Film subtitles doctored to make it appear feminist branded South Korean men 'incredibly primitive'

The doctored image, which appears to show an interview by South Korean broadcaster MBC, was shared here on Facebook on October 20, 2023.

The news ticker purportedly shows a quote from "Kim Ji-yeon, head of the Sookmyung Women's University Feminist Power Project". It reads: "The mentality of South Korean men is very primitive."

Image

Screenshot of the Facebook with the altered image. Captured November 1, 2023.

In recent years, South Korea's #MeToo generation has mobilised on a host of issues, from legalising abortion to demanding prosecutions for "revenge porn".

This has triggered online backlash against so-called "radical feminism", with young South Korean men bemoaning their own lot -- chiefly compulsory military service, from which women are exempt.

President Yoon Suk Yeol, who won the country's top post by the narrowest margin ever, appealed to disgruntled male voters, branding himself an anti-feminist and pledging to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality.

The same image has been shared online in multiple South Korean forums as far back as November 2020, including here, here and here.

Comments in the posts attacked Kim for her purported comments, indicating many believed the image to be genuine.

"This looks like a criminal's mindset, she needs psychiatric treatment," wrote one user.

"Yet she probably can't answer why she thinks men are primitive," another wrote.

The captions in the image, however, have been doctored.

Altered subtitles

Text included in the upper left corner of the image shows the title of the TV programme featuring this scene, which translates to: "These angry men."

Keyword searches on Google using this title found the image corresponds to an MBC documentary on the male backlash against the feminist movement in South Korea broadcast on July 29, 2019 (archived link).

The 50-minute-long film features young South Korean men and women commenting on the country's feminist movement and why some are so strongly opposed to it.

A separate search on YouTube found a clip from the documentary posted on MBC's official channel that includes the exact scene -- at its 44-second mark -- shown in the doctored image (archived link).

But Kim does not call South Korean men "primitive" in this scene, nor in any other part of the three-minute clip.

At the time of the documentary's broadcast, Kim was the head of an organisation named "Feminist power project" at Sookmyung Women's University working to advance women's rights, according to a report from the school's campus news in September 2019 (archived link).

The clip actually shows a conversation between Kim and another feminist activist.

"Around 20 to 30 students gathered on campus for hours to look at a poster about sexual violence," Kim says in the scene, referring to an incident of sexual abuse that happened at another school.

"People took interest in the case and posted words of solidarity on the school's web forums, and put up post-its with similar messages."

Below is a screenshot comparison of the altered image (left) and a corresponding scene from the MBC documentary (right):

Image

Screenshot comparison of the altered image (left) and a corresponding scene from the MBC documentary (right)

The two women go on to talk about their feminist activism experiences, the attacks they had to endure on- and offline as a result of their activities, and cases of sexual crimes targeting women that happened on campus.

An AFP journalist watched the entire documentary but found Kim only appears in this conversation scene and makes no derogatory statement about men in general.

An MBC spokesperson told AFP on November 2 the text in the image circulating online had been doctored and does not correspond to Kim's actual comments.