SEOUL — The election of Donald Trump has sparked a surge of interest in the United States in South Korea’s 4B movement, a radical feminist crusade that preaches the four B’s: bi-hon (no marriage), bi-yeonae (no dating), bi-sekseu (no sex) and bi-chulsan (no childbirth).
Since Nov. 5, there have been more than 500,000 Google searches for “4b movement,” while on TikTok, Instagram and X, support for the cause has been trending among young women voters who are vowing to swear off men.
“Ladies, we need to start considering the 4B movement like the women in South Korea and give America a severely sharp birth rate decline,” read one post on X with over 450,000 likes.
“We can’t let these men have the last laugh… we need to bite back”
“Reminder that the 4B movement, and the separatist movement in general, isn’t just about avoiding men—it’s also about supporting and investing in women,” read another.
Here’s what to know about the movement and its impact in South Korea:
What is the 4B movement and when did it come about?
While its exact origins or founder is unknown, scholars and activists agree that the 4B movement began in South Korea sometime after 2015, as part of a wider wave of youth-led radical feminism popularized through online forums.
Its emergence coincided with several major events that have fueled a wider reckoning of South Korea’s gender inequalities in the workplace and violence against women.
One of these events was the murder of a young woman in a public toilet in Seoul’s wealthy Gangnam district in 2016. The assailant, a 34-year-old male with a history of mental illness, later testified to police that he had stabbed the woman — whom he did not know — because he had been shunned by women in the past.
A woman enters a booth to cast her early vote for a presidential election at a local polling station in Seoul in March 2022.
(Ahn Young-joon/Associated Press)
The movement was spurred further by the #MeToo movement’s arrival in South Korea in 2018, the year that also saw mass public protests against the widespread circulation of nonconsensual pornography.
“For women, love, dating, marriage and childbirth were no longer perceived as refuges of peace and safety, but the site of exposure to male violence and subordination,” feminist scholar Yoon-kim Ji-young wrote in 2020, describing the 4B movement as “the complete severing of any emotional, mental, financial or physical dependence on men.”
In recent years, some adherents have expanded the movement into a variant known as 6B, which also calls for bi-sobi (no consumption of products that endorse misogyny or engage in sexist marketing) and bi-dop-bi — solidarity between unmarried women.
Despite bursts of virality and media coverage, the movement is still far from mainstream, and given its decentralized online existence, there is no concrete data on how many South Korean women actively identify as “4B.”
One of the most common ways for adherents to signal their commitment is to share social media posts with 4B-related hashtags, such as investment tips for women’s financial independence and photographs showcasing happily unmarried lives.
Some feminist scholars and activists in South Korea have criticized these lifestyle-oriented aspects of the 4B movement, arguing that individual acts of opting out ultimately do little to meaningfully advance women’s sex and reproductive rights in society at large. “At the center of young women’s commitment to 4B is the desire to focus on themselves,” feminist scholar Cho Joo-hyun wrote in 2020.
“The logical endpoint of that is becoming a successful individual in neoliberal society,”
Where does South Korea stand on gender equality?
By many gender equality metrics, South Korea lags behind much of the industrialized world.
The wage gap between men and women is the largest among the 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of wealthy countries, with South Korean women paid on average a third less than their male counterparts. In the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Gender Gap Index, which measures gender parity across economic opportunities, education, health and political leadership in 146 countries, South Korea is ranked 105th.
Disparities remain stark in the home as well. In households where both spouses work, women spend an average of 187 minutes a day on domestic work while men spend just under one-third of that — 54 minutes — according to government data from 2019.
Violence against women has also been criticized as an area of long neglect. Dating violence has seen a sharp increase in the country of 51 million, rising from 49,225 reported cases in 2020 to 77,150 last year, according to police. In addition, women in the country are victimized by deep-fake pornography at the highest rates in the world, according to an analysis of online content between July and August last year by U.S.-based cyber-security firm Security Hero.
In South Korea’s last election, conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol’s campaign was widely criticized for making misogynist appeals to young male voters, with Yoon denying that structural sexism exists and promising to raise penalties for false rape accusations.
Has the 4B movement managed to pull down South Korea’s birthrate?
Despite claims on social media that the 4B movement is behind South Korea’s dismal fertility rate, there is little evidence to back this up.
South Korea’s fertility rate — the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime — currently sits at 0.72, the lowest in the world and far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. Like most advanced economies, South Korea’s fertility rate has steadily been falling since 1980. Researchers have attributed its first significant dip in 2001 — to “lowest-low” levels of under 1.3 — to the labor market shocks caused by the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.
In more recent years, rising housing and child-rearing costs as well as workplace pressures forcing women to choose between motherhood and their careers have driven the figure down even further.
And while it is true that young South Koreans are increasingly disillusioned with marriage in favor of childless or single lifestyles, these changes are not exclusive to women. Today, just 28% of South Korean women and 42% of men in their 20s see marriage as necessary, dropping from around 50% and 70% in 2008, according to government data.
