On a late autumn night in 2023, in the metropolis of Jinju, a woman using the name On Ji-goo was handling nighttime duties at a convenience store when a young man burst inside, violently sweeping items off the shelves.
Things quickly intensified. As she attempted to call for support, he took her mobile and threw it in the store’s oven. She tried to stop him, and he took hold of her by the collar and arms, forcing her several steps while crashing her against display shelves.
When an older male customer sought to step in, the perpetrator confronted him, too, asking, “Why aren’t you supporting a fellow man?” Upon law enforcement's appearance, he stated he was part of a male advocacy organization and requested male officers to restrain him.
“Earlier, I had only the most basic understanding of gender equality advocacy – the kind any woman might typically understand,” states On, an writer hopeful who writes under an alias.
The interview occurs on a bright day in a espresso bar in Jinju, where she remains located, just blocks from the shop. It’s a sleepy provincial city of fewer than 350,000 residents.
On’s face is hidden behind a face mask, a cap drawn down. After experiencing unfeeling media scrutiny from regional press in the aftermath of her trauma, she needs a moment to feel at ease.
“I didn’t fully grasp the bias women face, or perhaps I normalized it as typical,” she notes.
The attack left her irreversible auditory damage and severe trauma. The offender was given a three-year prison sentence.
Via a historic court judgment, the higher judicial body identified gender-based hostility as the driving force behind the assault.
On’s story is not unique in a society where institutional bias and aggressive internet sexism have pitched mainly gen Zs and millennials into a heated conflict of the sexes.
While similar fights over feminist issues are playing out across the world, globally, South Korea has become the epicenter for male-female divisions.
On the surface, South Korea seems a hypermodern society, defined by its valuable additions to international entertainment, cutting-edge technology and modern metropolitan areas.
However, under the surface lies a expanding disparity between men and women that appears to fit to a different time.
Across member states of the OECD, the country leads the list for university attainment among women, yet maintains the bloc’s largest wage difference.
Ladies are still often omitted from leadership roles, and South Korea repeatedly scores lowest in measures of professional parity.
While the country leads the world in internet connectivity and hi-tech innovation, these identical virtual environments have become breeding grounds for among the most toxic anti-feminist communities.
The most shocking instance of this took place that year, when a 23-year-old woman was savagely slain in a restroom near a major transit hub.
The murderer, who waited hours for a random female victim, told authorities he did it because “ladies never acknowledged me”.
The case became a defining point, sparking massive protests, yet the digital targeting of women persisted.
Around that time, it had become so commonplace that it was typical to notice signs in restrooms indicating they were examined for covert recording devices.
Thousands of women objected to an surge in unauthorized recording and “exploitative imagery”.
The crisis deepened in 2020 with the infamous digital exploitation scandal of online coercion, in which users of a system of messaging channels coerced women and minors into making sexually explicit material.
More recently, a recent risk developed: AI-generated explicit content targeting schoolgirls, with culprits, often minors themselves, using artificial intelligence to overlay women’s faces onto adult material.
Such online offenses didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Among the most obscure sections of South Korea’s internet, young men assemble secretly to vent their frustrations.
While the west has 4chan and Reddit, South Korea has a domestic site – “daily best” – which at its height in the mid-2010s featured in the leading ten popular online destinations in the country.
Its impact goes much further than the digital realm. Its users pioneered offensive labels such as kimchi-nyeo (“Korean female”) to taunt women as materialistic gold-diggers.
These terms soon infiltrated public dialogue, with press agencies adopting derogatory endings in headlines to comment on any woman behaving badly in public.
As its influence grew, Ilbe began to become extreme, associating with far-right politics and planning controversial public displays.
During that period, an Ilbe user ignited an improvised device at a liberal speaker's event, asserting the speaker was sympathetic to the North.
Additional members mocked families of those who died in 2014’s Sewol ferry disaster, by consuming excessively pizza in front of mourning families on protest fast.
Even as user engagement dropped, its legacy endures in online communities known as namcho, short for namseong chogwa, meaning “overabundance of males”.
Such male-dominated spaces have expanded through forums and messaging apps, allowing young men to voice complaints about gender equality and what they see as inverse bias.
“When you obtain entry to the public web before you get properly instructed, your outlook will be fucked,” states Kim Min-sung.
The 22-year-old activist, formerly against gender equality, expresses an infectious energy.
As with numerous young men, Kim found these online spaces at a young age. He reflects searching for harmless material, such as humorous clips, only to be gradually exposed to misogynistic material.
His transformation came via an unlikely source: imaginative gaming. Through this medium, he encountered a community that was mostly women and progressive.
Originally, he says, “I kept my mouth shut and just played Dungeons & Dragons. But understanding their views, you just spontaneously participate in casual conversations and you grasp the outlook you
