Gender equity at stake in South Korea elections

Gender is not the only issue in this week’s election in South Korea, but it’s the hot-button topic. It’s not clear if there was ever a successful sexual revolution in the country, but the counter-revolution is definitely doing well. The “F-word” (feminism) is being used a lot by both major parties, and not in a good way.

The conservative People Power Party (PPP), unsurprisingly, deplores the activism of young feminists. Presidential candidate Yoon Suk-yeol claims “gender discrimination no longer exists,” and blames feminism for South Korea’s very low birth rate.

What’s surprising is that the liberal Democratic Party’s candidate, Lee Jae-Myung, sort of agrees. He’s a bit shamefaced about it, but he has expressed his “distaste” for feminism and recently shared a post online that said the “madness” of feminism had to be stopped.

This is a long way from the politics of outgoing President Moon Jae-in, who is also a member of the Democratic Party. When Moon took office five years ago, he raised the minimum wage, cut the maximum workweek from 68 to 52 hours and did all the things you’d expect from a former human rights lawyer.

Lee is not necessarily more conservative than Moon, but on the gender issue he has had to retreat. Most of Korean politics is unchanged — the southeast and older people vote conservative, the southwest and younger people vote liberal, etc. — but on this one issue there has been an anti-feminist landslide.

In byelections last April for the mayors of South Korea’s biggest cities, a staggering 72.5 per cent of young men in their 20s in Seoul voted for the PPP. The second city, Busan, was not far behind, and even among men in their 30s the conservatives were far ahead of their usual score. There is a huge male backlash going on, and even the Democrats can’t ignore it. Their calculation is as simple as it is ugly.

Young women who normally vote for the Democrats have nowhere else to go politically: there’s no other liberal-inclined party with a chance of winning office.

But what has happened to the young men? South Korea is still a strongly patriarchal society, but the young of both sexes were much more open to changing all that. There was certainly not the yawning gap between the sexes that has opened up today.

There is also a general shortage of suitable jobs for the generation now coming out of the universities and colleges. The Ministry of Gender Equality’s activities gave young men who didn’t get good jobs a reason to blame feminism. It backed initiatives like startup loans for female entrepreneurs, incentives to businesses to promote gender balance on their boards, and a pledge to allocate 30 per cent of cabinet posts to women. All that was long overdue, actually, but it fed the fire of misogyny.

And above all, the feminist movement took a wrong turn in about 2015. Radical online feminist sites adopted a strategy called “mirroring,” in which they took the worst kind of derogatory anti-female abuse and reshaped it as anti-male abuse, e.g. “hannam-choong” (male pest) for a man and “gisaengchoong” (parasite) for a male fetus. The campaign gave misogynists, and the patriarchy in general, enough ammunition to wage a ruthless and largely successful anti-feminist, even antifemale campaign in the media. That’s why 75 per cent of urban young men vote for the PPP, and why many Korean feminists now call themselves “equalists” instead. This too shall pass in the end, but it was a serious tactical error.