As Democrats struggle to come to terms with this week’s election results, some young women are looking abroad for inspiration. Across social media, women are exploring an idea called 4B, a protest movement in South Korea that calls for women to boycott men.
“Now I’m, how do you say it, a ho, but I really want to get behind this 4B movement,” A TikToker beginsHe is going to say that he approves of women withholding sex from men. “After this election where women were told by mouth that no one is talking about them at all, don’t forget, women, we have power. And you know the kind of energy I’m talking about. Giving up our bodies to men is a choice. We don’t have to do that.”
TikTok tags The #4b movement currently has thousands of posts With millions of views, and Google search interest in this term It increased after the election. Some social media posters are clearly joking out of a combination of anger, stress and sadness, but others are more serious.
“Once you can get it out of your mind that you’re not missing out by engaging in this behavior, you’ll be better off,” Says a sincere TikToker. “I encourage you to regain your strength and have a really honest conversation with yourself about whether or not it’s worth being in a romantic relationship with men at this time.”
For a certain group of young American women, Donald Trump’s decisive victory appears to represent a breaking point. After turning over Roe v. WadeRe-election of the person who destroyed it, and Both to loud cheers from several of her male supportersSome are toying with the idea of getting out of dealing only with men altogether. Trump was elected in part by a generation of men steeped in hyper-macho rhetoric about putting women in their place from figures like Andrew Tate. To women distressed by the ascension of these poisonous brothers, a Lysistrata The solution seems not only just, but potentially workable.
Born 4B
The 4B campaign was originally developed among feminist Korean Twitter users in 2017 and 2018 in conjunction with South Korea’s Me Too movement. It derives in part from the earlier and more popular Tal-Corset or Escape the Corset movement, which asked participants to cut their hair short or shave their heads, give up makeup, and eschew overtly feminine clothing.
Named after the Korean prefix bi, or no, adherents are asked to follow four prohibitions: no heterosexual marriage, no heterosexual dating, no heterosexual sex, and no procreation under any circumstances. Although it is difficult to know how many South Korean women participate in 4B, The group self-reports a membership of 4,000 followers. It’s niche, but it’s made itself heard in Korea and around the world.
Both 4B and Escape the Corset were born in a society with strict gender norms and strict beauty standards, and developed in response to what the participants saw as the dehumanization of women in their culture.
An inflection point came in 2015, the year of the MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus) epidemic, when a misogynistic smear campaign accused two Korean women of visiting MERS-plagued Hong Kong and refusing to get themselves tested before returning home. The entire MERS epidemic, the theory went, was the fault of two thoughtless, selfish and flighty women. The internet lit up with violently sexist hate speech — but the story was untrue.
Groups of women, outraged by the mistreatment, began gathering at a MERS forum to talk about their treatment of men. Over time, those online communities began to branch out into dedicated feminist websites, real-world gatherings, and eventually, the Escape the Corset movement.
South Korean beauty expectations are famously strict; The country has the highest number of plastic surgeons per capita of any country in the world. As women joining the Escape the Corset movement began to exit the beauty industry, they had a measurable impact on the South Korean economy, with women in their 20s making significant purchases. Less cosmetics, hair products and other beauty products In 2018 compared to 2016, and plastic surgery spending is down $58.3 billion over the same period.
Over the next few years, new fronts opened up in Korea’s gender war. In 2016, a 34-year-old man A woman was brutally stabbed to death In his 20s in Seoul’s busy Gangnam neighborhood, “I did it because women always ignored me.”
If women’s only social value is to reproduce animals and sexual objects, the practitioners of 4B declare, they will simply refuse to reproduce or self-objectify.
That same year, the South Korean government unveiled a new initiative aimed at improving the country’s birth rate with a “Birth Map”, which renders cities and towns in pink according to the number of women of childbearing age. “They counted the fertile women as they counted the cattle,” A feminist blogger wrote at the time.
More protests broke out in 2018 After a woman was captured taking pictures of a nude male model in her art class after refusing to cover her genitals during a class break, the photos were shared online to shame her. In South Korea, molka, or digital sex crimes involving nonconsensual images of women, became a thriving industryProvided by men armed with pinhole cameras waiting to videotape female suspects in bathrooms, subway stations or motel rooms. Despite a vocal protest movement for stricter laws, Only 9 percent of Molca offenders, mostly men, receive jail time.
In 2018, however, the woman in the art class was arrested, tried and sentenced to 10 months in prison.
For feminist activists, the incident symbolizes the double standards of South Korean law enforcement. Men who committed crimes against women were ignored or given a slap on the wrist, while women who committed the same crimes against men had the book thrown at them.
For all these problems – sex crimes committed with impunity, inhumane government initiatives, law enforcement that punishes only women – a solution became, finally, 4B.
If women’s only social value is to reproduce animals and sexual objects, the practitioners of 4B declare, they will simply refuse to reproduce or self-objectify. They will opt out. They just won’t give up makeup. They will give up marriage and sex and children. They will devote their lives to building their autonomy.
4B in the US?
The tenets of 4B are very different from the kind of feminism that tends to thrive in the United States, where popular culture places a premium on choice and empowerment. Mainstream feminist campaigns here generally celebrate women’s ability to make their own decisions and do what feels best to them as individuals.
The point of 4B and Escape the Corset, however, isn’t to make women feel more fulfilled or at home in their bodies. Nor is it to pressure men as individuals to reform their ways. The point of 4B is to send a message about the structure of society — to say that it’s not acceptable that you’re only valued for your fertility and sex appeal — and to assert your freedom.
In An academic paper Regarding the movement, writer Hyejung Park translated a 2019 video from the South Korean activist group Solidarity: “It is true that tal-corset [Escape the Corset] Some come with disadvantages,” the staff allows. “When your hair is short, you may have to get haircuts more often and you may have to buy a whole new outfit tal-corset Still, we practice tal-corset Because it’s not about being more comfortable. It’s about being a second-class citizen, not a puppet.”
It presupposes a world in which men and their desire for women are so strong that men themselves disappear from a woman’s life.
The idea of refusing to wear skirts for the sake of your politics, even if you like them, is an attitude that has not been favorable to American feminism since the end of the second wave in the 1970s. Still, there’s a discipline and an extremism to this kind of activism that you can easily understand feels appealing to the angsty young women of America right now. It presupposes a world in which men and their desire for women are so strong that men themselves disappear from a woman’s life. After the United States elected a symbol of patriarchal aggression and violence to our highest office for the second time, one can see the appeal.
The idea of such intense and uncompromising protest also makes sense considering the reams of hilarious rape jokes that fueled the mere discussion of 4B Online. Many American 4B TikToks have comments from men under them saying, “Your body, my choice,” refrain from young fans of a far-right influencer. Nick Fuentes It is known that there is School is taken to parrot.
“[W]Omen threatening sex strike like LMAO you want to say,” A post went from an X account With 122,000 followers.
It’s worth remembering, though, that the divide between left and right in this country doesn’t map neatly across the gender divide. Although we won’t know later how the numbers break down, Early exit polls say 45 percent of women and 53 percent of white women voted for Trump. Trump surrounds himself with capable women and the likes of Marjorie Tyler Greene screamed the misogynist with joy across the floor of Congress.
One possible lesson from the era of the Women’s March — the feminist response to the first Trump term — is this: uniting in a large group as a pure expression of anger is not always sustainable. Due to this, the women’s march is destroyed Terrible conflictwhich is traditionally What happens to large left-wing groups in the United States?.
Perhaps this is what her points of action are while being specific and disciplined for American feminism. 4B is specific and disciplined, which is part of what makes it difficult to translate out of its cultural context and into America. It is very clear about its goals, which is to assume personal autonomy through the power of self-denial rather than seeking it in votes or in interpersonal relationships.
A line of inquiry from 4B to American feminists is: What are you going to work towards? And what are you going to do to get there?
