Following Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, support for the “4B” South Korean feminist movement, which rejects marriage, having children and sexual intercourse, increased among young American women on social media. The movement attracted great attention on social media, and was heralded as a women’s rights revolution. So what is the 4B movement, how did it come about, and what is its connection to the US?
After Donald Trump won the US presidential election, an unexpected event began to trend on social media: Young American women are declaring their allegiance to the “4B”, a South Korean feminist movement that advocates the rejection of marriage, childbearing, dating and sexual intercourse. The movement has reached millions of views on social media, while posts on X have heralded the movement as a women’s rights revolution and have sparked intense interest around the world. However, the picture is more complex in South Korea, and in some places the feminist movement is under attack. WHAT DOES 4B MEAN? 4B means the four “B”s or “Nos” in Korean. These are “bisekseu” (no sexual intercourse with men); “biyeonae” (no dating men); “bihon” (no marrying men) and “bichulsan” (no having children). HOW DID IT COME ABOUT? The movement emerged in the mid-2010s amid growing online feminist activism in South Korea, where women face the widest gender pay gap and persistent discrimination among OECD countries. Several high-profile incidents have galvanized feminist activism in recent years.
In 2016, a woman was killed near Gangnam Station by a foreign man who said he did it because women were “ignoring” him. The incident sparked nationwide protests against misogynist violence. Digital sex crimes have further fueled the feminist movement, from widespread illegal filming using hidden cameras to a plague of AI-powered deepfake pornography targeting young women. Online activists have also challenged South Korea’s stringent beauty standards. In 2018, some young women began posting videos of themselves destroying their makeup and cutting their hair short in what became known as the “breakout of the corset” movement. WHY IS IT TRENDING? Google searches for the movement increased by 450 percent after Donald Trump won the US presidential election, with 200,000 people searching for it on Wednesday. In 2022, the right to abortion was overturned by the Supreme Court, which was ruled by Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices across the country. At the same time, it is claimed that a harsher attitude towards women’s rights and gender issues has risen, especially among young men, following Trump’s election.
