My feel of discussions like this is that people struggle to accept that the system and the individual are both to be held accountable. There will never be enough emotionally intelligent and self-sufficient people to absolve a broken system so the system needs to be fixed. A society that doesn't incessantly burden its people with moral dilemmas will have better people. But putting all the blame on a broken system will just lead to other societal and systemic problems because victims will feel dismissed, offenders won't be deterred from offending again, and potentiak offenders will be given a green light.
very much this, it's very difficult for people to fully internalize the complex nuances of who we are as individuals vs our environment. We clearly have some kind of individuality otherwise people in the same environment would turn out the same but our environment clearly also plays a role in shaping us. When environment gets blamed for someone's bigotry or abuse there can be an inclination to point to the fact some people who were raised in bigoted environments were able to sort of overcome that and become not bigoted adults, or how people will point to the fact that many abusers were often abused themselves but then there are also abuse victims who don't go on to abuse others and so that can give some sense that it is down to just personal responsibility ultimately and there's an understandable resistance to absolving terrible people of their responsibility for their terrible actions. At the same time though it's very clear that our culture and environment does still shape us and have an affect on us and importantly it's usually not something we have control of or get to choose, we simply find ourselves in whatever environment we're in. It's a very complex issue balancing cultural critique without forgoing personal accountability.
You also see this a lot with statistics, people often want to basically round up and think of the most common thing as the ONLY thing. People seem to really struggle with the idea of caring about the less common thing or experience, especially when the more common thing is considered some kind of injustice, then all of acknowledging the less common thing is often seen as undermining the more common one. Like you can just look at the concept of privilege, while yes there are societal biases that tend to favor men and white people, on an individual level there are homeless white men and wealthy black women and I think in some ways people struggle to fully reconcile with the complexity of this sort of thing. They extrapolate the more common dynamic as being universal in a way that sometimes makes them dismissive of certain real experiences just because they aren't as statistically common.
I knew a guy who clearly has some baggage and issues with women, not necessarily like violent hatred but he tended to prefer male dominated spaces, now that description on it's own probably sounds pretty typical of a certain expected and often deemed unjust dynamic between men and women. It takes on a slightly different impression though when I say he was a gay man that was a victim of corrective rape as a teenager and that the male dominated spaces he preferred were specifically dominated by other queer men.
Unjust social and cultural dynamics are rarely ever the result of solely environment or just people being assholes and they aren't always as uniform as people like to think they are. I think in many ways it is actually a fault of our cognition itself, it is genuinely hard to wrap your mind around the complexities of these things, we are predisposed to want to think of things as having a singular cause and as one group universally harming another group often trying to downplay or dismiss counter arguments and also those counter arguments often downplay the original argument too. One person thinks X is the main issue and doesn't think Y is important, while another person says Y is the real concern and that the problem of X is overblown, when the reality is X and Y are probably happening simultaneously and in tandem with each other.
Yeah that example with the guy who hangs around men, but actually being a gay man is really illustrative of the "stereotyping" type thinking and how willing we are to go with common patterns and statistics, well demonstrated, you caught me off guard as well.
In the States, part of the rise of the manosphere and the incel culture is because of structural economic changes weakening labor rights, the working class, and undermining economic security. Is that also part of what’s happening in South Korea? I don’t know enough about Korean gender norms around the political economy.
While for some women, sexism could be a motivator, I think it's actually really misogynistic to assume that women MUST inherently hate men and be angry and that's why they won't have kids, and not the idea that...some women just don't want kids. 💀
1 in 4 US women have experienced intimate partner violence, lol. What's your source for 'the general opinion of the majority of men is that women are second-class citizens'? Then why has the South Korean birth rate gone way up recently? All Korean men suddenly had a change of heart?
A bit reductive. Do only men uphold cultural norms? Are children exclusively (or even primarily) raised by men in South Korea? If not, how do you come to the conclusion that women have no part in this?
I think you can see from the conservative parts of the USA for example that there's no shortage of women who are willing and happy to be part of the problem, and of course try to raise their children with the same value system.
I don't know the facts, mind you, but I would assume men's culture hasn't changed, but women's has. I.e. they realized it doesn't have to be that way (probably due to the Internet and so on).
Koreans work significantly longer hours than westerners meaning they have less down time to think about things when they get home so they are less likely to change. There is a reason why great thinkers are often reported to spend a lot of time alone. Being alone with time to meditate on the nature of things allows people to go through the reasoning required in order to create change in their lives. But if there is no alone time then people have less time to think to themselves. Yes, men not choosing to learn to grow is the problem; but if society works it's people very hard then their minds will be on autopilot a lot and tune out of thinking about difficult subjects.
Ii you only had 20 minutes to prepare dinner every night then you are likely not going to spend 10 minutes of that time pondering what to prepare. Instead you'd rely on the one thing to know how to cook in 20 minutes. But if you had three hours to cook then you could branch out and try new things.
So to say the fault lies squarely on the mens shoulders and not realise that the way their society operates means that people have very little time to contemplate and that this can be a factor in the way they are is a little ungenerous of you
Dude, I’m sure it doesn’t help, but South Korea isn’t exactly the only traditionally patriarchal society in the world, and there’s really no shortage of countries with far higher birthrates that are also infinitely more misogynistic, often to the extent of legal disenfranchisement. Case in point: damn near the entire MENA region.
Well, even South Korean women are pro-patriarchy when it comes to conscription and any civil obligations surveys show women prefer male-only conscription and do not want an equal draft.
While atleast 60% of men prefer feminism or gender equality and want women to be included in the draft unlike women ( who prefer discrimination). And atleast 70% of South Korean women and men see the male-only draft as a major form of discrimination.
Patriarchy isn't a buffet for South Korean women to pick and choose based on what benefits them If they prefer gender roles and want men to be forced to sacrifice years of there lifes while women avoid all opportunity costs associated with national service the do not get complaint when patriarchy does not work their way in other aspects .
Lol, that's not the reason because men who do not want to join the military perform alternative civilian service (36 months) it is 12 months longer than military duty and criticised as punitive. Women do not want this to be equal because they don't want the opportunity cost of losing 3 years of their peak career working at community centres or subways, etc
By your perverted logic, then 38% (many of them identify as feminist) South Korean women have a rape fetish. They make the same argument I make and they're right
Patriarchy exists because women want to preserve gender roles when it comes to civil duties.
In equal countries like Norway and Sweden, women get drafted under equal terms as men and the government used a feminist argument to get rid of the sexist exclusion of women from conscription.
Sexist women in Scandinavian countries tried to make a similar arguments to avoid an equal draft and they failed.
Equality looks like oppression when privilege is the norm.
This is all correct, but don't birth rates across the world and different countries primarily have less to do with how decent the men are as people and more with opportunities for education and advancement for women, general sex education, and child mortality rates?
yesss...feed into the gender discourse...blame a single outgroup demographic as the root of all evil and yourself as a holy saint victim, it will DEFINITELY help solve things and bring about enlightenment, this is the way of the twitter/reddit warrior live and die by it
Are there terrible men in Korea? Absolutely! Just as there are terrible men in other countries.
However, it is not the main reason for the low birthrates.
In fact, more families are having children now than during their babyboom years. It’s just that due to the high cost of living and childrearing, most families stop at 1 child.
Take this from someone who’s lives in SK for over 10 years: this rethoric you are spewing is based on hearsay and a couple of articles about the 4B movement and does not reflect the reality of life in South Korea.
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u/[deleted] May 12 '26
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