Megalia (Korean: 메갈리아; RR: Megallia) was a feminist movement on the South Korean Internet. It is most well known for the "mirroring" strategy that participants (Megalians) used to defamiliarize misogynist ideas. Megalians mirrored the style of misogynist content but reversed gender roles, intending to provoke laughter or outrage.
The Megalia movement began in May and June 2015 with a surge of feminist trolling on the South Korean Internet forumDC Inside. Participants reporting feeling a sense of catharsis after enduring years of misogyny and gender-based harassment online. After moderators on DC Inside banned the posts, Megalians created a series of Facebook groups and an independent website, Megalian.com. They continued to mirror misogynist posts but also mobilized for feminist political causes. Megalian activists advocated that women "break the corset" of Korean beauty standards, helped pressure the South Korean government to shut down the non-consenual pornography site SoraNet [ko], and protested violence against women after the 2016 Seocho-dong public-toilet murder case. In December 2015, moderators on Megalian.com banned homophobic posts that targeted gay men. This led the majority of its users to leave for other forums, most prominently the website WOMAD. Although many South Korean feminists continued to identify with Megalia, Megalian.com and the Megalia Facebook groups lost their importance as online hubs and eventually shut down.
Megalia is well known in South Korea for its provocative tactics and for openly espousing feminism at a time when it was not widely accepted by Korean society. Backlash to Megalia contributed to the rise of antifeminism in South Korea. Many Korean men interpreted mirrored posts as expressions of genuine misandry rather than as ironic critiques of misogyny. Far-right users of the Ilbe Storehouse forum quickly developed a rivalry with Megalians that was framed in the mainstream Korean media as a "gender war". The media habitually blamed both Ilbe and Megalia for extremism. In contrast, international media outlets gave Megalia more sympathetic coverage, placing the movement within the context of gender inequality in South Korea. Feminist scholars generally praised the movement for revitalizing feminism in South Korea. Nonetheless, some feminist scholars criticized Megalians for focusing exclusively on combating misogyny while ignoring other issues that intersect with women's rights. Today, "Megalia" remains a shorthand in South Korea for feminism, especially "extreme" or radical feminism.
South Korean society has deep gender inequalities; in 2016 it ranked 116th out of 144 nations on gender equality according to the Global Gender Gap Report.[1] It is also a highly digitized society where Internet forums have been popular since the late 1990s.[2] Two of the most popular forums are DC Inside and ILBE. DC Inside is a mainstream forum "comparable to Reddit in size and scope", and has a predominantly male user base.[3] ILBE is a DC Inside splinter forum dominated by right-wing users.[4] In the 2000s and early 2010s, moderate gains for Korean women's rights caused an anti-feminist backlash on these forums.[5] Users coined a number of misogynist neologisms such as "doenjang-nyeo", "gimchi-nyeo", and "mam-chung", among others. These three terms are negative stereotypes of Korean women at a different stages of life. A "doenjang-nyeo" (Korean: 된장녀; lit. bean paste girl) is a college-aged woman who eats cheap meals such as doenjang in order to save money for conspicuous luxuries like Starbucks.[a][6] A "gimchi-nyeo" (김치녀; lit. kimchi woman) is a slightly older woman (late twenties, early thirties) who takes advantage of financial support from her male partner. The use of the word "kimchi" is a way of saying that this is the stereotypical Korean woman, in the same way that kimchi is the stereotypical Korean dish.[3][7] Middle-aged Korean women are targeted by the term "mam-chung" (맘충; lit. mom-bug), which "reduces a housewife/mother into a kind of idle and self-obsessed parasite who wastes money without appreciating her husband's struggle as he labors and sacrifices at his workplace, and does not do her own job of disciplining her child."[8] Paired with these negative stereotypes, online Korean misogynists invented ideals for women to conform to. In contrast to the stereotypically Korean "gimchi-nyeo", they coined the term "seusi-nyeo" (스시녀; lit. sushi woman) for Japanese women, who they believed to be models of submissiveness and traditional feminine values.[9] These terms became normalized online and even spread to Korean mass media.[8] For example, a large part of the popular song "Gangnam Style" parodied the stereotypes of the Doenjang girl.[10][11] Scholars Donna Do-own Kim and Minseok Yoo argue that these misogynist stereotypes pressured Korean women to "continuously police and prove themselves" so as avoid getting labelled selfish, materialistic, or undesirable.[12]
Feminist trolling on DC Inside
This post made by early Megalians is titled "We men are rational so we don't hesitate before doing things by chattering like girls." When opened, the viewer sees the content "We simply kill you!" followed by statistics showing that 94% of South Korean felonies are committed by men.[13]
The Megalia movement was sparked on DC Inside. In the spring of 2015, DC Inside users started a forum called "MERS Gallery" for sharing information on the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) outbreak. A false rumor spread that two women with MERS had refused to quarantine and instead went on a shopping trip to Hong Kong. Forum users bashed them and called them "kimchi women".[14] On May 15, 2015, female users began spamming the forum with humorous posts blaming men for all of the world's problems.[12] The women making these posts "began as group of trolls without an explicit activist goal". Their primary motivation was simply "to provoke and irritate young Korean men" who had spent years "ridiculing, denigrating, and bullying" Korean women online.[15] One widely-shared post had a title meant to sound like it was written by a male user, "We men are rational so we don't hesitate before doing things by chattering like girls." But when viewers opened the post, they would see the punchline ("We simply kill you!") and statistics showing that 94% percent of felonies in Korea are committed by men.[13] In later interviews, women who had participated in this initial wave of trolling described it as "cathartic" and "exhilarating".[3]
As these trolling posts grew in popularity and spread across the Korean Internet, posters began to take on a more self-consciously feminist attitude. They adopted the name "Megalians" as a portmanteau of "MERS Gallery" and "Egalia's Daughters." Egalia's Daughters is a feminist novel about a world where women are the dominant sex and men are forced into a subordinate role. By reversing gender roles, the novel reveals the misogyny hidden in many aspects of society, especially language.[16] Megalians sought to do the same thing to misogynist language on the Internet, "mirroring" the misogynist language used against women.[8] Popular mirroring posts included such comments as "Men should demurely handle housework at home," "Alcohol tastes best when served by men," and "Men are men's worst enemies."[3] Misogynist words were "mirrored", too: "kimchi woman" became "kimchi man" (김치남; gimchi-nam), meaning a man who judges women by their appearances. "Plastic surgery monster" (성괴; seong-goe) was countered with the homophone "sex buyer" (성괴; seong-goe). "Bean paste girl" was replaced with "mackerel pike man" (꽁치남; kkongchinam), referring to cheap men who refuse to pay for dates.[b]
Migration to Facebook and Megalian.com
Feminist trolling and the use of mirroring language provoked a strong negative response from website moderators. DC Inside banned mirrored terms like "kimchi man" and removed trolling posts.[13][18] Megalians considered this moderation biased because DC Inside had tolerated—and would continue to tolerate—the misogyny that these posts attempted to mirror.[19] Megalians founded a series of Facebook pages that were taken down for "derogatory language", leading frustrated Megalia users to call Facebook the "Blue ILBE".[20][21] A Facebook page called "Megalia 4" was formed in September that avoided a takedown by moderating its language and abandoning the "mirroring" strategy. Instead, it focused on internet activism and reporting on instances of gender discrimination.[22]
In the face of repeated bans from the moderators of other websites, a group of anonymous supporters created an independent website named Megalian.com on August 6, 2015.[23][24] Megalian.com was a message board like DC Inside, featuring boards such as the "best" board, "new posts" board, "Menyeom [meaning suitable for Megalia] board", "news" board, "data" board, "lecture" board, "capture" board, "humor" board, and "free" board.[25] Users were anonymous, but had to make an account using an email address in order to make or react to posts.[26][27] Megalian.com became very popular within the first few months of its existence. To the Megalians who had migrated from DC Inside, the influx of new users appeared to include many who used "intimate, warm and amenable" language they associated with female-dominated internet spaces.[27] The more aggressive Megalians denounced this manner of speaking and argued that posts on Megalia should be conspicuously hostile in order to offend their opponents.[28]
Social activism
Megalians used their website and Facebook groups to work for feminist political causes. Megalian activism drew on Internet culture and involved humor and vulgar language. Megalians developed a unique vocabulary to describe female liberation.[29] For example, some Megalians called patriarchal society "the DickTrix" ("dick" plus "The Matrix") and described becoming aware of sexism as "taking the red pill".[30] Humor and fun played an important role in building a sense of community among Megalia's users. Many activists found the process of creating and sharing mirrored posts to be enjoyable because it took the power away from misogynist posts that would otherwise feel threatening or uncomfortable.[31] Megalians frequently used the same vulgar language common on male-dominated Internet forums like ILBE, and reclaimed misogynist language by affectionately calling each other "cunt" (보지; boji).[32] The word "corset" became a metonym for the restraints women place on themselves in order to conform to the expectations of a male-centered society.[12] The popular view on Megalia was that all Korean women start out "corseted", but that exposure to feminist posts can help them notice and "break" their corsets.[33] This evolved into the "break the corset" movement in which women consciously rejected traditional Korean standards of female beauty. Participants would often cut their hair and stop using makeup.[34]
Shutting down SoraNet
SoraNet [ko] (소라넷; solanes) was a Korean porn-sharing site notorious for allowing the distribution of illegal pornographic content, including videos of rape, children, and molka (non-consensual spycam videos).[18] In addition to illegal pornography, SoraNet users allegedly used the site for "invitations", where someone would post a video of an incapacitated woman and invite other users to participate in a gang rape. SoraNet had been active since 1999 and had over one million members in 2015.[35] In October 2015, Megalians began a movement to shut down the website.[36] They made digital infographics, created an online petition, and put post-it notes in public places with messages against SoraNet.[35] Their efforts eventually inspired Korean parliamentarian Jin Sun-mee to demand the Chief of Police take stronger action against SoraNet.[35] In the hours after her speech, Megalians raised ₩10 million ($10,000) for Jin's office.[37] The police began a probe into SoraNet, and on April 6, 2016, South Korean and Dutch authorities cooperated to take down the site.[38][39][40] A number of websites attempted to recreate SoraNet, leading Megalian activists to launch anti-"digital sex crime" organizations like Digital Sexual Crime Out (DSO) and the Korea Cyber Sexual Violence Response Center (KCSVRC).[35]
Feminist Post-it notes
In October 2015, Megalians began sticking Post-it notes with feminist messages in public spaces such as public toilets and elevators. They hoped to spread feminist ideas and attract new participants to the Megalia movement.[41] Megalians would share photos of themselves posting the note and often sign them with the phrase "Megalian in action".[42] They adopted the use of Post-it notes from K-pop fans, who used Post-its to protest unpopular management decisions. The strategy proved affective at attracting newcomers to the website.[41]
Megalians helped create a memorial to a femicide victim that included 20,000 feminist Post-it notes
On May 17, 2016, a man stabbed a woman to death in the toilet at a karaoke bar near Gangnam station in Seoul.[43][44] The two had never met before that night, and the murderer later claimed that he did so out of his hatred for women as they had ignored and humiliated him all his life.[45] Thousands of Koreans, including Megalia users, gathered at the subway station to create a memorial for the victim. They left flowers and 20,000 Post-it notes speaking out for women's rights. Megalians helped organize a series on night marches in memorial of the victim and to raise awareness of violence against women.[20] On several occasions, men carrying anti-mourner or misogynist messages arrived at the memorial and confronted the mourners.[46][47][48]
Facebook lawsuit and t-shirt fundraiser
On May 28, 2016, the Megalia 4 Facebook group began to raise funds for a lawsuit against Facebook. They argued that Facebook had engaged in gender discrimination by taking down two Megalia-related groups while leaving up a ILBE-associated "Kimchi woman" group where a user had posted a video saying that he wanted to kill women. To raise money, Megalians sold t-shirts with the slogan "Girls Do Not Need a Prince". The campaign succeeded in raising ₩112 million ($95,000) from about 3,500 donors, ten times the initial goal.[21] On July 18, Korean video game voice actor Kim Jayeon posted a photo of her "Girls Do Not Need a Prince" shirt on Twitter.[49] Male Korean gamers pressured Nexon, the company that had hired her to do voice acting in the game Closers, to fire her. Nexon did so the following day, explaining their decision by saying they were listening to their customers and that Kim had "exacerbated the issue by posting inflammatory tweets such as 'what's wrong with supporting Megalia?'"[49] Social media harassment forced dozens of those who had stood up for Kim to issue public apologies.[49] The Justice Party (a center-left political party) issued a statement saying that Kim should not have been fired, leading several of its parliamentary members to threaten to withdraw from the party. The protesting members said that it was more humiliating to be associated with Megalia than to be associated with supporters of North Korea (an accusation that the party had faced in the past).[50]
Other projects
Megalians engaged in a number of smaller feminist campaigns using the website as a platform for organizing. After a Korean man maimed his ex-girlfriend in an acid attack, they successfully lobbied the Ministry of Environment to block online sales of high concentrations of hydrochloric acid.[51][52][53] They organized protests against Maxim magazine and a boycott against Namyang Dairy Products for sexist practices.[14][54] Megalians also compiled a list of misogynist celebrities.[54]
Reception and criticism
Because of its deliberately provocative nature, Megalia's mirroring strategy became a major source of controversy in South Korean society. On the mainstream Korean Internet, Megalia is considered to have been as extreme as ILBE, just on the other side of the political spectrum. It is common to accuse Megalians of misandry.[55] The mainstream Korean media criticized Megalia for being intentionally provocative and condemned both Megalia and ILBE for having hatred towards the opposite sex.[56] Many, including some feminists, say Megalia's tactics are unproductive and divisive.[14][57] One example was the website's logo, which shows a thumb and forefinger almost touching. The hand gesture is meant to mock to the allegedly small size of Korean men's penises, a mirror of "the constant and often cruel subjection of Korean women's appearances to male scrutiny".[58]Cultural anthropologist Sealing Cheng argues that this insult reflects mainstream Korean anxieties about masculinity. Many Korean men worry that they "are unworthy of respect and power because of their penis size."[59] Targeting this insecurity made the Megalian.com logo especially offensive to many Korean men, and thus, from the perspective of the Megalians, particularly effective at exposing the cruelty of body shaming.[60] The mockery of Korean men's penis size is found elsewhere too, such as with the mirroring term "god-Western-man" (godyangnam, the equivalent of the "sushi woman"), who is described as a progressive Western man with a large penis.[61] Feminist scholar Donna Do-own Kim, while defending mirroring in general, calls the idealization of Western men "unfortunate", and suggests that it "shows that fighting misogyny was not just one of the motivations... but the motivation; other social injustices were of lesser importance."[61] Another feminist scholar, Youngmi Kim, defended the mirroring strategy:
As unpleasant, vulgar, polarizing, and ultimately divisive as the strategy was, the mirroring strategy vividly and successfully exposed the misogynistic culture among some Korean men by "throwing back"—mirroring—the very same terminology and demeaning attitude towards them.
Another controversy caused by a mirroring post occurred in October 2015. The post claimed to be from a kindergarten teacher, and declared the user's desire to have sexual intercourse with a jonnini (좆린이), which is Korean slang for a male child. The poster (referred to by the media as "Ms. A") later addressed this, and while admitting the gravity of her statement, claimed that she was merely trying to bring awareness to the fact that male-dominated boards such as Ilbe allegedly routinely discuss sexual desires for underage girls (Korean: 로린이; RR: lolini; lit. Lolita girl).[c][62]
Other controversies include when users of Megalia posted gory images of severed or severely damaged male genitalia, or when users publicized men's explicit photos without their consent.[63]
Dispute over homophobic slurs and end of Megalian.com
A major argument between Megalian.com users took place in December 2015 over the use of homophobic slurs. The most common was ttongkko ch'ung (lit. "butthole-bug"), a term originally used on DC Inside to insinuate that overly-enthusiastic fans of male sports stars were homosexually attracted to them. It was adopted by some Megalians to troll gay Korean men.[64] Other incidents included the outing of gay men married to women by some Megalian.com users.[14] After Megalian.com moderators banned the use of ttongkko ch'ung and other homophobic slurs, the majority of users left to join splinter forums elsewhere. The largest of these splinter forums was WOMAD, which became Megalian.com's de facto successor.[65][66] Megalian.com shut down in 2017, and the Megalia 4 Facebook page stopped posting in 2018.[67]
Legacy
Megalia had a transformative impact on South Korean feminism. Both for critics and supporters of the movement, Megalia is considered "the emblem of South Korean popular feminism".[49] At the end of 2016, almost half of Korean women in their twenties considered themselves feminist, and a quarter of them credited Megalia for turning them into feminists.[3] However, the controversy associated with Megalia created negative associations with feminism in the minds of many South Korean men.[68] Even some feminists in Korea today distance themselves from Megalia, calling themselves "feminists but not Megalians".[69] Long after the movement went into decline, "Megalia" continued to be a shorthand in South Korean discourse for feminism, especially feminist beliefs or activists considered extreme. For example, in 2018 after two women reported they had been assaulted for not conforming to traditional standards of feminine appearance, 350,000 Koreans signed a petition asking police to prosecute the men who had assaulted them. When a YouTube video emerged showing the women taunting the men for their penis size, a counter-petition asked the police to prosecute the women because "there should be a different set of measures when dealing with women who belong to Megalia and WOMAD."[34]
The hand gesture depicted in the Megalian.com logo was the inspiration for the finger pinching conspiracy theory.[68] The theory claims that there is a conspiracy to promote misandry by subtly inserting the hand gesture into various media.[70] In 2021, convenience store brand GS25 had to remove an image of a pinching hand reaching towards a sausage from its ad campaign after backlash from Korean men who thought it looked like the Megalian.com logo.[71] In 2024, the Korean unit of Renault faced backlash when numerous videos on its corporate YouTube channel were alleged to show the finger-pinching hand gesture.[72] Numerous news outlets, such as The Hankyoreh, The New York Times, and Korea JoongAng Daily have criticized the conspiracy theory as fictious and as cover for antifeminist harassment.[73][68][74][75]
^At the time the term was coined, Starbucks was a symbol of sophistication and westernization.
^In Korean culture, it is uncommon for women to pay for dates or for a couple to split the check.[17]
^In news coverage, the offensive word was often replaced with eolini (어린이), the ordinary word for a child, or the first hangul letter of jonnini (좆린이) which is jot (좆) was blotted out to read "O린이". The uncensored post on Megalia can be found here (archived, in Korean).
^주점 화장실에서 20대 여성 살해한 피의자 검거 [Police arrested a suspect in a murder of woman in her 20s at the bar public toilet]. Seoul Seocho Police Station. May 18, 2016. Retrieved June 17, 2019.
^강남역 추모 현장에 '핑크 코끼리' 등장…정체는 일베? ['Pink Elephant' appeared at the memorial site of Gangnam station... identity of that is Ilbe?]. Seoul Shinmun. May 21, 2016. Retrieved June 17, 2019.
^Lee, Honggeun; Jeong, Hyojin; Kim, Eunseong (December 5, 2023). 메이플 '남혐 집게손가락'의 끊이지 않는 음모론 ['Men-hating Pinch Fingers' in MapleStory, a neverending conspiracy]. Kyunghyang Shinmun. Retrieved July 27, 2024.
Kim, Jae-hui (June 23, 2015). 일베도 서럽게 만든, '메갈리아의 딸들' [Even Ilbe was made to feel contrition by the 'Megalia sisterhood']. OhmyNews (in Korean). Archived from the original on September 22, 2015. Retrieved January 27, 2017.[unreliable source?]
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Munawar, Aniqua (July 2019). "The Reversal of Sexist Language: Analysing Gerd Brantenberg's Egalia's Daughters". International Journal of English and Education. 8 (3).
Seol, Seung-eun (May 22, 2016). 강남 묻지마 살인, 정신질환자 전형적 범죄…'女가 괴롭혀' 망상 [Motiveless murder in Gangnam, typical crimes of a mental patient... The delusion that women are bothering him.]. Yonhap News Agency. Retrieved June 17, 2019.
Park, Hye-song (January 15, 2016a). 여성 인권' 외치던 '메갈리아'의 정체는?…"소라넷보다 더한 막장 사이트 [Real identity of Megalia who cries for women's rights? Site more extreme than SoraNet] (in Korean). Archived from the original on January 15, 2016.
Park, Se-hwan (May 21, 2016b). 강남역 살인사건 현장에 나타난 핑크코끼리 '논란' [Controversy over 'Pink Elephant' appearing at the site of a murder case in Gangnam Station]. Kukmin Ilbo (in Korean). Retrieved June 17, 2019.
Herald Economy (November 17, 2015). 범죄, 테러 악용 우려…실험용 염산 온라인판매 금지 [Concerns about abuse for crime and terrorism... Ban on online sales of experimental hydrochloric acid]. The Korea Herald (in Korean). Retrieved May 31, 2021.
Jeong, Euisol (2020). Troll Feminism: The Rise of Popular Feminism in South Korea (PhD thesis). University of York.
Cho, HyeYoung (2024). "Intermedial Feminism: Megalia and Kangnam Station Exit 10". In Cho, Michelle; Song, Jesook (eds.). Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea(PDF). Translated by Kim, Aliju. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN978-0-472-90437-2. Retrieved November 12, 2024.
Brown, Lucien (2023). "The denigration of Korean men's genitals: Precision grip gestures and the multimodal construction of "taking offence" in media discourse surrounding anti-feminism in South Korea". Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. 12 (2).
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