The Bridge
The power of friendship: How a letter helped create an American bestseller about antisemitism
Laura Z. Hobson’s “Gentleman’s Agreement” explores antisemitism through reporter Phil Green’s experiences posing as Jewish, ultimately becoming a bestseller that sparked important conversations about prejudice in America.
Rachel Gordan, University of Florida
Eighty years ago, the Jewish American novelist Laura Z. Hobson was contemplating her next writerly move and was seeking a little help from her friends.
“Gentleman’s Agreement,” the story she was drafting, felt like a bold idea. Maybe too bold. In her vision for the novel, reporter Phil Green is assigned to write an article about antisemitism. He pretends to be Jewish so he can experience bigotry firsthand. Readers follow the character as he encounters the prejudice of supposedly good people and learns how to respond to the slights and jabs casually meted out even by Americans who consider themselves liberal.
It was 1944, three years after the United States joined World War II. What prompted Americans to finally fight, however, was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, not Nazi persecution of Jews and other marginalized groups. Antisemitism in the U.S. remained rampant throughout the early and mid-1940s.
With so many fraught feelings about Jews, and about the war in which American soldiers were risking their lives, Hobson was unsure how a novel about domestic antisemitism would be received. She might have wondered if readers would dismiss the story as a Jewish writer’s “special pleading” on behalf of her own.
Should she move forward with the novel that was bubbling up inside of her? To find her way out of her writing quandary, Hobson did something she had never done before and would never do again in her four decades of writing more than a dozen books: She consulted several friends and colleagues, mailing them her proposal for the novel and a cover letter explaining her quandary.
She did not know it at the time, but Hobson was about to write her most important book – one that would help broaden conversation about prejudice by reaching many more readers than would ever hear a rabbi’s sermon or read a committee’s report on antisemitism.
The right words
When the responses started to come in, it became clear that not all the feedback was of the helpful variety.
Lee Wright, Hobson’s editor at Simon & Schuster, seemed not to have fully grasped that writing fiction was a matter of placing oneself in the shoes of someone else. The editor advised Hobson that she was ill-suited to write from a gentile’s perspective because Hobson herself was Jewish. Further, Wright cautioned, Hobson should not attempt to write from a man’s perspective.
Hobson’s publisher and friend, Richard Simon of Simon & Schuster, was also skeptical. He did not believe that novels were the way to fight antisemitism or bigotry. And then Simon did that worst thing an editor could do: He reminded Hobson that her last novel, “The Trespassers,” had been a commercial disappointment.
Hobson stewed over these replies, as evident from her autobiography and letters archived at Columbia University, which I found while researching my first book, “Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American.” As Hobson later noted in her autobiography, her publisher’s less-than-enthusiastic reply sapped some of her confidence. She wasn’t entirely certain that she wanted to continue with her writing.
It was one of Hobson’s closest female friends, Louise Carroll Whedon, whose letter offered just the right words of encouragement. Known as Carroll to her friends, she was married to TV writer John Whedon – and the family’s writing success would continue with their grandson Joss Whedon, of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The Avengers” fame.
Familiar with the ups and downs of the writing life, as well as Hobson’s insecurities, Carroll replied with the enthusiasm that Hobson needed. “Let me say right away that I think the book ought to be written,” Whedon assured her, “and the sooner the better – not to highlight the plight of the Jew, but to examine the even more appalling plight of the non-Jew, and what the seeping poison of prejudice can mean to America.”
The Americans who really needed “Gentleman’s Agreement,” Whedon argued, weren’t the extreme antisemites, but the people hoping that “if you just pretend it isn’t there, maybe it will go away.” Otherwise, she warned, that willful ignorance and passivity could destroy the country – “at least the America that most people want to believe exists.”
Whedon did not deny the risks. But she wasn’t willing to watch her friend doubt her abilities – or her insights as a Jewish woman who had experienced antisemitism firsthand, and observed casual antisemitism from her non-Jewish friends. That Whedon was one of Hobson’s non-Jewish friends made her enthusiasm for a novel about antisemitism especially valuable to Hobson.
“It’s a controversial subject, Babe, and there’ll be arguments who should do it and when and how it should be done no matter what comes of it,” Whedon concluded. “For me, I think you’re in a singularly good spot to write it – in hot anger, sure – but in cold truth as well.”
Whedon had brought Hobson back to herself. Now, it was time to write.
Instant success
In a few years, the book stuck in Hobson’s mind would become a sensation. First published as a series in Cosmopolitan magazine, “Gentleman’s Agreement” was then printed by Simon & Schuster in 1947. It became a bestseller and later an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck.
“Required reading for every thoughtful citizen in this parlous century” was how The New York Times described the novel. Because of Hobson’s readable style and romance, the novel received attention from a wide range of publications, from the Saturday Review of Literature to Seventeen magazine. From books like Hobson’s, Americans were learning “how we could be humane, as well as human, beings,” Times reviewer Charles Poore wrote in a December 1947 roundup of the year’s top books.
“Gentleman’s Agreement” was never perceived as “just” a Jewish novel – mostly because readers mistakenly assumed an author named Hobson was not Jewish. Even for critics, the book broadcast a new openness toward discussing antisemitism. It was a story full of teachable moments.
Hobson’s novel was part of a wave of 1940s fiction against antisemitism. Some of these novels were written by Jewish authors who were beginning to form the nucleus of postwar American literature, such as Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller. Others were by writers who made their mark during the 1940s, but whose names have faded over the decades, such as Gwethalyn Graham and Jo Sinclair. But Hobson’s was the most popular of its time.
If it weren’t for Whedon’s encouragement, though, “Gentleman’s Agreement” might never have been finished. If every friend of a writer said just the right thing – offering the needed encouragement or tough love – it would not feel like such profound treasure to spy a pearl of encouragement. But nobody gets all the encouragement they need, and writers are no exception.
Rachel Gordan, Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies, University of Florida
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Discover more from Daily News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Community
Larry Krasner, Kensington, the scrapped Sixers arena − and other key concerns that will shape Philly politics in 2025
Richardson Dilworth, Drexel University
Campus protests. Homeless encampment clearings. Significant decreases in shootings, homicides and overdose deaths. Protests to “Save Chinatown.” A mass shooting at a SEPTA bus stop. Illegal car meetups. City workers called back to the office. A SEPTA strike averted.
These were just some of the headlines that dominated Philadelphia politics in 2024.
So, what does 2025 hold for the city?
I’m a politics professor at Drexel University and in 2023 I published a short book, “Reforming Philadelphia, 1682-2022,” that traced the city’s political development with an eye toward the future of its policy and politics.
Here are six key storylines that will shape Philly’s political landscape in 2025.
1. Partisan shifts
Philadelphia enters 2025 notably more politically diverse than five years ago.
Partisanship in Philadelphia is not so much captured by a Democratic-Republican split as it is by what local journalist Larry Platt once called “reformer vs. progressive,” referring to the division between more conservative Democrats on the one hand and more liberal Democrats and progressive third parties on the other.
Progressive candidates have had minor surges in recent years. Seven of the 17 members of the Philadelphia City Council are elected at large, but no party is allowed to nominate more than five members to run for these seats in the general election. This has meant that, as long as anyone can remember, there have been five Democratic and two Republican at-large council members.
Then, in 2019, Working Families Party candidate Kendra Brooks won one of the two at-large seats previously held by Republicans. One year later, two Democratic Socialists who ran as Democrats, Nikil Saval and Rick Krajewski, were elected to the state Senate and state House, respectively. And in 2023 another Working Families Party member, Nicolas O’Rourke, won the second at-large City Council seat reserved for minor parties, thereby completely replacing Republicans in those positions.
At the same time, the mayor elected in 2023, Cherelle Parker, is a reasonably conservative Democrat – at least in the sense that her focus has not been on social justice issues but rather the classic municipal issues of cleanliness and public safety.
And the 2024 elections saw the GOP vote go up in Philadelphia, as it did almost everywhere in the country. Republicans captured a state Senate seat in the city for the first time in two decades.
The most recent surge favoring Republicans would ostensibly threaten the two at-large Working Families Party members of the City Council, who are most vulnerable to electoral challenges that would bring back at-large Republicans. However, they’re safe until 2027, by which time another Democratic surge in Philadelphia is likely, as many voters will have most likely soured on the Trump administration by that time.
2. Will Krasner stay or go?
In 2025, the most high-profile city election will be for district attorney, and that does seem potentially ripe for change.
The incumbent is Larry Krasner, first elected in 2017 as part of the post-Trump progressive wave. He won again decisively in 2021, against a challenger in the Democratic primary whose main support was from the Fraternal Order of Police.
Yet as Parker’s election as mayor – and Trump’s as president – suggests, Krasner may face an electorate ready for a more law-and-order message in May 2025. The DA’s office in Philadelphia has historically been a bastion for conservative Democrats and even Republicans. Krasner may face more significant challengers this time around, especially in the primary.
3. Kensington at a crossroads
Parker has benefited from the sharp decline in crime and violence after its pandemic-driven spike. But she has also increased the police budget to provide for hiring 400 new officers; hired a police commissioner from within, Kevin Bethel, who previously received praise for his work on diversion and juvenile justice; and focused on quality-of-life issues such as cracking down on ATV gangs.
Parker has also focused in particular on the Kensington neighborhood and its notorious open-air drug markets. This is important, not least because Kensington has been a large contributor to the city’s unfortunate status of being a leader in drug overdose deaths.
The drug trade was also holding down development and property values – and therefore property tax revenues – in a neighborhood on the path of gentrification. From my perspective, cleaning up Kensington promises to be some of the best return on investment in the city.
4. Parker vs. Trump administration
Of course, another new thing that the city will have to grapple with in 2025 is the incoming Trump administration.
The previous Trump administration got into a fight with then-Mayor Jim Kenney in 2016 over the city’s sanctuary policy with respect to federal immigration enforcement. Basically, the Kenney administration won and got back federal grant money that had been withheld.
Parker may be in a tough spot if she plans to maintain some sort of sanctuary status for the city. The Trump administration – no friend of Philadelphia under the best of circumstances – will likely face less resistance and some acquiescence, as we’re seeing in Chicago, where some aldermen have suggested getting rid of that city’s sanctuary status.
The incoming president has also signaled repeatedly his willingness to use the military for mass deportations, thereby sidestepping necessary cooperation from local law enforcement. This is a critical issue because immigration is a key economic asset for Philadelphia. As the Pew Charitable Trusts have found, immigrants in Philadelphia tend to be younger, more likely to participate in the workforce, and more likely to start a business than native Philadelphians.
5. Market East in limbo
And then there was the proposed downtown 76ers arena, approved by the City Council in a 12-5 vote in December 2024 and then entirely scrapped in early January 2025. Was this entire project simply some sort of bargaining chip used by Sixers owners and management to get a better deal in South Philadelphia from Comcast Spectacor, the owner of the teams’ current home at the Wells Fargo Center?
Whatever the case, the entire project no doubt leaves a bad taste in the mouths of the Chinatown businesses and other interest groups who opposed the new stadium and felt sold out by the mayor and City Council. But with the next City Council and mayoral elections not happening until 2027, it seems likely that the entire thing will be forgotten by the time any elected official might be punished at the polls.
The fall of the downtown stadium deal throws open the future of the Market Street East corridor. The proposed arena was part of a reimagining of the Fashion District, a redevelopment project by the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust that opened in 2019. The pandemic and higher interest rates led to store closures and financial problems, and PREIT has since filed twice for bankruptcy. Add to that the fact that Macy’s, an anchor tenant on the corridor, announced it is closing its store in the historic Wanamaker Building next to City Hall.
Market East – essentially the front door of the city – doesn’t look so good for the 2026 celebrations planned as part of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the country. Indeed, the Constitution was drafted at Independence Hall, which is part of the Market East corridor. The chances that things will look much better in 2025 seem pretty dim, although there are plans to convert the space to apartments and smaller stores.
Other major infrastructure projects will likely work in the mayor’s favor, most notably a new park covering part of I-95 that will reconnect the Delaware riverfront to the Society Hill and Old City neighborhoods. This is set to be completed during Parker’s first term.
6. Inflation and housing
And finally, one of the bigger issues in the last presidential election was the housing affordability crisis. This crisis is slightly muted in Philadelphia compared with some other major cities, but it is real nonetheless.
Yet the city has to a certain extent inadvertently lucked out. As 2021 was the last year that developers could take full advantage of the city’s 10-year tax abatement for new construction, a record number of building permits were granted that year.
In 2022, the number of building permits plummeted to 2013 levels. Nevertheless, the permits from 2021 have led to a building boom, especially in residential construction, which may be keeping housing prices lower than they would otherwise be. We can expect this trend to continue into 2025, even if the volume of new permits drops even more.
Richardson Dilworth, Professor of Politics, Drexel University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Discover more from Daily News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Race Relations
Mass deportations don’t keep out ‘bad genes’ − they use scientific racism to justify biased immigration policies
Shoumita Dasgupta, Boston University
Threats of mass deportations loom on the post-2024 election horizon. Some supporters claim these will protect the country from immigrants who bring “bad genes” into America. But this is a misguided use of the language of science to give a sheen of legitimacy to unscientific claims.
Politicians invoke genetics to confirm false stereotypes that immigrants are more violent than native-born citizens as a result of biological differences. This is despite the fact that immigrants living in the country with or without legal authorization have significantly lower crime and violent crime rates than U.S. citizens. Moreover, there is no strong genetic evidence to support a biological predisposition for committing violent acts.
As a geneticist and a child of immigrants, I study the intersection of biology and bias. I am also author of the book “Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins: Lessons on Belonging from Our DNA.” What is clear from my professional work is that this line of thinking – attempting to use science to explain human difference in ways that reinforce social hierarchies – isn’t new. It takes the playbooks of genetic essentialism and scientific racism and applies them to public policy.
The fallacy of genetic essentialism
Genetic essentialism is the concept that genes alone are the reason why someone develops a specific trait or behaves a certain way. For instance, a genetic essentialist would say that a person’s athleticism, intelligence, personality and a range of other traits are encoded entirely in their DNA. They ignore the influence that sports training, material resources and learned behaviors have on these traits.
When used to explain differences between populations, genetic essentialism discounts the role that structural biases – inequities deeply ingrained in how systems operate – play in individual differences. Structural biases create a playing field that advantages one group over another from the start.
For instance, studies seeking to identify a gene for violent behavior may use measurements that are themselves biased. If arrest or incarceration rates were used as evidence of violence, study findings would be affected by discriminatory practices in the policing and criminal justice systems that more harshly penalize people of color.
Studies trying to disentangle the relative effects of genetic and structural factors on specific traits also face similar biases. For example, mental health outcomes are influenced by the identity-related stress that racial or sex and gender minorities experience. Similarly, socioeconomic outcomes are affected by the effects of redlining and segregation on generational wealth.
Genetics of educational attainment
As another example of behavioral genetics, consider a 2018 study on the genetics of educational attainment – in other words, whether certain genes were associated with years of schooling completed. The researchers were careful to communicate their results as pertaining specifically to educational attainment. They highlighted that genetic scores explained only about 11% to 13% of the variance – meaning, 87% to 89% of differences in educational attainment were due to influences other than genetics.
However, some popular press coverage oversimplified their findings as identifying genes for intelligence, even though the scientists did not directly measure intelligence – nor is it possible to.
Educational attainment can reflect everything from generational wealth to racial biases in education. A student with access to tutors their parents paid for has fewer educational obstacles than a student who has to work after school to make ends meet. Likewise, school punishment practices that are biased against students from certain backgrounds can set them on a harmful trajectory known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
Genetic studies are not conducted in a vacuum, and social influences can confound analyses seeking to focus on biological effects. In fact, some scientists think of genes as potential controls to allow more careful study of the nongenetic factors accounting for the remaining 87% to 89% of differences in educational attainment.
Intentional misinterpretation of these observations on educational attainment have led some to conclude that Black students are simply not as intelligent as their white counterparts. They argue that these differences are genetically encoded and immutable. However, when the effects of wealth gaps and school segregation are accounted for, test score gaps substantially narrow. Importantly, educational attainment gaps actually invert, predicting that Black students complete more years of school than white students.
Slipping to scientific racism
This brings us to scientific racism: the way in which science is contorted to support preexisting views about the superiority of the white race over all others.
American physician Samuel Morton was one of the original forebears of scientific racism. He was interested in providing “evidence” to support his belief that Caucasians were the most intelligent of all races. To do this, he collected skulls and categorized them into five racial groupings he believed were derived from separate creation events. He measured skull volume as an indicator of intelligence.
When comparing the averages from each group, his results supported his original theory. However, if he had instead focused on the array of skull volumes in his collection, he would have seen substantial overlap in each of the groupings. That is, each group had a range of small to large skulls. Morton’s singular focus on proving his beliefs from the outset likely influenced his favored analytical approach. Nor is there a meaningful correlation between brain volume and intelligence.
Similar beliefs are at play when white supremacists manipulate data to create a scientific basis for their claims that white people are more intelligent than Black people. These tampered results appear in dark corners of the internet where they are shared in fringe journals, far-right social media memes and racist manifestos.
To be clear, there is no evidence that genetic differences related to intelligence or cognitive performance exist between racial groups. Instead, this is another argument growing out of replacement theory, the conspiracy theory that Jews and Western elites are deliberately replacing white populations with populations of color. Adherents believe that people of color are genetically inferior but are reproducing and immigrating at greater rates, and so threatening white power.
Human genetic variation
Scientists have systematically studied human genetic variation for decades, looking at differences in the DNA of people around the world. These studies definitively demonstrate that we are far more alike than different. The vast majority of common genetic variation is found across populations, and very few rare variants are specific to an individual group.
This may seem unexpected. Looking at the world around you, you’ll observe some differences between racially defined groups, such as skin tone and hair texture. However, there is no place in the world where you’ll be able to draw a line that cleanly separates people with dark skin tone from those with light skin tone. Skin color varies continuously across the globe, and a range of skin tones are present within any individual group.
Importantly, variation in one genetic trait is not predictive of other genetic traits. That is, you can’t extrapolate conclusions about traits such as disease predisposition from the genes that influence skin color. Even if the fallacy of genetic essentialism were true and cognitive ability was primarily a biological trait – which it is not – it would not be possible to connect an observed skin tone to predicted intelligence. https://www.youtube.com/embed/wK94PWbCmsk?wmode=transparent&start=0 President-elect Donald Trump pledged to use the military to carry out mass deportations.
Misappropriating genetics
While science does not support genetic essentialism or other underpinnings of replacement theory, this exact rationale has made its way into national immigration policy.
These policies grew directly out of the American eugenics movement, which sought to build a supposedly better human race through social engineering based on “race science.” Zoologist Charles Davenport created the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Record Office in 1910 to pursue his interests in evolution, breeding and human heredity. There, he and his colleagues collected records of American families, documenting their traits and ascribing genetic bases to them.
Harry Laughlin, a high school teacher Davenport recruited to serve as superintendent of the office, was later appointed as the expert eugenics agent for the U.S. congressional Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. He commissioned studies to document race-based trends in so-called biological traits such as intelligence, inventiveness and feeble-mindedness, erroneously concluding that observed patterns were due to genetic differences between populations. His findings were used to inform U.S. immigration quotas, which were set higher for populations deemed to have good genes and lower for those with undesirable traits.
These policies were codified in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. In signing the act, President Calvin Coolidge declared, “America must remain American,” paraphrasing a popular Ku Klux Klan slogan. This law severely restricted immigration from Asia and implemented strict quotas for immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. It also established elements of immigration that remain in 2025, including the visa system and the Border Patrol. With the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act, anti-Semitism and xenophobia became law of the land.
Coming full circle, genetic essentialism and racism continue to drive present-day rhetoric using “bad genes” to justify mass deportations of people deemed harmful to American society. Politicians and tech moguls are employing a combination of racism, willful misunderstanding of genetic science and political power to promote their own social agendas.
Politicians and hate groups have often weaponized genetics, leading to violent events carried out in the name of white supremacy. These include the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, the 2019 Christchurch shootings of Muslims at two mosques, and the 2022 Buffalo massacre of Black customers at a neighborhood grocery store.
A better understanding of science and history can empower scientists, policymakers and others to reject unscientific claims and protect vulnerable members of society targeted by racism.
Shoumita Dasgupta, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean of Diversity & Inclusion, Boston University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Discover more from Daily News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The Bridge
Why so many South Korean women are refusing to date, marry or have kids
South Korean women are confronting severe sexism and rising digital sex crimes, prompting movements like 4B, where women reject relationships with men amid increasing gender hostility and resentment.
Min Joo Lee, Indiana University
South Korea finds itself embroiled in an all-out gender war – and it keeps getting worse.
The animosity between Korean men and women has reached a point where some women are outright refusing to date, marry and have kids with men – a phenomenon known as the 4B movement.
As a Korean feminist scholar living in the U.S., I’ve followed this gender war from afar as I conducted research on contemporary Korean gender politics.
However, I also became embroiled in it myself after my research on Korean masculinity was published by CNN.
The article described foreign women who traveled to Korea after becoming enamored of the idea of dating Korean men from watching Korean television dramas. I pointed out that since the tourists’ fantasies were based on fictional characters, some of them ended up disappointed with the Korean men they dated in real life.
The article was about racial politics and the masculine ideals. But some Korean readers thought that I was simply criticizing Korean men for not being romantic and handsome enough. One enraged Korean man commented that I was an “ugly feminist.”
But this was tame in comparison to what women living in South Korea have endured in recent years.
Extreme misogyny and a feminist backlash
Over the past couple of decades, there have been flash points in this gender war.
In 2010, Ilbe, a right-wing website that traffics in misogyny, started attracting users who peppered the forums with vulgar posts about women.
Then in 2015, an online extremist feminist group named Megalia arose. Its goal was to fight back by demeaning Korean men in ways that mirrored the rhetoric on sites like Ilbe.
A year later, a man who had professed his hatred of women murdered a random woman in a public bathroom near a Seoul subway station. He was eventually sentenced to decades in prison, but the lines were quickly drawn. On one side were feminists, who saw misogyny as the underlying motive. On the other side were men who claimed that it was merely the isolated actions of a mentally ill man. The two groups violently clashed during competing protests at the site of the murder.
A backdrop of digital sex crimes
However, none of these events have elicited as much public controversy as the steep rise in digital sex crimes. These are newer forms of sexual violence facilitated by technology: revenge porn; upskirting, which refers to surreptitiously snapping photos under women’s skirts in public; and the use of hidden cameras to film women having sex or undressing.
In 2018, there were 2,289 reported cases of digital sex crimes; in 2021, the number snowballed to 10,353.
In 2019, there were two major incidents that involved digital sex crimes.
In one, a number of male K-pop stars were indicted for filming and circulating videos of women in group chatrooms without their consent.
A few months later, Koreans were shocked to learn about what became known as the “Nth Room Incident,” during which hundreds of perpetrators – mostly men – committed digital sex crimes on dozens of women and minors.
They tended to target poorer women – sex workers, or women who wanted to make a few bucks by sharing anonymous nude photos of themselves. The perpetrators either hacked into their social media accounts or approached these women and offered them money, but asked for their personal information so they could transmit the funds. Once they obtained this information, they blackmailed the women by threatening to reveal their sex work and their nudes to their friends and family.
Since sex work and posting nude images of yourself online are illegal in Korea, the women, fearing arrest or being ostracized by friends and family, complied with the perpetrators’ demands to send even more compromising images of themselves. The men would then swap these images in chatrooms.
And yet a 2019 survey conducted by the Korean government found that large swaths of the population blamed women for these sex crimes: 52% said that they believed sexual violence occurs because women wear revealing clothes, while 37% thought if women experienced sexual assault while drunk, they are partly to blame for their victimization.
In other words, a significant percentage of the Korean population believes that female sexuality is the problem – not the sexual violence.
Government policy lays the groundwork
Digital sex crimes are too widespread to lay the blame at the feet of a handful of bad actors.
To me, part of the problem stems from the long history of “gendered citizenship.”
Korean feminist scholar Seungsook Moon has written about the ways in which the government created one track for men and another for women as the country sought to modernize in the second half of the 20th century:
“Men were mobilized for mandatory military service and then, as conscripts, utilized as workers and researchers in the industrializing economy. Women were consigned to lesser factory jobs, and their roles as members of the modern nation were defined largely in terms of biological reproduction and household management.”
Although these policies are no longer officially carried out, the underlying attitudes about gender roles remain embedded in Korean life and culture. Women who veer from being mothers and housewives expose themselves to public and private backlash.
The government has created gender quotas in certain industries to try to unravel this system of gendered citizenship.
For instance, some government jobs have minimum gender quotas for new hires, and the government encourages the private sector to implement similar policies. In historically male-dominant industries, such as construction, there are quotas for female hires, while in historically female-dominant industries, such as education, there are male quotas.
In some ways, this has only made things worse. Each gender feels as if the other is receiving special treatment due to these affirmative action policies. Resentment festers.
‘The generation that has given up’
Today, the sense of competition between young men and women is exacerbated by the soaring cost of living and rampant unemployment.
Called the “N-Po Generation,” which roughly translates as “the generation that has given up,” many young South Koreans don’t think they can achieve certain milestones that previous generations took for granted: marriage, having kids, finding a job, owning a home and even friendships.
Although all genders find themselves discouraged, the act of “giving up” has caused more problems for women. Men see women who forgo marriage and having kids as selfish. And when they then try to compete against men for jobs, some men become incensed.
Many of the men who have become radicalized commit digital sex crimes to take revenge on women who, in their view, have abandoned their duties.
Ultimately, the competitive dynamic created by the Korean government’s embrace of gendered citizenship has stoked the virulent gender war between Korean men and women, with digital sex crimes used as ammunition.
The 4B movement, whereby Korean women forego heterosexual dating, marriage, and childbirth, represents a radical escalation of the gender war by seeking to create an online and offline world devoid of men. Rather than engaging in altercations, these women are refusing to interact with men, period.
Digital sex crimes are a global problem
To be sure, digital sex crimes are not unique to Korea.
When I teach my college class on digital sex crimes in the U.S., I’m surprised by how many of my students admit that they’ve been victims of digital sex crimes, or knew of it happening at their high schools. And at the National Women’s Studies Association’s annual conference in 2022, I watched feminist activists and scholars from all over the world present their findings about digital sex crimes back home.
Since each country has its own cultural context for the rise in digital sex crimes, there isn’t a single solution to solve the problems. But in South Korea, continuing to unravel the system of gendered citizenship could be part of the solution.
Min Joo Lee, Postdoctoral Fellow, Indiana University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Discover more from Daily News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
-
Urbanism1 year agoSignal Hill, California: A Historic Enclave Surrounded by Long Beach
-
News2 years agoDiana Gregory Talks to us about Diana Gregory’s Outreach Services
-
Senior Pickleball Report2 years agoThe Absolute Most Comfortable Pickleball Shoe I’ve Ever Worn!
-
STM Blog2 years agoWorld Naked Gardening Day: Celebrating Body Acceptance and Nature
-
Senior Pickleball Report2 years agoACE PICKLEBALL CLUB TO DEBUT THEIR HIGHLY ANTICIPATED INDOOR PICKLEBALL FRANCHISES IN THE US, IN EARLY 2023
-
Travel2 years agoUnique Experiences at the CitizenM
-
Automotive2 years ago2023 Nissan Sentra pricing starts at $19,950
-
Senior Pickleball Report2 years ago“THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARDS OF PICKLEBALL” – VOTING OPEN