“It’s great that she got the gold medal, but her short hair suggests she’s a feminist. If that’s the case, then I’m withdrawing my support. All feminists must die.” It’s a comment on Korean social media from 2021 and the victory of An San, a three-time gold medalist at that year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics in the archery events, which has the misfortune of wearing short hair. The violence of the gender war in South Korea is chilling and this is not only illustrated by the 51% of young Korean women aged 20 who vote for the Democratic Party, a progressive party, compared to 26% of young Koreans; nor is it just anger among young Koreans who have difficulty with positive discrimination against women: exemption from military service, quotas for certain competitions and elections.
According to Min Hee Go, a professor specializing in gender issues, in a hyper-competitive society, young Korean women have become “competitors” whereas they were once “partners”, in other words women were relegated to the inside , destined to have children (in the 1970s, the rate of children per woman was more than 4, compared to 0.78 today). For Ji Sun-yun, professor of philosophy at Sejong University, “young Koreans feel incompetent, incapable of rising to the top of society. They think they are doomed to involuntary celibacy, to remain in an unstable situation without future, without reference, threatened or weakened by the questioning of the status they enjoyed before.”
Gender divide
And the welcome agony of the traditional pattern results in incredible violence against women. In 2016, a young woman was murdered by a man admitting to “hating women”; in 2018, it was the sordid affair of 30,000 sexual crimes linked to the use of hidden cameras to film women and very young girls without their consent; in 2020, it was the dismantling of a sexual exploitation network called “Nth Room” (Room N), founded by a 24-year-old man, who sold sexual videos of young girls, including minors, under threat odious blackmail; it is also “sperm terrorism”, an attack which consists of spreading sperm on women’s belongings, clothes, hair, faces. And the consequence of the revelation of these cases of sexual assault is the success of masculinist movements which consider that “feminism is a mental illness”. Bae In-kyu, 32, founder of the Male Solidarity group whose YouTube channel has 500,000 subscribers: “Women are not fulfilling their duty, not doing their part of the work, but demanding rights. On top of all this, feminists hate men, and that’s why I think feminism is a cancer.” Chilling.
Because this is happening in South Korea, one might believe that it is a phenomenon unlike our Western societies, but a long investigation by The Economist, entitled “A new global divide is widening between the genders”, tells us that from Poland to the United States via France, Germany and China, the ideological divide between young women and young men is unprecedented . While in the early 2000s, young people aged 18 to 29 voted significantly for the progressive left, in 2020 “in all the major countries studied, young men were more conservative than young women”. The height of the irony for a generation raised in the kingdom of Wokistan, young women vote like men aged over 60… The boomer suddenly becoming the unexpected ally of young neo-feminists, while he is vilified with endless tweets and articles.
To sustain the rights of women and minorities, the only viable method is equality. When we use radical speeches which rely on hatred of others, which only see the progress of some as the loss of rights for others, we inevitably smash ourselves against the wall of reaction. And then everyone loses.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist.
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