A World Without Men

[Mosby]

Youngmi’s childhood was a difficult one. The 25-year-old nurse was born to a poor family in Daegu, South Korea, known for being one of the most conservative cities in the country. Youngmi’s mom left the home when Youngmi was young to escape her husband’s physical abuse, leaving her and her sister behind with him and their paternal grandmother. When she was 5, her 8-year-old sister started losing her hair from stress.

As she grew older, Youngmi found herself depressed, unsure of what her future held, and financially unstable. In Korea’s patriarchal society — in which women are generally expected to defer to their fathers and to adhere to rigid beauty standards — she felt like a perpetual victim, obsessed by the wrongs done to her by her father and pressured into maintaining her appearance in order to please men. Despite her meager budget as a nursing student, she purchased new clothes each season, spending a lot of money on cheap, poor-quality clothes from H&M. She wore makeup religiously. “I could not go outside without any makeup. I felt ashamed of my face,” she said. “I had this pressure of wanting to look beautiful and wanting to be desirable, physically or sexually.”

While scrolling through Twitter in 2018, Youngmi came across footage of protests taking place in the streets of Seoul. In South Korea, where cases of femicide, revenge porn, and dating violence are widespread, a surge in spy-cam sex crimes, overwhelmingly committed by men, had mostly resulted in fines and suspended jail sentences, if they were prosecuted at all. That was not the case, however, for one 25-year-old woman who had taken a nonconsensual photo of a nude male model at art school and posted it online; she was sentenced to ten months in prison and court-ordered sexual-violence counseling. The demonstrations were a reaction to the blatant hypocrisy.

https://www.thecut.com/2023/03/4b-movement-feminism-south-korea.html

[irisblue]

1. Comments from the article

--"While 4B’s adherents may hope to change society — through demonstrations and online activism, and by modeling an alternative lifestyle to other women — they are not trying to change the men whom they view as their oppressors.
Well, that's probably a good thing, because if there's one thing men worldwide have steadfastly asserted, over and over again, it's that they have absolutely no plans to ever enlighten themselves or go against the status quo.

Men will never change. Ever. The world has accommodated them for far too long."


--" Men aren't monolithic, but the vast majority of them have been awfully quiet during the past few years while our rights have been annihilated.

Some say that pessimism is a reflection of reality.

The lives of women aren't improving in any aspect, obviously, and the fact that so many of us are choosing to eschew contact with men as often as we can isn't surprising. They still remain our number one apex predator.

(Edited)

--"Oh yes, a "great deal of historical evidence"--like the fact that it took hundreds of years for white women--and only white women--to gain voting rights in the US, and that the gender pay gap is still massive--"men are not monolithic..." sounds kind of like "slaveowners were not monolithic"--seems nonsensical and based on some sort of affect-theory of subjective, contrarian history that has no real sense of how power informs actual events, vs. some sort of low-level "resistance" that--seriously--" (white) women's suffrage???"--I have three words for you: Susan B. Anthony."



the number of replies saying " men suffer from patriarchy/toxic masculinity too! " is disappointing, but not unexpected.

Bonnie Burstows quote"“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother's fate.” is very true.




Thank you for giving us this Mosby

Posted too soon, added quote