I DM'd a Korean presidential candidate and ended up building his core campaign

Yeah, I'd express doubt. I do agree that South Korean feminist movement contains some batshit crazy elements, but those anti-feminist young Korean men aren't much better.

Both sides love to fixate on crazy crime stories to make themselves feel like victims. If a Korean man murders a woman, that's femicide and an example of how Korean men behave in general. If a bunch of Korean women share nude photos of men in a website, that's how they're wannabe rapists and an example of how Korean women behave in general. Yada yada.

The young men also opposes any kind of DEI, whether it's for women, rural provinces, or people from poor families, thinking that they are the competent people oppressed by the society. They also denigrate older men in their forties (who happen to be much more left-wing in general), thinking that those oldies were the lucky generation because when they were young jobs were plenty and there were less competition.

Never mind that those old men started their careers with 6-day weeks and horrible safety conditions. Such jobs are still plenty as they were in 1990s, it's just that they're so comparatively shitty that only migrant workers would be willing to fill those positions.

Funnily enough, it looks like fewer and fewer young men are supporting Lee Jun-Seok in recent months. It looks like Yoon's political suicide (via martial law) for the conservative faction did affect Lee in the long term. (It didn't help Lee Jun-Seok that the new president, Lee Jae-Myung, is more politically savvy and is publicly willing to talk about whether young men are feeling the "reverse discrimination" and what the government could do about it.)

> Well, I genuinely think the word "feminism" means different thing in Korea to the places I've lived at. It has much more inflammatory undertone there whereas in NZ, its just a term. When I see "anti-feminism" for Korean politician, I construe it to be "anti radical feminism". That's what I was trying to get at.

Any active, non-historical example of feminism is likely to be considered radical. I think for us to have a reasonable discussion, you’d need to define what radical feminism means to you.

Otherwise what you’re saying is practically equivalent to “Koreans are fine with good feminism, but draw the line at bad feminism”. Which, besides being tautological, is just a rephrasing of the pendulum thing.

> I think there are still gender inequality in Korea.

It seems we agree the issue that feminism aims to solve still exists in South Korea?

> The reason I'm defending them is that I just don't want people to label fair bit of young Korean men to be misogynist and write them off. Their struggles are real and if we keep marginalising them I don't think it would get any better.

I think it’s very possible to point out actions and beliefs rooted in misogyny while also recognizing that the people expressing those beliefs have real struggles. I think people can change and even if they won’t, you can still be empathetic.

I don’t see any inherent marginalization in noticing misogyny. These men are facing real problems. But a lot of the blame for these problems is likely misdirected.