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.
Couldn’t possibly be the soul crushing society we’ve created, or their absolutely insane academic regimen
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.
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.
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I’d like to remind everyone who’s coming here for the men vs women fight that not so long ago only men worked and they were still able to afford everything for their family. Now both work and can’t afford the same as men alone did then. We should be fighting such that either man or woman work alone and can still afford a home, not fight between us.
Men vs women, left vs right politics, black vs white, Christian vs Islamic,… we’re too blind with these petty fights among ourselves to see that we are all alike and there’s a different third party that is playing us like a fiddle.
