The Gender War and the Rise of Anti-family Sentiments in South Korea

Abstract

This chapter attributes the recent rise in anti-family sentiments in South Korea to the “gender war,” a conflict between men and women over gender issues that formed and evolved online, and then permeated mainstream and public discourse. This study first documents the nature and trajectory of this “gender war” online and offline over the last 5 years. The small, silent gender war taking place online first received significant public attention in 2015 with feminists’ outcries against the online grievances and slurs of a small group of right-wing men against young Korean women. The war intensified in May 2016, with a misogynistic murder of a young woman in public, which reinforced the burgeoning feminist movement and anti-patriarchal sentiment. Using archival and internet data, this study suggests that the murder increased public attention to misogyny and feminism, topics that had previously gone largely ignored. This study then examines the associations between the timing of the murder and trends in attitude toward marriage. My findings show that trends in negative attitudes toward marriage significantly increased after 2015, particularly among young women. These results suggest that young adults, whose awareness of entrenched misogyny and ideological support for gender equality recently grew, began to increasingly reject family. These findings suggest that young women’s desires for gender equality may have clashed with persistently patriarchal sentiment among men and traditional practices within the marriage institution.