Many young South Koreans are angry. Disillusioned by unfulfilled political promises, skyrocketing housing prices, and alarming wage stagnation, young people demand political change. This time, citizens have chosen to defy the nation’s historical trends by surrendering their liberal stance to instead assume the nation’s new swing voting bloc.
In particular, South Korean men in their 20s are the burgeoning skeptics of progressive politics, enraged over ex-President Moon’s failure to deliver on key domestic issues like affordable housing. Marking a dramatic populist shift, young men have redirected their growing economic frustration by scapegoating women as the new out-group responsible for these issues. This growing anti-feminist movement is a dangerous rightward turn among young voters and represents a catastrophic blow to an already grueling fight for gender equality.
An outpour of political frustration and misogyny culminated in the 2022 election, one in which the perils of populism and the unyielding consequences of gendered violence manifested in full force. On March 9, 2022, Yoon Suk-Yeol of the People Power Party won South Korea’s most competitive Presidential race yet, since the nation’s first free election in 1987. In a political quarrel characterized by mudslinging and impropriety, Yoon bested Lee Jae-myung of the incumbent Democratic Party to restore his party to power after the removal of Park Geun-hye from office in 2017. Yoon Suk-Yeol’s campaign platform relied heavily on the exploitation of an anxious youth male demographic, blaming women for societal issues like a low birth rate, slow economic growth, and the collapse of meritocracy. Yoon drew in South Korean men in their 20s who had found it increasingly difficult to find sustainable employment and affordable housing.
Needing a way to channel years of joblessness and anger towards the system, young men have painted themselves as victims of a vicious wave of “reverse sexism,” and in response, Yoon gathered widespread support among this target demographic by pledging to eliminate the national Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. According to young, conservative anti-feminists, women have disrupted the meritocratic system by energizing feminist movements like #MeToo and receiving societal privileges through women’s universities and gender-based job quotas. In fact, in a survey of South Korean citizens, over 80% of the male survey respondents in their 20s and 30s claimed to endure reverse sexism.
The reality? Women in South Korea face the most dramatic gender pay gap of any OECD nation and suffer one of the highest female homicide rates in the world. Women endure insidious cycles of trauma and hopelessness through sexual violence and ineffective law enforcers, and face unattainable beauty standards, even after winning three Olympic gold medals. Moreover, they face a perpetual glass ceiling in the job market and severe underrepresentation in positions of corporate responsibility.
Yet, many men see women as greater threats to economic mobility and societal welfare than the richest and most corrupt of Korea’s elites. Responsible for South Korea’s corporatocracy, the ruling class of “chaebols” – billionaire families that own national conglomerates like Samsung, Hyundai, and LG – wield control over national political agendas. They contribute to economic stagnation by crowding out small and medium-sized corporations, widening income inequality, youth unemployment, and political corruption.
Rife with political scandal, chaebols are repeatedly given the easy way out with President Yoon having already granted nearly 1,700 pardons in his first months of office to some of Korea’s highest elites, including Samsung’s Lee Jae Yong who was found guilty of bribery and embezzlement among other charges. “Gapjil” is a newly coined term to describe the all-too-common instances of workplace abuse, and so severe has this issue become that “gapjil” hotlines are now commonplace. While backlash against oppressive workplace dynamics has slowly revealed itself through whistleblowing and protest, public distrust of the justice system persists as rulings continue to let executives off the hook for even the most egregious instances of workplace abuse.
Research group Embrain Public found in a survey that almost 30% of office workers endured workplace harassment. According to analysis by Workplace Gapjil 119, an organization to support victims of office abuse, workplace sexual harassment cases led to punishment only 7.6% of the time with over 60% of cases abandoned from January 2021 to January 2022, due to legal loopholes where executives are exempt “official employer” regulations towards subordinates in much lower positions. In other cases, like that of Korean Air chaebol Lee Myung-hee who forced staff to kneel before her in an onslaught of verbal abuse when forgetting to buy ginger and physically assaulted her gardener with metal shears among other violent offenses, the retribution is minimal. Lee was punished with an initial sentence of community service and two years of jail time, only to be reduced to three years of probation and no jail time.
Despite the persistence of abysmal working conditions at the hands of corporate tyranny, this election cycle has revealed that young conservative men will still blame women in defiance of the other apparent factors that contribute to domestic economic problems.
In South Korea, to be labeled a feminist is akin to being deemed a Communist during the era of McCarthyism: an activist can face barriers to her political career, a K-pop star is met with fans burning her photos, and YouTubers receive death threats. For the President of a major conglomerate, it even meant a demotion for the slightest of feminist accusations. Politicians refer to feminism as “toxic as terrorism,” and even women’s rights activists hesitate to use the term “feminist” to describe themselves in fear of discrimination and judgment.
Addressing this issue requires the full acknowledgement of its multifaceted nature. Not only is misogyny pervasive as a tactic of political populism but it also violently manifests itself in daily life, through digitized abuse and the pervasive spy-cam crisis. Socially, young Korean men possess beliefs more anti-feminist than their fathers and direct blame towards women, rather than the culture of patriarchy and male chauvinism, for mandatory military conscription and the financial burdens of breadwinning.
For President Yoon and South Korea’s political establishment, responding to the increasingly polarized gender divide will prove to be a highly salient social and political dilemma. Absent addressing the root cause of South Korea’s economic crisis, it may prove difficult to assuage the uncontrolled anger of young men in the nation, but leaders should address the proximate impacts of gendered violence first and foremost through instituting harsher punishments for perpetrators of sexual violence in the workplace and online.
The case of South Korea parallels the lasting effects of Trumpism on conservative nativism in the United States, which attributes economic troubles to asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants. In fact, South Korea’s violent gender polarization reminds us that the true plague lies in populism, and the weaponization of national crises against marginalized groups.
Image by Manki Kim licensed under the Unsplash License.
