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I was in Korea some 20 years ago, and the situation for women there really is pretty shit. It's still very patriarchal and traditional (maybe less so now than then, but still very much more so than the West). They aren't anywhere near Islamic levels of oppression, but I heard from a lot of women even before the 4B movement spread that marriage was widely seen as something that women just have to suffer if they ever want a life (and children). They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them, they do not expect sex to be enjoyable, and they are expected to be essentially maidservants for their husbands' families. (There is an entire genre of Korean horror movies about evil mother-in-laws.)
Of course there are exceptions, and they all look at fairy tale romances as an ideal, but it seems like very few of them actually expect this to be the reality.
Related: I went to a college with a high Asian student population, also around 20 years ago, and there was a long-simmering argument over the issue of Asian women dating white men (at a much higher rate than Asian men dated white women). The Asian women were most likely to defend this choice with some variant of "you don't own us", but if pressed or in a spicy mood they would also point out that white men almost never expect a 10/10 submissive housewife, or have a mother who expects a servile daughter-in-law, whereas a non-trivial percentage of Asian men do.
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This seems common with pagan cultures. Like we knock on Islam for its(tbh, pretty repressive) treatment of women, but Islamic religion does tell husbands to take their wives' wants and needs into account and care for them. Scott just reviewed a book all about how early Christianity spread by telling women that it would make their husbands love them. And a pretty good chunk of the republican fertility advantage in the US comes from telling young women that socially conservative values will make men love them and treat them better(there's an entire genre of country music about loving on women who are babycrazy and have strong family values and how they're worth holding off on sex for and cutting back on drinking to reasonable levels and all that).
You don't have to deny women opportunities on a societal level to make their lives suck. Women are not the same as men, you can totally set up society to make it so they get the short end of the stick in hundreds of little ways.
I doubt that. Pagans have written books and created monuments to enjoyable sex.
Nuclear families are the primary cause for this going away. England was admittedly the earliest nuclear society, and avoided this problem all together.
It's an underdiscussed aspect of single-core mega-urban countries like SK. More than half the country lives within commute distance of Seoul. So you can't build physical distance between you and the in-laws. Being a larger and distributed country helps mitigate this problem.
Can't compare across different historic economic settings. But, women must be given opportunities. Opportunities to work, to choose their spouse, to leave their spouse, to choose a profession.
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