The 4B movement, originating in South Korea, advocates for radical feminism by rejecting traditional relationships and beauty standards.
While primarily a South Korean movement, 4B gained traction in the United States after Donald Trump’s recent re-election, with a surge of interest on social media and in Google searches. Many American women, disappointed by the election results, are engaging in 4B conversations, citing Trump’s controversial stance on “abortion rights” as a reason for concern.
“Young women don’t want to be intimate with men who don’t fight for women’s rights,” Michaela Thomas, a 21-year-old artist from Georgia told the Washington Post. “Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not be able to have access to abortion. They can’t have both.”
Fringe 4B also known as 4B movement is an extreme radical feminism movement in South Korea which started in 2017- 2018 partly basing on Me Too and Escape the Corset. These campaigns let women free from the traditional beauty norms and gender expectations for women, and told women that they should stop wearing makeup, cut off short hair, and give up the dresses usually considered appropriate for women. The 4B movement carries these ideas further by demanding that women avoid all forms of contact with men: romantic, sexual, and familial.
What are the 4Bs?
“4B” stands for four Korean phrases beginning with “bi,” which means “no” in English: bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating), and bisekseu (no sexual relationships with men).
4B activists renounce marriage, dating, sex, and childbearing with men as a way to escape the patriarchal structures they believe contribute to gender inequality. “It’s a new lifestyle focused on building safe communities, both online and in-person,” South Korean activist Haein Shim explained to The Guardian, adding, “What we want is not to be labelled simply as some man’s wife or girlfriend, but to have the independence to be free from the societal expectations that often limit women’s potential to be fully acknowledged as human beings.”
The movement grew in response to numerous societal issues in South Korea, including gender-based double standards and a widespread “spycam epidemic,” in which women were unknowingly recorded in private spaces. This phenomenon, combined with incidents like the 2018 arrest of a woman who posted nude photos of a male art model online, intensified frustration among South Korean women.
As Min Joo Lee, an Asian studies professor at Occidental College, noted, “There was a general sense of, ‘Who can I trust?’”
