Exploring the political divide between young men and women in South Korea
In a Financial Times article journalist John Burn-Murdoch highlighted a sharp and increasing divide in the political and ideological positions held by young men and women in South Korea. Indeed, beneath the vast currents of the ‘Korean Wave’ of Seoul’s soft-power lies a disquieting political and social divergence between the young men and women of Asia’s fourth largest economy.
At its most alarming extreme the ideological shift serves to highlight a sharp rise in misogynistic discourse amongst young South Korean men. Such a development is not limited to South Korea however, indeed research sanctioned by the UK Home Office warned against an alarming resurgence of global and domestic misogynistic worldviews that have grown and diversified in the last ten years. However, the sharp rise holds particular potency in South Korea where #MeToo protests in 2018 were amongst Asia’s most sustained and passionate and in a country which has been seen as one of Asia’s most successful liberal democracies.
The plight of feminism and its support amongst young Koreans holds clear importance, for South Korea has in recent years faced an epidemic of crimes against women, including upskirting and revenge porn with digital sex crimes in particular rising from 2,289 in 2018 to 12,727 in 2022. Indeed values matter in the fight against misogyny, South Korea’s long-standing social conservatism was directly confronted by a #MeToo movement that problematised both the portrayal and treatment of women in the workplace, the media and the home. Such a challenge was immortalized in Choo Nam-joo’s highly successful novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 which highlighted the hopes of a Korean cultural recalibration in challenging the everyday sexism that had long plagued the lives of Korean women.
Yet the rise in misogynistic discourse threatens to sweep away the advancements made by Korean feminists in challenging such practices. Moreover there is a clear connection between the visceral anger of those on the extremes of Korean anti-feminist movements and the political fortunes of parties openly questioning the progress made in gender equality in South Korea.
In the 2021 mayoral election in South Korea’s capital, Seoul, 72.5% of young male voters voted for the conservative ‘People Power Party’, a higher percentage even than the traditionally conservative men over 60 demographic. Indeed, whilst there is a clear separation between mainstream conservative parties in South Korea and the corrosive and violent, predominantly online misogyny eliciting increasing alarm globally, the People Power Party has courted young ‘anti-feminist’ men. For instance, one staffer working for current President, and People Power Party leader, Yoon Suk-yeol boldly claimed to the BBC that “90% of men in their twenties are anti-feminist”. Moreover, Yoon Suk-yeol himself blamed feminism for Korea’s low-birth rate and blamed advocacy for women’s rights preventing “healthy relationships between men and women”.
The courting of angry young South Korean men was not merely campaign rhetoric either, at the mayoral level in Seoul initiatives installed to safeguard women in public spaces were abolished whilst Yoon has repeatedly sought to abolish South Korea’s Gender Equality Ministry and successfully dismantled gender quotas for government officials drawing international criticism, a sharp rebuke for a country once celebrated for ‘breaking patriarchal barriers’ in the election of its first female President Park Geun-hye in 2012.
Indeed, some in South Korea framed President Park’s arrest and conviction on charges of corruption as evidence that women were not suited to political office in South Korea. Other men claim that a form of ‘reverse sexism’ in South Korea and the emergence of women into a highly competitive job and housing market has blocked their social and economic progression despite the fact that women make up only 5% of corporate boards in South Korea. Finally allusions to South Korea’s confucian heritage and its amalgamation with South Korea’s infamous top-down working structures that require ‘absolute obedience’ have been cited for the divergence in political identity amongst South Korea’s young on women’s place in society.
However, and crucially for the country with the world’s lowest fertility rate, increasingly women are rejecting such excuses for the resurgence in misogynistic discourse and reasoning. Moreover women are rejecting settling for Korean men that hold such views, undertaking an unofficial ‘marriage strike’ and spurning motherhood in record numbers. As such the growing political divergence between young Korean men and women on how they view society risks a fractured gender politics becoming entrenched, with a lost generation the result of growing misogyny amongst young South Korean men.
As such this split matters, it reflects the salience and electoral influence of misogynistic movements, with South Korea’s experience posing a clear challenge for democracies seeking to safeguard gender equality amidst an increasingly global backlash amongst young men. Obvious parallels with Japan and Taiwan, both of which have seen large social movements criticizing the experiences faced by women, have implications for democracy in the region. How democracies uphold commitments to gender equality whilst recognising the misplaced anger of young men poses considerable challenges especially as all three contexts face low-birth rates and their accompanying economic strain