January 2, 2022

"These male activists have targeted anything that smacks of feminism, forcing a university to cancel a lecture by a woman they accused of spreading misandry...."

"They have threatened businesses with boycotts... And they have taken aim at the government for promoting a feminist agenda, eliciting promises from rival presidential candidates to reform the country’s 20-year-old Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.... The backlash represents a split from previous generations. Older South Korean men acknowledge ​benefiting from a patriarchal culture that​ had​ marginalized women. Decades ago, when South Korea lacked everything from food to cash, sons were more likely to be enrolled in higher education. In some families, women were not allowed to eat from the same table as men and newly born girls were named Mal-ja, or 'Last Daughter.' Sex-preference abortions were common. As the country has grown richer, such practices have become a distant memory. Families now dote on their daughters. More women attend college than men, and they have more opportunities in the government and elsewhere, though a significant glass ceiling persists. 'Men in their 20s are deeply unhappy, considering themselves victims of reverse discrimination, angry that they had to pay the price for gender discriminations created under the earlier generations,' said Oh Jae-ho, a researcher at the Gyeonggi Research Institute in South Korea. If older men saw women as needing protection, younger men considered them competitors in a cutthroat job market."

From "The New Political Cry in South Korea: ‘Out With Man Haters’/After slow gains in women’s rights, the country is facing a type of political correctness enforced by young men angry at feminists, saying they undermine opportunity" (NYT).

33 comments:

gilbar said...

Families now dote on their daughters. More women attend college than men

funny that young men would think that this means They are being discriminated against
Don't they Realize, that their fathers had it good?
</sarc

tim in vermont said...

Sex selective abortions happen in the US all the time among members of certain cultures. It's a "low trust" society kind of thing, where people are not willing to make sacrifices for the common good. The US is becoming a low trust society with the Just Us Department ignoring the crimes of their friends, and inventing crimes for their enemies.

rhhardin said...

The men should go into comedy. There's no competition from women there.

Jonathan said...

"'Men in their 20s are deeply unhappy, considering themselves victims of reverse discrimination, angry that they had to pay the price for gender discriminations created under the earlier generations,'"

I am eager for human civilization to progress to where excellence is the sole sorting criterion. It can't happen soon enough.

Balfegor said...

younger men considered them competitors in a cutthroat job market.

My impression of South Korean business culture is that it is still extremely macho and chauvinistic. But I can also see how younger men don't see themselves as benefiting from that at all, particularly because mandatory military service can see them entering the workforce two or three years behind their female contemporaries. For people who go to college, there are ways of structuring it to mitigate the career impact (for students in America, one way is to do it between the sophomore and junior year; another is to do it after graduating college but before attending a masters program or a professional school like medical or law school). But the majority of men are basically stuck in a situation where they are a couple years behind right out of the gate, despite growing up in a culture with precisely the opposite expectations.

All that said, I think a lot of this is sort of on the fringe on both sides, both the feminists and the mens rights activists. Behind it all is a society in which many young people feel like career success is unattainable for ordinary people, but also feel incredible pressure to present an image of success. When unable to meet expectations, I think young men and women cast about for excuses, and sometimes those excuses are just blaming each other, much as in the US, the ready-made excuse is often racism or systemic inequality or that sort of thing.

n.n said...

Diversity, inequity, and exclusion. Exposing the sexist underbelly of the Pro-Choice religion and rebalancing the equation of political congruence. Eventually, they will reconcile, or repeat the act.

Kai Akker said...

---The US is becoming a low trust society with the Just Us Department ignoring the crimes of their friends, and inventing crimes for their enemies. [tiv]

Plus 10. And prosecuting each one two, three or many times, as needed.

Meanwhile, the US is the most overly feminized society in human history. We are sitting ducks for all the bastards on the planet. And then we still have to hear women whining about whatever they want more of at this moment.

Balfegor said...

Re: Tim in Vermont:

It's a "low trust" society kind of thing, where people are not willing to make sacrifices for the common good.

I don't see the connection at all. I think the most obvious explanation also has the most explanatory power: The male heir continues your family line. The memorial rites for you and your ancestors (jesa) are managed by your male descendants. Jesa are the centrepiece of the religious observances central to Korea Confucian culture -- the New Year (seollal) and the Harvest (chuseok). For many Koreans, at least up until my parents' generation, these ceremonies and the perpetuation of their family lines mean a great deal.

Accordingly, a male heir is naturally going to take priority over a daughter.

Bruce Hayden said...

It’s about time. Over a half century ago, when I was in K-12, public schools were already discriminating against males. It only got worse with eliminating recesses, drugging overactive boys, switching from individual accomplishment to rewarding collaboration instead. A lot worse. College was little better, routinely expelling young men solely on the word of scorned young women after completely consensual one night stands. No wonder that colleges are becoming heavily weighted toward women. Women and minorities have their safe spaces. Men don’t because that would mean sexual discrimination - despite being a minority in higher education. Women are still greatly advantaged in terms of divorce, child support, and custody. Indeed, men have no say in whether a woman Carrie’s his child to term, but is typically stuck with child support, even if she became pregnant through fraud (such as from the sperm in discarded condoms, or from intentionally punctured condoms). Despite being a majority, women owned businesses still get significant advantages in government contracting. Etc.

lgv said...

Well, Korean culture needed correcting. It's very different from even other Asian countries. It was a very rigid, patriarchal society, to the detriment of all its citizens. I can't begin to explain it within a short post. If a senior pilot gave commands that would crash the plane, the junior co-pilot would obey even if he knew it would crash the plane. Now, throw in gender and it's even worse.

What people in America don't understand is that America need diversity, equity, and inclusion programs less than any other country in the world.

Balfegor said...

Re: Tim in Vermont:

The US is becoming a low trust society with the Just Us Department ignoring the crimes of their friends, and inventing crimes for their enemies.

Also, while I'm not going to defend DOJ here, I don't think that's actually what signals that the US is low trust. And in fact, I think the US is still a hybrid of low and high trust contexts. We show extraordinarily high trust in basically anonymous interactions mediated through corporate bureaucracies, e.g. when purchasing from random sellers through Amazon, or inputting credit card numbers into a random website or over the phone. Most of us don't know what protections have been implemented through those corporate bureaucracies -- we just trust that they are there.

But we are, justifiably, quite low trust during in-person interactions where we don't have the benefit of that mediating infrastructure. For example, we're conscious of the risk of being pickpocketed or robbed or randomly attacked in public and alter our behaviour to mitigate risk. My go-to counterexample here is Tokyo, where people sometimes don't bother with bike locks, or hold their table at an outdoor cafe table by leaving their purse or an expensive smartphone out while they go in to order.

Trust in these mediating bureaucracies in the US may be eroding, but it's still quite high. But in contrast, everyday in-person interactions in the US strike me as quite low trust, and have been my entire adult life. That adult life has been spent primarily in urban environments (New York and DC), so it may be different in the suburbs and the country. But I would consider the US cities I know lower trust than Seoul. Meanwhile, I have higher trust in US corporate and government infrastructure than Korea's.

Kai Akker said...

Balfegor, you live where?

Balfegor said...

Balfegor, you live where?

DC (er, Arlington). Usually I split my time between DC and Tokyo, but the Japanese border is shut so unfortunately I can't return to my Tokyo place for the time being.

Lurker21 said...

Everything deserves a little pushback every now and then. If it's still around afterwards, it may have some value. If nobody ever challenges something, how do you know that it's right or true or worth anything?

Kai Akker said...

@ Balfegor. Those are highly self-selective places, the two capitals. And scarcely representative, at least as far as the USA goes. Re your generalizations. DC is in the midst of a massive case of cognitive dissonance politically and culturally (Imo). I wouldn't disagree with your specific observations in 3:52 post, but I do believe the dislike of the elites in the capital is greater than you think here, and justifiably so due to the treachery and hypocrisy Tim cited. They erode the common bond that America needs to function properly. Can't comment about Tokyo as my knowledge is limited to the Kurosawa movies of the '50s, '60s.

gspencer said...

They might consider transitioning and start taking places of women's college sports teams. Lots of opportunities there.

campy said...

+1,000,000 to Bruce Hayden @ 3:39 pm

The Vault Dweller said...

What's good for the Gander is good for the Goose.

Sydney said...

Strange, but at first I assumed they were talking about trans activists cancelling women in the West. It wasn’t until I read the Korea part that I realized it was cis-men.

Amadeus 48 said...

I am suspicious about this story. It seems agenda driven.

Pravda ran stories like this constantly. Are the young men the looters and wreckers so prevalent in the Soviet press? Next, NYT will be touting the superiority of women's sex lives in the old USSR...oh wait, they did that already.

n.n said...

Feminists and masculinists, or moderating diversity, inequity, and exclusion?

madAsHell said...

<>such as from the sperm in discarded condoms<>

I haven't used a condom in years, but if I recall correctly there was supposed to be a spermicide in the lubricant.

madAsHell said...

Whoops! I forgot the italics!!

tim maguire said...

lgv said...Well, Korean culture needed correcting

The point of most commenters here is that, if you had a man benefiting at the expense of a woman 50 years ago and you respond by benefiting a woman at the expense of a man today, you may have evened out the man/woman tallies, but you haven’t corrected any wrongs. You have perpetuated the wrongs. You have created 2 victims where formerly there was 1.

n.n said...

you may have evened out the man/woman tallies

At the expensive of the individual. And forcing an opening to deprecate both in a politically congruent function of choice (Choice, too). One step forward, two steps backward.

effinayright said...

lgv said...
Well, Korean culture needed correcting. It's very different from even other Asian countries. It was a very rigid, patriarchal society, to the detriment of all its citizens. I can't begin to explain it within a short post. If a senior pilot gave commands that would crash the plane, the junior co-pilot would obey even if he knew it would crash the plane. Now, throw in gender and it's even worse.
*****************

"Detriment of its citizens"? Do you realize where South Korea was 70 years ago, as opposed to what it's become? If "rigid patriarchy" was a problem, what about the NORKS and where THEIR economy sits?

As for pecking order among airline pilots---that's been a common problem in many parts of the world, not just in Korea or Asia. It was a natural outcome of the pilots and FOs coming directly from the military, with the pilots having more experience and having held senior rank.

An entire training regimen called "Crew Resource Management" sprang up in the 1970's after literally dozens of crashes all over the world were attributed to pilots' commands being treated as unopposable orders, with devastating outcomes.

Flight crews are basically taught that in the air the safety of the aircraft and its passengers are paramount, NOT cockpit status or former military rank. FOs can and do challenge pilot decisions and can even countermand them and take control when the situation merits it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rL4E43_ZOA

Greg The Class Traitor said...

Men in their 20s are deeply unhappy, considering themselves victims of reverse discrimination, angry that they had to pay the price for gender discriminations created under the earlier generations

Good for them. I wish American young men weren't so ball-less, and would act more like the SK young men

Assistant Village Idiot said...

@ Bruce Hayden - A half century ago? Read Tom Sawyer. The youngest grades have been discriminating against males for almost two centuries, and this has gradually crept up into higher and higher grades over the decades. Even in 1960, Girls made honor roll at a close to 2:1 ratio to boys, and nearly 3:1 for high honors. Over that time, schools were increasingly designed by women for girls. It eventually hit college, and then graduate schools, at much higher ratios than the advantage young men kept showing in standardised testing that caused the political brouhaha to curate the tests in the early 70s to eliminate the math questions that the boys got right more often than girls. Because that couldn't possibly be math, it must be prejudice.

For the cannier boys, it may have been and advantage because they learned early that life ain't fair and you need to find out what the real rules are in life, not the school rules. But for most boys, it was worse grades, much higher dropout rates, and less attractive admission profiles even with superior SATs. I contend that feminist outrage in the 60s on was largely derived from young women discovering as they graduated (with honors) that the school rules they have been taught to play by were not the Real Rules after graduation. How dare they! But they set about slowly changing the workplace rules by conquering HR departments and admissions criteria.

Howard said...

You need to hang out with higher quality people, Greg. Maybe you're just sampling from your own peer group. :^(

n.n said...

Redistributive change under the DIE (Diversity, Inequity, and Exclusion) protocol means that both boys and girls will be subject to affirmative discrimination in order to balance the scales of politically congruent functions. That, and tens, hundreds of millions of BLm in collateral damage. One step forward, two steps backward. All's fair in lust and abortion, I suppose.

bobby said...

I asked a Korean friend about this when I first saw the article. He read it, and sort of laughed, and equated it to the progressives' articles that make it sound as if the Proud Boys have taken over the US, or that we're all adherents of this "Q" thing.

Achilles said...

Amadeus 48 said...

I am suspicious about this story. It seems agenda driven.

Pravda ran stories like this constantly. Are the young men the looters and wreckers so prevalent in the Soviet press? Next, NYT will be touting the superiority of women's sex lives in the old USSR...oh wait, they did that already.



This is the proper lens.

The aristocracy pushes division along any lines they can. They divide by race. They divide by sex. When that isn't enough they create more sexes.

The people who respond to this crap with these claims of reverse discrimination are just feeding into this and pulling the pendulum.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

Howard said...
You need to hang out with higher quality people, Greg.

You're right, Howard. But for now I'll keep on hanging out with you