Why Does Korea Have an Under-Endowed Men's Movement?
Description
Years ago, I saw this very funny Daily Show segment featuring a professor who argued that we need affirmative action for ugly people. As he is talking about the systemic discrimination this class is subjected to, the correspondent asks the researcher whether he knows this from first-hand experience. The professor responds that he is average, which elicits laughter from the correspondent and the crowd. The two of them end up walking around the University of Texas campus and rating women, for the purpose of achieving social justice of course.
The segment shows why identity politics for ugly people is not a realistic prospect. When it comes to race, sex, and sexual orientation, individuals tend to fall into discrete categories. Looks is a trait that exists on a spectrum, it is to a large extent subjective, and nobody wants to claim ugly as an identity.
Understanding this, I was surprised to learn that Korean antifeminists have something of a small penis movement. This has manifested in the “finger pinching conspiracy theory,” which holds that feminists in advertising and the media are sending coded messages mocking men who are poorly endowed.
This is not a fringe view in Korea. The Wikipedia page on the conspiracy lists dozens of controversies in which celebrities, corporations, and government agencies have issued apologies or explanations for supposedly mocking men’s small penises, spanning from 2021 to late 2024. The hysteria makes our Summer of Floyd look like a culture of measured restraint and thoughtful discourse by comparison. Here’s the ad that started it all.
In the years since, there have been controversies involving advertisements and promotional materials put out by companies including Starbucks, Volvo, and Kakao Bank. The National Police Agency and the War Memorial of Korea have also faced controversies.
Here is a pair of graphics released by the Ministry of National Defense on social media that it later apologized for.
Here’s another one from EMart, the largest retailer in Korea, announcing a promotional event.
In addition to looking at still advertisements, there’s apparently a practice of going frame by frame through video games and anime cartoons to find instances of finger-pinching.
Why is pinching seen as a way to mock men with small penises in the first place? Apparently this was the symbol of a feminist group called Megalia, which had this logo.
