Assignment: South Korea - the feminist hunters

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why feminism has become a dirty word in South Korea. In South Korea being a feminist is now something that can only be admitted in private, thanks to a fierce backlash against feminism. Anti-feminists accuse women who advocate for equality as being man-haters, worthy of punishment. Online witch-hunts - spearheaded by young male gamers - target women suspected of harbouring feminist views, bombarding them with abuse and demanding they be fired from their jobs. Jean Mackenzie investigates how these witch-hunts have silenced women. She asks what this means for the future of women's rights in a country where gender discrimination is still deeply entrenched.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service, where we're on assignment in South Korea.
0:07.4	It's been so long since I checked out this, and it's so bad. It's worse that I remember.
0:13.8	Good God. Can you read me some of the messages?
0:16.4	Okay. What good can you find in a... Okay, um, 107k2i azzan Zhangghii, um,
0:21.7	what good can you find in a 200-pound pig old woman?
0:29.0	Korean women are spreading poison in the well.
0:33.1	It doesn't say Korean woman,
0:34.3	it's a slur for Korean woman.
0:36.1	It's all just general misogyny.
0:40.0	This one says that feminism starts with paranoia. You haven't had to look very far, right?
0:46.9	These are the first kind of few messages on this forum that we've come to. Very anti-Korean women.
0:52.7	Yeah, yeah. And the most recent anti-Korean
0:55.5	woman post was made one minute ago. I'm sitting with Min-Sung Kim. He's a big online gamer,
1:02.0	and we're looking through some popular online message boards on his laptop. So this is a forum
1:06.7	where people are supposed to be sharing tips about stocks and shares, and it's just flooded with anti-feminism and misogyny.
1:14.5	Yeah.
1:14.7	And very, very anti-Korean women.
1:18.3	Specifically Korean women.
1:20.0	Yeah.
1:21.0	In their view, the Korean woman is the epitome of evil.
1:26.7	So these are the sites where people are orchestrating
1:29.4	these feminist witch hunts. Yes. I'm Gene McKenzie, and this is the story of how
	...

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