MapleStoryIt was late at night, and Darim’s animation studio had just finished designing a new look for a character in one of South Korea’s most popular video games, MapleStory. Darim was proud of her work. So, sitting alone on the floor of her small studio apartment, she posted the trailer on social media. Almost immediately, she was flooded with thousands of abusive messages, including death and rape threats.Young male gamers had taken issue with a single frame in the trailer, in which the female character could be seen holding her thumb and forefinger close together. They thought it resembled a hand gesture used by a radical online feminist community almost a decade ago to poke fun at the size of Korean men’s penises.”There were insults I’d never heard before, they were disgusting and inhumane,” said Darim, which is not her real name. One read: “You’ve just sabotaged your job.”Messages then started piling into Darim’s studio and the game developer claiming she was a feminist and demanding she be fired. Within hours, the company pulled the promotional video.Darim had become the latest victim in a series of vicious online witch hunts, in which men in South Korea attack women they suspect of having feminist views. They bombard them with abuse and try to get them sacked.This is part of a growing backlash to feminism, in which feminists have been branded man-haters who deserve to be punished. The witch hunts are having a chilling effect on women, with many now scared to admit they are feminists. This is forcing the movement underground, in a country where gender discrimination is still deeply entrenched. South Korea has the largest gender pay gap in the OECD, a group of the world’s rich countries.The hunts are often spearheaded by young male video gamers, and target women who work in the industry, like Darim, though recently they have spread to other professions. They look for anything that resembles what they term the ‘finger-pinching gesture’ and use it as proof that men-hating women are surreptitiously mocking them.Once they spot a supposed sign, the hunt begins. “They decide that a dark, evil feminist is hiding in the company, and her life should be ruined,” explained Minsung Kim, a 22-year-old male gamer who, concerned by these witch hunts, set up an organisation to support the victims.The witch hunters track down all female employees at the company in question, and trawl their social media accounts, searching for any evidence of feminism. Way back on Darim’s timeline, they found an ‘offending’ post.Darim in fact had nothing to do with the disputed part of the animation, but her studio was rattled by the torrent of abuse – especially after Nexon, the gaming company, suddenly removed all the studio’s artwork from their roster and issued an apology to customers.”My company and CEO were in a panic,” said Darim. “I thought I was going to be fired, and I’d never be able to work in animation again.” Then Minsung’s organisation stepped in. They urged her studio to ignore the gamers and offered to pay Darim’s legal fees so she could report the abuse. “We said these demands will never end, you need to nip this in the bud now,” he said. The studio listened, and Darim kept her job.But similar witch hunts have worked, in the gaming industry and beyond, and they are becoming more f …
