Megalia

Megalia (Korean: 메갈리아; RR: Megallia) was a feminist movement on the South Korean Internet. It is most well known for the "mirroring" strategy that participants (Megalians) 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 SoraNet, 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.