Mere hours after Donald Trump was announced as the 47th President of the United States, Google searches for “4B movement” began skyrocketing. A feminist movement originating from South Korea, the r/4bmovement subreddit doubled its users since the election, and TikToks urging more American women to take part have gone viral. Many have already accused the movement of being anti-men and exclusive towards allies. And amidst its popularization, many questions about the movement have sprung up.
“Can I participate in the 4b movement but still love my boyfriend,” one person asked in the comment section of a post-election TikTok. “He's all for it and supports my decisions fully.”
The 4B movement, which began in the mid-2010s on the South Korean feminist website Womad, is preached on the four pillars of women refusing marriage (bihon), childbirth (bichulsan), dating (biyeonae) and sex (bisekseu) with men. “Bi,” meaning “no,” indicates the four “nos” that were their answer to systemic misogyny in South Korea. Some Western women have posted videos of them shaving their heads online in support of the slightly more intensive 6B4T movement, a sect of 4B which also encourages rejecting beauty standards and boycotting sexist products.
There's confusion around how popular it really is, the actual rules of it, who can participate. Some wonder if it would be possible in a heterogeneous racial society, where white women have proven themselves to continuously align with white supremacy over critical race feminism. Others question if it violated women's right to choose. While there's increased interest in the term, there's still a lot of contradicting discourse about what this resistance actually looks like. But women in South Korea say that the discourse of how to participate is less important than why it's happening at all — and that it's more important that women in the Western world pay attention to their reasons for needing a campaign like 4B, rather than debating the movement's specific guidelines.
Je-Young Nam, 17, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her privacy, is preparing for college entrance exams in South Korea. She enjoys reading books and watching the news, and chats with her mother almost every morning about current events. While Nam had been interested in feminist theory ever since the #MeToo movement touched down in Korea in 2018, she hadn't heard about 4B before this year.
“This summer, numerous Telegram chats were discovered in Korea that carried out sexual deepfakes of acquaintances, and a close friend of mine was victimized by a boy from the school next door,” she tells Rolling Stone. “While I was looking up information about deepfakes and feminism, I came across the 4B movement.”
Nam joined soon after, and has since been keenly watching it spread internationally. She says that she's far from the only one to experience sexism so early on. In Korea, particularly, there aren't many policies or spaces for women to find their own communities or resources, and the few they do have are already shrinking. Abortion remains in a legal gray area; abortion pills are currently illegal, with the government blocking access to overseas pharmacists, but abortion itself was decriminalized in 2021. The current government has eliminated words like “women” from policies addressing women's rights, meaning there aren't any legislative oversights specifically addressing women's needs. On Nov. 10, students at Dongduk University, one of South Korea's seven women's universities, erupted into protests as the school administration suddenly announced that they were moving to coeducation. Amid the student protests, a clip posted to social media captured one of the on-site police officers telling the women, “you will have to grow up and get pregnant later.”
Watching the movement spread to places like the US where women's rights are also under attack has been a point of interest for Nam. She's excited to see how it adapts to new cultural contexts.
“I've talked to a few fellow 4B women who have been on it for longer than I have, and they say that it almost feels like a dream to see an idea they formulated a decade ago being discussed in English by so many women, ” Nam says. “I also share the sentiment and am very glad that so many women are deciding to embark on a journey that will lead them to a freedom that they could not have imagined.”
Another 4B participant, who asked to be identified by the pseudonym Park Ji-Young for fear of retaliation, told me that she joined after learning about the expectation for women to stop working after marriage. “I did think I might consider marriage if I met a man I really liked,” she says. “But after learning about the 4B movement, I realized that not dating men or getting married was more beneficial to me, so I've continued with the 4B lifestyle.”
She's not entirely sure how it's being perceived in other countries, but hopes that people can understand why it's happening at all. “I hope it's seen not merely as a boycott of men but as a journey for women to step away from relationships with men and take time to understand who they are, what they like, and how to live for themselves,” Park says.
Non-4B participants in Korea are aware of the attacks women face on a daily basis. “Feminism is a very taboo topic in Korea, to the point a 'feminist' is considered a derogatory term by most men and even [some] women,” says Vivian Nguyen, a 29-year-old Vietnamese American who lived in Gonju, South Korea for two years as an English teacher. “South Korea has always been a very conservative country. In my opinion, the country's social progressivism couldn't keep up with the rate of its economic development, and so that's why there seems to be a dissonance.”
Even on a day-to-day basis, there is a sense of intrusion and lack of autonomy. “There is a huge spycam issue in South Korea,” Nguyen says. “Spycams are prevalent in restrooms, hotels, AirBnbs, et cetera. They were even found in elementary school restrooms. If you go to a female restroom in Korea, you will see tissue paper stuffed into any hole and crevice in every stall. That's the kind of quiet distrust you feel around you as a woman living there.”
At a systemic level, women are regularly asked about their plans for pregnancy and marriage in job interviews. Divorce is seen as taboo, with the blame falling on the mother and prejudice against the children. Raises are harder to come by for women, which often means they must become dependent on their husbands for income. There's also the glaring societal pressures to chase vanity, status, and rigid beauty standards: South Korean passport photos are often freely retouched, while injectable procedures can run as low as $19. In 2017, the government attempted to outlaw the hiring practice of asking applicants to include headshots on resumes, as appearance and attractiveness was often a factor in the hiring process. Escape the Corset, another fringe feminist movement that rose in the 2010s, specifically addressed the pressure on Korean women to constantly adhere to beauty standards.
Hajin Cho, 31, was born in South Korea but moved to the US when she was five. She would regularly visit for extended periods of time, staying for six months the last time she went in 2021. She's not actively part of 4B, but is sympathetic to the movement. “While I was living there, I wasn't necessarily engaged with the feminist movement,” she says. “I was open to dating and seeing what differences I would experience culturally by dating the men from my motherland.”
She ended up in a friends with benefits situation during the entirety of those six months. “Boy, oh boy, was it difficult,” she says. Often, he would criticize her style or mannerisms when he felt they weren't feminine enough. “I felt some weird pressure to conform to those standards whenever we met.” Sometimes, he'd do the same thing for himself, playing up what he thought were masculine traits as a way of flirtation.
“In those instances I would feel pressure to appease him in that situation so as not to embarrass him and not put myself in a sticky situation,” she said.
Nguyen and Nam also recognize the omnipresent performance of gender. “So these led me to think, married or not, involving men in a woman's life will almost disadvantage her in all aspects,” Nam said. “For me to fight these disadvantages, the most effective way is to make men irrelevant from my life.”
But it doesn't mean that the movement is widely accepted — 4B is controversial even among women in the country. South Korea has held the lowest marriage and birth rates worldwide for the past 20 years, with the government and corporations offering hefty cash incentives for couples to have children, but it's difficult to pinpoint just how much 4B is a factor in the steep drop. Critics have called 4B a fringe movement, saying very few women actually participate. The movement itself has also been criticized by other feminists for being transphobic and homophobic, peddling a TERF brand of feminism.
It's also not exactly renowned. The movement claimed to have just 4,000 members in 2019, while the subreddit still only sits at 13,000 followers. Still, Nguyen says it being a minority movement shouldn't deter people from listening to what women in South Korea are actually saying about living in a society where women's rights and spaces are constantly under attack. Many Korean women might not know about 4B itself, but sexism and the apathy towards bending to traditional gender roles is a widespread topic that goes by many names.
“Even if 4B isn't as big as it seems in South Korea, the way men treat women there has always been a topic of discussion among my female friends there — Korean and foreign,” Nguyen says. “I think people are more focused on how many people are a part of the movement rather than why the movement has even come to fruition in the first place. You don't need large numbers to validate the words all women have been saying for years; some women have just decided to push their thoughts to extremity as a last attempt to make their voices heard.”
Nam also believes that the American version of 4B will require modifications from the original movement. “American feminism is different from Korean feminism because they have unique American culture and issues tied into them,” she said. “For example, from what I observed, intersectionality is a big part of American feminism whereas it wasn't as huge in Korean feminism […] Because of these differences, I wouldn't be surprised if the 4B movement for American women evolves into a slightly different version from the original Korean 4B.”
Regardless, Nam is happy to be part of 4B. She's found a community of other women she can connect with, and feels it's given her a freedom to her life that she couldn't imagine. It's been freeing, Nam says, to focus on more important matters like higher education. She doesn't spend time, money, or energy thinking about boys. “There won't be a one-size-fits-all method that works for every woman,” she says. “This may be a chance to see how feminists can learn from each other and grow all together, a new era of growth and learning for all feminists.”
