[WHY] Korea's two-finger salute: What is the 'crab hand' and why is it so controversial?

The "crab hand" gesture has become synonymous with anti-male and radical feminist groups in Korea. But where did it come from and how did it achieve its notoriety?

The so-called jibgeson, or the ″crab hand,″ used by radical feminist website Megalia, left, and the alleged crab hand usage in a video uploaded by Renault Korea on June 27 [SCREEN CAPTURE]

Giving anyone “the finger” is universally understood as an aggressive gesture. But in Korea, there’s something that’s considered far more insulting and derogatory than the finger, at least to some young men: two fingers creating a pinching motion.

Known as the “crab hand” in Korean, or jibgeson, the pinching hand gesture is known as a symbol used by radical anti-male groups to mean that Korean men have small genitals. Ever since its first usage in the mid-2010s, young men in the online space have been actively seeking out anyone performing the gesture and hunting them down, not only online but also in real life.

The latest blip on the radar was Renault Korea, whose employee was reportedly caught repeating the two-finger gesture in the carmaker’s promotion video uploaded on June 27 for the company’s yet-to-be-released Grand Koleos SUV.

Captured images show a female employee of Renault Korea allegedly using the crab hand in a situation where the gesture was seemingly unnecessary. This resulted in some arguing that the employee was using the gesture in a spiteful manner. The images soon went viral, flooding online male-centered community spaces with angry posts, one going so far as to threaten the employee’s life.

Gender conflict has been as real as it can get in a notoriously patriarchal Korea, with women attempting to stand up against the historically old sexism prevalent in society and men fighting back to maintain the status quo. Reconciliation may seem like a far cry, but a cry that must be heeded nonetheless.

A captured image of Google when searching ″Ilbe hand″ [SCREEN CAPTURE]

What is the crab hand?

The origin of the crab hand dates back to 2015 when an online community named Megalia popped up on the internet with a logo resembling a pinching motion. The action has become very problematic for the Korean branch of Renault.

Megalia openly called itself feminist, with members made up of mostly women in their 20s and 30s. They expressed their rage toward the patriarchy in society and took part in what became known as "mirroring," or taking the hate speech they had endured from men in everyday life and turning it around to mock men.

The birth of Megalia is said to have resulted as retaliation against online male users who mocked two Korean females in Hong Kong who showed symptoms of MERS but refused to be quarantined. The MERS subcategory of the online community DCinside was swarmed with posts calling the two women “kimchi-nyeo,” or kimchi women, a term used to insult Korean women. The incident triggered online female users to fight back.

Megalia mostly focused on hitting back against the hate speech from a dominantly misogynistic website called Ilgan Best, abbreviated to Ilbe — a site that had actually started using hand gestures as a means to express user views.

A captured image of Ilbe (Ilgan Best), left, and Womad websites [SCREEN CAPTURE]

Ilbe was established in 2010, initially as a website to store the daily best — or "ilgan best"in Korean — posts from DCinside. It soon turned into the misogynistic website that it is known as today, where users refer to women by derogatory terms, such as kimchi-nyeo or worse, and regularly post sexist, and sometimes illegal, content related to women.

Ilbe members often took pictures of themselves to prove their membership, signing out the Korean initials of Ilbe with their fingers. They also started the tradition of sneaking their hand gestures into unrelated situations.

Since the mid-2010s, Megalia and Ilbe have been thought of as synonymous with misandry and misogyny in Korea, even after Megalia was shut down in 2017.

Megalia closed down after multiple rounds of internal conflict over whether or not to include members of the LGBT community as part of the feminist movement. Those who only saw biological females as the rightful holders of the feminist flag came together under the name Womad, while the rest of the moderate users dispersed into different internet communities of their own.

An employee reportedly caught repeating the two-finger gesture in the Renault Korea's promotion video uploaded on June 27 for the company’s yet-to-be-released Grand Koleos SUV [SCREEN CAPTURE]

What happened with Renault?

The video that caused Renault Korea to come under siege involved the much-maligned crab hand gesture, which an employee was found apparently using in shots.

The female presenter, who went by the nickname Reporter D in the video, appeared to make the hand gesture in numerous videos posted on the company's official YouTube channel, Renault Inside, including a recent promotion of the Grand Koleos SUV.

Multiple posts were uploaded across various online communities, mostly those with majority male users, which criticized the woman. Some users even went as far as threatening to cancel their preorders for the company's upcoming SUV, while others claiming to be car dealers said that they had orders of the Renault car canceled in response to the incident.

What angered users more was the employee’s letter of apology, which came on June 29.

Renault Korea CEO Stephane Deblaise [RENAULT KOREA]

This screenshot captured from Renault Korea's YouTube channel on July 1 of an apology statement over purportedly misandristic imagery contained in the company's YouTube videos [SCREEN CAPTURE]

The employee said that she was “aware that the hand gesture could be considered as hateful but was not aware that the hand gesture could be interpreted that way in the video,” leading some to say that she had knowingly made the gesture.

Renault Korea made an official apology on June 30 and promised to put together a personnel committee to deal with the employee. She has been suspended but not fired, the company said.

The company’s CEO, Stephane Deblaise, reassured staff that measures are being taken against the “magnitude and influence” of the “social controversy” caused by the videos, according to an internal notice on July 3.

“Renault will not tolerate any kind of discrimination, [and] the company, following such incidents, will systemize the creation, approval and communication process of the in-house created content and enforce a thorough ethics education to prevent such issues from reoccurring,” the CEO said.

The Angelic Buster Remaster promotion video taken down after using a radical feminist hand gesture.[SCREEN CAPTURE]

How real is it?

The online witch hunt for crab hands has been frequent, resulting in multiple companies and content creators having to apologize and take their works down.

In 2021, a number of webtoonists apologized and changed scenes where characters were either seen using the crab hand or using “anti-male” vocabulary perceived as popular in “feminist” communities. That same year, convenience store chain GS25 apologized for creating a “man-hating poster” that had the image of a hand picking up a sausage that resembled the crab hand.

Last year, game publisher Nexon took down a promotional video of its online game MapleStory after a character apparently used the crab hand gesture. The game company made another graphic adjustment to the same game this year after users complained that a character’s hand seemed to resemble the pinching motion.

A poster created by GS25 accused of using the so-called "crab hand" gesture

Steelmaker Posco also came under fire late last year for using the pinching gesture in the company’s animated employee recruitment video and took the video down after it went viral among male-centered online communities.

It is inevitable for companies, especially those whose customers are mostly male — for example, SUV makers or game publishers — to apologize and appease the angry mob because it’s the easiest and quickest fix, insiders say.

“An apology usually calms people down fast, so there’s really no need to be stubborn about it,” said a corporate industry insider who spoke under the condition of anonymity. “It’s not just about gender issues, but any issue at hand. If there’s something wrong, the best defense is an apology and taking back whatever made people angry.”

Quick apologies from companies have in fact helped them put out the fire in many cases.

Renault Korea did not comment on whether some customers actually canceled their preorders, but the number of preorders for the SUV model surpassed 7,000 as of Monday, the company said.

The revenue for GS25 operator GS Retail during the first half of 2021, when the “misandrist” poster was released, climbed 0.8 percent compared to the same period the previous year. The revenue grossed by MapleStory during the fourth quarter of 2023, when the animations surfaced, jumped by 54 percent year on year.

Apologizing may be an easy fix, but it definitely isn’t the real fix, according to Oh Hye-min, lecturer at the Arts and Gender Institute at the Korea National University of Arts.

“Giving too much attention to these voices may actually be the very cause of perpetuating the gender violence taking place throughout society,” Oh said.

“By fulfilling their needs, the companies are actually infringing on people’s rights to labor and expression, which many artists are actually exposed to. It gives power to violence and sends a message that violence works. It should be seen as more than just ‘gender conflict’ and authorities need to delve deeper into the social issues that have created such phenomena.”

An anti-feminist rally held on Nov. 15, 2020, with a slogan that reads, ″Feminism=Mental dillusion″ [YONHAP]

How does it stop?

A more fundamental change in society is indeed crucial, which starts by assessing just exactly why gender conflicts are getting fiercer by the day and by authorities taking the appropriate actions to remedy the ailment, not just applying a temporary Band-Aid.

Korea has gone through some of the most radical changes in its modern history, especially regarding politics and social norms. While women fight to minimize the wage gap and divide household labor hours within the household, men argue that military duties should also be divided with women amid the shrinking younger population.

“Young people these days are exposed to multiple uncertainties and vulnerabilities, including the housing crisis, social polarization, professional risks and just the overall fatigue from an overly competitive society,” said Professor Yun Ji-yeong from the philosophy department at Changwon National University.

“The more complicated the situation gets, the higher the tendency gets for young men to just blame everything on ‘selfish women’ and ‘feminists.’ Doing so makes it seem as if their problem can be solved easily if they just get rid of that one particular reason. The same thing happens in Western countries, but they blame the immigrants and other ethnicities. Conservative groups always try to maintain their power by turning their hatred toward the minority.”

Education is essential but so are politicians' urges to reconcile the situation, according to Kwon Kim Hyun-yeong, a visiting scholar at the Korean Women’s Institute at Ewha Womans University. Politicians in recent years have aggravated the conflict between various demographics by using their differences as a means to win votes, instead of seeking a solution to bridge the gap. This has led to the current standoff between the sexes, generations and other social groups, she said.

An anti-feminsit rally held on Dec. 10, 2017, in central Seoul [JOONGANG ILBO]

“Politicians have increasingly been using gender conflict as a means to win over a certain group’s votes in recent years,” Kwon Kim said, citing Lee Jun-seok, a representative of the National Assembly and one of the founders of the conservative Reform Party, as an example.

Lee has been criticizing radical feminists since early on in his career and argued that the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which was established in 2021, needs to be abolished. The Yoon Suk Yeol administration also promised to abolish the Gender Ministry, which was questioned by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women under the United Nations in May.

“Politicians are only using people’s hate to win votes, not to eradicate hate from the society,” Kwon Kim said.

“Education is also necessary, but it should start with politicians properly addressing the structural inequality that is very real and tangible in Korea. Yes, men can feel like their power is being taken away, but that’s only because they’re refusing to see what women have been denied all this time. Politicians have the power to divide people into groups, which should not be used to separate but to consolidate them.”

BY YOON SO-YEON [yoon.soyeon@joongang.co.kr]