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As with anything sociological, an examination of the Korean situation is incomplete without an economic background.
What 1 (low wages) + 2 (cutthroat meritocracy) imply is that Korean men have to work hard to get promoted to management if they want to support their family. This has historically taken the form of 60-hour work weeks (8 hours plus "voluntary" company dinners, Monday to Saturday). As women enter the workforce, the culture of company dinners has been pared back, and now it is 8 hours plus unpaid evenings if one wants to have a chance at being promoted to manager. (Women don't on average put in those hours, since 60% of them plan on leaving the workforce when they are married and have kids.)
Adding 3 (the social role of men as providers) means that their value is measured by the thickness of their wallets, and their wallets are on average not very thick, because 1 (wages are low) and their wallets are getting thinner, and less valued, because 5 (because women are entering the workforce).
Now owning a home is a precondition to marriage (and childbirth) in Korea, and this means that it is mostly the upper middle class which can afford to have kids. So you get a whole generation of women who were raised by their mothers in houses where their fathers were working 60-hour weeks to be that upper middle class. They grew up in material luxury, but their fathers would home drunk late at night after these company dinners and pass out immediately. They see their mothers working thanklessly in their home, barely time for a conversation with their fathers, and want none of it. Thus the mythology is born. "Korean men suck."
These women in the upper middle class have gone onto college, where they major in the humanities and are exposed to the imported concepts of third-wave feminism. Men are the oppressors, women are victims, and life sucks because of patriarchy. Life does suck. They try going into the workforce and see that wages are low and the culture sucks. Must be the patriarchy holding them back. (To emphasize the point, men in their cohort who enter the workforce had their mandatory military service counted as work experience and so enter at a higher pay level.)
Growing up in the upper-middle class with material opulence, these Korean women have high expectations for their quality of life, and instead of finding a marriagable high-status husband, their age-matched prospects are only poor men who are struggling to get ahead in the rat race. Then when they are looking for a husband, none of the available young bachelors have any money or free time. Nobody is buying that house! If they are schooled in third-wave feminism, the message is clear: "Korean men suck."
These feminist women go into jobs like journalism, where they write tons of articles about how terrible the men are, with no consideration for the economic constraints that got the entire society into this position. They hit age 30 (or 35) and are forced to marry by social forces (and that ticking biological clock). If they are marriageable, they end up settling for a man who they are not happy with, read HuffPost, and inhabit "mom cafes" online where they post screeds about how terrible men are. If they have poor personalities, they write screeds even more vociferously about their bosses and the men who rejected them. Somewhere, they read that foreign men are feminists and get the idea that foreigners will support them. (And boy the stories I have of what happens when they actually meet foreign men!)
(Women who were aware that their fathers were making sacrifices for them see the feminists going off the deep end and no longer feel comfortable calling themselves feminists.)
Young Korean men, on the other hand, see their fathers working 996, and instintively understand that their fathers are working as a sacrifice to provide material wealth for the family. They see that the women of their cohort (especially the self-proclaimed feminists) do not appreciate these sacrifices, and especially don't appreciate the sacrifice they made in lifetime to keep the country safe from the North Koreans. The women appear thankless and shrill. The men put their heads down and try to work harder to get ahead. If they are responsible, they save every last penny to buy that house when they get married.
The left-wing Moon administration rejiggers the housing market to try to lower housing prices, and ends up adding fuel to the fire and doubling housing prices in three years. The left/feminist wing also hushes up several cases of sexual assault by the left-wing mayor of Seoul, who commits suicide when the allegations become public. The right-wing candidate vows to abolish the "Ministry for Women and Family" (English translation: "Ministry for Gender Equality"), which is seen as a think-tank and jobs program for these radical feminists. In response mostly to housing prices but partly to the MfWaF who hate them and the hypocricy of the leftists covering up sexual assault, men in the next election vote for the right-wing candidate.
Korean journalists - especially ones who know enough English to write for foreign journals like CNN and the NYT - are largely drawn from those upper-class women who went through college in the humanities and were radicalized on third-wave feminism. The election of a right-wing government is portrayed by these Korean journalists (who never studied economics and don't want to talk about the rapey left-wing mayor) as a sign that Korean men hate women. (The actual surveys show that they hate "feminists".) Western media comes to believe that Korean men are sexists engaged in a gender war, as everything available in English is filtered through the lens of Korean feminists.
Edit: And as my Korean friend points out, Korean journalists frequently cite foreign (CNN, NYT, etc) articles about Korean gender wars to assert that these things are real, without thinking about the filter effect and the fact that the foreign journalists' friends are all upper-class English-speaking Koreans (i.e. filtered for feminists).
I think the question becomes why has the gender war not turned hot in Japan, which has similar economic factors?
That's a good question, but I don't know anything about Japan.
Also, I somewhat dispute that the gender war has "turned hot" in Korea. I think this "gender war" mostly journos trying to make a big issue about gender, for the reasons outlined in the second half of my grandparent comment. Surveys in 2021 showed that in every demographic surveyed, "inequality between men and women" was considered less of a problem in 2021 than in 2016. Also, if you are not terminally online you won't notice any gender war. (But Korean society does tend to be terminally online, so most people are aware of some feminist/anti-feminist drama. )
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I can't name sources in a hurry, and this might be a faulty explanation, but I think a partial reason of this is due to Korea turning super-neo-Confucian during the Joseon dynasty/period. This is most evident after the Qing conquest of the Ming, which the Koreans responded to by considering Qing China as not having political legitimacy*, and doubling down on their interpretations of neo-Confucianism; but strands of this are evident even earlier, when Korean scholars rejected Ming-dynasty innovations (e.g. the Lu-Wang school) in favour of elaborating on older models, most prominently from Zhu Xi. Even today you can see a much, much more obviously hierarchical system regarding personal relations present in Korea than in Japan or China, even counting pre-PRC China (edit: at least contemporaneously).
China, on the other hand, did have such reevaluations, and the Manchu conquest prompted significant soul-searching, resulting in things like the kaozheng school of thought. Japan's kangaku, likewise, did not hunker down in the same way Korea did.
I could easily see how a more hyper-Confucian society that's had a crash course in modern liberal democracy and capitalist markets would create sex-based resentment, especially if you introduce a dose of feminism into it.
*For further reading you could go look at how many Koreans at the time considered themselves to be sojonghwa and the real inheritors of Chinese political culture and civilisation, now that actual China was overrun by "barbarians". This was to the extent that, IIRC, Joseon Korea refused to use Qing dynasty regnal years as part of its calendar, and continued counting as if the last Ming emperor (?) was still in power. Also note that this was not entirely unique to Korea; there were politicians and thinkers in Japan and Vietnam who shared this opinion.
Some element of this after the "loss of China" in the 17th century likely contributes to Korean culture today. I've been told by native Koreans about how the older generations still sometimes say outright that "since the fall of the Ming there has been no worthy Chinese (persons)"; and there's always some loony Korean nationalist scholar, never taken very seriously, insisting on how this or that aspect of Sinosphere civilisation (from festivals to Chinese characters, so on and so forth) actually originates from Korea.
Oh, that's where this comes from! I've seen Chinese people complaining about this, but I never understood why it was a thing that the Koreans did, and it always struck me as bizarre.
I'll stress that that part is my own conjecture, and doubtless modern nationalism and fear/mistrust of the PRC plays into this phenomenon as well. But it seems unlikely to me that the historical background didn't contribute to this. And that the Chinese usually overhype whatever minor Korean nutter has to say for their own purposes as well, to the extent that the average Chinese is probably more misinformed about the actual state of understanding in Korea (where Koreans rightfully mostly relegate such hyper-nationalism as mostly batshit insane).
Then there are things that are just kinda...dumb, like the Chinese getting irate at the Korean dragon boat festival getting recognised internationally (honestly who gives a shit? It's like Italians getting upset about modern British celebrating a derivative of a Roman festival). That stupid thing about kimchi and paocai thing still confuses me to this day (not the background facts, but the sheer idiocy of it, as well as the initial irresponsibility of the Chinese press).
I'll file this away as an unconfirmable theory, then. :-)
If you mean that Koreans have nutters who claim Chinese things — and other things too, for that matter — are actually Korean, no, that's real. The Chinese do grossly exaggerate the extent of belief, of course.
The festivals thing I was thinking of was related to Lunar New Year. I'm going off this by memory, so couldn't find a source in time.
The Chinese character thing was something found originally here, where some Korean novelist and former(?)-professor expounds on the idea that actually proto-Koreans created Chinese civilisation before migrating to Korea (by equating proto-Koreans simultaneously with the Shang and the Dongyi). (Apparently the same person was also featured in a video here earlier this year where he more explicitly claims that Chinese characters are Korean. That video has been private'd, but some vengeful Chinese netizen has re-uploaded it)
(I also somehow found this looney tunes Korean guy claiming that English is descended from Korean?)
Again, these things aren't taken seriously by the (vast?) majority of Koreans, but they do exist (as do more mainstream but still silly nationalistic punchups). This is also not to elide that you see loony shit from the Chinese (and Japanese, and every ethnicity really) as well -- sometimes even from the state organs!
My conjecture is that some part of this historical revisionism has to do not only with modern nationalism and geopolitcal rivalry, but also a longer-rooted hostility that has fomented since the Qing conquest.
Don't worry, I know the nutters are real. It's just that I'm going to have to try hard to not get carried away with this cool new explanation that you provided. :-)
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I'm coming here from the QC thread, and I must agree that this is an absolutely fantastic post. I was wondering why the gender divide was so huge in Korea, and this answered it quite nicely.
How did you get this info? Are you Korean yourself? Do you have friends that live there? Or is this all from reading articles/online discussion boards?
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Is the primary complaint of women in Korea really that the men don’t have enough money, then? That hasn’t been widely reported.
I'm sure you could find more, but even just a brief perusal gives me examples of this from the Atlantic in an otherwise unsympathetic piece. I feel like it's pretty well known even with only a relatively passing interest in Korea.
Two examples inside that article are that of an engagement getting broken off because a downturn in a business owned to-be-groom's parents spooked the to-be-bride and her family, and a late-50s university lecturer finding out that he wouldn't meet the salary demands outlined by Korean women now.
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Yes, it doesn't add up, although the general narrative of the comment is fairly convincing. Simple anthropology tells us that roughly an equal number of boys and girls are born into upper middle class South Korean families. They have the same advantages in life. For every single woman with high expectations, there's a well-paid single man of similar social status.
Except the UMC-raised men don't have the same financial status now as the UMC women did when they were growing up; they're earlier in their careers and thus lower on the finance/status ladder than the women's fathers were. Contemporary young UMC men also seeing their wages diluted by women's entry into the labor market and rising housing costs. The latter are actually double whammy, as higher rents hurts UMC men's ability to save for a home/family, and higher home prices means that their diluted savings don't go as far when it comes time to get married and buy a place.
It seems like a person would have to be awfully stupid not to notice this about their own life?
Hence why in America women generally contribute to housing costs. I'm not sure about the statistics, but Americans mostly seem to buy houses when already engaged/married/ready to have a baby. Do they not in Korea? If not, why not?
People often are, particularly about personal preferences.
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I can't say about Korea, but in China there's a whole Thing about buying houses, and who pays, and who owns it in the marriage, and who gets it in the divorce. It's like someone took America, realized that we're all sappy romantic meme-infected morons, and solved for the equilibrium. Which turns out to be a ruthless financial battle of the sexes.
If Korea has gone further down the Neo-Confucian gender-role rabbit-hole than China, combined with the same Western personal freedom as long as you don't marry, no wonder it's such a nightmare.
Especially with the male oversupply (see: one-child policy and preference for sons), at least up till quite recently, owning a residence is considered the minimum requirement for getting a decent match in China, at least in the urban areas. It gets to the point where multiple generations might be investing in a property for a son so he can get ahead (admittedly not just in romance; also stuff like residency status and rights, but I am very far from an expert on this)
More anecdotally, I know of Chinese women who openly discuss/brag about what sort of make of car/house/whatever accessory they require before giving a man the light of day.
Not sure how the owning a house thing is doing with the property market still in freefall.
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To me, this sounds a lot more plausible than “#MeToo did it.” The articles looked political first and theoretical a distant second.
What’re you basing this on? What gives you this impression?
Without doxxing myself, all I can say is that I am immersed in Korean life. My source is mostly synthesis of what people have told me over the years while talking to me candidly and first-hand observation while experiencing the rat race. In my workplace, I saw men putting their children to bed on Kakao Facechat. In my extracurricular activities, I met a few mid-30s journalist women who were writing for foreign-language outlets. I saw friends get married, be disappointed, and turn bitter, and know many who cannot afford to get married.
So you should treat the above as original research, almost anecdotal. I was trying to convey the economic and social forces which push men and women into discontent with each other (well, mostly a subset of women into discontent with men), but also the filtering effect of what gets to English-language media, and the citogenesis effect of the English-language media on Koreans' understanding of their own culture (which I think is despicable).
Thanks. I got the impression it was something like that.
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Well, there's a rather self-evident political option to remedy this.
Is there any society where owning a house/apartment is not generally considered necessary before marriage?
In America you’re totally allowed to rent, and if you have a plausible story and one set of parents is willing you can live with them- my parents lived with dad’s family at first.
And there are plenty of societies(eg Albania) where owning your own home before marriage would be seen as highly unusual or possibly suspect. They’re not societies most people want to live in, but neither is Korea.
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It's not just the ownership that matters, it's that renting is frouned upon, housing loans are not cheaply available (30% down payment is common, IIRC), housing is treated as an investment, the closing price for typical condos is now 20x~30x the median annual salary. I only know one 20-30 year old who purchased a condo in the last 5 years without parental assistance (and the one guy sold his startup to a conglomerate for millions.)
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My wife and I were married for nearly a decade before we bought a house. In the US.
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I'd guess that marriage and owning a house are generally somewhat correlated here, but I know a plenty of married couples with kids who rent.
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Just across the yellow sea there is a quite similar culture that didn't have this expectation; in China the (male's) parents would typically buy a house when their child gets married - and subsequently move in with the newly married couple. Hence the preference for sons, since you'll get your adult child to take care of you in old age, whereas the parents of the woman just get a dowry.
The preference for sons in China goes deeper, as in older tradition the sons of a family perform the sacrificial rites due for ancestor worship. But it is true that the pragmatic aspect of this was of significant concern as well, enough for (no longer extant) jokes to exist about families being "robbed" by having many daughters but no sons.
Then again, go back that far and often enough the newlyweds would just live in the (husband's) family compound...
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Plenty of married couples rent? That's without going into the "living like a pack of sardines at your parents' place, possibly with your sibling(s) and their spouse(s)" arrangement that was pretty common in my parent's generation, even in Europe, and is likely still common in poorer parts of the world.
I'm sure they do, generally as long as they're still childless. Once they're not, I'm not sure most people see that as a viable option.
Tell me you're American without telling me you're American.
That's only managerial class and above Americans. Plenty of Americans have kids while renting, even in smallish apartments.
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I'm in fact not American.
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You can't write this and then not give us anything!
Haha. You fell for the bait! Ok, some anecdotes that come to mind now. Might add more later:
Careerist girl in her early 30s spent years watching South Park. Gets really good at English (in a South Park drawl!), but remains single for years. Discovers the Man of Her Dreams on Tinder. Spends two months raving about how perfect he is, how Tinder is different in Korea. Then learns he was also dating three other Tinder girls.
Staunch feminist sits next to foreign guy on the subway. Guy completely ignores her. She tries to get his attention, he keeps ignoring her. She gets up and starts berating him for "manspreading," threatens to take his picture and put it on Twitter. Incident resolves when he threatens to take her picture and send it to the police for harrassment.
Tall (= tough dating prospects) artistic (=open-minded) girl falls in love with a foreign guy. Everything seems to be going well, except he's not very patient about her lack of English fluency. He takes her home to meet his family ... and it turns out they all live on a trailerpark. Relationship survives until he goes on a date with another girl. When she does meet a guy who is patient with her, that's one of the points she brags to her friends about.
Staunch feminist in her early 30s meets foreign guy. Everything is going well, except that he walks out of a movie when it gets to a particularly girl-power scene. She has a two-week identity crisis over meeting someone so "anti-woman".
Early 20s reader of The Ethical Slut finally finds the rich foreign gentleman she's been trying to snag. Comes back raving about how the first date was amazing, he must have spent $500 between dinner and the hotel, she's finally found the man of her dreams. A week later he has to go on an international business trip, and stops answering his phone. Oddly, his phone is ringing like it's still in Korea ...
To be fair, this behavior is genuinely puzzling.
Why? That’s not much money for a high earner and seducing a very desirable woman for a night and then moving onto the next one definitely beats almost any other alternative spending option in terms of satisfying the male psyche
Fair enough. When I first read it, I didn't notice that the story also entails boning.
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Please talk more about this one. What did the identity crisis entail? Was she astonished that someone could be so "anti-woman" or was it more self reflecting on how her own actions made her look to him? Or something else?
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It’s like a darker, grittier version of this scene… [trigger warning: anime]
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Check the quotes in the original comment, I suggest.
Sure I've read those, but I'm curious to hear more.
It's just the same old shit. They get their "information" about the West from clickbait trash sites, and conclude that Western men are different, when, in fact, men are just men everywhere, and women are just women everywhere. Also, women want fried ice.
Fried ice what?
That's the point. Fried ice does not and can not exist. It's an old Arab proverb, supposedly.
If we can fry ice cream…
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That was about how much they hate Korean men; how are western men "different" to the degree that they don't deserve their dicks cut off? I don't read clickbait articles targeted at Korean women.
Apparently Korean women assume that they are feminist allies, and aren't icky betas, I suppose.
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