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.