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‘Men don’t know why they became unhappy’: the toxic gender war dividing South Korea
(www.theguardian.com)
Capitalism. That's always the answer.
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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Capitalism to fascism pipeline (so hot right now) with not having immigrants to blame so women become the scapegoat.
What the actual fuck. I'm mostly sharing this article because it left me speechless. I kinda had to take 3 attempts to even pull through with reading the whole article. I had to think of a female friend i once knew and about how she would feel in all this. It's just ... maybe the article exaggerates a lot ... i hope.
Shocking article, thanks for sharing. I heard of demographic challenges, 4B and the recent presidential fuckery, but had no idea SK is in this bad of a state by now.
Interesting how in all countries, the right wing elite always presents a boogeyman for the peple, usually in the form of an opressed group within society. I wish the article dug deeper beyond a mention to show, that all the problems that make these young Korean men angry are caused by neoliberal capitalism.
He later admitted he had singled out On because of her short hair.
There’s a lot of very confusing toxic masculinity stuff in Asia. This man obviously has mental problems.
This reads like incel radicalization which originated in the anglosphere on the internet.
the anger exploding online reflects deeper societal shifts. She traces young men’s discontent to South Korea’s embrace of neoliberalism. “Before democratisation, when military regimes ruled Korea, the government could create stable jobs,” she says. “Up to the late 80s, men with only a college education could get jobs in good companies. The economy was expanding rapidly.” But by the mid-90s those men were being laid off and “when social hierarchy changes, groups used to more powerful or privileged positions will respond with intense emotional reactions to their loss of status and respect”
Seems to me there is a whole lot of anger simmering in general, and misogyny is one way of expressing this, especially when they status of the social groups are shifting in relation to each other. For some men, losing status is an existential crisis.
The same dynamic plays out in other countries, but also includes other targets like gay, foreigners, ...
Of course politics doesn't handle unexpected consequences and long term effects well and at worst will exploit it for their own gains instead of defusing this.
To be frank, I don't like this common neoliberal talking point that's like "if men lose access to stable jobs, they're entitled misogynists" this is a sex reductionist take.
Men and women, should both be entitled to good paying jobs. The elites want men and women fighting each other over meagre scraps.
they’re entitled misogynists
That's about as helpful as "have you tried not being poor?" and doing the elite's job of blaming each other.
Yep..
The culture wars and gender wars are intentional distractions. The class war is the one that matters. The billionaires figure they can solve the housing crisis, solve economics, end war, and save the environment by simply making the rest of us extinct. And in the most cruelly utilitarian way possible, there is even some truth to that. They do not value human creativity, human rights, or human life at all. They are extracting every last scrap of value we have, then they will end us. They consider themselves above the rest of humanity, transhumans, superhumans, better than obsolete humans, and they think the world will be an objectively better place with much fewer of us on it. When you start to see everything that's going on in the world it all starts to make sense when you understand that is actually their goal. Their goal is to not need us any longer, and then to remove us. I am certain it will not be as easy as they think, but expect them to try.
I have thought about this for a while now.
It definitely seems like the whole gender war topic is artificially inflated by social media, which in turn is owned and regulated by billionaires, so i'm inclined to think that yes, the gender wars are a part of a distraction scheme by the rich to keep the people divided, but also i think there maybe is more to it.
Like, i have talked to a lot of people in person, and the common narrative seems to be among a lot of people (maybe a third) that they outright don't want to have children, never wanted to have any, and simply feel pressured by society to marry and have children at all. In that case, you could look at it like a "liberation movement". But also, that is only a small part of the population (maybe 1/3). Then you have a lot of people who don't have an opinion and simply move along with whatever the societal mainstream is (maybe another 60%), and then you have a small amount of anarchists who want to determine their own lifes, and these often do want to have kids. So, a significant part of society (i'd say maybe 60%) is inflluenced by the media, and the media sends two conflicting narratives:
On the one hand, they send the narrative in leftist spaces that "having no children is a good thing and you should all want it. Having children pushes the women into difficult situations since they will end up being the caretaker and such."
On the other hand, in right-wing circles, especially the white-supremacy movement, they say that having children is good because we need to preserve our white race.
So, if you take these two things together, possibly there's a push to make right-wing people have more children and left-wing people have less children. But that's only a guess on my side. I'm still investigating more about this.
Who said "entitled"? OP was merely observing an outcome.
Swear to fucking god, we can't say, "A happened, predictably followed by B.", without someone screaming, "You support B!"
Both men and women are miserable because they both feel like they need to be something they're not in order to appease the other.
Men, you don't need a high paying job.
Women, you don't need to disrespect yourselves.