Florence Guzman
08/26/2021 6:30 AM
Clarín.com
Culture
Updated 08/26/2021 6:30 AM
When South Korean An San, the current
Olympic gold medalist in Bow
, received misogynistic attacks for wearing short hair, headlines about the wave of anti-feminism in South Korea traveled the world.
What was not shown is that the person who wronged
An San
at his own school was immediately identified and is now facing the appropriate legal consequences.
While the rest of South Korea
celebrated its triumph:
as can be seen in their social networks, her compatriots flooded her with love and did not allow a tiny group of haters to tarnish her moment.
But
anti-feminist activism
in
South Korea is
not just a couple of trolls;
nor to the traditional values linked to
Confucianism
of which modern South Korea is the main cultural heir (and which could explain other aspects of the situation experienced by women and dissidents in South Korean society).
The particular anti-feminism that is emerging in
South Korea
is more similar to the so-called "movements for men's rights", the red pill and the manosphere - the virtual spaces exclusively for men, which oppose feminism and claim masculinity.
In the West they have intellectual references such as the psychologist Jordan Peterson.
An San.
The athlete criticized.
Photo EFE
They are movements that have a strong presence on YouTube;
During the pandemic, they also reached the mass media.
More than anything, they appear as
a right-wing reaction to neoliberal feminisms,
mainly in the United States.
In South Korea it emerges as a conflict of gender and class, but most especially over the accumulated tensions
between the younger generation and its predecessors
.
In South Korea something similar happened to the "revolution of the daughters" in Argentina.
It is
the peers of that generation
- who are now between 25 and 30 years old - who question on the right their place in South Korean society today.
A bit of context
Under the Moon Jae-in government, South Korea reached
the highest unemployment levels in the past two decades
.
Relatively low looking at the numbers from Argentina and in the context of a pandemic.
But this is not what young South Korean men perceive when compared to their female peers, or even worse when they consider men over forty.
In addition, young women get better grades in two crucial exams for South Korean society: the dreaded
Suneung,
which is the University School Aptitude Test;
and the PSAT, which is an entrance exam to the career of public servant.
Not only do these exams have centuries-old historical roots, even for some authors (Evans, 1996) these exams are one of the main causes of the success of the developmental type of state and
a highly competent state bureaucracy
that produced the South Korean economic miracle.
The reality is that
80 percent of South Koreans have a university degree
, something that has become
a minimum requirement
within the job market, while entry into the public service is highly desired due to the stability and prestige it confers.
It is women who
perform better on both exams
in an extremely competitive society.
To this is added that men must do compulsory military service, since, technically, South Korea is still at war with North Korea, and the economic remuneration for putting your life on pause for two years is equivalent to only a quarter of the salary basic.
These are
the main arguments
of men's rights activists against affirmative action policies in South Korea.
An immovable roof
On the other hand, the "glass ceiling" that prevents women from climbing has remained largely unchanged: how far they can go falls off the cliff after the age of 40 when compared to men of the same generation.
For this reason, they previously postponed the family project, but today more and more women decide directly that forming a family is not theirs:
the birth rate
fell to 0.8 and is
the lowest in the world
.
The heavy workload at home and hostility in the work environment they experience when they return to work after maternity leave also contributes to this decision.
South Korea: Ads that sparked controversy over finger gestures
In South Korea,
one of the largest social divisions is generational:
respect and obedience to the elderly in the workplace and within the family.
The generation of men born in the 2000s believes that women over 40
made many sacrifices
and suffered discrimination, but they do not believe the same in the case of young women in their 20s.
That is why they argue that it
is hypocritical
for the generation of President Moon Jae-in, a self-proclaimed feminist, to dictate gender policies when they are directly responsible for the discrimination suffered by women in South Korean society.
Other.
A gesture that spread and angered.
Affirmative actions to reverse this situation, they argue, are aimed
at a generation that supposedly did not experience it
.
This feeling of anger against the political establishment resulted in the emergence of the political figure
Lee Jun-seok,
current president of the conservative People Power Party 국민 의 힘.
Of humble origins and a Harvard scholarship graduate, Lee is called "the South Korean Trump" for his charismatic participation in television debates, in which he positioned himself as
the anti-feminist voice
and where he capitalized
on the anti-establishment sentiment of South Korean youth
.
He thus became the historically youngest leader of the main opposition party of conservative values. Although we could not precisely say that the current ruling party is the feminist utopia, it is true that they promoted policies to reverse a situation that left South Korea in the lowest position in terms of gender equality within developed countries according to the OECD .
For its part, the
delirious debate
that triggers the popularity of
Lee Jun-seok
dealt with, among other points,
an advertising poster
for the G25 chain in South Korea last May.
The controversial sign read something like
Let's go camping!
It was illustrated by a hand holding
a mini sausage
between the index finger and the thumb, the same gesture that in Argentina would be equivalent to asking for a cut.
A similar gesture
can also be seen in the iconography of Megalia, a radical feminist group that has been denounced for
misandria
(hatred of men)
.
This similarity was the reason to justify the boycott of three advertising campaigns so far this year.
Hate speech or over-interpretation?
The point is that in the debate the feminist representative Jiye Shin only focused on the fact that there was no evidence of the connection between feminist groups and the company of the advertisement, trying to present the facts in the most objective way possible.
For his part, Lee Jun-seok said something like that the sausage there was not relevant to promote camping products, but that it was commonly used to refer to the male genitalia and that, therefore,
the intention was to humiliate
by referring to at its length ... who could be confident after repeatedly seeing that image?
Gesturing and repeating that it was all "very suspicious",
Lee Jun-seok
fueled the conspiratorial idea.
Beyond the strong presence of radical feminism on Twitter and anti-feminist comments on forums such as Ilbe Storage House,
a war of the sexes is not perceived in the streets of Seoul
.
What you do feel is
irreversible progress in terms of expanding rights
and progress in conversations about sexual dissidence, made visible through culture, cinema, novels and music.
A relevant case is the Seoul International Women's Film Festival that is taking place these days in the South Korean capital: here most of the progressive activism is concentrated.
But progressive or conservative, South Koreans conceive that
an advanced country is not just an economically developed country
.
And there is nothing that unites South Koreans more than the desire to belong to an advanced country, regardless of what "advanced" actually means.
* Florencia Guzman is a Researcher in Social Theory and Korean Society at Kookmin University, Seoul.
Look also
Korea today: Argentine footprints in the country that only wants to be the future
"Kim Ji-young, born 1982", Korean feminism