NullHypothesis
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User ID: 2718
NullHypothesis
2d ago
Same reason why women can denigrate men based on their height but men can't judge a woman based on her weight, even though one is a mutable characteristic and the other is immutable.
For a woman, a lot of her social status and worth does stem from her appearance. To insult a woman's appearance, or to even rank her lower relative to her peers in terms of attractiveness, is to denigrate her very existence. Their looks determine who they get to date, who becomes friends with them, and how people treat them. A woman's academic or athletic ability relative to her peers is not as important since women aren't competing with each other on the basis of academics or athletics, especially when it comes to the dating market. Also, women are more neurotic and take these things more personally than a man would. A man that complains women call him ugly would be labeled a loser and an incel. A woman complaining is a victim that needs protection, and being a victim (only for women and minorities) gives you social brownie points nowadays.
Notice it's not really men pushing against this sort of ranking, it's mostly women. The only men that do are male feminists or men who have to criticize in lieu of reputation harm.
NullHypothesis
3d ago
School children ranking each other on attractiveness is nothing new. Not sure about Australia but here in the states ranking people based on attractiveness made it's way around the news as well previously. As the article points out, this had been happening for as long as people can remember and many people have had personal experiences going across both sexes. Heck, even I had the misfortune of finding out what some girls rated my attractiveness back during high school.
It's just yet another opportunity to bash on men and to push the women are victim narrative that seems to become ever more prevalent.
Interestingly enough /r/TwoXChromosome had a thread on that news and most responses seem responsible: https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/b68zn2/teen_boys_rated_their_female_classmates_based_on/
The responses that seem to say the attractive rating between teens is problematic are actually downvoted.
That being said, this was 5 years ago. I wonder if the average user/demographic has shifted enough that the responses would be different today. There is another post on /r/melbourne about the exact article you linked to: https://old.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/1ckq7hp/private_school_boys_suspended_after_absolutely/
It's a different subreddit so I would expect TwoXChromosome to be more sympathetic to the girls, yet the responses on this more recent story seem to be more full of outrage.
NullHypothesis
3d ago
A lot of "therapy" that gets pushed around seems to get rid of any notion of personal responsibility or self-improvement and instead focuses on making the person a victim of the circumstances around them and that it is solely outside factors to blame. I think this is prevalent because for a lot of people, it is easier to be told that their bad situations/issue is a result of outside forces, and nobody likes to be told that it could possibly be their own fault because that would mean they have a problem that they have to fix. It probably is the case for some people, but I doubt it's as prevalent as it's made out to be.
I believe most of the time people just need to be told to consider the opposite of what they're thinking or believe solely to be exposed to more viewpoints which can then help them make a more informed decision. People who are too self-critical and self-blaming need to be told that perhaps there are some things out of their control, while people who think everyone and the world is against them need to be told that they should probably be more self-critical. Unfortunately, nobody wants to be told that their way of thinking is wrong, and since a lot of therapy you can pick and choose your therapist, many people will pick the therapist that reinforces their worldview.
The thing is, this is literally impossible because my dad is 10 years younger than her so he would have been a toddler when this sexual molestation she claimed my dad did happened.
Imagine if your dad was older than his sister, the amount of reputation damage it would have done. I wonder how many families have been damaged due to these repressed memory therapies. People's memories are bad and unreliable. According to one study, 50% of people are susceptible to believing false memories, and 30% of people could even vividly recall that false event happening and provide additional details. How many of these repressed memories coming out of therapy is just the therapist planting a false memory into a person instead of a person being an actual victim of childhood abuse?
NullHypothesis
3d ago
Nobody needs to propose anything because women already abandon their professional careers for motherhood. For many of these women, they would have been far happier pursuing motherhood earlier. Are there women who are happier pursuing careers than if they had pursued motherhood? Sure, but the exception should not drive societal policy and culture. You don't hear anyone push motherhood except conservatives, which most young women do not listen to. So your average young woman might hear from their parents/family about pursuing motherhood, and then nearly the rest of social media/entertainment/school/friends/society tell her to pursue a career instead.
Respect for motherhood does not mean men have to treat all mothers with respect, or treat any random mother to a higher degree of respect than they do for any other person. If the parents did a good job raising their children, it is likely there to be a good relationship between a man and his mother. Most men I know that have a good relationship with their parents do in fact respect their mother and take her input into consideration. I personally also regularly talk with my mother for advice. This does not mean if I meet any random mother, I would respect her opinions any more than that of any other person, unless we were talking about something where her experiences as a mother would be relevant to the conversation.
Why would and should anyone respect a CEO's wife to the same level of respect as the CEO? If the CEO was a woman and her husband raised their kids I would respect the CEO more than her husband because she's the one making the decisions for the company. The CEO is making business decisions that likely have a greater impact on my life than a mother does raising her children. A man can also aspire to be a CEO. So of course a CEO get more respect on the basis that it's something men can aspire towards and on the impact it could have on their day-to-day lives. Does this mean men don't respect motherhood? No, what you're doing here is a false equivalency. You're basically arguing that men don't value motherhood or don't value it enough because they wouldn't respect a CEO's wife who is a mother to the same level of degree as they would for a CEO. The thing is, I respect and admire my own mother a hell of a lot more than I do any CEO, and I'm sure many other men feel the same way towards their mother. A man can simultaneously find motherhood high-value and important and still admire a CEO more than they would that CEO's wife.
Plenty of rich and successful people attribute their success to their mother. You don't hear that type of respect and love as often for a father. If anything, in modern American culture motherhood is highly elevated while fatherhood is not. The most common trope of a father you see in movies, tv shows, video games, advertisements, books, academic articles, the news, etc. is a deadbeat dad, a missing father, a dead father, a stupid father, the list goes on. Of course, there are negative stereotypes about women mothers too, narcissistic parents and all that but despite that, your average person seems to still outwardly declare their love and respect for their mother far more often than they do for their fathers. Just because there are negative tropes about mothers does not mean motherhood is not respected, it just means there are bad mothers out there. If a child does not speak with their parents and has a bad relationship with them, to me that is indicative of poor parenting and not reflective of a societal dislike and hatred for mothers or fathers in general.
NullHypothesis
6d ago
Whether this is true or not I don't know, I'm certainly not a bear expert. Multiple people have been making statements that support that claim even in this thread (in reference to black bears, panda bears, etc). Perhaps it may be true for some species of bears and not others. Even if it was true I don't think it's a good enough reason to pick a bear over a man.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
Generic statement, I don't spend enough time here to form an image of any individual poster.
Also not meant to be a fully exhaustive answer, just an example of things that can be done. I don't think I need to repeat what other people have said, they have already said it far better than I can.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
As Andrew Breitbart says, politics is downstream from culture.
People on the right need to be better at winning the culture war by producing more of their own entertainment. This is difficult because the personality traits that lead someone to be conservative also lead them to not engage in works that dominate culture, such as entertainment and media. And conservative media/shows/games tend to be comically overtly conservative.
But there is a gap in entertainment. If people on the right can make entertaining works that dignify and uplift the values they hold dear without making it overtly political and cringy, they can start winning via culture. More and more people are consuming media/entertainment from East Asia because they don't push woke nonsense (or don't do so as much as it is done in the West), so there clearly is a demand for non-Hollywood non-woke content.
Also, form a strong community. Be a good person. Start a family. Serve as a good role model. You don't have to do everything on your own. If you're a positive influence on just a few people around you, then you are already doing way more than the average person.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
Because we have been conditioned by society to tell our daughters to avoid strange men (and for good reason!) and men are applying that same conditioning to this scenario. It's a trick to try to get men to consider the scenario from a woman's perspective.
As you point out, your daughter would have greater chances with a random man than with a bear.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
If the questions specifies that they're in the woods, this presents a situation where the male in question can reasonably expect not to be observed.
That is a fair point but I will still have to disagree with you that greater than 20% of men when given the opportunity will have a near 100% chance of committing rape/assault on a lone woman.
I'm not quite willing to say 20% of men would not, purely on the evolutionary argument that assault and rape were a common element of our ancestral environment.
On the evolution argument, the child has to survive to pass on their offspring. Babies and pregnant women are extremely vulnerable. The genes that foster safety in groups and willingness to cooperate will outpace the genes that might make a man rape/assault someone. There could be an argument for tribes taking women as a prize after some kind of war/battle, but that's distinct from just an early caveman just raping/assaulting any woman.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
I believe the rhyme goes as follows:
If it's black fight back.
If it's brown stay down.
If it's white, goodnight. (never really liked this one, although to be fair this is the one you are least likely to encounter so I guess the rhyme doesn't matter too much).
NullHypothesis
7d ago
It's funny how so many people online think that's a good response but all it does is serve as yet another example of how poorly so many people understand and use statistics.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
It certainly is a vague question, and vagueness does seem to be a requirement for things to go viral since people can interpret things in so many different ways.
What's interesting is how people choose to interpret the question.
To be counter-pedantic, I'd argue the bear still has the worst odds. Plenty of women go abroad alone to dangerous countries like India. Sure there are some examples of women getting raped/killed there, but plenty more aren't. And they encounter a huge number of foreign men before those negative events occur. Most men who commit crimes also tend to be on the younger side. If I recall, stats showed 3% of young boys have violent tendencies, most of which are raised out of it. Even if I was generous and gave black bears a 0% chance to attack, that's a 20% chance of a dangerous encounter. I would not say 20% of men across the world would choose to assault/rape/attack a lone female. And even actual criminals don't commit crimes all the time.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
To be honest, I wasn't sure if I should post this topic either, since at the end of the day it's just one of many hundreds of viral internet trends indicating the battle of the sexes. People will say anything on the internet to get clout, there are hundreds of ragebait topics being discussed. Plus are TikTok/internet trends indicative of general trends in the population?
What made this trend more interesting is that it's gotten so viral to the point that there are now journalists and news articles that are using this to push the "women's lives are so hard" narrative, and we have a few actual polls now to get a better understanding of what the split is. So at this point it's not just a stupid viral TikTok trend, it's a question that is being used to push an agenda.
Is that perhaps the reason why people may give men the benefit of the doubt in the case of an ambiguous he-said-she-said situation, but not give such benefit to a bear? Do men not deserve such a benefit over bears, because, you know, they're actual people and bears are not?
I've always had a problem with women complaining about how no one would believe them if they cry rape/sexual assault. I think it's similar to when people said people didn't vote for Hillary Clinton during 2016 just because she was a woman. Well yes, but people also did vote for her solely because she was a woman. #BelieveAllWoman was (and still is?) a thing, the biggest high-profile case I remember in recent times was the case between Amber Heard and Johhny Depp. Plenty of people automatically believed her story, just as plenty of people automatically doubted her. We didn't know the facts so the most unbiased stance should be "I don't know, let's wait for some evidence before concluding." Well based on the evidence, the jury did find Amber Heard liable of defamation and that he did not abuse or assault Amber Heard.
People should give men the benefit of the doubt because of the mantra "innocent before proven guilty". Anyone can accuse anyone of anything. Yet the mere accusation can destroy a man's livelihood and his reputation. There are plenty of examples you can find that have impacted everyday average men. Women have plenty of reason to falsely accuse men, whether it be an act of revenge, some way to get clout, and so on. And women tend to overdramatize their experiences. Men face harassment online more often than women, but women are more upset about it. There was also that video of a woman walking through New York to show how much catcalling/harassment she got and all it did was show how it wasn't much of anything at all... (and also, how the men doing the "problematic" activity was a certain demographic of men, specifically black/latino but it's racist to point that out). Or that one journalist that wrote an article complaining about catcalling... only a few years later to then write an article complaining about how nobody would catcall her anymore and how she misses it (can't find the source atm).
If a bear is falsely accused, well nobody really suffers from that. If a man is falsely accused, there is an actual victim in that false statement. Which is why the appropriate response should be to hear out their case, and if it sounds like an actual crime is investigated, then a police report should be filed and the situation investigated. Surely spending a few hours at the police station and getting some justice is better than spending days/weeks/months suffering and letting the criminal go free?
If a woman told her friend she was raped/assaulted, in reality, it's likely 80 - 99% of her friends would automatically believe her unless she did such a horrible job of telling the story that it would cause reason for doubt. Most people's automatic response is to believe, not to doubt. But because some people might dare question the story, it's a huge problem.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
That's an interesting post from Devon Eriksen and certainly worth some food for thought.
I feel like his claim that women claim men want to rape them to signal desirability is a bit of a stretch though. I think it's more likely they are conditioned from birth to think that about of men rather than it being some hidden ploy to boost their social worth by indicating desirability. They might be boosting social worth by showing they agree with whatever society says it's good to signal.
Taking his thoughts to their logical conclusion, women will also vote in a way to signal social status, not vote for what is would be best for them/family/society, which means women should not be allowed to vote. Certainly more to be said about this although I'm pretty sure it's already been discussed ad nauseam.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
I thought about bringing up the fact that the question can be leading to an answer by juxtaposing a man to a bear, but I couldn't find a good way to fit it in so I left it out. But it's still telling that if both are being treated as a dangerous being that could potentially harm you, women would rather it be a bear than a man.
Also, I'm not sure how much the framing matters. If the question was "Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a woman or a bear" most people would say woman, and would not probably consider the scenario of fighting a woman.
If the question was "Would you rather be stuck in a cage with a man or a bear" which dials up the potential aggression/dangerous aspect up to 100 then I wonder how many people would still pick bear over a man.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
This trend is actually propaganda by the bear mafia to increase optics for bears.
Seriously though, bears are portrayed more positively than men are in media and entertainment. I can't recall the last time I saw a bear portrayed as a threat or a cause of a dangerous scenario in a movie/tv show/game. But you have plenty of cute, cuddly teddy bears, bears as cartoon characters, sexy bears in Baldur's gate, etc. Or if the bear is an enemy that's because it's a bear rider in a video game and frankly speaking that is awesome.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
I'm going to add this to the list of reasons. It's almost as bad as the "if a bear attacks you, people will believe you, if a man attacks you, people will not believe you" argument but it's a different reason.
There is a recent trend on TikTok and social media where people are asked if they would rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a man. Surprisingly, (or perhaps unsurprisingly to some of you), many people, especially women, are saying they would rather be stuck with a bear than a man. When men are asked this question and the script is flipped to "would you rather your daughter be stuck in a forest with a bear or a man", a lot of men seem to respond with bear rather than a man as well.
Here is a link to a Today.com article about this topic: https://www.today.com/news/bear-or-man-woods-tiktok-trend-rcna149611
It has a live poll, and at the moment the split is 28% with a man, 65% with a bear, and 7% in between.
That's 68% of respondents that would be more comfortable being stuck with a bear than a man. 68%! Unfortunately, there is no breakdown of who the respondents are, the best I could do is look at the average demographics for people who go to Today.com, which is 61.39% female and 38.61% male. Assuming the readers of this article has a similar demographic breakdown as the average person going to the website, and that all female readers chose a bear, that means that a solid chunk of men also are more comfortable being stuck with a bear than another man in the forest.
I found another poll on a women's forum asking the same question - the split there is 15% male, 85% bear at the moment.
So all the evidence seems to point that your average woman would rather be stuck with a bear than a man.
Here are some general arguments for why women are choosing bear over men, trying to not strawman to the best of my ability:
- If a bear attacks you, people will believe you, if a man attacks you, people will not believe you.
- Many women get attacked/assaulted by men every year, bear attacks on humans are extremely rare.
- You don't know if the man will attack you or not, but a bear is predictable.
- Men are scary.
- Bears might not attack you. Bears are more afraid of you than you are of them!
- Men have said negative things to me or about me. A bear won't do that.
The way news and social media are spinning this is that this reveals just how dangerous the world is for women, that women live their day-to-day lives in constant fear of the men around them because of how dangerous the world is to them. Frankly, I cannot relate to this view, perhaps because I am a man, but I also think this view can only develop when society, social media, entertainment, and the news are constantly bombarding you with all these negative notions about men. Your average woman is safer, far more liberated, has more rights, and meets more people than at any point in history (and especially compared to the entire scope of human history), and yet fear and hatred of men are more prevalent than ever before.
If anything, what this question reveals is just how warped women's views of men are and how negatively men are depicted in society.
It also reveals how people poorly use statistics to rationalize their stances. They will look at the raw number of bear attacks to the number of assaults/rape/sexual on women and then assume the two can be directly compared without any adjustment. Oh, only 1 person dies to a black bear each year in the US but but 5000 women are murdered each year, that means I'm 5000 times more likely to be killed if I were in a forest with a man than with a bear. Nearly everyone encounters at least several if not hundreds of men per day, and most people won't even encounter a bear in their lifetime. If women encountered the same number of bears as the same number of random men they encountered in their day-to-day lives, those numbers would be very different.
In reality, women encounter hundreds of men every day and not a single one of them rapes or assaults them. I'm not saying their fears have no basis in reality, or that they don't take actions that increase their safety, but do they have any idea what percentage of men would actually attack them?
The average man is far more likely to be of help if you're stuck in a forest because they would likely help you get out of the forest. No doubt women have received plenty of help for free throughout their lives on the basis of being a woman, and yet they still fear the idea of a man more than a bear. I'm going to try to put some estimates on the likely outcome for each scenario:
- Man helps you: 50% | Bear helps you 0%
- Man attacks/rapes/assaults you: 0.1 - 5% | Bear attacks you: 25%
- If the man chooses to assault you, you die: 10-50% | If the bear chooses to assault you, you die: 95%
You may disagree on the percentage, but even if you were extremely generous to both ends for the other perspective it would be extremely difficult to justify the percent chance of the negative outcome being better for the bear instead of the man. So in all situations, you are far more likely to get a better result with a man than a bear.
It would be interesting to see how people would respond if you asked them would you rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a black man. Would the fear of being thought of as a racist overcome the fear of men?
Factors Playing Into Korea's Gender War
Korea is susceptible to outside influence for a few reasons.
- Korea was a nation that occupied and had much of its culture destroyed during WWII and suffered enormous losses and destruction during the Korean war.
- Korea saw rapid economic development, transforming from one of the poorest nations to one of the richest nations in a few decades.
- Korea is a relatively small country, with most business and culture highly concentrated in the capital city of Seoul. Nearly 50% of the population live in or near Seoul.
- Korea has rapidly adopted the internet. Almost 98% of Koreans own a smartphone today, the highest in the world. Korea was quick to adopt the internet when it was able to and it has become a major part of daily Korean lives.
There are some other factors to consider that tie into the Korean culture war:
- There are huge expectations from Korean society. From a young age, Korean children are bombarded with expectations about education, dating, looks, physique, social status, success, etc. There is a reason Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Korean women have one of the highest rates of plastic surgery in the world. For example, a lot of Korean women (and even men) have their jaw bone cut and removed to restructure their face.
- Korean web culture and gaming/webcomic culture is a huge part of Korean lives. There is a reason the first professional mass-scale competitive esports, Starcraft, arose out of Korea of all places. So a lot of users are susceptible to changes/things in those spaces.
- Many Koreans are struggling economically, a point which is covered in depth in @rokmonster's response.
- Mandatory military service for Korean men. All men have to serve 1.5 years in the military (used to be 2 years until very recently). The compensation for military service is very little, so Korean men feel like they are penalized when trying to enter the workforce. Factor in the increased amount of women entering the workforce and men are starting to feel like they are falling behind.
- Factor these together and you end up with many Koreans that go to video games, webtoons, etc as a means to escape their highly stressful lives. So anything that can be seen as an attack on video games/webtoons/ etc. is going to be highly impactful. Factor in the shared culture and Korean's time/access to the internet and this leads to more explosive results and drama that bleed into Korean culture and life.
Here is an interesting comment I found on reddit with some stats:
Have you heard about Japan's herbivore men? That a large statistic of men aren't having sex or dating? Korea is worse. From demo 19-39 of age, roughly 75% of respondents see dating as a fear or dangerous. Reasons include: possibility of inflicted violence, gender discrimination, gender related crimes like falsely accused of SA (men) or becoming a victim of illegal recording (women), record low interest in marriage etc.
On a question "Is Korea is more favorable towards men or women?" Each sex accused each other of having the advantage and both believe they are the overwhelming victim. Historically, legitimate sexism against women did exist prevalently. But today, it's really a grey area for most developed countries where gender-specific issues do exist but it's the most equal the 2 sexes have ever been. Compare gender equality 50 / 100 / 250 / 500 / 1000+ years ago where women were second class citizens.
75% of young people are afraid of dating. That's a huge number. Korea had its own version of #metoo across many politicians, celebrities, etc, with some cases even ending in suicide (for both victim/accused). People are too stressed studying and working, they don't have the time to date. No doubt Korean internet/social media is having similar effects warping people's perspectives the same way it is doing to people in the west, and you also end up with Koreans that have warped views of the genders.
It's also interesting that both genders view themselves as the victim and that the other gender has unfair advantages. There likely is an element of truth to their claims, and this is a classic case of the grass being greener on the other side.
Megalia's Legacy And Influence On How Feminism is Viewed In Korea
This isn't the first time Korea's gender war caused huge controversies in the country. Megalia was a highly controversial feminist website that had a large influence on shaping Korean views on feminism during 2015 and 2016. According to Wikipedia, 50% of women in Korea considered themselves feminists and 25% of them attributed Megalia as the reason for it. That's 12.5% of women being influenced by a singular group, and supposedly Megalia was extremely full of misandry, with statements wanting to kill all men, calling men bugs, if they had a boy they would abort, celebrating actual stories of men being murdered, and other standard anti-men statements take up to the next level of extreme.
Just some examples of things members in the community did:
- A teacher encouraging a male student in middle school to commit suicide.
- Poisoning men with antifreeze.
- Kindergarten teacher indicating she wanted to have sexual relations with a male child.
- A more comprehensive list in Korean: https://namu.wiki/w/%EB%A9%94%EA%B0%88%EB%A6%AC%EC%95%84/%EC%82%AC%EA%B1%B4%20%EC%82%AC%EA%B3%A0
To try to keep things fair, here are some points in support/defense of Megalia:
- Statement of Megalia was satire to highlight how men talk about/treat women in Korea. They were taking what men said and just changing the genders around.
- Megalia brought to attention issue of hidden cameras in women's bathrooms.
- They raised awareness of violence against women, organizing around tragic events such as the murder of a women from a man who claimed he did so because the hated all women.
- Megalia shut down sites such Soranet, which distributed illegal pornographic material.
Here are some related drama that happened around that time related to Megalia that the west got some exposure to:
https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4tk21u/id_like_to_share_a_disaster_happening_in_korea/ https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4xummg/korean_actress_kim_jayeon_fired_by_gaming_company/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201225070116/https://np.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/4u5jbb/last_3_days_for_korean_manhwawebtoon_community/
To spare the details, there was a lot of controversy in Korea's internet, kdrama, gaming, webtoon spaces all tied to Megalia and feminism.
People made all kinds of attempts to tie Megalia and its influence to other related scandals. For example, in 2016 there was a huge political scandal involving then president Park Geun-hye being influenced/controlled by a shamanism cult. 2 million people ended up protesting and she later got impeached and arrested for the scandal. People online attempted to tie this to a conspiracy of hidden cabal of rich women in Korea using the media and politicians to support the ideas that came out of Megalia. Supposedly the Justice Party, the third biggest political party in outright declared public support of Megalia and members of Megalia infiltrated Korean news media, the Huffington post, politics to push their agenda. The source of this data is suspect so I would take this information with a grain of salt, but the point is that Megalia had such a huge impact on Korean internet discourse.
This is all past drama, but it had a huge net negative impact on Korean men's view of feminism. Even Korean women's support for Feminism began to drop due to all the controversy around it. More sensible feminists in Korea make sure to distance themselves from Megalia, but it seems to have left a permanent negative connotation of feminism in the eyes of Korean culture. If you look at recent trends, feminism has decreased outright support in Korea, such as the number of women in their 20s considering themselves feminist dropping to 31.3% in 2023.
Recent Korean Gender War Drama
I'm going to talk a bit more about the video brought up in the OP: Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War
It's quite an informative video, although it misses some crucial context which is the information I covered above. It does seem like he covered the topic a bit in his follow-up video, but I don't have the time to watch it right now.
To summarize the video, there was controversy in a Korean gacha mobile game because a promised swimsuit skin (cosmetic purchase for a video game character) for the female character was a wetsuit, while the corresponding swimsuit skin for a male character was just a regular swimming trunk with his abs exposed. Gamers got angry and thought this was driven by feminist ideology and that their precious games were forced to be censored (remember how important games are to Korean culture?). They found a female artist on the project who had extremely feminist views (retweeting tweets from Megalia, except it was 5 years ago), blamed her for this, and pressured the company to fire her. However, it turns out this was completely false, the actual artist of the swimsuit skin was a male, and the main decision maker to give the female character the wetsuit was also a male. So to outsiders, it just looked like a group of gacha gaming incel men bullied a company into firing someone for political reasons even though said person's political views had no bearing on the decision the game company made.
Here is a decent writeup of another recent gender war controversy in Korea: https://old.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/18dz3je/least_biased_perspective_on_recent_megalia_hand/
Take a look at the hand sign in Megalia's logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalia#Reaction_to_Gangnam_Station_femicide
While the official stance on the meaning of the hand sign is that it represents an equal sign, in reality, it was used as a way to insult men's penis size. It's basically a dog whistle much akin to the ok sign being a white supremacist symbol. Unlike the ok sign, which was a hoax perpetrated by 4chan, the Megalia hand sign was used by actual members of Megalia to insult men.
An online shitstorm happened about 2 weeks ago when an animation studio Ppuri (뿌리) was under fire because netizens discovered the infamous hand pinch sign in the promo video of Maplestory's Angelic Buster Remaster. At first netizens thought it may have been just a coincidence but upon digging into this studio's previous contract works for various gaming companies, more and more hand pinch signs were being discovered to no end (games: Maplestory, Dungeon Fighter, Blue Archive, Epic 7, Eternal Return etc). In many cases hidden within a single frame of a trailer.
Gallery of these hand signs found recently from just this studio.
However this hand sign controversy first appeared a few years ago with GS25's camping poster and a few other companies. The biggest difference between the incidents from before and the most recent one is that one of Ppuri's lead animator (Datso) was dumb enough to tweet that she worked on the Maplestory project. Revealing her past tweets and retweets linked to feminism and general misandry. Her tweet "I've never quit feminism, I'll keep doing it" has become a meme because of her phrase "은근쓸쩍 스리쓸쩍." Which I think is a really funny phrase but I have no idea how to translate it to English. Sneakily cunningly? So if you've seen the gallery and knowing this particular lead animator's political views, I think it's safe to say that it's no coincidence. It's also inconclusive to say that this animator is a Megalia user. Nevertheless the backlash has been significant.
Personally, I think this hand sign thing is blown a bit out of proportion, maybe some of these are intentional but I also think from certain angles and resting positions that pinching hand gesture can just come out naturally. Regardless, it's become a tainted symbol and something animators/game developers have to be conscious of in Korea now. Outsiders looking into the current Korean gender drama just see a ridiculous controversy, but they don't have the contextual understanding of how tainted feminism and anything associated with it has become in the eyes of the general Korean public.
I also don't think their concerns are completely unfounded even if you ignore the context. If you've been following gaming, you'll know about all the controversies related to gender/beauty that have riled recent produced names, especially from Western developers. There were controversies regarding body types, characters made to look ugly (such as in Pokemon Go), progressive storylines/ideas being pushed via Sweet Baby Inc. the list goes on and on. These trends can be argued to stem from a Feminist perspective. Stellar Blade is a recently released title from Korea that opted to not play into those tropes and instead allows a main character to be a conventionally sexually attractive female, but even that game now has a controversy around censorship. For Koreans looking at these developments on the West, it's not far a stretch for them to want to protect entertainment being produced in their own country from meeting such a fate.
Ultimately what comes to the West is highly filtered and the only reason these stories even come here is because Korean games/webtoons/tv shows/drama/kpop has a fan following. Actual gender/political war issues are less likely to make their way to the West because the number of people who would care about such things is significantly smaller.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
Does the Motte website support something like saving drafts of comments? For example, say I start writing a comment on my phone, and then it turns into a longer response/post so I want to shift over to my computer.
I guess you could just post a comment and edit later but if it's a top-level post on the culture war thread for example, I don't want to post something unfinished so that I can finish it elsewhere on another device. It's not a big deal because I can just save the post elsewhere and get it that way but I was wondering if such a feature is available.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
I believe in Roman times there was an herb/plant that was quite effective as a birth control. but it was used to extinction. I searched it up and it seems to have been known as Silphium. It seems to be called both a contraceptive and aphrodisiac which is interesting. There's still a debate on which plant it was but I'm not surprised the Romans used it to extinction if it was real.
Probably other herbs/concoctions had varying levels of effectiveness, as well as pulling out or engaging in other kinds of sexual acts that wouldn't result in pregnancy. It might be worth looking into the history of prostitution/sex in Japan to see what was done there. Many women actually wrote fiction and diaries in Japan during the Heian period and beyond so there could be a lot of documentation and scholarly research on that subject.
NullHypothesis
4mo ago
You're right, I haven't done my research here properly. I wrongly assumed she was a genetical outlier (which she is, but for different reasons than I thought).
But if Semenya is categorically trans-women then that would serve as a point of example of extreme outliers. Hard to say if Semenya can be considered a trans-women though, it seems intersex is a more appropriate description which is a separate category from trans-women. Goes to show there is some space for nuance outside just the trans-women vs women discussion. Regardless I'm going to remove it from the overall argument since it was built on false premises.
What's interesting is that this fact wasn't mentioned in any article I came across mentioning Semenya and I had to specifically search for it after you pointed this out.
NullHypothesis
4mo ago
That is interesting, probably wasn't the best example I could've used then. Actually, I do remember reading an article or watching a video about how athletes with prosthetic legs can have an advantage over regular runners due to the design of the prosthetic leg reducing the amount of physical effort to move a certain distance and increasing the rebound from the springiness on the leg portion. My post was getting a bit long by this point though and this is beside the point so I just left it out.
If it was an uphill race they would be very likely to lose though.
NullHypothesis
4mo ago
The realm of responsibility falls on the parents. Just as they're responsible for feeding and clothing their kids and deciding what school/clubs/activities to send them to, they're just as responsible for what they choose to put online. Any personal videos you want to put out that you don't want any strangers to see should be private and access heavily restricted.
People can and will sexualize anything and everything, see rule 34. This is a touchy subject but I'm not sure we can or should do more than we already do, which is banning any explicit sexual content of children and socially ostracizing those with that kind of desire. But you can't stop or control what people think, and I draw the uncomfortable line at turning those desires into actions. If they're just engaging in masturbation in the privacy of their own home, then while disgusting, isn't doing any actual harm. But if they start compiling videos to make it easier for others to see, or invite others into their fetishes, or start reaching out to the parents/child then they are engaging in actions that actually have an impact on the person, and punishment should take place here.
Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.
Did you mean the other way around? I think I would be mortified if they were directly some captured in some internet stranger's hard drive, ai generation not so much since the output is not the same as the input. Maybe you meant specifically about deepfakes, that is something I haven't come to terms with myself since I haven't given it much thought yet.
Interestingly this statement is said by a pro-palestine student protestor. The previous time I heard this sentiment was from conservatives criticizing universities for being too left-leaning/left-biased. The question is, would this student be just as supportive if someone came to their school to push far-right talking points? The difference between the two is that one side has far too many proponents of its idea explicitly calling for the death/genocide of another group and the other side gets their views and ideas framed as violence and calls for genocide. Also, in my opinion, the universities have been far too tolerant of one but not the other.
It's only tolerance if you tolerate the intolerable. It's only freedom of speech if you support the speech of those you disagree with the most. At the same time, is it morally/ethically inconsistent to choose to hold people up to their own standards?
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