To return to the original article:
I think that women in South Korea generally have things harder than do American women.
As I understand it (anyone please correct me if I'm wrong on any point), Korean tradition calls for the eldest son to live with his parents, and for his wife to move in and be bossed around mercilessly by her mother-in-law.
In Korea, there is nightmarish competition to get into the best universities. Koreans study hard and work hard.
Koreans have extremely long work days, for very little pay.
Women are typically paid less than men.
Beauty standards for Korean women are very high.
The cost of living in Korea is high. Even ordinary items manufactured in Korea cost more in Korea than they do in the United States.
Married Korean women are under a lot of pressure to take care of their husbands, their husbands' parents, and their children.
After going to so much effort to graduate from the best university, and to get a job that basically sucks, a lot of women do not want to give up their careers, or to see their opportunities for professional advancement eroded.
So, the 4B movement probably makes a lot more sense for Korean than American women.
Here is a scholarly article, "The 4B movement: envisioning a feminist future with/in a non-reproductive future in Korea", published in 2021
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... 7#abstract
Well worth reading, if you're interested.
The Abstract wrote:
Recently, in Korea, young feminists launched the 4B (4非) movement: bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, bisekseu, meaning the refusal of (heterosexual) marriage, childbirth, romance, and sexual relationships. The 4B movement encompasses not only criticisms of the pro-natalist turn in state policy and protests against it, but also various forms of self-help discussions and practices that are explicitly oriented towards women’s individual futures. In this article, we explore how the 4B movement has given young feminists the opportunity to envision the future that they had been discouraged from imagining. Presenting a lived critique of contemporary Korea, these feminists ask how young women are led to imagine their current, single life as a temporary state, as consumer capitalism and the patriarchal state together place these young non-married women in an economically vulnerable position. They see this as achieved by endorsing ‘feminine’ desires and a presentist lifestyle, as well as excluding non-married women from opportunities in the job market and state-sponsored benefits in welfare services. We argue that the 4B movement and its discourses on the future and self-help could offer these women one possible way to envision a feminist future as individuals without being part of the state’s reproductive future.
The Beginning of the Introduction wrote:
In March 2018, one Twitter user suggested to her young female comrades that they should learn more about economics, and ‘save money that would otherwise be spent on self-fashioning labour’ in order to secure a home of their own, sustain a ‘non-married life (bihon)’, and ‘continue [feminist] struggles’. Otherwise, she said, ‘one might become a penniless granny with a wardrobe full of clothes’ (Pulmetalhalmeoni, Citation2018). These tweets were written and circulated at the confluence of two different, yet closely related movements among young online feminists in Korea – the Tal-Corset (Escape the Corset) movement that campaigned against the ideal of femininity,Footnote1 and the 4B (4非) movement (bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, bisekseu), which refuses marriage and other heterosexual relations and practices. The imagery of an old woman whose wardrobe is packed with outdated fashion items was powerful. Screenshots of this writer’s tweets and other users’ comments were circulated well beyond Twitter to other women’s online communities, and even became ‘images that help me curb my urge to buy new clothes’ (Yeoseongsidae userFootnote2, 2019)....
If the movement at least succeeds in persuading women to spend less on clothes, then more power to them!
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Semen retentum venenum est
16 Nov 2024, 10:24 am
