Is This Our Future?

South Korea's Great Sexual Depression

apologies for displaying a hate symbol

Donald Trump made a lot of progress with young men, though how much is not clear until more in-depth voter surveys are conducted (some exit polls find that Trump won young men, others that he merely performed better, but he clearly made inways). He made slight or no progress with young women, who backed Kamala Harris (but unclear whether at larger or smaller margins than in 2020).

This has led to a lot of stupid takes, and a lot of fairly hysterical denunciations of “aggrieved feminist hags pushing men away” or “evil men choosing to oppress women” or whatever. This was the subject of a previous post, by which I still stand, about diverging politics between men and women. Without getting into the weeds here¹, the thing about the chart that matters is that South Korea has a much starker gender political gap than the US:

Given how badly everyone is taking the gender vote gap, is that where everywhere else in the world is headed?

I am going to get into some specifics later, but in general I find South Korean men grossly unsympathetic - besides some valid issues (which I’ll get to in a bit), the whole thing is just a reactionary temper tantrum to extremely reasonable demands, like “punish rapes that happen in public spaces” or “jizzing on women in public is unacceptable behavior”. The entirety of the political divergence started in 2016, when a series of protests about a variety of things (mainly that the President wasinvolved in an overly convoluted corruption scheme involving cults) specifically triggered a series of protests about rapes in public places going unpunished. This becomes really complicated really fast, but basically, high-profile feminist activism led to both women becoming more politically involved, and men reacting badly to that involvement - leading to reactions then reactions to the reactions then reactions to the reactions to the reactions, etc, resulting in an increasingly large gender divide in politics. But there’s also deeper roots that I think make the situation very South-Korea specific.

I’m Just Ken

"If men are accustomed to high status, if men feel that they deserve to be at the top but are not getting it because they are denied and frustrated, that's what caused this backlash."

Is the situation in (South) Korea bad? Yes, very. Gender relations in Korea are disastrous. As seen above, men are much more right wing than women, to the point where the last election was nicknamed “the incel election” and saw a virulent misogynist be elected, largely off the back of his views.

Attitudes among young men are largely regressive: 80% of South Korean men believe they are discriminated against, and to a large extent their political beliefs are in the grip of a vicious anti-feminist backlash - for example, 50% of young men describe themselves as anti- feminist, twice as many as feminist, and young men are substantially likelier than young women to oppose gay marriage. This has gotten to a point where the “okay” hand gesture used in the banner of this post is considered by many men to be a hate symbol mocking for their (small) penis size.

What exactly is up with South Korean men? A lot, beyond the fact that they have some very bad apples among them and some very bad opinions in general. First, there’s a large “manosphere” of podcasters, influencers, and overall internet types with extremely pernicious and misogynistic ideas.

Additionally, and I think this is the most important party, is that South Korea had substantially more men than women be born at birth: starting in 1980, 10% to 15% more men were born than women in every year until 2010, resulting in an enormous discrepancy. This is largely due to a strong cultural preference for boys, and thus a strong increase in sex-selective abortions, at a time when fertility was already declining substantially. Basically, this resulted in approximately 700,000 to 800,000 men who didn’t have an “other half” among Korean women (around 3% of men are gay, so the lower bound is probably correct for the “spare” men who won’t be able to find a native-born partner). There are a number of issues caused by the fact that there’s 11 men for every 10 women, but mainly it’s that because of this, men have to expend enormous effort into attracting a woman, for example the highest per capita male skincare spending on the plane. This dynamic, where the dating market is strongly skewed in favor of women, feeds incel and misogynistic views - men want to keep their societal status, and if women aren’t letting them have it, they’ll lash out.

Thirdly, one actual and valid grievance that South Korean men do have is that the country has a draft from which women are exent. Besides from the obvious unfairness, particularly when other countries with high military needs like Israel do enlist women, there’s also the fact that military service, against conventional wisdom, tends to be really bad for you. Using the fact that the Vietnam War draft was assigned via a lottery, which means you can compare draftees to non-draftees, you find that veterans drafted through the lottery had real lifetime incomes 15% lower than those of non-veterans who also participated in the lottery, their children have lower wages and lower labor force participation rates, and military service is linked with some evidence to family instability - divorce, single parents, and “moving around” a lot. Lastly, evidence from Argentina points to military draftees having significantly higher crime rates than non-draftees - both for those who participated in the Falklands/Malvinas War, and for those who didn’t. This effect was larger for those in the Navy than for those in the Army or Air Force, which points to the idea that losing labor market experience is the causal channel - because Argentinian Navy conscriptions were two years long. There is some evidence, however, that after a decade or two the effects cancel out due to extra education acquired after serving.

One final aspect is that South Korea has extraordinarily high income inequality and especially a widening chasm between educated and uneducated workers, as well as high youth unemployment, tepid wage growth for blue collar workers, and extremely demanding work hours with little chance of “moving up”, particularly since the labor market is extremely concentrated in either giant conglomerates or tiny, unproductive firms. Additionally, trends like high automation (for which Korea is famous for) have damaged men’s wages in manufacturing, and the combination of increased longevity and seniority-based pay have led to a glut of young men who can’t advance in their careers. This means that, given men’s lower educational attainment and reduced labor market experience, they face a very concrete disadvantage versus women - which generates additional resentment.

Economic stagnation is a very dangerous thing for societies already polarized by gender, since it tends to draw people into extreme politics: in both the United States and Europe, rising economic inequality and slowing growth are linked to support of far-right parties. In Brazil (good Spanish writeup here), economic liberalization led to higher unemployment, which resulted in higher affiliation with pentecostal churches - which, in turn and coupled with tax policy, led to higher vote shares for far-right candidates. There is a specific gender component of this issue: in Europe, there is a strong association between male job insecurity and sexism. European regions where unemployment has increased, also have men be more in agreement that women’s advancement and opportunities came at their expense. In China (another country with uniquely messy gender relations), men who scored higher on measures of economic deprivation also scored higher on measures of hostile sexism. And British men who grew up in high-deprivation, high-unemployment regions report feeling more hostile to feminist and progressive attitudes. And the current President’s austerity agenda is not helping: districts more closely harmed by the Weimar austerity programs turned to supporting Hitler in posterior years.

The Four Bs to the Longhouse

Of course, the fact that men do face concrete challenges in South Korea doesn’t mean they’re good - or that women don’t face a complicated panorama. The country has a massive wave of deepfake porn, where a Telegram group of 220,000 men shared artifically created porn of women and girls. There was also an epidemic of spy cam pornography meant to humilate and degrade women by, for example, taking upskirt pictures of women. 80% of women report being sexually harassed at work, and most men admit to being violent with their partners, and women report that fear of men is a big reason why they don’t want to date. There’s a movement of men who masturbate and ejaculate on women’s belongings in public (called “semen terrorism”), and, in slightly more lighthearted news, there’s growing demands to abolish priority seating for pregnant women in South Korea. South Korean beauty standards are incredibly demanding, and plastic surgery is extremely common even among very young women. In response to all of this very let’s just say inhospitable facts, a feminist movement known as “4B” proposes that women refrain from sex, dating, babies, or marriage with men (to be even-handed, it seems that two of the Bs are a bit superfluous given the other two).

Why is women’s situation so bad? The first, important fact to consider is that South Korean society is structurally misogynistic: “Man high, women low” is a common Korean idiom, and 33%, above the global average of 25%, agree that men are better than women at most things. This particularly impacts labor market outcomes, since South Korea has the largest gender pay gap and male/female labor force participation gap in the OECD. The reason why women have a much lower labor force participation rate only if they’re married: they face enormous pressure to drop out of the labor force and stay home to look after the kids.

However, the explanation for the pay gap isn’t really related to the seemingly obvious fact that working hours are extremely long (which is an important component in most other countries), because the work decision is made at the intensive and not extensive margin, as mentioned previously. The real reason is the system of seniority-based pay: you need to work at a company for a really long time and for really long hours to move forward. Given South Korea’s largely male management at firms, this means that men are advantaged via casual socializing with their bosses, while women are held back because of extremely misogynistic viewpoints, and are put in lower-ranking positions than even their less qualified colleagues. In this same sense, South Korean women only make up 19% of the national legislature, among the lowest in the OECD, and the country ranks dead last in the “glass ceiling” index.

Children of women

South Korea also has extraordinarily low fertility and marriage rates: the fertility rate of under 1 birth per 1,000 women is the lowest in the world, and marriage rates have declined by 25% since 2010. “Later, Fewer, None” is basically how to sum up the fertility situation. Surprising nobody, I think that the main reasons are housing costs, extremely involved parenting styles, and the large degree of tension between men and women.

South Korea has had skyrocketing housing prices in recent years, and the price of the average house has quadrupled since the mid 2000s. Additionally, even renting is extraordinarily burdensome, since the common jeonse rent system involves paying a large upfront sum rather than monthly installments. The housing market, being seemingly broken beyond repair, is also extraordinarily sensitive to interest rates (to maintain the profitability of the jeonse rentals), and very prone to scams and ripoffs. This does not help couples settle down together, and does not help them when they decide whether to have children or not.

The intensive parenting thing is important: parenting is getting more and more demanding, and affluent parents do more and more, while poorer parents fall behind. In South Korea, fertility linearly increases with income, so only wealthy families have “many” (two) kids, but poor and middle class families often have only one - the reason, basically, is that the extreme degree of inequality and difficult labor market conditions mean that extreme investment into education and tutoring is required. The “Tiger Mom” stereotype may be real here, but it also means that parents would rather put all their resources only one child, particularly when children frequently have to financially provide for their elderly parents for many decades.

But we are putting the cart before the horse here. Declining marriage rates are obviously linked to declining birth rates, because in a society with contraceptive choice, most births are planned. The most obvious reason for lower marriage rates is that women can make their own money, so there is less reaosn for cohabitation. Particulalry, the rise in singledom makes unions that produce children rarer and less frequent, and those unions later (for the reasons outlined above) have fewer children, and later. A big issue here is, unsurprisingly, the enormous degree of gender friction: women do not want to date men because of widespread fears of physical and sexual violence, which are not frequently punished. Additionally, women want a partner who will want an equitable division of domestic labor and who will allow them to work, especially important given how difficult it is to advance a career as a woman. Women don’t want to sacrifice their hard-earned careers for a family, and will in fact sacrifice the family for work (which I don’t really get but whatever).

Conclusion

So, overall, South Korea seems to be locked into an extremely bad dynamic: men have some legitimate grievances and some systemic disadvantages, which they have reponded to by… becoming unhinged fascists who sexually predate on random women. The women, very reasonably, don’t want anything to do with these men, and prefer to lock into work. Which results in increased competition, also bad for gender relations, and decreased interest in settling down versus a career. And, of course, in decreased relationship formation. This is paired with skyrocketing housing costs and higher and higher investment for children, which means that the few people who have them also have them later and fewer of them. So it’s all just fucked and will require really big changes to South Korea to make any of it better.

1. You should go read my post anyways, but my take was that men were moving into moderate/independent territory, a lot of the evidence for their supposed conservatism was really weak, a lot of the definitions of “more conservative” are really squirrelly, and there seemed to be a small divergence in actual opinions between the genders that didn’t seem out of the ordinary for older generations.