On the times she’s feeling most beneficiant towards males—say, when she sees a good-looking man on the road—Helena Lee can typically put her distaste apart and respect them as “eye sweet.” That’s so far as she goes: “I don’t need to know what’s inside his mind.” More often than not, she needs nothing in any respect to do with males.
“I attempt to place confidence in guys and to not be like, ‘Kill all males,’” she says. “However I’m sorry, I’m a bit of bit on that facet—that’s, on the acute facet.”
Her father, she says, was abusive and moved out when she was 6, and he or she has lived together with her mom and grandmother ever since, a mini-matriarchy that fits her nice. She wears her hair in a bob, and on the day we met, she had on a black-denim button-down and a beige trench coat. In school, male classmates advised her she’d be cuter if she “fastened her homosexual fashion.” The worst half, she mentioned, was that they had been shocked when she was offended—they thought they’d paid her a praise. She is 24, learning for civil-servant exams, and likes studying Andrea Dworkin, Carl Sagan, and the occasional romance novel, which she considers pure fantasy.
Lee is a part of a boycott motion in South Korea—girls who’re actively selecting single life. Their motion—presumably tens of hundreds sturdy, although it’s unimaginable to say for certain—is known as “4B,” or “The 4 No’s.” Adherents say no to courting, no to intercourse with males, no to marriage, and no to childbirth. (“B” refers back to the Korean prefix bi-, which suggests “no”.)
They’re the acute fringe of a broader pattern away from marriage. By one estimate, greater than a 3rd of Korean males and 1 / 4 of Korean girls who are actually of their mid-to-late 30s won’t ever marry. Much more won’t ever have kids. In 1960, Korean girls had, on common, six kids. In 2022, the typical Korean lady may count on to have simply 0.78 kids in her lifetime. In Seoul, the typical is 0.59. If this downward drift continues, it is not going to be lengthy earlier than one out of each two girls within the capital by no means turns into a guardian.
Many international locations’ populations are ageing and, in some circumstances, shrinking. In January, China recorded its first inhabitants decline because the Sixties, when the nation had been racked by famine. America’s delivery charge has been falling because the Nice Recession (although 86 p.c of American girls nonetheless have a minimum of one baby by the point they’re of their 40s). However South Korea’s fertility charge is the bottom on the earth.
Marriage and kids are extra intently linked in South Korea than practically wherever else, with simply 2.5 p.c of youngsters born exterior of marriage in 2020, in contrast with an OECD common of greater than 40 p.c. For practically 20 years, the Korean authorities has tried to encourage extra marriages and extra infants. In 2005, the federal government acknowledged low fertility as a matter of nationwide significance and put forth its Framework Act on Low Start Fee in an Getting older Society, variations of which have been renewed each 5 years.
The federal government has tried increasing maternity depart, providing {couples} larger and larger bonuses for having infants, and subsidizing housing in Seoul for newlyweds. The mayor there has proposed easing visa restrictions to import extra low cost overseas nannies, whereas some rural governments fund bachelors searching for overseas brides. In 2016, the federal government printed a “delivery map” on-line exhibiting what number of girls of reproductive age lived in several areas—a slipshod try and encourage cities and cities to supply extra infants. It prompted a feminist protest with girls holding banners that learn my womb is just not a nationwide public good and child merchandising machine. The map was taken down.
In all this time, the nation has spent greater than $150 billion hoping to coax extra infants into the world. None of its efforts are working. Many Korean metro methods have hot-pink seats designated for pregnant girls, however once I visited Seoul in November, six months pregnant myself and simply drained, I used to be hardly ever in a position to snag a seat; they had been stuffed with dozing aged folks.
There are a whole lot of causes folks resolve to not have a child. Younger Koreans cite as obstacles the excessive value of housing in larger Seoul (dwelling to roughly half the nation’s 52 million residents), the expense of elevating a toddler in a hypercompetitive tutorial tradition, and grueling office norms which can be inhospitable to household life, particularly for ladies, who’re nonetheless anticipated to do the majority of home tasks and baby care. However these explanations miss a extra fundamental dynamic: the deterioration in relations between ladies and men—what the Korean media name a “gender battle.”
“I believe essentially the most basic concern at hand is that a whole lot of ladies understand that they don’t actually have to do that anymore,” Lee advised me. “They will simply choose out.”
The plummeting fertility charge has its roots within the fast transformation of Korean society. After the Korean Warfare, many individuals migrated from villages to work in city factories for depressing wages, as a part of a state-led financial transformation that turned often called the “Miracle on the Han River.” Excessive-school and school enrollment shot up. A prodemocracy motion ultimately led to the toppling of army rule in 1987, and to new freedoms. After the 1997 monetary disaster, firms restructured, and Korea’s company tradition—recognized for demanding lengthy hours in change for job safety—took on the precarity acquainted to Individuals.
However gender roles had been slower to evolve. Chang Kyung-sup, a sociologist at Seoul Nationwide College, coined the time period compressed modernity to explain South Korea’s mixture of lightning-fast financial transformation and the sluggish, uneven evolution of social establishments such because the household. An increasing number of girls entered larger training, lastly surpassing their male counterparts in 2015. However educated girls had been nonetheless usually anticipated to drop out of the workforce upon marriage or motherhood. The household remained the fundamental unit of society, and each the outdated order and the brand new assigned familial duties practically solely to girls. Girls’s ambitions have expanded, however the concept of what it means to be a spouse and mom in Korea has not. In consequence, resentments on either side of the gender divide have flourished.
On a sunny day in November, I met Cho Younger-min, 49, at a café in Gangnam. After greater than twenty years in advertising and marketing, she runs a enterprise creating city gardens. She sees the gender battle partly because of that disconnect in expectations, and the truth that, for the primary time, women and men are actually genuinely competing for jobs.
The unemployment charge in Korea is comparatively low, lower than 4 p.c, however it’s considerably larger for folks of their 20s. Necessary male army service—South Korea remains to be technically at battle with North Korea—provides girls what many males understand as a bonus within the labor market, a head begin of 18 months to 2 years. Girls counter this with information on the pay hole, the most important within the OECD at 31 p.c.
“To girls’s minds, earlier than, they’d a really small portion of the pie, like this”—Cho held her thumb and index finger shut collectively. “Now they’re increasing the portion, little by little. It’s nonetheless very small in comparison with the boys’s portion. However to males, they’re dropping.”
Final March, Yoon Suk-yeol was elected president on a wave of male resentment. He pledged to abolish the nation’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Household, which he mentioned handled males like “potential intercourse criminals.” And he blamed feminism for the nation’s low delivery charge, suggesting that it “prevents wholesome relationships between women and men,” including that this was “not an issue that may be solved by giving out authorities subsidies.”
In response to exit polls, practically 59 p.c of males ages 18 to 29 voted for Yoon, whereas 58 p.c of ladies in that age group voted for the liberal candidate. One commentator declared it the “incel election.” A number of folks famous to me that in a rustic as ethnically homogenous as South Korea, the election emphasised the extent to which gender, reasonably than race or immigration standing, has turn out to be the important thing social fault line.
Cho Jung-min had all the time deliberate to be married by 23. Her mom had married younger, and given delivery to her at 22. Cho beloved having a younger mother; the 2 of them watch the identical TV reveals and admire the identical singers. “I needed to do the identical factor for my baby,” Cho advised me. However when she was 17 or 18, she’d talked about her marriage plan to a good friend. “Then why are you struggling so onerous to review and go to college?” her good friend requested. Good query. “That was one of many turning factors,” she advised me. Cho is 32 now and single.
We met at an Indian restaurant close to her workplace. Cho has wavy black hair and swanned in sporting a classy wool coat and sparkly scarf. She had studied and labored in France for years, however moved dwelling in the course of the pandemic. She is now a company strategist at a luxurious e-retailer, the place a lot of her workdays stretch till 10 or 11 p.m. (This isn’t unusual: Final week a authorities proposal to boost the cap on the authorized workweek from 52 hours to 69 hours was deserted after younger folks and ladies’s teams protested.)
These hours present Cho with little alternative for courting, which, anyway, has not been a convincing success. She’s gone on 4 or 5 blind dates prior to now two years. (Blind dates arrange by associates or colleagues, in addition to massive matchmaking firms, are frequent methods of assembly folks in South Korea, the place on-line courting is just not as widespread as it’s within the U.S.) She discovered the boys closed-minded, with “a conventional mind-set.” Males, she mentioned, “all the time need to debate with me: ‘Why are you pondering that approach?’ All of them want to show me.” She doesn’t inform them she’s a feminist. Her mother has warned her to not, as a result of she thinks it might be harmful.
Once I requested why she thought younger Koreans had been retreating from courting, Cho instantly introduced up bodily security. “Lately, there may be a whole lot of violence throughout courting, so we begin to really feel very afraid,” she mentioned.
In 2016, a 34-year-old man murdered a lady in a public restroom close to the Gangnam metro station in Seoul. Though he mentioned he was motivated by girls routinely ignoring him, police blamed psychological sickness. This was a germinal occasion for a lot of Korean younger girls, who had been livid and terrified; it may have occurred to anybody.
Certainly, a 2016 survey by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Household discovered that 62 p.c of South Korean girls had skilled intimate-partner violence, a class that included emotional, bodily, and sexual abuse, in addition to a variety of controlling behaviors. In a single 2017 examine of two,000 males, practically 80 p.c mentioned they’d been psychologically or bodily abusive towards their courting companions.
Not way back, Cho was on a bus ready to get off at her cease when an SUV pulled over. A person received out and began throwing bowling balls into the road. A girl climbed out after him, crying and screaming, and he started hitting her. Cho known as the police. “I assumed it was solely on the information,” she mentioned. “I spotted that it may well additionally occur to me.”
Many ladies I interviewed mentioned that their childhood had been marked by home violence and that they feared being harm by males they could date, or filmed in an intimate second.
Meera Choi, a Yale doctoral pupil, is researching gender inequality and adjustments in household formation in South Korea—what she calls a “disaster of heterosexuality.” Once I expressed my shock at how prevalent fears like Cho’s appeared to be, she estimated that 20 of the 40 girls she had just lately interviewed about these points had skilled both familial or courting violence.
Many of the ladies I spoke with mentioned that patriarchy and sexism haunted their earliest recollections. Some had grown up ready till all the boys of their households had completed consuming earlier than sitting all the way down to their chilly leftovers. They’d watched their dad and mom dote on their brothers. They’d been hit by fathers and sexually harassed at college. They’d grown up and gone to job interviews and promptly been requested about their marital standing.
However many mentioned they’d solely come to articulate these experiences after encountering feminism—incessantly on-line. They described a second of awakening, maybe even radicalization. They examine femicides, stalking, and digital intercourse crimes, often called molka, reported circumstances of which have been on the rise since 2011.
The world over, males are loud on the web. The Korean web site Ilbe.com, recognized for its overt anti-feminism, receives about 20 million visits every month, in a rustic of just below 52 million folks. (Its customers are anti- numerous different issues too: anti-LGBTQ, anti-liberal, anti-immigrant). The Ilbe group has parts of the alt-right and the manosphere; some have likened it to 4chan or incel boards. Customers consult with Korean girls as kimchinyeo, or “kimchi girls,” stereotyping them as useless, materialistic, and manipulative. Males share sexist memes and complaints about reverse discrimination that one Korean author has described as “paranoid misogyny.”
In 2015, some girls started to battle again. They created an internet site, Megalia, the place they practiced the artwork of “mirroring”: They adopted the identical rhetorical units, sick humor, and misogynistic tropes, however used them to make enjoyable of males. In response to the objectification of Korean girls and complaints about their small breasts, girls poked enjoyable at Korean males for, they claimed, having small penises. The Megalia brand was a reference to this: a picture of a hand with the thumb and pointer finger shut collectively. They flipped the gender of frequent refrains about girls, posting feedback like “Girls favor a virgin man” and “Males ought to keep within the kitchen.” Jeong Eui-sol, a lecturer in gender research at Chungnam Nationwide College in Daejeon, describes this as “troll feminism.”
Megalia shut down in 2017, after many customers left for a new feminist group, Womad. However feminist concepts had been touring in different methods too. The novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, in regards to the sexism that characterised a Korean lady’s life from childhood by way of motherhood, offered greater than 1,000,000 copies, and was made into a preferred movie. Kim Jo-eun, a sociologist learning gender and demography at KDI Faculty of Public Coverage and Administration, in Sejong, discovered a pointy rise within the variety of Google searches for misogyny and feminism after the Gangnam homicide. Searches for feminism rose once more in 2018, when Korea’s #MeToo reckoning started.
Mistrust and even hatred between ladies and men, Kim believes, is the important thing to understanding South Korea’s declining delivery charge. It’s not that girls are with a associate and “interested by having one or two extra infants,” she advised me. “It’s that you just simply don’t need to be in a relationship with males in Korea.”
Though Megalia’s strategies had been controversial, it completed its intention of creating misogyny seen. In Helena Lee’s view, the success of the net feminist motion was that it confirmed girls whom they had been coping with, and why males weren’t price appeasing. “You don’t need to do cosmetic surgery; your look is just not your price; you don’t have to have lengthy, flowy hair; you don’t need to do make-up; nurturing or mommying your boyfriend is just not good for you,” she mentioned, reciting among the concepts that she and fellow feminists sought to impart.
What the motion didn’t do, most agree, is enlighten males or change their views. As an alternative, for males who already felt victimized and indignant, it helped flip feminism into a grimy phrase.
If Korean girls chafe at males’s expectations of them, the reverse is true as properly.
Males are nonetheless anticipated to be breadwinners, and so they work a mean of 5 extra hours every week than girls—40.6 hours versus 35.2. Many Koreans nonetheless count on that the person or his household will purchase a newlywed couple’s dwelling, even when each companions have careers. Certainly, one examine discovered that parental revenue is a robust predictor of whether or not a person will marry, however has no impact on marriage charges for ladies.
I met Ha Jung-woo at a café one night after work. Ha is 31, tall and good-looking, with a heat smile and impeccable manners, the form of man you want you can clone for all of your single straight girlfriends. He went to the College of Texas at Austin and had a severe relationship there, with a Korean American pupil. After they broke up and he moved dwelling, he met one other lady right here. They shared the identical values, he mentioned. In the event that they watched a film collectively, they’d cry on the similar issues, and in the event that they had been studying the information, they’d get indignant over the identical issues. He appreciated that she laughed loads.
In 2021, they received engaged. The date was set, the venue booked. Each units of oldsters had agreed that they’d, collectively, assist purchase the newlyweds an condo; her household would cowl 30 p.c of the acquisition value, Ha 20 p.c, and his father the remaining 50 p.c. However then his father’s textile enterprise suffered some setbacks, and he may put up solely 30 p.c. Ha was pleased to take out a mortgage—he had a safe job. However he says that the information of his dad’s diminished circumstances spooked his fiancée’s household, and he or she known as off the engagement.
Ha was devastated. He requested her: “Is it your determination or your dad and mom’ determination?” When she mentioned it was her determination, he gave up.
Yoon Jun-seok is in his second yr of a mixed grasp’s and Ph.D. program in electrical engineering on the prestigious Seoul’s Korea College. Once we met at a café close to campus, he wore a San Francisco Giants hoodie, and black slide sandals with the Giants brand on them. He has few feminine associates, and has by no means had a girlfriend. He doesn’t really feel that courting is “vital” proper now. At 25, his solely precedence is to complete his doctorate, which can take one other 5 or 6 years, after which line up a gentle job.
At that time, he’ll be about 32. Then, and solely then, does he suppose he would possibly make an effort up to now. “If I can get married, then perhaps I favor between 35 and 40,” he mentioned. “Elevating children in Korea prices loads.”
In a 2020 survey of 1,000 South Koreans of their 30s, greater than half of males who didn’t want to marry cited monetary considerations as their primary hesitation; 1 / 4 of ladies mentioned they had been “pleased residing alone,” whereas one other quarter named “the tradition of patriarchy and gender inequality” as their chief objection to marriage. (One other current survey by two matchmaking firms discovered that girls had been reluctant to marry as a result of they anticipate an asymmetrical division of home tasks, whereas males hesitated due to “feminism.”)
On my first morning in Seoul, I met Jung Kyu-won, a bioethicist who teaches regulation and drugs at two universities in Seoul, for espresso. We had been emailing in regards to the gender battle, and he had requested his male college students if they’d converse with me. The younger males weren’t snug being interviewed, however they shared their ideas with him, which he summarized for me. (That it was a lot simpler to seek out girls prepared to speak about these points than males appeared maybe related to the issue itself.) That they had an extended checklist of complaints, a lot of which boiled all the way down to a scarcity of belief in potential feminine companions, and resentment over the expectation that they’d bear practically all of the monetary duties in a relationship.
Jung is in his late 50s and has been divorced for a few years. He just lately learn an article about girls’s expectations for a husband, he advised me, and realized that he himself, regardless of his skilled accomplishments, didn’t meet their wage necessities.
Some younger folks I met want issues had been totally different. Shin Hyun, 20, is a religious Christian learning comparative literature and tradition at Seoul’s Yonsei College. He’s near his dad and mom, who all the time advised their kids, “You guys are my best reward.” He’s eager to marry and expertise parenthood for himself in the future. “I don’t suppose you possibly can really feel a love that’s larger than parental love,” he advised me.
Strolling round Seoul, I started to surprise the place the youngsters had been hiding. All through town, I noticed “no-kids zones”—eating places and cafés with stickers on their door asserting the institution’s no-kids coverage. However the kids have to be someplace, proper?
One night, I went with a translator to Daechi-dong, an space in Gangnam well-known for its focus of hagwon—cram colleges. He pointed up on the workplace buildings lining the boulevards, noting which colleges had been on which flooring—this one was recognized for languages, that one for math. At about 9:30 p.m., automobiles (all with mothers on the wheel) pulled as much as idle by the curb. By 10, kids and youngsters of all ages, laden with heavy-looking backpacks, streamed out into the road.
Just a few nights later, I sat down with Lira, a cheerful lady in her late 40s who requested that I take advantage of simply her first identify for privateness causes. She grew up within the Seventies and ’80s, when college students attended hagwon provided that they had been weak in a given topic. Now the faculties are important for any child who needs to get into an honest school. Lira’s daughter studied at a high-pressure hagwon, 30 to 40 minutes from their home, to get right into a aggressive highschool. It value about $2,400 a month, “a whole lot of our household’s bills,” Lira mentioned. Once I requested if her husband helped with any of the preparations—researching the very best hagwon, the every day drop-off and pickup, the contemporary meals and particular treats she made to ease her daughter’s stress—it took her a minute to cease laughing earlier than she may say no: “In Korea, baby care is extra the lady’s accountability.”
Certainly, most of the moms I spoke with, regardless of being married, gave the impression of what I might quickly turn out to be: a single mother. At 40, I made a decision to make use of eggs that I’d frozen a couple of years earlier for in vitro fertilization—one thing that isn’t solely frowned upon in Korea, however mainly unimaginable: The Korean Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology permits solely married girls to acquire donor sperm.
At some point, towards the tip of my journey, I visited a clinic run by CHA Fertility Heart. I used to be shocked, given CHA’s rising egg-freezing enterprise, to listen to a director of the middle inform me that she personally doesn’t assist girls turning into single dad and mom, as a result of “it’s not good for the kid.” However as younger folks eye the heterosexual nuclear household with an increasing number of skepticism, South Korea may have to just accept, and even assist, different fashions.
Only a few wealthy international locations have efficiently reversed a decline in fertility, and none has climbed again above the alternative charge of two.1 births per lady after dropping under it. Paul Y. Chang, a Harvard sociologist who research household life in Korea, sees the fabric and social challenges there as intertwined. “For those who present housing for each single unemployed man, my guess is that they’ll be a bit of bit much less misogynistic and fewer indignant on the world,” he mentioned. Equally, “if we’re in a position to someway drive firms to pay girls equally, and provides them promotional pathways which can be equal to what the boys get, then I’m certain that it might take the sting off the feminism.” A safer society may make folks extra snug planning for a future that features marriage and kids.
However a lot of the girls I spoke with pushed again on these concepts. Some thought-about Korean society irredeemably misogynistic. Many ladies mentioned they had been pleased residing with their pets; others had began courting girls.
Park Hyun-joon, a sociologist on the College of Pennsylvania, directed the Korean Millennials Mission, for which he and colleagues surveyed about 5,000 Korean adults ages 25 to 49. He has discovered that many Koreans see household as “a luxurious good.” However he additionally acknowledged the divergence in values between ladies and men, a difficulty that’s much less simply solved by coverage interventions. “I clearly see why Korean girls don’t need to get married to Korean guys,” he mentioned. “Their political and cultural conservatism in all probability makes them fairly unattractive within the marriage market.”
Or as one younger lady I spoke with put it, her associates “form of hate males, and they’re afraid of them.”
I puzzled whether or not the actual luxurious Park was referring to was belief—the capability to imagine that tomorrow will likely be higher than at the moment, and that your fellow residents are working to make it so.
I requested many individuals whether or not they thought South Korea was dropping something in its spurning of replica. Some had bother greedy the query. Just a few talked about one thing about having to pay larger taxes sooner or later. One lady, a 4B adherent, mentioned she jokes together with her associates that the answer to South Korea’s issues is for the entire nation to easily disappear. Thanos, the villain in The Avengers who eliminates half the Earth’s inhabitants with a snap of his fingers, didn’t do something unsuitable, she advised me. Meera Choi, the doctoral pupil researching gender inequality and fertility, advised me she’s heard different Korean feminists make the very same joke about Thanos. Beneath the joke, I sensed a hopelessness that bordered on nihilism.
After speaking with so many considerate and sort younger folks, I principally felt unhappy that, a era from now, there will likely be fewer like them of their nation. One morning exterior my lodge, I watched a father in a swimsuit and trench coat wait along with his younger son on the nook. When a faculty bus pulled over, he helped the boy on, and stood there waving and smiling at him by way of the bus’s home windows because the little boy trundled down the aisle to his seat. The daddy waved frantically, lovingly, as if he couldn’t squeeze sufficient waves into these previous couple of moments during which he held his son’s gaze. He was nonetheless smiling lengthy after the bus drove off.
Reporting for this text was supported by the Pulitzer Heart.
