Megalia
Megalia was a feminist movement on the South Korean Internet. It is most well known for the "mirroring" strategy that participants claimed to have used to defamiliarize misogynist ideas. Megalians mirrored the style of misogynist content but reversed gender roles, intending to provoke laughter or outrage.
The Megalia movement began in May and June 2015 with a surge of feminist trolling on the South Korean Internet forum DC Inside. Participants reported feeling a sense of catharsis after enduring years of misogyny and gender-based harassment online. After moderators on DC Inside banned the posts, Megalians created a series of Facebook groups and an independent website, Megalian.com, which was later banned from Facebook for derogatory language. They continued to mirror misogynist posts but also mobilized for feminist political causes. Megalian activists advocated that women "break the corset" of Korean beauty standards, helped pressure the South Korean government to shut down the non-consensual pornography site , and protested violence against women after the 2016 Seocho-dong public-toilet murder case. In December 2015, moderators on Megalian.com banned homophobic posts that targeted gay men. This led the majority of its users to leave for other forums, most prominently the website WOMAD. Although some South Korean feminists continued to identify with Megalia, Megalian.com and the Megalia Facebook groups lost their importance as online hubs and eventually shut down.
Megalia is well known in South Korea for its provocative tactics and for openly espousing feminism at a time when it was not widely accepted by Korean society. Some feminist scholars praised the movement for revitalizing feminism in South Korea and exposing the misogynistic slurs, while others distanced themselves from Megalia, calling themselves "feminists but not Megalians", and criticized their tactics to be divisive, unproductive, or lacking concern for issues that intersect with women's rights. Many Koreans interpreted mirrored posts as expressions of misandry. The controversies associated with Megalia created backlash to Megalia that was an important factor in the rise of antifeminism in South Korea. Far-right users of the Ilbe Storehouse forum quickly developed a rivalry with Megalians that was framed in the mainstream Korean media as a "gender war". The media habitually blamed both Ilbe and Megalia for extremism. Today, "Megalia" remains a shorthand in South Korea for feminism, especially "extreme" or radical feminism, as well as an emblem of South Korean popular feminism.
Background
In 2023, South Korea ranked 30th out of 177 countries on the Women, Peace and Security Index, which is based on 13 indicators of inclusion, justice, and security. In 2023, South Korea has ranked 20th out of 193 countries on the Human Development Index. In 2025, it ranked 12th out of 172 countries on Gender Inequality Index, making the country the 2nd least gender unequal state in Asia. On the other hand, South Korea ranked low on Global Gender Gap Report, placing 99th out of 146 in 2022, leading to criticism of having deep gender inequalities.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 "", "", and "", among others. These three terms are negative stereotypes of Korean women at a different stages of life. A "doenjang-nyeo" is a college-aged woman who eats cheap meals such as in order to save money for conspicuous luxuries like Starbucks. A "gimchi-nyeo" is a slightly older woman who takes advantage of financial support from her male partner. The use of the word "kimchi" is a way of saying that this is the stereotypical Korean woman, in the same way that kimchi is the stereotypical Korean dish. Middle-aged Korean women are targeted by the term "mam-chung", 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 ideals for women to conform to. In contrast to the stereotypically Korean "gimchi-nyeo", they coined the term "" for Japanese women, 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 Doenjang girl.
Feminist trolling on DC Inside
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 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 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.
Migration to Facebook and Megalian.com
Feminist trolling and the use of mirroring language provoked a strong negative response from website moderators. DC Inside banned mirrored terms like "kimchi man" and removed trolling posts. Megalians considered this moderation biased because DC Inside had tolerated—and would continue to tolerate—the misogyny that these posts attempted to mirror. Megalians founded a series of Facebook pages that were taken down for "derogatory language", leading frustrated Megalia users to call Facebook the "Blue ILBE". A Facebook page called "Megalia 4" was formed in September that avoided a takedown by moderating its language and abandoning the "mirroring" strategy. Instead, it focused on internet activism and reporting on instances of gender discrimination.In the face of repeated bans from the moderators of other websites, a group of anonymous supporters created an independent website named Megalian.com on August 6, 2015. Megalian.com was a message board like DC Inside, featuring boards such as the "best" board, "new posts" board, "Menyeom board", "news" board, "data" board, "lecture" board, "capture" board, "humor" board, and "free" board. Users were anonymous, but had to make an account using an email address in order to make or react to posts. Megalian.com became very popular within the first few months of its existence. To the Megalians who had migrated from DC Inside, the influx of new users appeared to include many who used "intimate, warm and amenable" language they associated with female-dominated internet spaces. The more aggressive Megalians denounced this manner of speaking and argued that posts on Megalia should be conspicuously hostile in order to offend their opponents.