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WTF is going on in Korea?
Meta: I haven't posted in the CWT in a minute, Life gets in the way. This post is going to be mostly copy pasted content from elsewhere. I will attempt to consolidate some of it here. It's probably going to be a very sparse list compared to all the relevant pieces of context, but I attempt to shed some light and discuss nevertheless.
TLDR: The "Gender War" is a significant aspect of the Korean culture wars. And it seems to be more pronounced in Korea than any other society. I really want to know why. I think this bears studying given gender relations are deteriorating globally, and if Japan is 10 years ahead in neetdom, South Korea is definitely 10 years ahead in whateverthefuck dom this is. Their infamously low birthrate is also an elephant in the room, whilst we have this discussion.
Exhibit A
This culture war survey:
Page 12, We can see that Koreans most of all nationalities think there is significant tension between men and women. Koreans tend to top the charts for other questions as well, so it might just be the case that the Korean social fabric is especially frayed, or Koreans are just especially neurotic or self-critical.
However, it does seem that the social fabric is fraying like no other on multiple fronts in Korea:
Exhibit B
Just simple web searching. If something is in the air, people are probably talking about it. Or inversely, if people are taking about it, it stinks.
It does seem that the Gender War is becoming more "interesting". Not especially so in Korea however. But try the search term "reddit war $COUNTRY", and lo and behold, you actually get posts about it when you try with
COUNTY='Korea'.Some examples from the first page: https://old.reddit.com/r/Hangukin/comments/1708gpj/can_people_explain_to_me_wtf_is_going_on_with_the/, https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/18cnto9/whats_going_on_with_the_gender_conflict_and_it/, https://old.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/18qlyqe/why_does_the_battle_of_sexes_seem_more_pronounced/, https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/19bvpjq/whats_the_deal_with_feminism_and_antifeminism_in/, https://old.reddit.com/r/SingaporeRaw/comments/192yymo/do_you_think_singapore_will_face_a_south_korean/
Exhibit C
"The incel election" Enough said? I don't think there is much other evidence required that this is a significant CW front in Korea.
Youtube video - Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War (You can disagree with thesis, I'm just linking to show its a thing people are picking up on)
Study - The Gender War and the Rise of Anti-family Sentiments in South Korea (You can disagree with thesis...)
Exhibited D
This is totally comprised of anecdotes, but I buy it.
Some comments from the reddit posts above: Common theme, Korean feminism dials the man-hate up to 11.
So what gives? Why did the gender war hit Korea like a truck?
Korea is already on its way to extinction, so at least this won't be a problem for that long, but still, I am really left scratching my head. Are there any historical examples of this ?
One running theory other than the normie, "It's because they work really long hours hurr durr" (which does have a massive nugget of truth to it), is that Korea is especially unfathomably status obsessed. All that exam cramming, all that plastic surgery, it's all indicative.
I point out the above because most countries the gender war is more along the lines of "incel men" vs "feminists". Men are usually the active camp complaining about not getting anything from women, women complain about not getting anything from society, men take the aggressive stance. However, in Korea women are on the offensive as well, this seems unique to me.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that South Korea's birth rate is a product of gender war. It just seems like a miserable place to live, where children are drafted into the rat race as soon as possible, forced into 4 A.M. tuition classes for exams they're going to write a decade later, coming home at 10 PM, then doing it all over again, until you eventually graduate, get a job and can inflict the same rat race on a new kid who has the misfortune to emerge from a South Korean womb. An endless labyrinth of status games that makes the experience of parenthood and childhood uniquely awful, even by the infamously taxing standards of East Asia.
It may be that the miserable nature of the South Korean lifestyle makes dating logistically difficult, and as a consequence men and women develop mutual hostilities simply because they have fewer opportunities to come into intimate contact with each other. But I'm just speculating.
One point of commonality between Korea and the West is that these stories of "gender polarization" are really just about sharp radicalization of women, and the author's need to coach that observation in both-sidesism for political correctness. There's a graph that circulates on Twitter frequently about how Western youth are supposedly polarizing sharply away from each other, with women becoming more left-wing and men becoming more right-wing, and if you actually look at the graph it just shows men becoming mildly more conservative, a change that is barely perceptible, while women are stampeding to the left.
South Korea is an exemption though, as far as I can tell.
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My suspicion is that Korea is just a sucky place due to their lifestyle and that places which are sucky for fixable-seeming reasons(Koreans could just not do the things that make them miserable if they could figure out the coordination problem) are drawn to radical and generally bad ideas. You used to see it a lot with communism; tsarist Russia was genuinely worse off than its neighbors even if everyone expected it to catch up eventually. I'd hazard a guess that Korea has built-in antibodies to communism for obvious neighbor-related reasons and that it has no such antibodies to feminism, allowing it to run wild into radical man-hating.
In other words, Korean gender wars are a side-effect of the same factors driving down the birth rate. And I've pointed out before that people don't have kids if they expect it to be a miserable experience all around which for Koreans is a very reasonable and grounded expectation. I like to compare to rednecks in America who absolutely love being parents and have a replacement fertility. My tribe's TFR advantage isn't because of our better family values, it's because we expect to actually like it(well, kind of- I'm talking about the broader red tribe here and not about tradcaths specifically, that TFR is probably due to conservative family values).
Yes, that's called "being a fully mechanized nation". Most Western powers ran into this somewhere around the 1900s, and women were first granted rights above and beyond men (as in, "rights without corresponding responsibilities") in those nations around that time- you see that with the right to vote most prominently [without the corresponding duty to be drafted into a war they voted themselves into, something we see in Ukraine today], but prohibition and minimum-age requirements for brides are their doing as well.
I think the pedofascist was/is trivially correct when he made the point that these policies, from the start, are properly viewed as radical man-hating; tearing down the places they'll go after work and putting ever-increasing caps on the quality of women they can afford with no suitable substitute are not exactly pro-man things (worth noting 1984 begins with a description of "the only woman a middle-class income affords the average man is an ugly, infertile, prostitute", and then Winston finds a secretly-transgender [from a biological standpoint] woman who he has wild sex with before the Gender Police torture them to ego death; I believe Orwell predicted modern gender politics to a tee). In that light, first-wave feminists must have been motivated by the same hatred/anger that motivates third-wave feminists (and the white-knights for each wave similarly motivated), and it's always the legitimately transgender individuals that are used as tokens by said women only to later suffer from it (in this case, "the 1% of women who actually are competitive with the men want the right to pursue those opportunities"- something that would fit under the trans umbrella as 1900-1950s society would have understood it; today, the genders are reversed, where men are demanding the opportunities and privileges of women).
[Further effort post: the concept of transgenderism is coherent from a strictly biological standpoint, and our instinctive grouping of all non-straight-as-in-established-man-on-youngest-possible-woman sexuality into "biology should not predict this behavior therefore the people that do these things are malfunctioning" is also coherent, but the people who are transgender under this definition are not the people most people would claim it is today!]
But if the complete obviation of the biological male gender role was such an impending disaster, what let us avoid those consequences for so long? Well, the post-war WW2 boom pushed the economic balance in the West far enough towards men that it was the women who couldn't meaningfully co-ordinate to soak up so much wealth, but that was over by 1980 and the problem our great-grandparents failed to solve has returned to haunt us once again.
Korea, then, is experiencing this for the first time, in full force, being that they have only just made it to full mechanization (they weren't in a position to benefit from post-WW2 booms especially thanks to that civil war)... and being a US-occupied nation means they have to deal with the US' cultural outlook/propaganda, which is currently tilted in the gynosupremacist direction. It's probably worth considering how the Japanese managed to avoid this problem, but I think that was because they mechanized in that boom time and managed to lock in a "the genders aren't actually at war with each other" mindset (and their rule-following did the rest) [but they still haven't dodged the problem, because all the good gender relations propaganda in the world can't actually solve a problem of 996/economics].
The Koreans, by contrast, didn't make it in time- but they also happen to be blazing a trail (being a smaller nation) whose trajectory men (and women) in the wider West would be wise to observe, regardless of whether it fixes the problem or conclusively demonstrates it's not fixable.
I think it is true for Americans as well; states that have successfully kept angry/neurotic women from destroying the rights of parents to allow their children to enjoy life as much appear to have higher TFRs, even though their average income would take even more of a hit by having kids. Sadly I can't find a by-state breakdown of TFR for 1920 to prove that, so my evidence for that ends at the car seat thing.
It sounds like a very American thing, to assume that all wars are something you vote yourself into.
I don't think Americans think that about most wars we get involved with, either. There's rarely a chance to vote against them.
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This is also my suspicion about what's going on in the West. Not to the same degree or because of the same factors, but because social atomization drives people apart. This leads to fewer connections with other people, fewer relationships with opposite-gender people (platonic and romantic), fewer intimate connections with people you share a background with, alongside more internet doomscrolling, more online dating, more echo chambers. The main way men and women are coming into contact with each other is through online dating apps. And even the people who have success there (according to whatever their definition of that is), both men and women, regard it as a necessary evil.
It's no wonder men and women hate each other: they know each other only through the adversarial, hierarchical, soul-destroying apps.
I may be an extreme outlier in this but I’ve met, hooked up with, and dated a lot of women (and eventually married one) from dating apps and both me and the women I met for the most part regarded the experience as fun and rewarding. I’m close friends with a couple of my former partners and we’re all happy about it. It was not appreciably worse than meeting women in person. This was mostly in the Bay Area so maybe it’s an unrepresentative market for how good online dating is/bad in person dating is. I’d be happy to keep hooking up with bumble chicks if I hadn’t met my wife.
Every single time I use Online Dating in the past five years, the dates never happen. We match, we talk, I ask her out, she says yes, she bails, I ask her out again, she says yes, she bails again, I get the hint and stop talking to her. This is AFTER I lose weight and move to a major metro area.
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