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Organization Womad Turns 10! - Printable Version +- clovenhooves (https://clovenhooves.org) +-- Forum: Women of the World Unite! (https://clovenhooves.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=10) +--- Forum: Asia (https://clovenhooves.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=56) +---- Forum: East Asia (https://clovenhooves.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=15) +---- Thread: Organization Womad Turns 10! (/showthread.php?tid=1912) |
Womad Turns 10! - Impress Polly - Feb 7 2026 On this day, February 7, 2026, the greatest site on the internet, Womad, officially turns a decade old!! I gotta celebrate this occasion because no site/movement has more influenced my own current worldview than they. ![]() For just a small taste of the flavor of Womad, here, according to their official Wiki, are their memorial days: Quote:Womad Memorial Days Each of these days has special significance to the herstory of Korean feminism, but to explain just one of them, Jaegi Day refers to a an infamous Korean men's rights activist and rape apologist who made it his mission in life to get the country's Ministry of Gender Equality abolished and sue the victims of male sexual violence for legally pursuing their attackers. His organization ran short of funds and so one day in 2012 he decided to stage a fundraising event wherein he'd put on a performance demonstrating the plight of Korean men by jumping into the Han River and pretending to drown. "Un"fortunately, he landed on a spike under the water that impaled him up the ass and thus accidentally succeeding in drowning himself. The Womad Wiki entry on the subject explains with a wink and a nod that this act rendered Jaegi (or Jaggy) South Korea's first, and so far only, male feminist and that this "exemplary behavior of jaegi is a paragon for all Korean males to copy." (The lower-case spelling of Jaegi's name has been verbed in reference to his accidental suicide.) ![]() Quote:Jaegi (also spelled Jaggy) I think this captures the difference of attitude that exists between Korean and Western feminists quite well. Euisol Jeong authored a great read on the subject back in 2020 that I'd recommend. To try and summarize it as briefly as I can, basically before 2015, Korean feminism was very much a niche phenomenon that was imported from abroad, mainly existing as a quasi-Marxist appendage of the country's labor movement. Key feudal codes continued to define the lives of many South Korean women well into the 2000s. Then the Mers Gallery episode happened. The story begins in a forum within South Korea's vast DC Inside message board (which enjoyed millions of members) called Mers Gallery. Mers was shorthand for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome; a coronavirus that at the time had recently spread to South Korea. The male users of the site responded by creating threads naming a Korean woman as patient zero, claiming that the virus had been brought into the country by a prostitute who'd recently returned from the Middle East infected, and began faulting all Korean women, writing comments like “Korean women should be dead,” “Korean women spend money vainly,” and “Korean woman are stupid and have spread this virus". It was all proven moid projection though when patient zero was soon proven to have been a South Korean man instead and that in fact most patients were males. Now suddenly the forum's men switched roles and began voicing sympathy for the victims of the virus instead of blaming and attacking them, now that it was known they were predominantly male. Since their male counterparts had switched roles in the discussion of Mers, the women satisfyingly responded by doing the same, "mirroring" the previous male behavior by now attacking and faulting Korean moids for introducing and spreading the virus. This was the beginning of a trend they called mirroring, which means reflecting the same hate women receive from men back onto them; essentially treating others as they treat you rather than applying the golden rule. This feral practice proved not only immensely fun and cathartic to the predominantly young and fun-loving women on the forum, but it also quickly began to enlighten a whole generation as to what misogyny looks like. Soon those women moved to a new site of their own that they called Megalia. The term Megalia combines "Mers Gallery" with the name of Gerd Brantenberg's 1977 feminist classic novel "Egalia's Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes". The novel takes place in a repressive fictional matriarchy called Egalia wherein patriarchal social roles are flipped, following story of a boy who seeks to end this oppression, cast off his PH ("penisholder", Egalia's male analogy to a bra, which was known as a "breast holder" in the author's country) and fulfill his dream of becoming a seawom. With the gender roles reversed, the sexism of the society in question becomes plain for all to see and it has a way of causing the reader to reflect on that of the real world. Anyway, I think this captures the spirit of the place. It was, in other words, defined by the practice of mirroring. According to Wikipedia... Quote:Megalians sought to do the same thing [as Egalia's Daughters] to misogynist language on the Internet, "mirroring" the misogynist language used against women.[12] 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."[7] 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.[/url] As Euisol Jeong's aforementioned dissertation points out, the term "corset" initially referred to all forms of woman-imposed misogyny, though the "anti-corset" movement later became primarily known for opposing beauty practices, including actions like cutting their hair short and destroying their beauty products. It's worth pointing out that this more famous movement was itself a creation of Megalians. Inspired by a famous study concluding that Korean men had the smallest average dick size on Earth, Megalia.com adopted this as their official logo: snickers In South Korea, it's common for feminists to be alternately described simply as "Megalians", although there certainly are, in truth, many who don't believe in this man-hating troll approach. It just captures the broad influence of Megalia to point this out though. Megalians also initiated the country's famous anti-molka (spycam) movement and in fact ultimately got the biggest porn site in Korea, SoraNet, shut down for posting spycam videos as well as non-simulated videos of women and children being raped. As much is often considered their principal accomplishment. Why all this discussion of Megalia? Because Womad is its main ideological descendant. For all its accomplishments and cultural influence, Megalia always had certain limits that quickly proved its undoing. The site included men, with gay men being heavily represented amongst the administrators. Critiques of stuff like drag and transgenderism were accordingly censored and women increasingly felt restricted even in their new home that they'd joined precisely to feel free. Accordingly, most Megalian women soon left for other places. A newly-organized site called Womad became the most common destination. Appropriate to the situation, their title combines the terms "woman" and "nomad" and was/is for women only. Their logo depicts a vulva with red dot at the center representing both period blood and fire. This symbolic choice was informed by the fact that, as Tae Kyung Kim and Jen Izaakson noted in their 2020 article on the South Korean women's movement that was posted to Feminist Current (linked above), it had become "common for women to call each other “vulvas” on [Megalia], saying things like, “Well done — you are the strongest vulva,” or “Brilliant idea! You’re a great vulva." Without moid parasites to restrain their critiques of misogyny or limit their actions against it, Womad women embraced mirroring shock tactics to get public attention and inspire the broader female public to rise up toward their stated goal of establishing a matriarchal world free of men. As the aforementioned Euisol Jeong writes in pages 116-17 of her dissertation: Quote:Womad’s head administrator was alleged to be a woman who lived outside South Korea and held citizenship of another country (Womad administrator 3-002, 2017). She was elected to the position because someone who has a different nationality is not commonly investigated by the police for the kind of trivial violations of the law that often occurred in Womad, such as uploading photos without consent or engaging in online defamation. The website’s server was also in another country to evade the South Korean police authorities. Womad users had learnt how to evade the law through their previous experiences of struggling with misogynistic digital crimes, which were not punished because the police claimed that they could not investigate websites that had their servers in other countries (Park & Lee, 2016). These methods of evading South Korean law intensified the wicked aspect of Womad. This is the main herstory of Womad as a movement (which I guess might be the more proper term than "organization", but "organization" is the closest label this site's tags allow me to select as a descriptor). The six rallies described above, which took place in 2018, were the largest women's rights rallies ever in Korea, with the largest drawing some 80,000. Much of the Courage Rally can be seen in the video below with English subtitles. I'm highlighting it especially because it represented the zenith of the nation's feminist wave. The relationship between Womad, the residual Megalians, straight-laced egalitarian feminists, and the larger female population of South Korea can be best summed up, I think, as having been the relationship between a revolutionary vanguard and its orbiting periphery. Although they might not sign on to everything the Womad women were doing, nonetheless women's activism writ large across the country at this point in time existed in relationship to Womad and what they were doing. In this sense, they controlled the narrative through propaganda of the deed. Make no mistake either: while these mostly young women may have enjoyed game-ifying their activism, they were serious revolutionaries trying to start a war -- a real, physical war, not a metaphorical one -- between the sexes, and the referenced six rallies could be described as progress in that general direction. It wasn't to be though. The downturn was foretold when in, in October of 2017, the Womad community administrators had a conflict with the web developer that compelled them to transfer the site's ownership to someone with Korean nationality. In August of 2018, South Korea's authorities took advantage of this new situation by arresting Womad's head administrator. The head administrator briefly took the site down out of concern and in response the community chose to scale back on shock tactics out of a realization that the site's continued existence was now imperiled by them. Unsurprisingly though, this tactical shift resulted in traffic to the site fairly quickly slowing down, marking the end of Womad being the center of gravity in Korean feminism. I discovered them toward the tail end of the aforementioned series of 2018 rallies. The downturn was something I largely witnessed in real time and it was a downturn not just for Womad, but for all of the South Korean women's movement and it made me pessimistic about the feasibility of women's revolution, which in turn led me to explore black pill feminist spaces more extensively. Nonetheless, Womad audacity has been of profound influence on me. Here are their official positions... Quote:Womad Stance ...and site rules: Quote:WOMAD is an online community only for women where women’s rights come before any other rights. Just... !They're unsurprisingly considered the extremists of the movement, but the simple existence of such a pole, when it was relevant, helped Megalians and other feminists' demands seem like reasonable compromises even though they often weren't too moderate by our standards. The final noteworthy achievement of this wave of feminist action in the country was the legalization of abortion in a 2019 court ruling (with the court order taking effect beginning January 1, 2021). It's appropriate that that resembles what the beginning of the end looked like for the 1970s-era women's lib movement here in the U.S., with Roe V. Wade marking the beginning of the downturn in street activism. I don't necessarily find myself capable of adhering to every single principle of theirs myself, but I do embrace most. Some of the more salient items among their stances to me these days are the inclusion of "patriot", "morality", and "leftist" corsets on their list of forms of women's self-imposed misogyny; shit they believe gets in the way of women's liberation from patriarchal conditioning. Can't say that I find those conclusions to be wrong. It's part of why I've chosen to remain an independent, for example. I also just find so-called troll feminism a lot more fun than guilt-ridden Western identity politics. The online femcel community is probably the closest cultural analogy we see to that whole aura here in the English-speaking world. r/FemcelGrippySockJail's one rule being that it's "a place for girls to become worse" captures that whole vice signaling, fun-loving vibe despite its obvious overriding air of sadness. (Sadness and joking, frankly, go hand-in-hand for many of us. Joking is often coping and also an effective way of legitimizing otherwise taboo ideas. One can, after all, get away with saying more in jest than in seriousness at any given point.) But femcels are just a backward lifestyle movement, not serious women's activists. I feel like Western feminists writ large though have kinda lost their youthful edge in comparison. One thing that Womad's legacy ought to show you is that fun and games and serious activism can be complementary things rather than mutually exclusive. Well anyway, just wanted to share because of how much Womad has influenced my own worldview! I'm pretty sure they have no future. Traffic to their site looks comparable to like traffic to Clovenhooves at this point and I suspect the place with shut down within a few more years. The founding generation, after all, has grown up, finished school, entered the professions, gotten established, settled down, and accordingly, has mostly left Womad in their past at this stage of their lives. That trend will only continue. To these ends, it's worth exploring the site while it's still there. There's a lot of valuable herstory and insight to catch up on! What you can't read you can always run through Google Translate. TL;DR: Learn to have fun and be evil. |