A politician in South Korea is being criticised for making dangerous and unsubstantiated comments after linking a rise in male suicides to the increasingly “dominant” role of women in society.
In a report, Seoul City councillor Kim Ki-duck argued women’s increased participation in the workforce over the years had made it harder for men to get jobs and to find women who wanted to marry them.
He said the country had recently “begun to change into a female-dominant society” and that this might "partly be responsible for an increase in male suicide attempts”.
South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates among the world’s rich countries but also has one of the worst records on gender equality.
Councillor Kim’s comments have been criticised as the latest in a series of out-of-touch remarks made by male politicians.
It is true that women generally want a partner who makes the same or more than them, while men generally find income/career status less important in mate selection. That is a scientific fact before you politicize it. And it’s also a fact that as more women receive higher education and fair pay, the pool of men who make the same or more than the average woman will shrink pretty dramatically.
So it is true to say that as women become empowered and more able to care for themselves without the help of a man, the majority of lower-income and males with a lower socioeconomic status will have a much harder time finding a mate. This mostly affects men negatively at a younger age when their earnings are lowest and they sit closest to the bottom of that hierarchy. Conversely, the negative impacts hit women later on when the end of their child-bearing years approaches and they realize that putting a family on hold to focus on their career may have been a more permanent decision than they’d intended now that they’ve moved up the economic ladder and the small proportion of men at or above their level are either already taken or happy to play the field non-monogamously.
It hits both genders just as hard and it’s an issue we need to solve. Our evolutionary psychology and mate selection processes just haven’t caught up with modern society. And since males are more prone to isolation and suicide, we see the affects against them more readily. But the affects to women will become more apparent in the next few decades.
I know this is politically charged territory, but it’s pretty well established from a sociological and evolutionary psychology perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mating_preferences#:~:text=Mate preference priorities,-Research has been&text=In the study%2C it was,attractiveness%2C as the highest priorities.
Edit: Changed “lower-status males” to “males with a lower socioeconomic status” since that seems to be a trigger-word for some folks.
This is supercharged in Korea because it’s a very traditional society. Not only are women not able to find compatible men, but they also have to give up the careers they built in order to stay home and raise kids.
I don’t know about Korea specifically, but it’s pretty common in SE Asia to have live in nanny’s from poor countries to child rear when both parents are power career players. It’s this not the case in Korea?
It’s hard to talk about this without people getting upset but I think you were pretty genuine in trying to talk about it.
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That’s a lot of extra words to say you, knowingly or otherwise, buy in to incel rhetoric…
I’m linking to peer-reviewed scientific studies over here. If you want to dispute what I’m saying, avoid the genetic fallacy and engage with the substance.
By “lower-status”, I meant lower socioeconomic status. Less education and less income. The two things women primarily judge potential mates on.
I agree with you, though its all a symptom of the larger class war and the market capitalist owners need for mooaaaaaaar that required almost everyone to work to support a household. Same reason they limited abortion for poor women here in the US, the need for more desperate workers.
The sad reality is the truths you lay out are just not palatable to the current culture, despite being true. They also will not even begin to improve until the larger global class
waroccupation is addressed and the greed of the owners is put into check by force.Even that is a losing battle, but at least it has meaningful support. If you’re going to fight a just but losing battle, fight the one that informs all others that won’t get rotten fruit unfairly pelted at you in the public square.
Love this line. I’ve been eating a lot of fruit here on Lemmy. Going to have to put some thought into this one.
I did as well when I started pontificating on the current gender conflict, only to be rebuked not on the facts or the data, but on the feels with ad hominems directed at me.
But the thing is, in addition to dictating all poors must work in the wake of the loss of their jim crow pseudo-slave workforce, the market capitalists want us divided in every conceivable way so we never look up at them basking in the dragon hoards we never stop growing for them with our bodies.
They use the media they own and the curriculum they inform through captured governments to stoke racial/political/sex/cultural divides. It is in their interests to keep us ignorant, largely devoid of critical thinking, and hostile towards one another.
Neither men nor women are setting these terms on the basis of their inherent drives, their drives are being manipulated to serve the market by a few thousand sociopath families with aligned interests based in unquenchable avarice. All of us without considerable net worth are less than human to the market capitalist owners.