On August 22, South Korean media outlet Hankyoreh revealed the existence of a Telegram bot that, for just 650 won (44 euro cents), allowed users to generate pornographic images with artificial intelligence based on any photograph. The report indicated that the service had been used by nearly 227,000 men to create deep fakes of hundreds of thousands of women they knew, many of them minors. The scandal had its epicenter in South Korea, but its reverberations shook the entire world, unleashing a wave of criticism towards men in a country with a long history of a culture with macho roots. ” You could never pay me enough to be with a Korean man ,” read one post on X that reached nearly 15 million views and thousands of interactions.
Searching for “Korean men” on any social media platform these days means entering a sea of criticism and news about sexism in South Korea. However, until recently, it was difficult to scroll through platforms like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook without constantly coming across accounts of fans of K-pop idols or the latest K-drama, the countless soap operas that have conquered screens around the world over the past two decades. If you, the reader, are a man, you may not have heard of this phenomenon, but ask the young women around you.
Has the new myth of masculinity died? “We are in a time of dual messages. We no longer receive only the idealized image of Korean men in series (K-dramas), but all these news stories with the most misogynistic elements of their attitude. And it remains to be seen whether the fantasy sold by K-dramas outweighs these news stories, or vice versa,” says Min Joo Lee , professor of Asian Studies at Occidental College (Los Angeles).
Lee began her academic career studying the Korean Wave , or Hallyu, one of the most successful soft power and country brandingcampaigns of recent times. A wave of television productions with its own stamp, a music industry with the recipe for the perfect hit , skin care routines that have become basic for many young women around the world… in short, a cocktail – with some government planning and large economic injections – that placed South Korea as one of the great poles of attention beyond Southeast Asia and, as a consequence, increasing foreign tourism. But it was here that Lee detected an anomalous pattern: a growing number of Western women traveling to Korea to find a boyfriend and, why not, something more.
“There was a trend of women spending a significant portion of their time doing more than just visiting tourist sites or filming locations for their favorite drama. Many were on Tinder, checking out profiles of Korean men, going on dates, going to bars and clubs at night,” she says. That’s where the germ of her research, ‘In Search of Mr. Right: Korean Dramas, Romance, and Race’, was born.
These women, in their most exaggerated version, a simple fascination in the mildest cases, was fueled by an image of the Korean man who has a more delicate, more romantic masculinity , compared to the hypersexuality of the West (there is a classic joke in Korean series that says ‘there will be no kiss until chapter 21’, compared to the Spanish one, which will have a sexual scene in the first chapter). The Korean woman is less manly in terms of aesthetic canons, a masculinity that is not afraid to express what is beautiful or to take care of itself, Lee and Ainhoa Urquia Asensio , a professor in the East Asia Area of the Complutense University of Madrid, outline. “A mix between the new masculinity in the visual and the physical, but also a return to traditional gender roles from a positive point of view, the man who opens the car door for you, who takes off his jacket so that you do not step in the puddle,” she sums up.
The phenomenon of Western women fetishizing Korean men based on an idealized image of masculinity, born from the one represented in K-dramas, is the culmination of almost twenty years of the Hallyu wave , but it is a dream that is close to being shattered. A disillusionment in which the latest Telegram scandal is only the most visible drop in a glass that is getting fuller, scandal by scandal.
How to break a myth
In South Korea, 80% of men aged 20 to 29, and 70% of those aged 30 to 39, feel they are being severely discriminated against. This perception arises from the belief that women are “stealing” job opportunities from them in a highly competitive market, exacerbated by the obligation – exclusively for men – to perform military service, which interrupts their careers. “All men considered capable have to do it, and that is going to condition their working life. It greatly affects their socialisation, in a very hierarchical way, with very militarised dynamics,” adds Ainhoa Urquia Asensio, a professor in the East Asia Area of the Complutense University of Madrid.
At the same time, South Korean women, increasingly liberal, are increasingly rejecting traditional roles that relegate them to the background (more than 25% of women now in their 40s lost their jobs after giving birth), challenging the norms that have historically defined the country’s social structure. A train wreck that, in recent years, has brought to light the darkest side of Korean masculinity.
“We no longer receive only the idealized image of Koreans in series, but other news with the most misogynistic elements of their attitude”
Perhaps the first hint Western audiences had that gender issues in South Korean society were more than just the standard machismo of a Confucian culture came during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. South Korean athlete An San then became the target of fierce criticism at home, not for her sporting prowess — she won three gold medals in archery, South Korea’s national sport — but for her short hair, a style associated with feminism in South Korea. Men called for a boycott. The incident laid bare, for international scrutiny, the deep tensions between young South Korean men and the women’s rights movement.
South Korea’s demographic crisis has also been a constant source of international headlines, bringing the gender divide into sharp focus when journalists ask a simple question: why? Despite government attempts to encourage births with financial incentives, the birth rate continues to decline, reaching a record low of 0.72 children per woman, the lowest on the planet. And while this is a trend that has been developing for decades — fertility fell below the replacement rate, 2.1, in 1983 and reached 1.5 in 1998 — the most recent surveys, focusing on women, reflect that among the most common reasons for remaining single is “the low commitment of men” to housework and childcare.
This growing anti-feminist radicalisation among South Korean youth goes hand in hand with the worrying rise in digital sexual crimes in the country, with the recent Telegram scandal being just the latest in a long series. The most notorious case was the “ Nth Room ”, a sexual exploitation network that operated on the same messaging app between 2018 and 2020 and was dedicated to extortion and distribution of explicit sexual content. The case affected at least 74 women, including 16 minors, whose images were distributed to more than 60,000 users.
“At a public level, this information is making its way, especially with the wide coverage on social networks that didn’t exist before, where before only the wonderful part came through, a very modelled image that they want to project,” admits Urquia Asensio. In other words, it’s the other side of the coin: overwhelming popularity creates fascination, but also attention to the phenomenon.
A trend is emerging in this regard. In 2019, a new sex scandal was revealed, known as Burning Sun , which involved several celebrities, including Korean idols from popular K-pop groups, involved in various cases of rape, assault, sexual recordings distributed without the victim’s knowledge, prostitution… among others. At that time, Urquia Asensio recalls, many fans rushed to take to the networks to defend their idol. But now, more and more news is starting to accumulate.
“I also believe that every wave has to break at some point. The bigger the rise, the bigger the fall. There are no trends that last that long, and we have already left the peak of the Korean Wave behind us,” he concludes.
On August 22, South Korean media outlet Hankyoreh revealed the existence of a Telegram bot that, for just 650 won (44 euro cents), allowed users to generate pornographic images with artificial intelligence based on any photograph. The report indicated that the service had been used by nearly 227,000 men to create deep fakes of hundreds of thousands of women they knew, many of them minors. The scandal had its epicenter in South Korea, but its reverberations shook the entire world, unleashing a wave of criticism towards men in a country with a long history of a culture with macho roots. ” You could never pay me enough to be with a Korean man ,” read one post on X that reached nearly 15 million views and thousands of interactions.
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