Global Courant 2023-05-16 10:48:15
South Korea is engaged in an all-out gender war — and it’s getting worse. The animosity between Korean men and women has reached a point where some women outright refuse to date, marry and have children with men – a phenomenon known as the 4B movement.
As a Korean feminist scholar I live in the US and have followed this gender war from a distance while researching contemporary Korean gender politics. But I got caught up in it myself after my research on Korean masculinity was published by CNN.
The article described foreign women who traveled to Korea after falling in love with the idea of dating Korean men by watching Korean television dramas. I pointed out that since the tourists’ fantasies were based on fictional characters, some of them eventually became disappointed with the Korean men they dated in real life.
The article was about racial politics and male ideals. But some Korean readers thought I was just criticizing Korean men for not being romantic and handsome enough. An irate Korean man remarked that I was an “ugly feminist.”
But this was tame compared to what women living in South Korea have endured in recent years.
Misogyny and backlash
There have been flashpoints in this gender war over the past few decades.
In 2010 Ilbe, a right website that deals in misogyny began to attract users who peppers the forums with vulgar posts about women.
Then, in 2015, an online extremist feminist group named Megalia arose. The goal was to fight back through humiliating korean men in ways that mirrored the rhetoric on sites like Ilbe.
A year later, a man who had confessed that he hated women killed a random woman in a public restroom near a subway station in Seoul. He was eventually sentenced to decades in prison, but the lines were quickly drawn.
On one side were feminists, who saw misogyny as the underlying motive. On the other side were men who claimed they were merely the isolated actions of a mentally ill man. The two groups violently clashed during competitive protests at the murder scene.
However, none of these events has generated as much public controversy as the surge in digital sex crimes. These are newer forms of sexual violence facilitated by technology: revenge porn; upskirt, which refers to taking pictures surreptitiously under women’s skirts in public; and the use of hidden cameras to film women having sex or undressing.
In 2018 there were 2,289 reported cases of digital sexual crimes; in 2021, the number snowed to 10,353.
In 2019, there were two major incidents involving digital sexual offences. In one, a number of male K-pop stars were charged with filming and distributing videos of women in group chat rooms without their permission.
A few months later, Koreans were shocked to hear about what became known as the “Nth Chamber Incident”, in which hundreds of perpetrators – mostly men – committed digital sexual crimes against dozens of women and minors.
They mostly targeted poorer women—sex workers, or women who wanted to make a few bucks by sharing anonymous nude photos of themselves.
The perpetrators either hacked into their social media accounts or approached these women and offered them money but asked for their personal information so that they could transfer the money. Once they obtained this information, they blackmailed the women by threatening to reveal their sex work and nude photos to their friends and family.
Since sex work And post nude photos of yourself online Being illegal in Korea, fearing arrest or exile by friends and family, the women complied with the perpetrators’ demands to send more compromising images of themselves. The men would then exchange these images in chat rooms.
In July 2019, protests erupted in Seoul after women were drugged and sexually assaulted at a popular nightclub part-owned by K-Pop star Seungri. Photo: Jean Chung / Getty Images / The Conversation
And yet a 2019 investigation conducted by the Korean government found that large segments of the population blamed women for these sex crimes: 52% said they believed sexual assault occurs because women wear revealing clothing, while 37% thought that if women were sexually assaulted while drunk, they were partly responsible were for their victimization.
In other words, a significant percentage of the Korean population believes that female sexuality is the problem – not the sexual violence.
Government policy forms the basis
Digital sex crimes are too widespread to blame a handful of bad actors. To me, part of the problem stems from the long history of “gender-based citizenship.”
Korean feminist scholar Seungsook moon has written about the ways in which the government created one job for men and another for women as the country tried to modernize in the second half of the 20th century:
“Men were mobilized for compulsory military service and then, as conscripts, employed as laborers and researchers in the industrializing economy. Women were assigned to lower-level factory jobs, and their roles as members of the modern nation were largely defined in terms of biological reproduction and household management.
While these policies are no longer officially enforced, underlying beliefs about gender roles remain embedded in Korean life and culture. Women who deviate from mothers and housewives expose themselves to public and private backlash.
The government has introduced gender quotas in certain industries to try and unravel this system of gendered citizenship.
For example, some government jobs have that minimum sex quota for new employees and the government encourages the private sector to pursue similar policies. In traditionally male-dominated industries, such as construction, there are quotas for female hires, while in traditionally female-dominated industries, such as education, there are male quotas.
In some ways, this has only made things worse. Each gender feels that the other receives special treatment because of this affirmative action policy. Resentment festers.
‘The generation that gave up’
Today, the sense of competition between young men and women is exacerbated by the rising cost of living and rampant unemployment.
Called the “N-Po generation”, which roughly translates as “the generation that has given up”, many young South Koreans don’t think they can achieve certain milestones that previous generations took for granted: getting married, having kids, finding a job, owning a home and even make friends. .
Members of the South Korean Women’s Party campaign ahead of the 2020 election. While the party did not win any races, it was the first time a feminist party had sought seats in the National Assembly. Photo: Jung Yeon-Je / AFP via Getty Images / The conversation
While all genders feel discouraged, the act of “giving up” has created more problems for women. Men see women who refrain from marriage and childbearing as selfish. And then when they try to compete with men for jobs, some men become enraged.
Many of the radicalized men commit digital sexual offenses to take revenge on women they believe have neglected their duties.
Ultimately, the competitive dynamic created by the Korean government’s embrace of gendered citizenship has fueled the virulent gender war between Korean men and women, using digital sex crimes as ammunition.
The 4B movement, in which Korean women refrain from heterosexual dating, marriage and childbirth, represents a radical escalation of the gender war by creating an online and offline world without men. Instead of getting into fights, these women refuse to associate with men, period.
Digital sexual crimes are a global problem
Certainly, digital sexual crimes are not unique to Korea.
When I teach my lectures on digital sex crimes in the US, it amazes me how many of my students admit to being victims of digital sex crimes, or knew it was happening in their high school.
And at the National Women’s Studies Association annual conference in 2022I watched as feminist activists and scholars from around the world presented their findings on digital sexual crimes in their home countries.
As each country has its own cultural context for the increase in digital sexual crimes, there is no single solution to solve the problems. But in South Korea, further unraveling the system of gender-based citizenship could be part of the solution.
Min Joo Leepostdoctoral researcher, University of Indiana
This article has been republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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