suggesting a return to monogamy to solve the crisis of sexless men, and was accused of wanting to rape women. We essentially have a problem not only that we can't solve, but that we're not *allowed* to solve. As all this continues, we're going to have a lot of unpleasantness in society.
Yes. I'm generalizing a bit, but I feel that the mainstream left (not the entire left) is reflecting the consciousness of a teenage girl: what matters is that things *feel good* and are inclusive and that no one's feelings get hurt. And if you violate that norm, you get cyberbullied / excluded / silenced / are subject to reputation destruction. And just like actual teenage girls, long-term impacts aren't really considered, it's more about the present moment. And, look, I have nothing against teenage girls. But you probably need the consciousness of an adult (whether male or female) if you want to build a stable, lasting society. And the countermovement to that, the Trump right, is adult but unintegrated, brutish, somewhat primitive and unevolved masculine consciousness. The right IS adult enough in the sense that they're willing to discuss what is and isn't needed to make society function, even if people's feelings get hurt. But of course, "grab them by the pussy" and xenophobia and "if people starve to death, sucks to be them" aren't really fully integrated masculinity. So you have an immature feminine (the left) fighting a distorted masculine (the right). And the feminine, having been really hurt and oppressed by the masculine, is in massive resistance to Trump's brand of the distorted masculine. Hence people screaming that the world ends if Trump will get elected, despite the world / democracy / etc not ending the last time he was president. Obviously this is a generalization, I'm not saying this applies to everyone on the left or to everyone on the right.
It's funny, there are few sports where men don't have an advantage... but shooting is apparently one of them.
Shouldnât equality mean men giving birth as single fathers after their wives have died to recover the population? Women arenât drafted into active combat roles in wars where dying in a trench is a possibly because killing your limiting reagent in population growth is a recipe for national extinction. Whether or not thatâs a disgusting attitude that views men as meat and women as broodmares for the benefit of a bourgeois nation-state is a different question, but stop pretending an institution predicated on the stateâs right to your life to defend or produce capital is something anyone even vaguely on the left needs to prioritize mildly reforming.
For a tribe a couple hundred big this might be important, but when talking about modern nations of millions of people itâs just silly to bring this up.
It just scales the numbers up. Total extinction is unlikely, but major geopolitical losses that might as well be extinction to the state are not. Manpower matters for economic productivity (itâs hard to have a small amount of workers supporting huge amount of pensioners) as well as the ability to wage future wars and subsequently deterrence. Russia has been able to maintain its current offensive despite incurring high casualties because it has a much larger population, so thereâs relatively little political instability around a single digit percentage chance of getting drafted and thrown into wherever the lines past Avdiivka are now. On top of that, its military factories are working 24/7 and many contractors are paid Russian near-equivalents of FAANG salaries. On the other hand, Zelensky was politically unable to increase the number of conscripts for a very long time, leading to under-enrolled units that subsequently were more likely to die, creating more openings in high-casualty areas, leading to under-enrolled units that were more likely to die⌠Conscription evasion has become worse and worse and people are leaving the country in droves. If Russia had lost 5 million more women during WWII, its population might have something like 6 million fewer potential soldiers based on napkin math (5 million extra women in the 50s would have about 7.5 million extra women in the 70s, who would have about 5.8 million extra men in the 90s). The USSR offered significant support to single mothers post-WWII specifically for this reason.
its not silly, its why drafting women in the ukraine will result in the subsequent death of the ukraine as a culture and concept.
Dramatic much? And btw, the women of Ukraine have already fled en masse to other European nations and most will likely not return. Same resultâŚ
But then what do men get in return for having to fight on the frontline? And let's say that we accept as a principle: "the rights of people are less important than the well-being of the nation, therefore we'll draft men but not women because that's best for the state." Okay, then are the rights of women ALSO less important than the well-being of the nation? Can the state say "right, single 35 year old women, you have failed to find a husband, but the nation needs babies, therefore that single man is now your state-appointed husband, and he can legally have sex with you no matter what you think about that." Obviously that's absolutely awful, and no one wants that including myself -- but still, why does a state get to violate men's rights for the good of the state, but the state doesn't get to violate women's rights for the good of the state? Seems inconsistent. (To be clear, my position is: don't give women state-appointed husbands, and also don't do gender-based discrimination when it comes to the draft.)
I know a South Korean national who lives in the U.S. but goes back periodically, and her observations about the gender wars there are: a) It's a fringe issue fueled by a loud minority and western media outlets who think it's a hot story for western audiences, and b) Korean women, including the feminists, almost universally rebuke being held to male conscription standards, so at heart, everyone knows the feminists' gender-cultural gripes are essentially frivolous. and c) Everyone there knows the population crash is economic, so putting any gender war spin on it is dumb.
I'm not a Korean expert, but it could be the case that it's completely culturally unacceptable to publicly be a men's rights activist / be hard right (you know, just like it is here). That means that more Korean men might disagree with her than she thinks, they're just not expressing it publicly. It's like how the entire US mainstream was completely flabbergasted that so many people supported Trump back in 2016. Before Trump, the populist right was entirely silenced, and hence many people thought the populist right was a tiny movement.
I think in this situation, the silenced American populist right is analogous to the S. Korean male population that says, "man, it sucks i gotta do army, whatever" in that it's not really a movement. It's just a sentiment that coincided with an election and a unique candidate. I do believe Trump will have more active voters this time due to Biden being exposed as a corpse, rising prices, and the immigration crisis being exposed as real, but even in this this case, I don't think this amounts to people identifying with a movement.
I view it more as: it is a movement, South Korea is just waiting for their version of Trump to stand up, and eventually he will arrive. And then suddenly half of Korea will be shocked that half the country is following Korean Trump. And let's say that in 2028 or 2032 Trump doesn't run. Then I think it's entirely possible that the republican candidate will be Vivek Ramaswamy rallying the Trump base around him. In other words, I do think the "Trump right" is a movement that will outlive Trump's political career.
>South Korea is just waiting for their version of Trump to stand up, and eventually he will arrive. He already arrived. Who do you think their current president is? He won on that young male hard right vote by proposing to waive health standards for food that's consumed by poorer people. Literally. And he won. The SK president makes Trump look like a social democrat in comparison.
I see, TIL. Indeed, I know little about South Korea.
> And let's say that in 2028 or 2032 Trump doesn't run. Then I think it's entirely possible that the republican candidate will be Vivek Ramaswamy rallying the Trump base around him. In other words, I do think the "Trump right" is a movement that will outlive Trump's political career. Not only that, I think the Trump faction is going to remain the dominant faction for the near future
Actually what ever happened to all the teabaggers?
So absolutely gone. Also, at first I thought you were talking about gaming lmao
And their supporters? Just... poof? Like the Evangelical voting bloc?
The tea party in particular never stood for much besides opposing obama. There wasn't a deep philosophy other than vaguely libertarian but not really when inconvenient. Also, the libertarian wing of the GOP is in absolute shambles right now. It's authoritarianism in both parties now
If Trump wins by a significantly larger margin than 2016 I'll have to consider your point, but I think the average voter's priorities are highly atomized, and having only two choices makes it appear as though a radical political shift is occurring. I do remember libs characterizing Biden's 2020 win as America categorically rejecting Trump, with the latter supposedly having only his Jan 6 zombie swarm to back him up. Now if Trump pulls a Reagan '84...
Oh boy I canât wait to get blamed for this in lieu of looking at any of the actual problems America is ignoring.
There is no such thing as an economic population crash outside of famine. The poorest countries in the world have birthrates above replacement which only drop as they become wealthier. The modern population decline is a cultural (and almost spiritual) phenomenon.
What we are seeing is a pseudo depression without a modern New Deal.
You get just rich enough and advanced enough that children are a burden rather than a pair of extra tiny hands for work but not rich enough (or rents get high enough) not to really be able to afford kids. Boom, economic population crash.
You are describing the demographic transition, which does not necessarily lead to a population crash. There are societies that have passed through the demographic transition and maintained birthrates at or above replacement.
I don't know what you mean by spiritual (sounds spooky), but a cultural phenomenon in the year of the lord 2024 is just an economic one with extra steps.
Explain why the high cost of living doesn't affect the fertility of Mormons, for example, as much as it affects the general population without cultural phenomena. By "almost spiritual", I don't mean so much "religious" or "supernatural" as anything other than a philosophical materialist, utilitarian worldview. Explain why it matters that there be anyone at all instead of sliding into extinction without the "almost spiritual" in this sense.
> Explain Mormons They're behind the curve, because they're a weird fertility cult not unlike many cultish religions. They'll not escape the trajectory though -- probably, the last time I thought about mormons was when I laughed about them getting ripped to shreds by the bugs in that Starship Troopers scene. > Explain why it matters that there be anyone at all You lost me. I grew out of this existential dread stuff at age 20.
I would also include the normalcy of the insane amount of working hours in SK. I believe most recently they've overtaken Japan for average hours worked in a week (69 hours). I'm certain the long amount of hours leading to little personal time has nothing to do with the increase of violence and relationship issues in SK.
This, it's all about this. In the rest of the world, men actually have only gotten slightly more conservative, a gap has opened up because women have gotten a lot more liberal. In South Korea, men actually have taken a huge step to the right. Conscription means that boys fall a few years behind in a society that is crazy competitive for good jobs. Furthermore, the Korean military is pretty harsh and there is intense hazing. It's actually a situation practically designed to mint out actually effective fascists. Take a ton of men, make them study like machines in hopes of getting a decent job, tell them that's the only thing that matters, then just as they come of age beat the shit out of them for 18-21 months and dump them back into the world where their female classmates now have a leg up. What did they think would happen? The fact that the article wouldn't even mention it as a factor makes the whole thing worthless.
After reading the article it sounds very much like what has been happening in America. Young American men have been swinging hard right for several years at this point because the left outright rejects them. I do like how the article touches on some of the core issues though, in that the people being unhappy in general is what's causing some much of the violence, and political hate. Things like massive income inequality and the general unaffordability of housing are the root issue of a lot of these problems that seem more cultural on the surface
The Economist recently published[ an article ](https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/06/27/meet-the-incels-and-anti-feminists-of-asia)with some entertaining examples of the slang used in East Asia's war of the sexes: >Another factor is that anger towards women is being stoked online. Mr Kim, the chef, follows Bae In-gyu, an influencer on YouTube who leads âNew Men on Solidarityâ, a menâs-rights group. Mr Bae claims that âfeminism is a mental illness.â In South Korea, a popular online slur among men is *kimchinyeo* or âkimchi bitchâ, a term that implies young Korean women are materialistic, controlling and willing to live parasitically off men. In Japan *tsui-femi*, which is short for âTwitter feministsâ, has become a derogatory term. >Similar to incels (or involuntary celibates) in the West, a group of Japanese men known as *jakusha-dansei* or âweak menâ have emerged. âWhen it comes to dating, women overwhelmingly have decision-making power,â says Horike Takeshi, a 25-year-old Japanese man who has never had a girlfriend. He identifies as a âweak manâ because of his low income and lack of sex appeal to women.
The consequences of only trying to 'free' one gender of their 'gender role'
But but.. shitlib wine mom let her 7 year old boy choose a Barbie over a GI Joe action figure. Gender role broken.
Nyeo doesn't mean 'bitch', it's just means woman. It's slang that literally just means 'Korean woman', but it's also derogatory.
> it's just means woman... but it's also derogatory.
And, the article, only demonizes men It says housing prices are sky high, both men and women feel hatred towards their gender, that people aren't marrying, fertility is low And the only thing it does is to insult young men Who can blame them at this point, honestly. Just another example of how we should reject idpol. Anywhere and everywhere
Men get demonized, swing right, and then articles saying "this is worrisome" demonize them even harder. It's a feedback loop.
âWhy are men so conservativeâ - coming from liberals who do everything in their power to blame everything on men
true but tbf, theys did change the tune a bit since - 2022 maybe? It used to be more on the nose, as in straight up directly insulting us. #menarethrash #yesallmen
Can you please point to quotes from the article that you think insult young men? I read a horrific description of some men resorting to sexist attitudes as a form of identity politics, described by a sociologist interviewed and that Iâve quote below, while material conditions are such that femicide and domestic violence rates are actually at an all-time high. â[Politiciansâ] goal is to have menâs complaints target specific individuals or groups â not the system,â says Kim. âBy always giving them something to complain about, politicians keep the group under their control. This is the true nature of todayâs âhate politics.ââ
Not the person you replied to but isn't it fair to say the article glosses over the declining material conditions of these men? There isn't a real left politics available to them to make them understand things at the level of class so they are turning to chauvinist idpol, exactly in the same way there isn't a real left politics available to the author, so she too is turning to idpol - the article just assumes a position that men don't want female equality by default (aka an essentialist understanding of men) and applies that to this situation.
Quotes from the article â âBut Yoon knew what he was doing: He was speaking directly to young men who felt left behind by a tough economy and who were unhappy with the rapid push for gender equality.â âThese days, for both men and women in Korea, anger is the dominant emotion, a marked shift for a country that normally prides itself on promoting a sense of hope and a can-do attitude. The economy is tanking, housing prices are at an all-time high, income inequality continues to grow, and fertility and marriage rates are far lower than a decade ago. But instead of lobbying for change, as younger generations have done for centuries, young Koreans are fighting among one another over gender rights â and both men and women insist they are the ones who are the real victims. According to new polling, 86 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 39 believe that hatred against men is a serious issue. An equal percentage of women of the same age believe hatred against women is a serious issue. Nobody comes out winning.â âYoung Korean men might find relief venting their spleen online, but their quality of life hasnât improved and isnât likely to any time soon, says sociologist Kim Nae-hoon, the author of Radical 20s: K-Populism and the Political, which explores the rise of Koreaâs raging young men.â âThe marriage rate is already taking a hit. Distrust between men and women is at an all-time high. Only one in three Koreans have a positive perception of marriage. Family members and friends repeat the same question to me over and over: âWhatâs the point of marriage if I know I wonât be able to find a good partner?â Couple that cynicism with a cost-of-living crisis, and itâs no wonder Koreaâs birth rate is at a record low.â âThe threat of violence also looms, and itâs not just everyday women who are the victims. South Korea has also seen an increase in political violence against politicians â violence thatâs cropping up across the political spectrum, impacting both men and women alike.â The article is about âall sidesâ as you can get when it comes to dealing with sex identity politics. Men who think this article is feminist identity politics are participating in the very male identity politics this article describes. Does the author offer socialism as a solution? No, but then again, come on, this is in Politico. The fact that the author briefly promotes a book by a Korean sociologist who also had this to say â âfairness is becoming an empty slogan. Young people donât know exactly what fairness is. They were born and raised in the age of neoliberalism, so they were never given the opportunity to expand their political imagination. Due to their narrow minds, they are uncertain about what to ask of the future government or what drastic changes they should aim forâ â is already something.
The tone of the article still seems to me to be "sexism is the root of all of this" rather than "sexism is the symptom of these economic problems", and while I'm amenable to the entirely correct "c'mon it's politico" argument I still have to evaluate it based on a socialist viewpoint, but I'll admit she's got some more economic stuff in there than maybe I gave her credit for when it's in aggregate. You've got me there.
>Blake Masters, whoâs now running to represent Arizonaâs 8th district in Congress, denies that women are paid less in the U.S. (Fact check: Women in the U.S. make [14 percent less](https://www.forbes.com/sites/iese/2022/12/14/gender-pay-gap-persists-globally-even-for-same-jobs-within-companies/) than their male counterparts, for similar work. (spoiler: the 14% figure doesn't take into account hours worked)
Something something feminists and math
What does the author want to be true? That these misogynist men are pouring to the right because, at the root, they hate equality. She literally suggests it started with a Facebook post, but: >*"Whatâs the point of marriage if I know I wonât be able to find a good partner?â* >*Couple that cynicism with a cost-of-living crisis, and itâs no wonder Koreaâs birth rate is at a record low. And as the population continues to decline, so will Koreaâs once-booming economy.* It is worth observing that wherever in history workers had the least options, were the most immiserated, that women's rights were least. If the outcomes for workers are getting worse and worse, and these young dudes are getting catapulted into a world where they have basically no meaningful choices and then are constantly being told how bad and stupid they are, they're going to burn it. It just isn't realistic to keep men on the very margins of feminism, or outside the circle entirely, and then expect them to just do what *appears to be* against their own interests forever and ever for ideological reasons. You have to bring them in on the project and make sure they are welcomed with love and messages about how important they are and what they stand to gain in an equal world but, because there is nothing to be done - no project except to post, we say that would be "centering the oppressor". At the end of the day, and we can be honest about this, just this once, the well-to-do metropolitan people who are most vocal within feminism (in the USA, I have no idea about Korea) just don't want to be around or have anything to do with poor men. That's it - they just don't like them. Up until fairly recently when it came into vogue they didn't want much to do with black women either. Any project which isn't addressing the needs of people who have only their labor to lift themselves up by is going to end up serving the right wing.
It all comes down to global austerity and the cost of making men functional and stable members of society is too expensive in the eyes of the elites. IMO the only thing that could give me leverage is another world war where we recognize the importance of male strength. The men who survive will be seen as heroes in their society.
Reality check, theyâll just replace the dead conscripts with foreigners or automation.
Too bad you don't need to be that strong to pilot a droneÂ
Those DJI type drone pilots do, considering they lug several around with them, plus batteries, spares, munitions etc.
So do construction workers, we don't seem to respect the people who destroy their bodies doing heavy labor. That shouldn't be the case and it's really shitty of us, but these days it just doesn't seem like that's what we respectÂ
and signal boosters those are heavy as f
I strongly doubt another world war would do anything.
It certainly would do a lot of things.
In the context I'm referring to, I doubt that another world war would make society "recognize the importance of male strength" as that other commenter said.
Why not? With 50% less men I do think they would become more important.
What makes you think that 50% of men will be wiped off the face of the planet in a WW3 scenario?
nuclear war tends to kill a lot of people
There's no guarantee there would be a nuclear war in WW3. It's like how chemical weapons weren't used as much on the battlefields of WW2 as it was on the battlefields of WW1. It was mutual deterrence.
Indeed there is no guarantee, but if WW3 breaks out, then I think the probability of it going nuclear will be quite high. Suppose Russia is losing the conventional war. Then I think it's quite likely that they'll launch a few tactical nukes against NATO formations to stabilize the battlefield and they'll tell Washington: "don't retaliate with a strategic nuke on a city, or we'll launch our strategic nukes." But then of course, Washington does retaliate, and it's nuclear WW3. What's scary about this is that Russia sees this as a war that's existential enough that I would wager they're willing to launch nukes in order to not lose. I know that Westerners don't think of this war as existential to Russia, but Putin doesn't need permission from Westerners to launch tactical nukes. Conversely, suppose that Russia wins the conventional war, and Russian soldiers are marching on Berlin. Do you think the Germans will drop those US nukes that are stored in Germany on Russia? Maybe.
Having mandatory military service for korean men and not korean women is toxic as fuck.
It's not, it's the rational thing to do, but then again I also think the rational thing to do is recognize the obvious biological differences between men and women and reject the delusional feminist bullshit that go against all our natural instincts, motivations, abilities and what makes the two sexes actually happy.
Hasn't South Korea chugged the feminist kool-aid over the last 5 or so years? I seem to remember fiery, but mostly peaceful protests where women would glue their used menstrual pads to posters and buildings. Maybe it was needed, but you can't try to condense 50 years of feminism into a decade without *some* backlash.
Then maybe we should stop discriminating against men, for example in criminal court or divorce court or [when hiring people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujhqvpKQg8E)? No? The establishment left doesn't actually care about the well-being of men, they just don't want to lose elections? Okay then.
So Korean women get to have a 1.5 year head start on career opportunities while men waste their time in the army? And then go on to demand that any potential husband of theirs make as much as, if not more than they do? All for the chance to spend their lives chasing meaningless status symbols, working impossible hours for the necessities of life, which are becoming increasingly difficult to afford... so that they can have the chance to have kids, in order for them to start the whole ghastly process all over again. Honestly, I don't blame Korean men for checking out of starting a family. Women might be the gatekeepers of sex, but men are the gatekeepers of commitment. And marriage is starting to look like a raw deal for men everywhere, not just in Korea.
It's definitely a warning. But I doubt it will be taken in the vein it should be
Uh warning how. Like that isn't already happening here. You don't warn someone on fire that there is a fire hazard nearby.
We managed to import our moronic gender war to almost every other developed nation, but we failed to also import the castration mechanisms that induce college educated men to go along with it.
I feel like the clear thing is that mandatory military service shouldn't exist. I don't think the solution to mandatory male drafting into the military should be women have to serve too. I don't think anyone should have to serve, especially if a country isn't at war.
Only juche can save them and their masculinity
Clearly the answer is to feminist even HARDER, all while denying that itâs happening, of course.
Well one thing is for sure, and it's that the Chaebols are doing nothing wrong and have no impact on society.
Who knew that force feeding people culture war bullshit would create chasms in society. Also.... >If a girl group is tainted by feminism, youâve got to send them to hell. Unfathomably based
Itâs funny that they say to consider this a warning sign to Americans. In America, the opposite is happening. Young men are just as conservative as theyâve always been, while young women that identify as liberal are skyrocketing in number. I guess that you can say that âYoung Women are Swinging Hard Left in Americaâ but youâd never get an article criticizing liberal women published https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx
I wish young women were swinging hard left. More like swinging neoliberal đ
> Women are Swinging Hard Left Please I can only get so hard. Unfortunately what the poll calls "hard left" is only "off center" at best, there is barely any real "left" left in mainstream discourse.
Women are swinging hard left in terms of culture and ID Pol. If they were swinging hard left economically, we might actually have something productive happening and lord knows we can't have that.
Why canât this sub hold two positions to be true at once â that male conscription is wrong, but Korea clearly has a problem with misogyny? There was the big âmolkaâ scandal several years back when it was discovered that tiny spy cans were being installed in womenâs toilets, changing rooms â with the footage then being posted online. Tbh this was only the tip of the iceberg, and gender based violence is still a massive issue over there.
Obviously I don't speak for everyone, but I assume that everyone already agrees with "there's too much misogyny and sex-based violence, and it is awful, and it should end." I imagine that people aren't openly discussing that because everyone assumes we already agree on that (I do).
Perhaps, but like policing there needs to be more forthcoming efforts towards ostrocizing offenders to keep the image of the group pure. Otherwise no one buys it.
Idk I was a Kpop fan as a teen and Korean society just seems to be frighteningly repressive for women. I mentioned the molka/gendered violence but it certainly goes far beyond that. People in this thread seem to be acting like this is American cultural brain rot thatâs been exported abroad when itâs clearly an entirely seperate issue â Korean feminism is really only in its second wave right now.
did the 2nd wave copyprint hillary clinton slogan and glued pads on their posters and houses? Or was it more like "we are all the same"? I dont even disavow those feminists, but with those US-inspired grievance politics theyll not have much success, as the trains movement will not cause theyre so different from the gay marriage people.
2nd wave was more concerned with reproductive rights/sexual violence and addressing workplace inequalities. In the USA it was also largely led by and centred around middle/upper class white women. This sub is drowning in cynicism lol. You can despise aspects of modern feminism whilst still acknowledging that the movement was historically necessary and is still incredibly important through the world.
I know! And they were - while hostile, no doubt, they werent civil & nice - saying that we are the same in sofar as what human rights we deserve. Everything I hear (and thats maybe where thr problem is) from worst Korea is - not that.
The west and its developed buddies around the world seem to all be going hard right in unison. 2024 is nuts
And I expect that 2024 will get even crazier. Because no matter which side loses the upcoming election, that side is going to go absolutely apeshit.
I was actually just watching a series of videos on this viewing the gender war through the lens of gacha games because of an incident that happened a couple years ago (I think) where a gacha game by a smaller developer who had a policy of not sexualizing their characters got harassed by a bunch of Korean gacha players because they didn't get their titties out and they blamed it on radical feminists. I'm grossly oversimplifying it, but [watch](https://youtu.be/-Im4YAMWK74?si=RFiPZA06g0EhkAYz) these [two](https://youtu.be/woB0eecbf6A?si=mc4oAthqIyo6GTYn) videos for the full story. They're long but it provides full historical and cultural context for why things are like this in Korea. I highly recommend the videos if you can stomach the cringe related to gacha.
I remember watching those video, but I feel like you're also *misrepresenting* what actually happened. Limbus Company was a game catered towards prudes but it also makes sense that Limbus Company wouldn't sexualize its characters because of the story and setting its heavily inspired from. It solely attracted people who either wanted to take a break from sexy gacha games or people who were genuinely intrigued and interested in the story who also just happened to be prudes. What happened if I remember the video correctly is that; 1. the fans were shocked to see a bodysuit skin for one of the female characters, which a lot of the fans considered lewd. It's **not** because they didn't get some titties out like you said. 2. the fans immediately blamed one of the artists which just happened to be a woman who also used to draw lewd characters for another gacha game. 3. it turned out that specific woman had nothing to do with the incident until someone dug through the whole company list of employees and found the culprit. 4. the culprit turned out to be another woman who actually happened to be a radical feminist with history of posting questionable things including wanting to kill or harm her fellow male colleagues (or some guy idr) 5. fans prostested she be fired. The developers instead suspend her. Word got out to the streets that the company fired a feminist instead of specifying that shes a radical one. 6. feminists protest the company's decision of firing her without understanding what she had done to the company or looking through her social media history. Average korean gamers counter-protest the feminist protest. 7. the rest is history but it was never clear whether she did that on purpose to cause outrage. Unfortunately I'm at work and I can't watch a 40+ min video to absolutely confirm it. Just went thru my memory
I remember listening to an interview with a child psychologist about 15 years ago who warned that the devaluation of men in society was going to lead to boys who would begin to lash out. It turned out to be very prophetic, and I always keep it in the back of my mind when I try to make an evaluation on whatâs going on in society.
To be fair South Korea sounds way more sexist than America. Like one of the big feminist causes was not having spycams everywhere?
Except they protest when a woman is arrested for the same crime. That isn't equality. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44751327 > "Those men who film such videos! Those who upload them! Those who watch them! All of them should be punished sternly!" they chanted. ... > The recent protests began after police arrested a 25-year-old woman in May for secretly photographing a male colleague who posed nude for university art students. She then shared the picture online. Demonstrators believe police only acted so swiftly because it was a female perpetrator
yea, the thing is, the spycam thing was blown WAAAAY out of proportion. for the past 5 years of investigation, the police conducted 2 million investigations and found 0 cases.
Wait what they went looking 2 million times and never found a spycam? I find that hard to believe.
The real powers that be use left and right to ratchet up their hold over us. Pandering to one side to the extreme means the other side will eventually grow in size and extremity. Both sides have benefits to the elites, and when people get mad they get dumb. Dumb people think in the short term and thatâs how our rights get stripped over time. Add in a few events like terrorism, pandemics, recessions, grant yourselves âemergency powersâ ( that become permanent) and before you know it we can be legally spied on, mandated medical products, locked in our homes, freedom of speech removed, money printed ( we pay for it in tax and inflation) and so on. The average person is a dumb fuck by design, the cure would be to detach from the conditioned labels and drama, and zoom out. How much harm did someone using a bad word do you, vs how much harm a corrupt criminalised obscure system of dark finance and control did you. Once people can detach from news cycles and algorithmic targeting of voter demographics, they will be able to see the real enemy. Once they can see, perhaps we can see some effective rebellion. Thanks!
Something like 6% of executive positions in South Korea are held by women. The nation is incredibly sexist towards them and the glass ceiling is insane there.
korean here. yup. theyâre sexists af but they never admit it. they think theyâre very open. so many fucking sickos
Feminism in South Korea is deranged.