Feminists vs. male supremacists

/ Korea Times graphic by Cho Sang-won

Mutual hatred in cyberspace spreads to offline confrontation

By Kang Hyun-kyung

“There's no government that can protect women in this country.”

Internet user Skeleso groaned in a post regarding a news article explaining the rejection of arrest warrants for baseball players Cho Sang-woo and Park Dong-won, who are accused of sexually assaulting a woman in her 20s at a hotel in the port city of Incheon on May 23.

Cho, pitcher of the Nexen Heroes, reportedly admitted he had a sexual relationship with the girl that night but insisted it was consensual. Meanwhile, his teammate Park has denied the allegation he raped her.

If the victim is female, Skeleso complained the woman is portrayed as a hooker who had sex with the men for money. “The female victim will have a difficult time proving anything happened against her will,” the internet user wrote.

Some internet users believed to be men, meanwhile, blamed the victim for allegedly enticing the baseball players, calling her “a kimchi girl.”

“Kimchi girls” is internet slang referring to social climbers or gold diggers in their 20s and 30s. They overspend their income to finance their luxurious lifestyles and invest most of their income, time and energy in upgrading their physical appearance.

On the internet, the clash of feminists and male supremacists has been evident since the mid-2000s.

Parodies of materialistic women gained attention in 2006 when an internet user uploaded a hilarious but scathing posting about how “a soybean paste girl,” an early version of kimchi girls, spends a day.

The posting of a fictional, materialistic college girl had gone viral, leading to a follow-up comic and webtoon featuring young social climbers.

Gender experts take the soybean paste girl posting as the beginning of misogyny in cyberspace and say confrontations between feminists and male supremacists has continued to this day.

Asking for anonymity, a gender expert said society has become poles apart as confrontations between feminists and male supremacists went on and the gender equality movement became radicalized.

“I have my own opinion about what's going on in the feminist movement,” she said. “But I won't tell the media what it is, mainly because I'm afraid I would be attacked by either side if I comment on it. We are dealing with the issue where experts have nothing to gain if they reveal what they really think about it.”

According to internet portal Daum, in 2015 kimchi girls and other derogatory terms for women appeared 80,000 times per month on blogs or Twitter accounts, showing such words are widely used among internet users.

A survey shows many men “concur” with such scathing descriptions of women.

The Korean Women's Development Institute poll released in March 2016 found over 50 percent of men aged between 15 and 35 said they are sympathetic about the use of such terms to belittle women.

As the survey results show, Kim Jung-sook, president of the global women's rights group International Council of Women, said hatred toward women certainly exists. “It is deep-rooted and widespread in this society. There's no question about that,” she said.

In the face of misogyny, feminists took counter-action by fanning misogamy.

They labeled men who reveal their discontent toward women as “han-chung” _ slang meaning Korean men are hopeless _ to discredit their claims.

The feminist-male supremacist feud in cyberspace has exploded offline.

Pop culture critic Kim Tae-hoon's 2015 column published in the fashion and lifestyle magazine Grazia served as a tipping point for the outbreak of offline clashes between male and female extremists.

In the column, titled “Brainless Feminism is Even More Dangerous than Terrorist Group IS,” Kim accused the feminist movement of losing its direction. According to him, true feminism is a fight against the system that facilitates gender-based discrimination, not a fight against men.

According to him, feminists in this country are trying to bring men down and consider men an enemy they need to topple. “What I'm seeing now is the danger of the brainless feminist movement going on in this country,” his column read.

His column stirred a heated debate. It ultimately caused women's rights activists to team up against him.

Feeling pressure from their collective action and warning of boycotting TV programs in which he appeared, Kim dropped out of those programs and offered a public apology for what he said in the column. The magazine Grazia also offered an open apology to its readers for causing unintended trouble.

Their apologies, however, were not accepted. Women's rights activists were unstoppable. They joined hands to shut down the website Soranet which permitted uploading and downloading of revenge porn and voyeur videos. Soranet was finally shut down years later.

Emboldened by their victory, feminists organized rallies to fight misogyny.

In May, they hosted the one-year anniversary of the Gangnam murder case where a 20-something woman was killed by a stranger. The murderer later said he killed her because he hated women. The police said the murder was not a hate crime.

But activists tried to keep the momentum alive.

Last week, a group of women who identified themselves as activists from the feminist group FireFemi Action launched a topless protest in front of the Facebook Korea headquarters in southern Seoul, demanding the social media company reinstate the topless photos some of their members posted on Facebook earlier. Following its obscenity policy, Facebook deleted the photos featuring topless women.

The feminists accused Facebook of using a double standard when determining obscenity. According to them, the social media company takes no action against shirtless men whereas it removes topless women which the protesters claimed is discrimination.

Facebook later apologized and reinstated the photos after the police said their topless protest didn't violate the anti-obscenity law.

Their protest, however, stirred a debate about the direction of the feminist movement. Some voiced worries about radical feminism.

ICW leader Kim said FireFemi Action is a radical feminist group and they are not representative of the feminist movement in Korea.

“I share a lot with them in terms of their claims about the status of women in this country,” she said. “But I disagree with them regarding their way to make their voice heard. I think they have gone too far.”

Kim said it's true that there's still discrimination based on gender and there are also men who are trying to spread misogyny.

She said she didn't support the idea of fanning misogamy for the sake of tackling misogyny, simply it would only facilitate confrontation between men and women.