That's horrific and awful -- and fits my general sense that there are fault lines in the relationship between men and women which are particularly tense in Korea.
This is a real hell in a handbasket thing, and, to switch mindless yet appropriate cliches, the tube really can't be put back into the toothpaste. People are just going to have to raise children, particularly daughters, in the knowledge that people can do this shit, and it says a lot about them, and nothing at all about you. Not this this is always going to work, but it's what there is.
My granddaughter is in 2d grade, and has yet to see any redeeming value in boys. Hard to argue with her. She tolerates me well enough so long as I'm useful. (I drive her to school every morning which is better, marginally, than taking the bus.)
The Korean gender crisis is a thing, as some recent thread got into. Elke and I have watched some Korean shows set in high school and I've been fairly shocked by the dystopian levels of dominance and shaming, particularly among/inflicted on girls. That's fiction of course but it's presumably tracking real vibes.
Has anyone written a deep dive into whether the muslim world from 1975-2010 was just early on the trend of toxic masculinity and the rest of the world is catching up, or whether they're just fundamentally different phenomena?
I do have an article sitting in a "maybe post" pile in my inbox about the current restrictions on Afghan women. Extremely depressing.
4: I was just reading this (which I would take with a grain of salt -- I don't know that the data is sufficient for the conclusions): https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-great-global-divergence-of-values
As the world has become more globalized, it's clear that people are getting exposed to a broader range of novel cultural ideas than they were in the past. (For example, I recall sitting down to dinner in a house without running water in 2011--when I lived in the West African nation of Togo for a few months--and we ate the Togolese dish of fufu while watching reruns of the 1990s American sitcom Full House, dubbed in French on Togolese TV). This exposure to more globalized, Western culture could plausibly produce a convergent effect.
Instead, what the researchers found is that culture is converging, but at the regional rather than the global level. In other words, countries in, say, southeast Asia, are getting more similar to each other, but are not converging toward a global uniformity.
...Only time will tell if our findings represent a general cultural trend or a historically isolated phenomenon...Value divergence could also explain theoretical puzzles in the social sciences. For example, there is a popular theory that rising wealth and technology facilitate religious decline because they decrease existential insecurity and relieve the economic pressure to have children. But this model does not explain why rising wealth has not brought religious declines in Middle Eastern countries and has even correlated with rising religiosity in some of these countries.
Practically, value divergence has implications for political polarization and conflict across world countries. Russia has framed the recent war in Ukraine as a war against Western values. Chinese politicians have spoken against countries that "forcibly promote the concept and system of Western democracy and human rights". Western non-governmental organizations have faced recent accusations of seeding immorality and propagating Western imperialism, and public opinion polling has found increasingly hostile attitudes towards Western countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa."
4: I think you're over extrapolating from two examples - Iran and Afghanistan - where initial improvements in the lot of (mainly urban) women were overturned by exceptionally misogynistic governments. I don't think you could say that there was a wave of misogyny particularly in 1975-2010 in Saudi Arabia. I mean, they were like that already.
I'm not even sure there's been a wave of misogyny over 1975-2010 in the west either. Things were not great in the early 70s!
I've started to follow Alice Evans, who researches this topic. Her conversation with Jerusalem Demsas (smarty) about whether young men are becoming more sexist was pretty interesting.
I do recall them discussing South Korea.
I wonder if it's possible to ID any of the chatroom chatters (maybe find Mark Robinson?) and use the same software to create deepfake images with teeny, tiny erections. Doesn't undo the damage of the original, but perhaps the equivalent of a high, inside brushback pitch. Also, funny.
11. Some years ago in ROK there was a case where a woman shared a nude photo of a man without his consent. This by itself was unusual and newsworthy, because like 99% of molka perpetrators are male. Also, notably, the man was a nude model, and the photo was taken during an art class, so it was a situation where the man was purposely nude in a not-completely-private space -- differently from oft-discussed molka cases where, for example, a man places a hidden camera in an office bathroom stall so he and his friends can giggle and sneer over videos of their female coworkers using the toilet.
Anyway, normally molka cases almost never result in jail time, but the nude figure drawing class lady was sentenced to a year in prison. Womp womp. I imagine that the (mostly male) ROK prosecution and judiciary wouldn't share our sense of humor.
Anyway, normally molka cases almost never result in jail time, but the nude figure drawing class lady was sentenced to a year in prison.
That's disturbing.
People are just going to have to raise children, particularly daughters, in the knowledge that people can do this shit, and it says a lot about them, and nothing at all about you
That's just horse manure. There is NO REASON that tech companies have to make it so easy for people to do this. There are many, many things they can do to make it more annoying and harder to do.
That won't stop every creep from being awful, but it will remove the easy slide into horribleness for people who might not otherwise seek out the more effortful way to do it.
Tech companies have been waving their hands in the air and pretending to be helpless for way too long (cf. Amazon and their horrifying refusal to reprogram the algorithm that suggests what else to buy to make a suicide kit).
They make up false dichotomies and straw men about how they can either ban everything or nothing, when the reality is that they ALREADY make a zillion decisions a a day about which content to boost and what to hide, what behavior to incentivize and what to punish. I am not buying these "too bad, can't do anything about horrible people making nonconsenual sexual images of you, gotta live with it" excuses, and none of us should accept them either.
Thanks for that Witt. You're right that efforts should be made to drive this shit off of tech companies. I'm not sure that there won't just be new places it could live, but I guess I don't really understand the internet well enough to know where and what the actual chokepoints are.
I'm nowhere near a software engineer, but the people I know and trust who work on these issues professionally, as well as my own reading, have convinced me that there is far more that could be done and is not being done.
The canary in the coal mine was the young Hollywood actresses who faced this kind of abuse 5-7 years earlier than the rest of humanity. Nobody did much of anything to protect them, and now here we are.
I think I'm also angrier and sadder about this because of the abortion laws and the rape trial happening in France right now. Not the one awful man, but all the other men he recruited to go along with his assaults, and how many of them flat-out said that because the husband consented, they didn't need to get the wife's consent.
It just feels like a million different ways in which our society is demonstrating utter contempt for women's and girls' safety and well-being right now.
There is also a truly enormous amount of real-person porn - as in, porn that is literally depicting real people without their knowledge or consent - on sites like Archive Of Our Own, which would be very easy for the site to take down or ban. Instead, the site provides a handy link from the front page to help people find it.
AO3 is doing more than just words these days?
Text only, as far as I know, but presumably that is also very distressing to the women portrayed.
" the young Hollywood actresses who faced this kind of abuse 5-7 years earlier than the rest of humanity"
Still angry for Kathy Sierra.
AO3 definitely allows images, although I think text-only is more typical.
18: My rational brain knows its more of a conflagration of a lot of factors, but the added fact is that #metoo freaked the living fuck out of powerful men at every level, and that it was probably a major factor in many VCs/senior-level Silicon Valley execs to right-wing ideology.