SEOUL – For some women in the United States, Tuesday’s election was a referendum on women’s rights, with reproductive freedoms at stake. So with Donald Trump – who has been found liable for sexual abuse and touted his role in overthrowing it Roe v. Wade — after winning the presidency, some women say they are turning to a radical Korean feminist movement that renounces men to regain a sense of agency.
The 4B movement, a fringe brand of Korean feminism, has captured the attention of young Americans on Instagram and TikTok in recent days, with users espousing the merits of the four “no’s”: no sex, no dating or marrying men and no children. On Google, the number of searches related to 4B increased in the hours after the US election results.
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Here’s what you need to know about the movement and how it’s generating interest in the United States.
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What is the 4B movement and how did it start?
4B is an amorphous, online feminist movement in South Korea that took root on social media in the mid-to-late 2010s, at a time when the country was undergoing a renewed reckoning with violence against women and other gender equality issues.
It’s called the 4B movement because “B” is an abbreviation for the word “no” in Korean. For example, ‘Bi-hone’ is an abbreviation for ‘no marriage’ or ‘voluntarily unmarried’.
In 2016, the murder of a 23-year-old woman in a public bathroom at Seoul’s bustling Gangnam Station drew attention to women’s issues on a national level, sparking a yearslong activist movement focused on women’s rights in a largely male-dominated society. The attacker, a 34-year-old man, reportedly said he committed the murder because women have “always ignored him.”
By 2018, the #MeToo movement in the United States had spread to South Korea, sparking protests and accusations of sexual misconduct against high-profile men. Around the same time, another digital movement called ‘Escape the Corset’ inspired many young women to cut their hair short, dress androgynously, and destroy their makeup palettes on social media as a rejection of consumer culture and the male gaze.
Some may view 4B as an offshoot of #MeToo or other feminist movements of the period, said Sunyoung Park, associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Southern California in Dornsife.
“It comes from the everyday life experience of young women,” she said. “It has gone beyond the hashtag and [social media] and makes headlines because conservative men, male intellectuals, respond to it,” she added.
Kim said young women – “the Instagram generation” – are often the key demographic behind 4B and Escape the Corset, which she described as a digitally indigenous groundswell of “individualized resistance” rather than a highly organized movement.
“It’s not like someone organizes a group and says, ‘Okay, now we’re promoting 4B,’” she said.
Both the 4B movement and feminism more broadly are highly polarizing topics in South Korea, a country with the largest gender pay gap in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the lowest birth rate in the world. During his campaign, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol – who has been described in local media as a South Korean Trump and who won in part thanks to a critical swing vote from young male voters – fueled the gender divide by promising to close the Ministry of Gender Affairs to abolish. Equality and Family, a movement that women’s groups condemned.
“The 4B movement emerged earlier in South Korea, but has now intensified because Yoon Suk Yeol scapegoated women,” Park said. “Feminists respond to certain political developments.”
4B is praised for its apostate fight against patriarchy, but also criticized for being too extreme.
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Why interest is increasing in the United States
While the premise of 4B may sound radical to some, for Michaela Thomas, a 21-year-old artist living in Georgia, 4B is simply a way to “show people that actions have consequences.” Thomas heard about 4B online about a year ago, she said, and attributes the recent increase in interest to young men voting for Republican candidates.
“Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not have access to abortion. They can’t have it both ways,” she said, referring to the anti-abortion stance of many Republican leaders. “Young women don’t want to be intimate with men who don’t fight for women’s rights; it shows that they don’t respect us,” she added.
Exit poll data shows that 55 percent of men voted for Trump in Tuesday’s election, while 53 percent of women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Park, the USC professor, said that while in South Korea economic differences have driven the 4B movement, in the United States it seems to be more the “political conflict and gender divide that is giving 4B momentum.”
“Trump explicitly appealed to young male voters,” Park said during his campaign. Meanwhile, “American women see young men voting for this conservative candidate who threatens their bodily autonomy.”
In the hours after Trump’s victory, young women shared posts on social media criticizing the 4B movement. As a concept, “sex strikes” go back at least as far as the ancient Greek play “Lysistrata,” in which women swore off sex in protest against the Peloponnesian War. In the United States, singer Janelle Monáe proposed one in 2017. Actress Julia Fox has said she has been celibate for more than two years in response to the overturning of Roe.
Breanne Fahs, professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, said in the wake of the election: “Young women don’t trust that their reproductive rights are safe, so they are turning to new ways to assert their agency and to regain their power. a sense of control over their body.”
She noted that 4B is currently “everywhere” and pointed to a number of challenges women face, such as the pressure in personal relationships “to cater to men’s desires and fantasies” and wider issues such as increased misogyny.
“We should never be surprised when these kinds of catastrophic clashes cause a general refusal among women to play along with traditional gender roles,” she said.
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