Editor's Note

Abstract

In the aftermath of South Korea’s recent presidential election, while the public, regardless of party alignment, was still reeling from Yun Sŏkyŏl’s victory, there emerged a startling voting pattern. Almost sixty percent of men under the age of thirty had voted for the far right-wing candidate. This was a group that had been important in the historic Candlelight Movement of 2016–2017, which ousted the ultra-conservative president Pak Kŭnhye and brought in the presidency of the center-right Mun Jaein, anticipating the lengthy rule of Mun’s party, the Democratic Party. Five years is a long time in liberal politics, but the fact that in the period of a single presidential term the majority of South Korea’s young men rejected the Democratic Party and its capable, if not slightly slick, candidate Yi Chaemyŏng and found resonance in far right-wing politics was bewildering—and symptomatic of a cultural fissure in the country. The on-going MeToo movement in South Korea is a crucial rectifying process, but it has also mademore audible the discontent of underprivileged men who experience disadvantages in university admission, secure employment, and social life, largely due to the economic class and geographic region they were born into. They see—misrecognize—the new culture of feminism, with its sophisticated use of art, scholarly research, and social media, as another layer of unfairness over which they have little influence (when in reality it will uplift them, too). At the same time, we are observing that the conservative turn of young men is a global phenomenon driven by the conditions of labor precarity. And naturally,