“Feminism” in Korea has taken on a different meaning sadly. I’ve commented in HN before at how abhorrent women’s right has been in Korea, especially up to my mother’s generation. It really has drastically improved last 20 years. However, many young men feel like the pendulum has swung too much to the other direction. Society still expects men to do “manly things” (mandatory army service, physical labour etc) but girls around their age get policy benefits instead. I’m not going to into whether this feeling is justified or not. But wanted to point out most don’t want women’s right to regress to their mom’s generation. They just want to feel like they are treated equally in society.
A feeling that “the pendulum has swung too much in the other direction” characterizes pretty much any modern reactionary anti-feminist movement in any country. And like in other countries, these feelings aren’t really borne out by the stats [0].
As far as I can tell, the only unique element of the South Korean anti-femenist movement is how mainstream it is. But that doesn’t mean whatever (knee jerk) reaction one might have to an anti-feminist politician at home wouldn’t apply to one in South Korea.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_South_Kor...
Well, I genuinely think the word "feminism" means different thing in Korea to the places I've lived at. It has much more inflammatory undertone there whereas in NZ, its just a term. When I see "anti-feminism" for Korean politician, I construe it to be "anti radical feminism". That's what I was trying to get at.
> these feelings aren’t really borne out by the stat
Those stats you've linked are pretty controversial: one says 10th and the other says 118th.
> Due to the various methods of calculating and measuring gender inequality, South Korea's gender inequality rankings vary across different reports. While the 2017 UNDP Gender Inequality Index ranks South Korea 10th out of 160 countries, the World Economic Forum ranks South Korea 118th out of 144 countries in its 2017 Global Gender Gap Report
I think there are still gender inequality in Korea. The reason I'm defending them is that I just don't want people to label fair bit of young Korean men to be misogynist and write them off. Their struggles are real and if we keep marginalising them I don't think it would get any better.
Oh that’s okay I’ll say it - privileging women over men, and enacting a double standard where men are expected to comfort to a gender role whole women aren’t is NOT FEMINISM.
Feminism is not ‘the pendulum.’ If every aim of feminism were realized, men and women and all people would be equal. The goal of feminism is not a retargeting of supremacy, it is the destruction of supremacy in the first place.
There is really only one kind of person who throws around terms like ‘anti-feminism’ and ‘the pendulum had swung too far’ and I don’t think I need to waste my breath describing them, because every single one of us reading is intimately familiar with them.
Both sides love to fixate on crazy crime stories to make themselves feel like victims. If a Korean man murders a woman, that's femicide and an example of how Korean men behave in general. If a bunch of Korean women share nude photos of men in a website, that's how they're wannabe rapists and an example of how Korean women behave in general. Yada yada.
The young men also opposes any kind of DEI, whether it's for women, rural provinces, or people from poor families, thinking that they are the competent people oppressed by the society. They also denigrate older men in their forties (who happen to be much more left-wing in general), thinking that those oldies were the lucky generation because when they were young jobs were plenty and there were less competition.
Never mind that those old men started their careers with 6-day weeks and horrible safety conditions. Such jobs are still plenty as they were in 1990s, it's just that they're so comparatively shitty that only migrant workers would be willing to fill those positions.
Funnily enough, it looks like fewer and fewer young men are supporting Lee Jun-Seok in recent months. It looks like Yoon's political suicide (via martial law) for the conservative faction did affect Lee in the long term. (It didn't help Lee Jun-Seok that the new president, Lee Jae-Myung, is more politically savvy and is publicly willing to talk about whether young men are feeling the "reverse discrimination" and what the government could do about it.)
Military service is also a benefit that women don't get, too. They don't get to make the connections in the military that would help them along in their careers.
> They just want to feel like they are treated equally in society.
Shouldn't you wait until your country is half run by women before claiming oppression? Until your boss and CEO are as likely to be women as men? I feel like this stuff it bought into by marginal men who are oppressed by other men of a higher class, and average women catch all the flack because they're simultaneously accessible and denying marginal men what they want on a daily basis. They don't see upper-class men as enemies because they don't ever see upper-class men; when they hear about upper-class cruelty, they fantasize about the revenge they would take if they were in power, especially on the women who say no.
In Korea, the anger about conscription just gives them a semi-legitimate gripe that seems like it should be taken away by conscripting women.
Well boss and CEO's generation _were_ heavily discriminated and no one disputes that. For younger generation who are working, they go through 2 years of military service, then sees women in their generation go on a trip to find herself instead, then gets "preferential treatment" at work (e.g. woman police officer goes up 2 rank for giving a person in distress their jacket). Meanwhile, men are expected to financially contribute more for marriages. So now you get this explosive cocktail of resentment: it's hard to get well-paying jobs + have to go to the army + other societal expectation for manhood.
Disclaimer: I don't think it's _that_ bad but I don't live in Korea, and I have lost friends for claiming this.
> I feel like this stuff it bought into by marginal men who are oppressed by other men of a higher class
Yes, there is some truth to this. Korean media is actively fuelling this outrage but I don't think you can't generalize it to everyone who supports it. Funnily enough, latest social discourse is around "Young Forties" (so older men with more social status), so now they are trying to stir up some discourse between generations.
> In Korea, the anger about conscription just gives them a semi-legitimate gripe that seems like it should be taken away by conscripting women.
I do think they should conscript women even for social services and that would quench most of the frustration from young men. But man suggesting this would get mocked for being so petty i.e. "not manly". Politicians also stay well away from this as it would be a political suicide. So where do these marginalised men go? To Lee and anyone who'd listen to them.
Edit: Once you delve deeper into this topic, Korea's abysmal birthrate of 0.68 will really make sense :p
The people at the top don't have a victim mentality because they're successful. However, there are a lot of people who aren't at the top, who aren't doing great, but on the basis of their gender are told that they deserve dispreferential treatment because there's more of their gender at the top of society. I don't see how that makes them evil. Perhaps I'm just totally misunderstanding your point though.
> Military service is also a benefit that women don't get, too. They don't get to make the connections in the military that would help them along in their careers.
They can volunteer if they wanted those supposed benefits. Seems weird to try to make conscription sound like it has positives when it's just purely negative.
> Shouldn't you wait until your country is half run by women before claiming oppression? Until your boss and CEO are as likely to be women as men?
This is an overly simplistic view of "oppression". Do you think that men as a whole somehow benefit from there being an over representation of their gender at the top of society? That despite struggling to survive, because we share the same gender that we aren't suffering or that we can't be oppressed?
It's like people blame all men for the actions of our ancestors and want to take revenge or something. It's really weird.
When we get attacked on our privilege, we feel as if it were a mortal wound.
I completely agree with you. Men pull out the victim card like it was the easiest thing in the fucking world. Of course, if anything happens, it's the fault of those weaker than us.
That's because we aspire to be them. To be the oppressors. There won't be any liberation, just a change of guard.
I fucking hate men and masculinity. This is the poison that will lead to humanity's extinction.
I didn't DM anyone, and I didn't run the campaign, but there happened to be the John Edwards campaign HQ near me so I walked inside and said I could help do their IT, next day I was a full-on volunteer.
They took me to Charleston for a rally (which was cool cuz I never been) and even got me a jacket with my name and the campaign logo on it. Was pretty nifty at the time.
Few months later they hired me and sent me to New Hampshire for the primary.
Wasn't long after that that we were no longer in the running, but was great experience.
Highly recommend more young people attempt cold walk-ins/calls/DMs like this article mentions.
Some non-tech people tend to think of IT folks as jack of all trades with the ability to fix their faulty printer all the way to hacking email accounts for fun/profit.
I'm sure few of them would have believed that their IT team could have prevented the scandal by some fast & serious typing on the keyboard a.k.a hacking for regular folks :)
Seems quaint these days.
It’s interesting how similar opportunities can happen in totally different places.
Glad it turned into something meaningful for you.
I’d prefer not to dive into policy positions here — the main focus of my post was the product-building process and what it was like to work behind the scenes.
> I want to see what it would look like if someone like this had more power and responsibility.
You were attracted to his campaign because of his policy positions, which most people see as dangerous and offensive.
My own story:
- helped found my college paintball club (Rutgers University)
- that became our college paintball team (where we played other schools)
- graduate
- had a real job (involving LOTS of database work)
- find out that year after I left, the team go to go to paintball World Cup (and I was mad/envious that I didn't get to go)
- quit my job
- wanted to go to World Cup and only person I knew was the head of the college league so DM'ed him asking if he needed help with the college event. He replies that he actually needs help with a player database and asks if I know databases? (I do)
- Go to world cup, love it, keep working on the player database
- Three years later I'm the General Manager of the pro-paintball league (I was 26!)
People would often ask me, at the time, if this was my dream job. I would often answer "Calling it my 'dream job' would imply I knew it existed as an option to dream about. I just emailed a guy and one thing led to another and here I am"
Thank you.
Glad you enjoyed the read!
Commentors here are not from Korea, so maybe we should refrain from commenting about policy of a given candidate?
I really enjoyed your story, about how much tech can achieve. Technology really is a multiplier of effort. Amazing story.
HN is an international place. Even just Silicon Valley itself is.
Thank you for sharing this short time of your (development) life, including all the reasons and logic on why and how.
With those little takeaways in between like talking to users first to understand their requirements, building an mvp and shipping it as early as possible I was half expecting the article ending with the kind of startup lessons/wisdom you typically see here on HN.
But I'm really glad it wasnt. Not everything has to have a grand lesson or takeaway. I enjoyed reading your once in a lifetime experience.
Happy to hear you enjoyed the ride :)
In his 40s, touring the country "debating" college kids. Selling middle-school level economic arguments that appeal to online community addicts.
Basically a spokesman for the "I tell it like it is" crowd.
What is that about? Why do they generally always target college kids for that kind of thing instead of, hell I don't know, nursing homes or construction sites?
> He has been noted for his staunch antifeminism and support from South Korean idaenam (young men).
…
> He became popular in the 20s and 30s due to his opposing stance against political correctness such as "faux feminism," introducing reforms supporting meritocracy rather than outright equality of outcome.
I know only a little about Korean politics, enough to know that it’s very dramatic with wild stuff happening, but not really to understand it. From the outside, the politics around feminism there seems rather strange.
> Lee was an early proponent of the finger pinching conspiracy theory, a claim alleging hidden radical feminist messaging in advertisements
Speaking of strange.
> Lee's advocacy of merit-based processes such as exam scores, credentials, and measurable qualifications has been viewed by supporters as aligning with younger voters' expectations of fair competition.
I suppose all the political content was left out of the linked article, but it would be nice to have more context.
Also, looks like he’s at least somewhat technical:
> After graduating from Harvard University in 2007, Lee returned to Korea to perform military duties working as a software developer (alternative military service as industrial technical personnel) at 'Innotive', an image browsing software startup, a subsidiary of Nexon.
> After completing his national service, Lee prepared to start his own venture. He received funding from the venture startup program backed by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups on 5 August 2011 and founded Classe Studio: an ed-tech startup that developed personalized tutoring software and workplace training applications.
Weird diseases of a chronically online generation.
Are there any other countries in the world that use a different wiki than Wikipedia as their main wiki, except for those where Wikipedia is banned? Korea seems like the only one.
Any active, non-historical example of feminism is likely to be considered radical. I think for us to have a reasonable discussion, you’d need to define what radical feminism means to you.
Otherwise what you’re saying is practically equivalent to “Koreans are fine with good feminism, but draw the line at bad feminism”. Which, besides being tautological, is just a rephrasing of the pendulum thing.
> I think there are still gender inequality in Korea.
It seems we agree the issue that feminism aims to solve still exists in South Korea?
> The reason I'm defending them is that I just don't want people to label fair bit of young Korean men to be misogynist and write them off. Their struggles are real and if we keep marginalising them I don't think it would get any better.
I think it’s very possible to point out actions and beliefs rooted in misogyny while also recognizing that the people expressing those beliefs have real struggles. I think people can change and even if they won’t, you can still be empathetic.
I don’t see any inherent marginalization in noticing misogyny. These men are facing real problems. But a lot of the blame for these problems is likely misdirected.
I’ve also been reading some of the replies and I think I should learn more about this from other perspectives. Thanks for chiming in.
From what I could find, working in a presidential campaign is mostly volunteer-based and pretty much full-time.
It sounded fun and like an incredible experience, but I was already working full-time and didn’t have that kind of availability. So I politely declined.
The second rule of it is that the right questions (have you stopped beating your wife?) can always be spun to make your opponent look like a complete idiot. Always control the framing of a situation.
The third rule of politics is that while intelligent people can see through charades #1 and #2, and if they aren't your target demographic, you don't need to give a shit about what they think.
If you go with your own microphone you can shout out and shut down the competition and game your own youtube clips, while the competition can't trespass you from the property.
It's really the ultimate cheap shot.
You basically have to be a moron to debate someone like Charlie Kirk in the first place because the game is rigged; he has the table, the microphone, the editing, the security and if you object to the rules there's nothing you can do but walk away. The moment you get the upper hand he can simply kill the mic, stop recording, and move on to the next guy and all the meanwhile claiming he's doing it on neutral terrain.