Loss of privilege has driven an ugly turn to the hard right. South Korea’s experts who have focused on this issue point to two tendencies among young Korean men: worship of the idea of meritocracy and misogyny. Young South Koreans, born in the late 1990s when South Korea was well into being a prosperous liberal democracy, have little sense of the historical struggles that defined the older generations, such as the Korean War or the fight against military dictators for democracy. Instead, their struggle is with a series of examinations: entrance exams for high schools, entrance exams for colleges, and entrance exams for high paying, secure jobs. This is the generation that has spent most of their lives taking or preparing for exams, in the infamously grueling *hagwon* or cram school system. As a result, younger South Koreans have internalized the logic of those exams and elevated it into a type of distorted moral sensibility, where the poor are to blame for their own suffering.
The other characteristic of South Korean men in their 20s is their aggressive misogyny. To be sure, sexism has been a long-standing issue in South Korea. Yet this generation’s aggrieved version of sexism has taken on a different character from their fathers’ more traditional version of sexism featuring machoism and strict gender roles. If older Korean men see themselves as patriarchs who oversee women, younger Korean men see themselves as victims of feminism. Cheon, one of the co-authors of *Men in 20s*, noted that survey results showed young men rejected both male privilege and the duty that typically come with the patriarchal form of sexism. Instead, the survey showed their version of sexism was marked by over-the-top hostility against feminism: 58.6 percent <https://twitter.com/BluRoofPolitics/status/1392847250544603138> of Korean men in their 20s said they strongly opposed feminism, with 25.9 percent marking the intensity of their opposition as 12 on a scale of 0 to 12. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/23/young-south-korean-men-hate-liberals-feminists/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#9547): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/9547 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/83892447/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
