The Anti-Anti-Feminist Election

The Atlantic

5 days ago

Opposition to women's rights has helped fuel authoritarian movements in Russia, Hungary, Brazil, and the United States. That the same is true in South Korea, which is holding an early presidential election tomorrow, is perhaps less well known. There, the role of anti-feminists is particularly stark, helping to put women's issues at the very center of the country's fraught contest.
To appreciate the stakes, recall that just a few months ago, South Korea nearly lost its democracy: On December 3, then-President Yoon Suk Yeol shut down the parliament, banned all political parties, and suspended the free press. His power grab was swiftly defeated by mass demonstrations and a heroic parliamentary effort—members climbed fences to reach the chamber, where they unanimously voted to lift martial law—but the shock remained. Why was a country known for technological prowess, slick horror films, and dreamy boy bands descending into chaos?
The answer lies in part with the country's struggle over women's rights. Even as South Korea has raced ahead economically, gender equality has lagged behind other indicators. Out of 146 countries indexed by the World Economic Forum, South Korea comes 112th in women's economic participation and 100th in women's educational attainment (only slightly better than Iran).
For longer than it has had a democracy, South Korea has had a women's-rights movement pressing to improve these conditions. In the late 1980s, a labor activist named Kwon In-sook filed charges against the government for sexual assault she allegedly suffered at a police station. Dozens of women's organizations came together to support her in a coalition known as the Korean Women's Associations United. KWAU wound up playing an important role in the country's democratic transition, and Kwon herself served as a member of parliament until last year.
In recent decades, women's rights have advanced steadily, if slowly. Advocates successfully pushed for sexual- and domestic-violence legislation in the 1990s. In 1999, they managed to abolish a system that awarded extra points on civil-service exams to military veterans, who are overwhelmingly male due to South Korea's male-only conscription. They got rid of the hoju family-registration system, which automatically counted men as the heads of households.
But legislative advocacy has not eradicated violent crime against women, a grim reality that has spurred a particularly dramatic upsurge in women's activism in the past 10 years. In 2016, a woman was murdered near the world-famous Gangnam metro station in Seoul by a man who complained about being 'ignored' by women. In 2019, a criminal network implicated K-pop stars, corrupt police officers, and elite businessmen in a slew of crimes—among them, administering date-rape drugs and nonconsensually filming sexual encounters to distribute online. South Korean feminists have demonstrated against gender violence and objected to its glorification in popular culture. In 2015, for example, Maxim Korea featured a 'bad guy' theme on its cover: A man was shown smoking by his car with a woman's legs, bound at the ankles, jutting out of his trunk. 'Girls like 'bad guys'?' the story demanded. 'This is a real bad guy. Are you dying to love it?'
In recent years, some elements of the South Korean feminist movement have attracted attention for their radicalism; others, for their media-savvy tactics. Adherents to the 4B movement refuse to date, have sex with men, marry them, or have children (these tenets all start with bi, which roughly means 'no' in Korean). In 2018, in an action called Escape the Corset, women threw out cosmetic products and cut their hair—making headlines in a country where about a third of women in their 20s have had plastic surgery, largely to meet exacting beauty standards. That same year, a news anchor became the first woman in her field to wear eyeglasses on major-network TV.
The ever-higher profile of the feminist movement has inspired right-wing forces to present themselves as the champions of disgruntled men. The story is a familiar one: South Korea has some of the classic problems of an industrialized society, including a housing crisis affecting young people, a declining birth rate, and a short supply of well-paying jobs. Anti-feminist forces have galvanized supporters by blaming these problems on women and feminists.
The gambit has worked. In 2016, anti-feminists went after the actor Kim Jayeon, who voiced one of the characters in the popular Korean video game Closers, because she wore a T-shirt that read girls don't need a prince. A backlash among gamers led the company to fire her. The episode spoke to a broader phenomenon in South Korean society. According to one poll, a whopping 79 percent of men now believe they are being discriminated against because of their gender.
Much as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro did in 2016 and 2018, respectively, Yoon capitalized on men's grievances in his 2022 run for president, using anti-feminism as a cudgel against the outgoing center-left president. In his campaign, Yoon promised to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. He repeatedly claimed that South Korea did not have a misogyny or gender-violence problem. His wife, Kim Keon-hee, mocked victims of sexual assault in a highly circulated YouTube interview. Gender issues became central to the campaign, and the young male voters Yoon attracted formed a base of support as he swung toward authoritarianism.
Yoon was impeached after his aborted December coup, but South Korea's political crisis did not end there. Only on April 4, when the constitutional court upheld his impeachment, was Yoon formally removed from office. His party is in turmoil over his legacy and only recently settled on its candidate for tomorrow's election. The Democratic Party is running Lee Jae-myung, the same candidate Yoon faced in 2022, and he is now the front-runner.
Lee mostly shied away from women's issues when he ran against Yoon in 2022, but this year, he has promised to empower the gender-equality ministry. In the past, he has rebuked Yoon for claiming that there is no gender inequality in South Korea; he has also promised to reduce the gender-wage gap, strengthen laws against stalking and dating violence, offer free HPV vaccines to adolescents, and establish a system for reporting and monitoring businesses with discriminatory employment practices. Feminists will likely support him to prevent the right's return to power. Kim Jae-yeon of the Progressive Party ran to become 'South Korea's first feminist president,' but she ended her campaign on May 9, asserting that the priority should be to ' deter far-right insurrectionist power from seizing presidential authority again.' She has endorsed Lee.
With the disarray on the right, Lee stands a good chance of winning the presidency. If he does, he would do well to remember that South Korean democracy will be preserved not by appeasing anti-feminists, but by devising solutions to real problems, such as the cost-of-living and urban-housing crises, that gave an opening to demagogues like Yoon in the first place.