On the times she’s feeling most beneficiant towards males—say, when she sees a good-looking man on the road—Helena Lee can generally put her distaste apart and respect them as “eye candy.” That’s so far as she goes: “I do not want to know what is inside of his brain.” Most of the time, she desires nothing in any respect to do with males.
“I try to have faith in guys and not to be like, ‘Kill all men,’” she says. “But I’m sorry, I am a little bit on that side—that is, on the extreme side.”
Her father, she says, was abusive and moved out when she was 6, and she or he has lived together with her mom and grandmother ever since, a mini-matriarchy that fits her advantageous. 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 informed her she’d be cuter if she “fixed her gay style.” The worst half, she mentioned, was that they have been stunned when she was offended—they thought they’d paid her a praise. She is 24, finding out 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—ladies who’re actively selecting single life. Their motion—presumably tens of hundreds robust, although it’s unattainable to say for certain—is named “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 are the intense fringe of a broader pattern away from marriage. By one estimate, greater than a 3rd of Korean males and 1 / 4 of Korean ladies who at the moment are of their mid-to-late 30s won’t ever marry. Even extra won’t ever have kids. In 1960, Korean ladies had, on common, six kids. In 2022, the typical Korean girl may anticipate to have simply 0.78 kids in her lifetime. In Seoul, the typical is 0.59. If this downward drift continues, it won’t be lengthy earlier than one out of each two ladies within the capital by no means turns into a father or mother.
Many international locations’ populations are growing old and, in some circumstances, shrinking. In January, China recorded its first inhabitants decline for the reason that Sixties, when the nation had been racked by famine. America’s beginning fee has been falling for the reason that Great Recession (although 86 p.c of American ladies nonetheless have at the very least one youngster by the point they’re of their 40s). But South Korea’s fertility fee is the bottom on the earth.
Marriage and youngsters are extra carefully linked in South Korea than practically anyplace 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 recognized low fertility as a matter of nationwide significance and put forth its Framework Act on Low Birth Rate in an Aging Society, variations of which have been renewed each 5 years.
The authorities has tried increasing maternity go away, providing {couples} greater 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 “birth map” on-line exhibiting what number of ladies 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 ladies holding banners that learn my womb isn’t 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 programs have hot-pink seats designated for pregnant ladies, 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 have been stuffed with dozing aged folks.
There are a whole lot of causes folks resolve to not have a child. Young Koreans cite as obstacles the excessive price of housing in better 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 are inhospitable to household life, particularly for girls, who’re nonetheless anticipated to do the majority of housekeeping and youngster care. But these explanations miss a extra fundamental dynamic: the deterioration in relations between ladies and men—what the Korean media name a “gender war.”
“I think the most fundamental issue at hand is that a lot of girls realize that they don’t really have to do this anymore,” Lee informed me. “They can just opt out.”
The plummeting fertility fee has its roots within the fast transformation of Korean society. After the Korean War, many individuals migrated from villages to work in city factories for depressing wages, as a part of a state-led financial transformation that grew to become referred to as the “Miracle on the Han River.” High-school and school enrollment shot up. A prodemocracy motion finally led to the toppling of navy rule in 1987, and to new freedoms. After the 1997 monetary disaster, firms restructured, and Korea’s company tradition—identified for demanding lengthy hours in change for job safety—took on the precarity acquainted to Americans.
But gender roles have been slower to evolve. Chang Kyung-sup, a sociologist at Seoul National University, coined the time period compressed modernity to explain South Korea’s mixture of lightning-fast financial transformation and the gradual, uneven evolution of social establishments such because the household. More and extra ladies entered larger schooling, lastly surpassing their male counterparts in 2015. But educated ladies have been nonetheless typically anticipated to drop out of the workforce upon marriage or motherhood. The household remained the fundamental unit of society, and each the previous order and the brand new assigned familial tasks practically solely to ladies. Women’s ambitions have expanded, however the thought of what it means to be a spouse and mom in Korea has not. As a outcome, resentments on either side of the gender divide have flourished.
On a sunny day in November, I met Cho Young-min, 49, at a café in Gangnam. After greater than 20 years in advertising and marketing, she runs a enterprise creating city gardens. She sees the gender warfare partly on account of that disconnect in expectations, and the truth that, for the primary time, women and men at the moment are genuinely competing for jobs.
The unemployment fee in Korea is comparatively low, lower than 4 p.c, nevertheless it’s significantly larger for folks of their 20s. Mandatory male navy service—South Korea remains to be technically at warfare with North Korea—provides ladies what many males understand as a bonus within the labor market, a head begin of 18 months to 2 years. Women counter this with information on the pay hole, the most important within the OECD at 31 p.c.
“To women’s minds, before, they had a very small portion of the pie, like this”—Cho held her thumb and index finger shut collectively. “Now they are expanding the portion, bit by bit. It’s still very small compared to the men’s portion. But to men, they are losing.”
Last 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 Family, which he mentioned handled males like “potential sex criminals.” And he blamed feminism for the nation’s low beginning fee, suggesting that it “prevents healthy relationships between men and women,” including that this was “not a problem that can be solved by giving out government subsidies.”
According to exit polls, practically 59 p.c of males ages 18 to 29 voted for Yoon, whereas 58 p.c of girls in that age group voted for the liberal candidate. One commentator declared it the “incel election.” Several folks famous to me that in a rustic as ethnically homogenous as South Korea, the election emphasised the extent to which gender, moderately than race or immigration standing, has change into the important thing social fault line.
Cho Jung-min had at all times deliberate to be married by 23. Her mom had married younger, and given beginning to her at 22. Cho cherished having a younger mother; the 2 of them watch the identical TV reveals and admire the identical singers. “I wanted to do the same thing for my child,” Cho informed me. But when she was 17 or 18, she’d talked about her marriage plan to a buddy. “Then why are you struggling so hard to study and go to university?” her buddy requested. Good query. “That was one of the turning points,” she informed 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 carrying a classy wool coat and sparkly scarf. She had studied and labored in France for years, however moved dwelling through 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: Last week a authorities proposal to lift 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 powerful 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 giant matchmaking firms, are widespread methods of assembly folks in South Korea, the place on-line courting isn’t as widespread as it’s within the U.S.) She discovered the boys closed-minded, with “a traditional way of thinking.” Men, she mentioned, “always want to debate with me: ‘Why are you thinking that way?’ They all need to teach me.” She doesn’t inform them she’s a feminist. Her mother has warned her to not, as a result of she thinks it could possibly be harmful.
When I requested why she thought younger Koreans have been retreating from courting, Cho instantly introduced up bodily security. “These days, there is a lot of violence during dating, so we start to 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. Although he mentioned he was motivated by ladies routinely ignoring him, police blamed psychological sickness. This was a germinal occasion for a lot of Korean younger ladies, who have been livid and terrified; it may have occurred to anybody.
Indeed, a 2016 survey by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family discovered that 62 p.c of South Korean ladies had skilled intimate-partner violence, a class that included emotional, bodily, and sexual abuse, in addition to a variety of controlling behaviors. In one 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 thought it was only on the news,” she mentioned. “I realized that it can also happen 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 may date, or filmed in an intimate second.
Meera Choi, a Yale doctoral pupil, is researching gender inequality and modifications in household formation in South Korea—what she calls a “crisis of heterosexuality.” When I expressed my shock at how prevalent fears like Cho’s gave the impression to be, she estimated that 20 of the 40 ladies 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 reminiscences. 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 mother and father 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.
But many mentioned they’d solely come to articulate these experiences after encountering feminism—continuously on-line. They described a second of awakening, maybe even radicalization. They examine femicides, stalking, and digital intercourse crimes, referred to as 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, identified for its overt anti-feminism, receives about 20 million visits every month, in a rustic of slightly below 52 million folks. (Its customers are anti- numerous different issues too: anti-LGBTQ, anti-liberal, anti-immigrant). The Ilbe group has components of the alt-right and the manosphere; some have likened it to 4chan or incel boards. Users check with Korean ladies as kimchinyeo, or “kimchi women,” stereotyping them as useless, materialistic, and manipulative. Men share sexist memes and complaints about reverse discrimination that one Korean author has described as “paranoid misogyny.”
In 2015, some ladies started to combat again. They created a web site, Megalia, the place they practiced the artwork of “mirroring”: They adopted the identical rhetorical gadgets, sick humor, and misogynistic tropes, however used them to make enjoyable of males. In response to the objectification of Korean ladies and complaints about their small breasts, ladies poked enjoyable at Korean males for, they claimed, having small penises. The Megalia emblem was a reference to this: a picture of a hand with the thumb and pointer finger shut collectively. They flipped the gender of widespread refrains about ladies, posting feedback like “Women prefer a virgin man” and “Men should stay in the kitchen.” Jeong Eui-sol, a lecturer in gender research at Chungnam National University in Daejeon, describes this as “troll feminism.”
Megalia shut down in 2017, after many customers left for a new feminist group, Womad. But feminist concepts have been touring in different methods too. The novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, in regards to the sexism that characterised a Korean girl’s life from childhood via motherhood, offered greater than 1,000,000 copies, and was made into a well-liked movie. Kim Jo-eun, a sociologist finding out gender and demography at KDI School of Public Policy and Management, 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.
Distrust and even hatred between ladies and men, Kim believes, is the important thing to understanding South Korea’s declining beginning fee. It’s not that girls are with a associate and “thinking about having one or two more babies,” she informed me. “It’s that you just don’t want to be in a relationship with men in Korea.”
Although Megalia’s strategies have been controversial, it achieved its intention of constructing misogyny seen. In Helena Lee’s view, the success of the net feminist motion was that it confirmed ladies whom they have been coping with, and why males weren’t price appeasing. “You don’t have to do plastic surgery; your appearance is not your worth; you don’t need to have long, flowy hair; you don’t have to do makeup; nurturing or mommying your boyfriend is not good for you,” she mentioned, reciting a few of 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. Instead, for males who already felt victimized and offended, it helped flip feminism into a grimy phrase.
If Korean ladies chafe at males’s expectations of them, the reverse is true as properly.
Men are nonetheless anticipated to be breadwinners, and so they work a median of 5 extra hours per week than ladies—40.6 hours versus 35.2. Many Koreans nonetheless anticipate that the person or his household will purchase a newlywed couple’s dwelling, even when each companions have careers. Indeed, one examine discovered that parental earnings is a robust predictor of whether or not a person will marry, however has no impact on marriage charges for girls.
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 sort of man you want you can clone for all of your single straight girlfriends. He went to the University of Texas at Austin and had a critical relationship there, with a Korean American pupil. After they broke up and he moved dwelling, he met one other girl right here. They shared the identical values, he mentioned. If they watched a film collectively, they’d cry on the identical issues, and in the event that they have been studying the information, they’d get offended over the identical issues. He favored that she laughed rather a lot.
In 2021, they received engaged. The date was set, the venue booked. Both units of oldsters had agreed that they’d, collectively, assist purchase the newlyweds an residence; her household would cowl 30 p.c of the acquisition worth, Ha 20 p.c, and his father the remaining 50 p.c. But then his father’s textile enterprise suffered some setbacks, and he may put up solely 30 p.c. Ha was glad to take out a mortgage—he had a safe job. But he says that the information of his dad’s diminished circumstances spooked his fiancée’s household, and she or he known as off the engagement.
Ha was devastated. He requested her: “Is it your decision or your parents’ decision?” When she mentioned it was her resolution, 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 University. When we met at a café close to campus, he wore a San Francisco Giants hoodie, and black slide sandals with the Giants emblem on them. He has few feminine associates, and has by no means had a girlfriend. He doesn’t really feel that courting is “necessary” proper now. At 25, his solely precedence is to complete his doctorate, which is able to take one other 5 – 6 years, after which line up a gradual job.
At that time, he’ll be about 32. Then, and solely then, does he assume he may make an effort so far. “If I can get married, then maybe I prefer between 35 and 40,” he mentioned. “Raising kids in Korea costs a lot.”
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 issues as their major hesitation; 1 / 4 of girls mentioned they have been “happy living alone,” whereas one other quarter named “the culture of patriarchy and gender inequality” as their chief objection to marriage. (Another current survey by two matchmaking firms discovered that girls have been reluctant to marry as a result of they anticipate an asymmetrical division of housekeeping, whereas males hesitated due to “feminism.”)
On my first morning in Seoul, I met Jung Kyu-won, a bioethicist who teaches legislation and drugs at two universities in Seoul, for espresso. We had been emailing in regards to the gender warfare, 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 search out ladies prepared to speak about these points than males appeared maybe linked to the issue itself.) They had a protracted listing 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 tasks in a relationship.
Jung is in his late 50s and has been divorced for a few years. He just lately learn an article about ladies’s expectations for a husband, he informed me, and realized that he himself, regardless of his skilled accomplishments, didn’t meet their wage necessities.
Some younger folks I met want issues have been completely different. Shin Hyun, 20, is a religious Christian finding out comparative literature and tradition at Seoul’s Yonsei University. He is near his mother and father, who at all times informed their kids, “You guys are my greatest reward.” He’s eager to marry and expertise parenthood for himself at some point. “I don’t think you can feel a love that’s greater than parental love,” he informed me.
Walking round Seoul, I started to surprise the place the youngsters have been hiding. Throughout the town, I noticed “no-kids zones”—eating places and cafés with stickers on their door asserting the institution’s no-kids coverage. But the youngsters should 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 faculties. He pointed up on the workplace buildings lining the boulevards, noting which faculties have been on which flooring—this one was identified for languages, that one for math. At about 9:30 p.m., vehicles (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 girl in her late 40s who requested that I exploit simply her first identify for privateness causes. She grew up within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s, when college students attended hagwon provided that they have been weak in a given topic. Now the faculties are important for any child who desires to get into a good 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 price about $2,400 a month, “a lot of our family’s expenses,” Lira mentioned. When I requested if her husband helped with any of the preparations—researching the most effective hagwon, the each 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, child care is more the woman’s responsibility.”
Indeed, lots of the moms I spoke with, regardless of being married, seemed like what I’d quickly change into: 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’s not solely frowned upon in Korea, however mainly unattainable: The Korean Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology permits solely married ladies to acquire donor sperm.
One day, towards the top of my journey, I visited a clinic run by CHA Fertility Center. I used to be stunned, given CHA’s rising egg-freezing enterprise, to listen to a director of the middle inform me that she personally doesn’t assist ladies changing into single mother and father, as a result of “it’s not good for the child.” But as younger folks eye the heterosexual nuclear household with increasingly skepticism, South Korea may have to just accept, and even assist, different fashions.
Very few wealthy international locations have efficiently reversed a decline in fertility, and none has climbed again above the alternative fee of two.1 births per girl 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. “If you provide housing for every single unemployed man, my guess is they’ll be a little bit less misogynistic and less angry at the world,” he mentioned. Similarly, “if we’re able to somehow force companies to pay women equally, and give them promotional pathways that are equivalent to what the men get, then I’m sure that it would take the edge off the feminism.” A safer society may make folks extra snug planning for a future that features marriage and youngsters.
But a lot of the ladies I spoke with pushed again on these concepts. Some thought-about Korean society irredeemably misogynistic. Many ladies mentioned they have been glad dwelling with their pets; others had began courting ladies.
Park Hyun-joon, a sociologist on the University of Pennsylvania, directed the Korean Millennials Project, 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 luxury good.” But he additionally acknowledged the divergence in values between ladies and men, a problem that’s much less simply solved by coverage interventions. “I clearly see why Korean women don’t want to get married to Korean guys,” he mentioned. “Their political and cultural conservatism probably makes them pretty unattractive in the marriage market.”
Or as one younger girl I spoke with put it, her associates “kind of hate men, and they are afraid of them.”
I questioned whether or not the actual luxurious Park was referring to was belief—the capability to consider that tomorrow shall be higher than immediately, 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 girl, 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 mistaken, she informed me. Meera Choi, the doctoral pupil researching gender inequality and fertility, informed me she’s heard different Korean feminists make the very same joke about Thanos. Underneath the joke, I sensed a hopelessness that bordered on nihilism.
After speaking with so many considerate and type younger folks, I principally felt unhappy that, a era from now, there shall be fewer like them of their nation. One morning exterior my lodge, I watched a father in a go well with and trench coat wait together 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 via the bus’s home windows because the little boy trundled down the aisle to his seat. The father waved frantically, lovingly, as if he couldn’t squeeze sufficient waves into these previous few 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 Center.