We take the red pill, we confront the DickTrix: online feminist activism and the augmentation of gendered realities in South Korea

Abstract

In recent years, the internet in South Korea has become a battleground for unprecedented gender wars. This was intensified by the emergence of Megalia, an online feminist group that was started in 2015 as a response to the misogynistic culture and discourses in male-dominated online communities. This article explores the emergence of a new form of digital feminist activism as a process through which gendered realities and feminist experiences are simultaneously augmented. We argue that female online users in Korea, by taking the online seriously as a focal site in which offline realities are not simply extended or revoked but augmented through and through, could gain a critical perspective on gender relations via the activism of fun.

Keywords:

• Online misogyny
• digital feminism
• augmented reality
• online community

Notes

1. Egalia’s Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes. Written by Gerd Brantenberg in 1977, Korean translation published in 1996.

2. http://cafe.daum.net/myboddymychoice

3. http://dsoonline.org

4. Translated by the authors.

5. The debate on the abolition of the veteran’s extra point system for public servants, ensured by a constitutional appeal by feminist and disability-rights activists in 1998, was an important event that caused young Korean men to identify feminists or young women in general as their adversaries, who steal their privileges and are parasitic on their sacrifice.

6. Young Korean men’s anti-immigrant sentiment is termed “imagined exploitation” by Korean cultural critic Park (2013). This is because “even though young men claim immigrants steal their jobs, the actors who actually deprive them of their jobs are not immigrants, but the state and capital.” We contextualize young Korean men’s misogyny as based on “imagined deprivation” in this vein.

7. http://megalian.com/free/359466 Dec 14, 2015 (Accessed June 10, 2017 in the archived form http://archive.fo/U5Fn1). All quotations from megalian postings are the authors’ translations.

8. In a survey conducted in 2015, 51.6 percent of 317 participants answered that they had received misogynistic messages from the mass media and everyday life experience in one week. “Q. Why did young men come to despise women?” July 3, 2015, Busan Daily News. http://news20.busan.com/controller/newsController.jsp?newsId=20150704000030 Accessed December 6, 2017.

9. MIC reports Ilbe as “a loose group of mostly digitally savvy, ultra-right-wing South Korean men” congregated in a “4chan-esque web forum.” “Inside Ilbe: How South Korea’s angry young men formed a powerful new alt-right movement” MIC, September 19, 2017. https://mic.com/articles/184477/inside-ilbe-how-south-koreas-angry-young-men-formed-a-powerful-new-alt-right-movement#.xRNJMMGju (Accessed December 8, 2017).

10. Ilbe’s blatant refusal to recognize social norms and its hostility towards women has been analyzed as a product of the precarity of young men and their unfulfilled desire for intimacy and individualized gender rivalry (Bora Yoon 2013), and as the manifestation of male desire to reassert the ideal of normative femininity in order to regain control over women (Jin Um 2016).

11. “We men are rational so we don’t hesitate before doing things by chattering like girls” MERS board, June 2, 2015. (Reposted August 5, 2015 at http://gall.dcinside.com/m_entertainer/2021696 . Accessed September 19, 2017).

12. http://cafe.daum.net/subdued20club/ReHf/1135430 (Originally from Megalia, shared in a women-only community November 24, 2015, Accessed May 8, 2017).