As Donald Trump secured victory within the US presidential election, an sudden phenomenon started trending on social media: younger American girls declaring their dedication to “4B”, a fringe South Korean feminist motion advocating the rejection of marriage, childbirth, courting and intercourse.
The motion has sparked intense international curiosity, with tens of millions of views on TikTok and viral X posts heralding it as a girls’s rights revolution.
But inside South Korea itself, the image is extra advanced and in some locations the feminist motion is underneath assault.
“I had by no means heard of 4B till not too long ago,” says Lee Min-ji, an workplace employee in Seoul who was shocked in any respect the worldwide consideration. “I perceive the place all of the anger comes from, however I don’t assume avoiding all relationships with males is the answer.”
Park So-yeon, a publishing skilled in Seoul, says she doesn’t date as a result of she is prioritising her skilled life.
“Like me, most of my feminine pals are extra centered on their careers than courting proper now, however that’s not due to 4B, it’s simply the truth of being a younger skilled in Korea,” she says.
Pushing again towards an unequal society
The 4B identify stems from 4 Korean phrases starting with “bi” (that means “no”): bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no courting), and bisekseu (no intercourse). As with previous “separatist” feminist actions, 4B represents a rejection of heterosexual relationships as a method of resisting patriarchal buildings.
The motion emerged within the mid-2010s amid rising on-line feminist activism in South Korea, a rustic the place girls face the widest gender pay hole amongst OECD nations and chronic discrimination.
A number of high-profile incidents have galvanised feminist activism lately. In 2016, a girl was murdered close to Gangnam Station by a male stranger who mentioned he did it as a result of girls had “ignored” him. The case sparked nationwide protests towards misogyny-driven violence.
Digital intercourse crimes have additional fuelled the feminist motion, from widespread unlawful filming by means of hidden cameras to the most recent epidemic of AI-generated deepfake pornography focusing on younger girls.
On-line activists have additionally challenged South Korea’s demanding magnificence requirements. In 2018, some younger girls started posting movies of themselves destroying make-up merchandise and reducing their hair quick in what turned often known as the “escape the corset” motion.
However there was a backlash, to the purpose the place the phrase “feminism” itself has nearly turn out to be a slur in South Korea, carrying connotations far faraway from western views of gender equality advocacy.
“In contrast to the west’s lengthy historical past with feminist actions, Korea is experiencing these modifications in a really compressed means,” says Gowoon Jung, assistant professor of sociology at Korea College. “This has led many to view feminism solely in its most radical kind.”
President Yoon Suk Yeol, who took workplace in 2022, partly rode to victory on anti-feminist sentiment, courting disgruntled younger male voters by denying the existence of structural gender discrimination and promising to abolish the nation’s gender equality ministry.
“4B is extra of a feminist assertion that represents younger digital feminists’ grievances and frustration about Korean society,” explains Minyoung Moon, a sociology lecturer at Clemson College who research on-line feminism in South Korea. “Nonetheless, its radical nature has contributed to severe backlash, with many younger males and a few girls equating all feminists with man-haters, which deepens societal divisions.”
Lee Jeong-eun, who lives in Busan, says that overtly feminist girls face backlash on and offline. “You’re handled just like the satan,” she says.
This worry isn’t unfounded: final yr, a feminine comfort retailer employee in Jinju was violently attacked by a person who assumed she was a feminist just because she had quick hair, resulting in a court docket ruling that recognised misogyny as a hate crime motive for the primary time.
This hostile setting has led many younger Korean girls to practise what students like Moon and Jung time period “quiet feminism”– embracing feminist rules privately whereas avoiding public identification with the motion.
An affect that’s exhausting to measure
South Korea’s digital panorama performs an important function within the 4B motion’s expression. Nameless on-line boards and social media function protected areas for feminist discourse that is perhaps tough to voice overtly. The web nature of the motion, nonetheless, makes it practically unattainable to measure 4B’s true scale or affect.
Inside South Korea itself and earlier than Trump’s victory, 4B had acquired comparatively little mainstream consideration, although internationally some media protection has tried to hyperlink 4B to South Korea’s record-low birthrate, which hit 0.72 kids per girl in 2023. That may be problematic, says Moon.
“The low fertility fee in Korea is a fancy difficulty, and you can’t merely argue that Korean girls boycotting males results in a low birthrate,” Moon says.
The start fee has been dropping for many years and is regularly attributed to components just like the financial burden of kid rearing, excessive housing prices, intense instructional competitors, and shifting priorities. “Girls’s mistrust and frustration with Korean society could have some cultural relation to it, however there isn’t any confirmed correlation,” Moon says.
For Jung, the worldwide consideration on 4B displays a shift in how feminist actions journey globally. “Many Asian social actions have traditionally been influenced by the west, as we noticed with the #MeToo motion,” she says.
“Now we’re seeing actions that originated in Korea probably influencing western societies.”
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