The pinching hand symbol has become a point of contention in a charged battle over gender and anti-feminist backlash by men's rights groups.
www.latimes.com
Just saw this trending on twitter.
The gist is that the 🤏 pinching hands emoji has upset the men's rights types who believe feminism has gone too far.
This is South Korea one of the most unequal countries in the world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_South_Korea
Out of 144 countries they are:
127th for Economic Participation and Opportunity
101st for Educational Attainment
Women are far more likely to be victims of violence in a relationship than men, recent police statistics continue to confirm. Last year, police charged 9,858 people with crimes against their intimate partners, including murder, rape, battery and stalking. Women were victims in 9,682 of those...
m.koreaherald.com
Korea Women's Hot Line's analysis of crimes reported by the media shows at least one woman was killed or nearly killed by her male partner every 1.8 days in 2019. The figure excludes crimes that were not covered by the media.
So that sets the scene and here's some quotes from the article showing how pathetic the victimhood feeling these.men have are:
Men's rights groups have taken to searching for the image included in various posters and ad campaigns, in a McCarthyistic hunt for companies, organizations or their employees sympathetic to feminism, targeting them with boycotts or a barrage of complaints.
And they're having success
And their campaigns have proved effective: Major corporations have disciplined or demoted employees for advertisements that used the pinching hand, government ministries and municipalities have apologized and revamped promotional material, museums have dismantled displays and celebrities have seen their careers threatened.
More than 65% of South Korean men in their 20s said they equated feminism with hatred of men, according to a 2018 survey by the Korean Women's Development Institute, and 56.5% said they would break up with their girlfriend if she was a feminist.
"Feminism is a mental illness" has become a common refrain in some street protests by men's rights activists. One columnist wrote in 2015 that "mindless feminism" was "more dangerous than the Islamic State" militant group.
The origins of the 🤏 pinching hands meme is as follows:
The pinching hand entered the gender debate in South Korea in 2015, years before it became an emoji. That year, a group of South Korean women fed up with widespread misogyny on male-dominated online forums decided the best way to push back was to give as good as they got. They began referring to men by their genitals, as men had often done of women. They created male versions of online slang that was degrading to women, and reverted sexist idioms — "A woman's voice should never go beyond the fence," "Women and dried fish need a pounding once every three days" — against men. They ridiculed and belittled men based on their physical appearance, and often, the size of their appendage.
In 2016, a voice actor for a video game was fired after she posted a photo of herself online in a T-shirt that read "Girls do not need a prince,"
I remember also there was a music artist that had to apologise when she took a photo with her reading a feminist book.
In 2018, men and women came to blows at a pub in Seoul after an argument in which they yelled the insults popularized online at each other — the women shouting "6.9," the average penis size of Korean men in centimeters according to one 2003 study, and men retorting by calling them "Megal bitch."
In April, a branch of the convenience store chain GS25 faced criticism after a job posting specified that applicants should not be a feminist, leading to an apology from the corporate headquarters.
Ha Heon-gi, a former legislative aide and founder of the media consultancy New Communication Lab, said the men behind the effort were taking a page from the feminists' book and using methods they've seen employed by women to object to misogynistic statements or practices and extract apologies or topple powerful men.
"It's tit for tat. You've taken issue with ridiculous things so we do the same," he said. "It's a sense of political efficacy, that collective action works. Women got together in one voice and were listened to. Men didn't have that experience and now they're making their will known as consumers."
There's really no self awareness with these men.
South Korea is famous for sexism, this doesn't help that perception at all.
The country is at the level where a convenience store thought it alright to say they don't hire feminists.
The article also mentions that conservative mayors have been elected for both Seoul and Busan stemming from discontented men in their 20s and this movement.
