Megalia

Megalia was an online community and social movement of South Korean feminists that began in May and June 2015. The movement is most well known for the "mirroring" strategy that supporters ("Megalians") used to expose misogynist ideas on the South Korean Internet. Megalians would repost ("mirror") misogynist content with the gender roles reversed, with the goal of provoking laughter and/or outrage. After being banned from the Internet forum DC Inside, Megalians created several Facebook groups and an independent website called (archived and in Korean). They continued to mirror misogynist posts but also began mobilizing for feminist causes. Important Megalian campaigns included taking down the non-consenual pornography site SoraNet, advocating that women "break the corset" of Korean beauty standards, and protesting violence against women after the 2016 Seocho-dong public-toilet murder case. The movement split when moderators on the Megalia website banned homophobic posts targeting gay men. A group of users opposed to the decision left to found WOMAD. In 2017 the Megalia website was shut down, in part due to users leaving for WOMAD and a multitude of smaller sites.

Megalia and Megalians are both well known in South Korea for openly espousing feminism at a time when it was uncommon. Many Korean men saw the "mirrored" posts as misandrist, and Megalians developed a rivalry with users on far-right forum ILBE. The mainstream Korean media criticized Megalia for being intentionally provocative and condemned both Megalia and ILBE for starting a "gender war". Feminist observers generally praised Megalia for revitalizing feminism in South Korea. Some feminists criticized Megalia for focusing exclusively on combatting misogyny while ignoring other issues that intersect with women's rights. Today, "Megalia" remains a shorthand in South Korea society for feminism, especially extreme or "radical" feminism (not to be confused with radical feminism, a specific feminist ideology).

Background
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. It is also a highly digitized society where Internet forums have been popular since the late 1990s. 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. ILBE is a DC Inside splinter forum dominated by right-wing users. In the 2000s and early 2010s, moderate gains for Korean women's rights caused an anti-feminist backlash on these forums. Users coined a number of misogynist neologisms such as "bean paste girl", "kimchi woman" , and "mom-bug". Each refers to a negative stereotype of Korean women at a different stage of life. A "bean paste girl" is a young, college-aged woman who eats cheap meals in order to save money for things like Starbucks, which at the time was a symbol of sophistication and westernization. A "kimchi woman" is a slightly older woman (late twenties, early thirties) who takes advantage of financial support from their male partner. Middle-aged Korean women are targeted by the term "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." Paired with these negative stereotypes, online Korean misogynists invented idealized models they wanted women to conform to. They compared Korean women disfavorably to Japanese women (for whom they coined the term "sushi woman"; ), who they believed to be models of submissiveness and traditional feminine values. These terms became normalized online and even spread to Korean mass media. For example, a large part of the popular song "Gangnam Style" parodied the stereotypes of the "bean paste girl". 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.

Beginning of the movement


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". On May 15, 2015, female users began spamming the forum with humorous posts blaming men for all of the world's problems. 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. 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. In later interviews, women who had participated in this initial wave of trolling described it as "cathartic" and "exhilarating".

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. Megalians sought to do the same thing to misogynist language on the Internet, "mirroring" the misogynist language used against women. 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." Misogynist words were "mirrored", too: "kimchi woman" became "kimchi man", meaning a man who judges women by their appearances. "Plastic surgery monster" was countered with the homophone "sex buyer". "Bean paste girl" was replaced with "mackerel pike man", referring to cheap men who refuse to pay for dates.

Feminist trolling and the use of mirroring language provoked a strong negative response from website moderators. DC Inside banned mirrored terms like "kimchi man" while allowing the continued use of the original, misogynist terms. Posts such as the one about Korean crime statistics were removed. Megalians moved to Facebook and founded the group "Megalia 2", but it was shut down by moderators for "derogatory language". A second Facebook group, "Megalia 3", was also shut down, which led Megalians to dub Facebook the "Blue ILBE". A "Megalia 4" was founded in September 2015 and managed to avoid being taken down by using more moderate language. Nonetheless, a group of anonymous supporters decided to create a new, independent website, and founded Megalian.com on August 6, 2015. Megalian.com featured several different textboards, including 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. All users on the website were anonymous, including administrators. The site received 170,000 unique visitors in August, growing to 370,000 a month by November.

Social activism
Activism on Megalia drew on Internet culture and involved humor, vulgar language, and eventually, collective action for feminist political causes. Megalians developed a unique vocabulary to describe female liberation. For example, some Megalians called patriarchal society "the DickTrix" ("dick" plus "The Matrix") and described becoming aware of sexism as "taking the red pill". 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. 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". Other phrases common on Megalia included "Korean man-bug", "dead older sister" (referring to the practice of aborting female fetuses), and "Schrödinger's South Korean man" (58% percent of South Korean men have paid for sex work). The word "corset" was used as a metonym for the restraints women place on themselves in order to conform to the expectations of a male-centered society. 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. 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.

Within a short time of founding the website, Megalian activists began to mobilize their online community for a series of feminist political causes.

Shutting down SoraNet
SoraNet 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). 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. In 2015, Megalians began a movement to shut down the website. They made digital infographics, created an online petition, and put post-it notes in public places with messages against SoraNet. Their efforts eventually inspired Korean parliamentarian Jin Sun-mee to demand the Chief of Police take stronger action against SoraNet. In the 24 hours after her speech, Megalians raised ($10,000) for Jin's office. The police began a probe into SoraNet, and on April 6, 2016, South Korean and Dutch authorities cooperated to take down the site. 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).

Reaction to Gangnam Station femicide
On May 17, 2016, a man stabbed a woman to death in the toilet at a karaoke bar near Gangnam station in Seoul. 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. 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. The post-its spread to public spaces throughout Korea, such as public toilets and elevators. Megalians would share photos of themselves posting the note and often sign them with the phrase "Megalian in action". On several occasions, men carrying anti-mourner or misogynist messages arrived at the memorial and confronted the mourners. Megalians helped organize a series on night marches in memorial of the victim and to raise awareness of violence against women.

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 the groups "Megalia 2" and "Megalia 3" 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 ($95,000) from about 3,500 donors, ten times the initial goal. On July 18, Korean video game voice actor Kim Jayeon posted a photo of her "Girls Do Not Need a Prince" shirt on Twitter. 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?'" Social media harassment forced dozens of those who had stood up for Kim to issue public apologies. 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). The Justice Party eventually withdrew their statement on the incident.

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. They organized protests against Maxim magazine and a boycott against Namyang Dairy Products for sexist practices. Megalians also compiled a list of misogynist celebrities.

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. The mainstream Korean media criticized Megalia for being intentionally provocative and condemned both Megalia and ILBE for having hatred towards the opposite sex. Many, including some feminists, say Megalia's tactics are unproductive and divisive. 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". 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." Targeting this insecurity made the Megalia logo especially offensive to many Korean men, and thus, from the perspective of the Megalians, particularly effective at exposing the cruelty of body shaming. 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. 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." 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, 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.

Other controversies include when users of Megalia posted gory images severed or severely damaged male gentalia, or when users publicized men's explicit photos without their consent.

Decline and end of website
A major argument began between Megalia users in December 2015 over whether it was acceptable to attack men for being homosexual. Some Megalia posters outed gay men who were married to women. Megalia's administrators eventually banned homophobic posts, which caused a large number of users to leave and found an alternative forum known as WOMAD, followed by almost one hundred other splinter sites. The movement continued for months, but the Megalia 4 Facebook group went dormant in the latter half of 2016 and the Megalia website was shut down in 2017.

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". 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. However, the controversy associated with Megalia created negative associations with feminism in the minds of many South Korean men. Even some feminists in Korea today distance themselves from Megalia, calling themselves "feminists but not Megalians". 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." The Megalia logo, and the hand gesture it depicts, have continued to be a flash point for arguments about feminism in Korean politics. In 2021, GS25 (a Korean convenience store brand) 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 too much like the Megalia logo. In 2024, the Korean unit of Renault was found to have posted numerous videos over the years showing the pinching hand gesture. In the videos, a presenter named Reporter D makes the pinching gesture. The employee who was later suspended claimed in a now-deleted statement that she was "aware that specific hand gestures are an action of hate" but claimed to have "not realized the hand gestures made could be interpreted that way." In response, the company deleted the videos and made a statement that “Renault will not tolerate any kind of discrimination, [and] the company, following such incidents, will systemize the creation, approval and communication process of the in-house created content and enforce a thorough ethics education to prevent such issues from recurring.”