This is one of those stories that proves, well, I guess it proves humans can come up with the most amazing/infuriating ways to drive each other crazy.

This one comes from South Korea. If you think America has a thing about ‘traditional values’ and how politics can be tangled up with them, it’s not a monopoly. This is taken from a NY Times guest opinion piece by Hawon Jung. The title is:

The Little Symbol Triggering Men in South Korea’s Gender War

SEOUL — One day, she was an ordinary working woman in South Korea, married with a son and designing ads for one of the country’s largest convenience store chains. The next day, she was branded a man-hating feminist on web forums popular with men, a “cancer-like creature” among an “anti-social group” of “feminazis.”

The hostility centered on an ad the woman had designed for camping products. It depicted a tent, a forest, a campfire and a large hand about to grasp a sausage. With its thumb and index finger pursed, the hand image is much like the pinching-hand emoji, a symbol often suggesting something is small.

Many men were furious, convinced it ridiculed the size of their genitals.

They threatened to boycott the multibillion-dollar company, called GS25. The woman, whose identity has been withheld by the company for her safety, desperately tried to defuse the situation. “I do not support any ideology,” she said in an online statement in May. She denied that her design was a veiled “expression of hate for men.”

Nonetheless, GS25 disciplined her and publicly apologized.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: women are making gains against The Way Things Are Supposed to Be, and it’s not going well.