Money as Hard Reality: A Case of New Men’s Solidarity in South Korea

This paper examines the role money plays in the South Korean antifeminist organization, New Men’s Solidarity’s (henceforth NMS) YouTube videos. NMS is one of South Korea’s (henceforth Korea) biggest antifeminist organizations with more than half a million subscribers on YouTube. Existing scholarship has examined NMS’s importance in the context of its relationship to the far-right conservative party, the People Power Party (PPP). It has also attended to the political economy of antifeminism in Korea, especially how organizations like the NMS have adopted a ‘market-friendly’ business strategy that involves exploiting anti-feminist content to generate profit and attract donations. Kim Bo-Myung has called this ‘occupational anti-feminism’, i.e., an anti-feminism practised for profit. The term ‘femi coin’, where femi means feminism and coin refers to money, has also become popular to denote such practices. While such scholarship has excellently shed light on how misogyny has become a business, this paper is interested in the affective fictions about money created in the videos by NMS. It borrows Hemmings’s (2023) concept of ‘affective fictions’ to formulate its arguments. According to Hemmings, antifeminist movements show how “feelings do not need to be ‘true’ to be powerful” (p. 9). Drawing on this conceptualisation of reality as being under-contestation, this paper identifies two aims. On one level, it seeks to understand affective meanings attached to money by NMS. On another level, it intends to unveil the ‘fictions’ NMS constructs by using the language of money. By doing so, this paper argues that in NMS’s videos, money appears as a material and immaterial ‘object’ that is connected to larger ideals of truth and reality. By examining what money does to truth and reality, this paper contends that money, in all of its forms, is employed to sell affective fictions masked as cold truths about ‘reality’.