What is 4B? The protest movement that renounces men explains.

As Democrats struggle to come to terms with this week's election results, some young women are looking abroad for inspiration. On social media, women are engaging with an idea called 4B, a protest movement in South Korea that calls on women to boycott men.

“Now, as you say, I’m a whore, but I really want to get behind this 4B movement,” a TikToker begins, going on to say that she approves of women withholding sex from men. “After this election, where women were told to their faces, so to speak, that no one cares about them, remember, ladies, we have power. And you know what kind of power I'm talking about. Giving our bodies to men is a choice. We don’t have to do this.”

The TikTok tag #4bmovement currently has thousands of posts with millions of views, and Google search interest in the term surged after the election. Some of the social media posters are clearly joking out of a combination of anger, stress and sadness, but others are more serious.

“Once you get rid of the idea that you're not missing out on anything by doing this behavior, you'll feel better,” says one serious TikToker. “I encourage you to take back your power and have really honest conversations with yourself about whether pursuing romantic relationships with men is worth it at this time.”

For a certain cohort of young American women, Donald Trump's decisive victory appears to represent a breaking point. After the overthrow of Roe v. WadeWith the re-election of the man who destroyed it and the intense joy of some of his male supporters over both, some are toying with the idea of ​​simply giving up associating with men altogether. Trump was elected in part by a generation of men who were characterized by hyper-macho rhetoric and wanted to put women like Andrew Tate in their place. For women suffering from the advance of these toxic bacteria, a Lysistrata solution seems not only justified but also potentially effective.

The 4B campaign developed in 2017 and 2018 primarily among feminist Korean Twitter users in the context of the South Korean Me Too movement. It harks back in part to the earlier and more popular Valley Corset or “Escape the Corset” movement, which encouraged participants to cut their hair short or shave their heads, go without makeup, and be overtly feminine to give up clothes.

Named after the Korean prefix “bi,” meaning “no,” followers are urged to follow four prohibitions: no heterosexual marriage, no heterosexual dating, no heterosexual sex, and not bearing children under any circumstances. While it's hard to say how many South Korean women participate in 4B, the group itself says it has 4,000 followers. It's niche, but it's made its voice heard in Korea and around the world.

Both 4B and Escape the Corset emerged from a society with strict gender norms and strict beauty standards, and were developed in response to what the participants see as the dehumanization of women in their culture.

A turning 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 leave before returning home to undergo a test. The theory was that the entire MERS epidemic was caused by two thoughtless, selfish and flighty women. There was intense sexist hate speech circulating online – but the story was untrue.

Groups of women outraged by misogyny gathered at a MERS forum to talk about how they treated men. Over time, these online communities began to expand into dedicated feminist websites, real-world rallies, and eventually the Escape the Corset movement.

South Korea's beauty standards are notoriously strict; The country is by far home to the most plastic surgeons per capita of any other country in the world. As women who joined the “Escape the Corset” movement began to withdraw from the beauty industry, it had a measurable impact on the South Korean economy: Women in their 20s purchased significantly fewer cosmetics, hair care products, and other beauty products in 2018 than in 2016, and spending on plastic surgery fell by $58.3 billion over the same period.

Over the next few years, new fronts continued to open in Korea's gender wars. In 2016, a 34-year-old man brutally stabbed a random woman in her 20s in Seoul's busy Gangnam district, saying: “I did it because women have always ignored me.”

That same year, the South Korean government unveiled a new initiative aimed at improving the country's birth rate with a “birth map” in shades of pink to rank cities by the number of women of childbearing age. “They counted fertile women like the number of farm animals,” wrote a feminist blogger at the time.

In 2018, further protests erupted after a woman was jailed for photographing a naked male model in her art class after he refused to cover his genitals during a break in class and shared the images online to attack him to shame. In South Korea, molka, or digital sex crimes involving non-consensual images of women, had become a thriving industry run by men armed with pinhole cameras waiting to film unsuspecting women in bathrooms, subway stations or motel rooms. Despite a vocal protest movement calling for stricter laws, only 9 percent of Molka offenders, mostly men, receive a prison sentence.

However, in 2018, the woman in the art class was arrested, tried and sentenced to 10 months in prison.

For feminist activists, the incident epitomized the double standards of South Korean law enforcement. Men who committed crimes against women were ignored or slapped, while women who committed the same crimes against men were punished.

For all of these problems – the sex crimes committed with impunity, the dehumanizing government initiatives, the law enforcement that punished only women – 4B eventually became a solution.

If women's only social value was to breed animals and sexual objects, 4B practitioners explained, then they would simply refuse to breed or objectify themselves. They would get out. You wouldn't just skip makeup. They would renounce marriage, sex and children. They would dedicate their lives to building their autonomy.

4B's tenets are very different from the forms of feminism that flourish in the United States, where popular culture places a heavy emphasis on choice and self-determination. Mainstream feminist campaigns here typically celebrate women's ability to make their own decisions and do what makes them feel best as individuals.

However, the point of 4B and Escape the Corset is not to make women feel more fulfilled or more at home in their bodies. Nor is it about putting pressure on men as individuals to change their behavior. The point of 4B is to send a message about the structure of society – to say that it is not acceptable for you to be valued solely for your fertility and sexual attractiveness – and to ensure your independence.

In an academic paper about the movement, author Hyejung Park translates a 2019 video by South Korean activist group SOLOdarity: “This is true Valley corset (Escape the Corset) brings some inconveniences,” the activists admit. “If you have short hair, you may need to get your hair cut more often and may need to buy a whole new wardrobe Valley corset. Nevertheless, we practice Valley corset because it's not about being more comfortable. It’s about not being a doll, not being a second-class citizen.”

The idea of ​​refusing to wear skirts for political reasons, even if you like them, is an attitude that has fallen out of favor in American feminism since the end of the second wave in the 1970s. Yet there is a discipline and radicalism to this form of activism that is easy to understand because it appeals to America's angry young women at this moment. It assumes a world that so forcefully decentralizes men and their desires for women that men themselves disappear from a woman's life. After the United States elected a symbol of male aggression and violence to our highest office for the second time, one person can see the appeal.

The idea of ​​such vigorous and uncompromising protest also makes sense considering how many chuckle-worthy rape jokes the mere discussion of 4B has generated online. Many American 4B TikToks have comments from men crowing, “Your body, my choice,” a refrain that young fans of far-right influencer Nick Fuentes reportedly parrot in schools.

“(Women) threaten sex strikes like LMAO like you have a say,” read one post from an X account with 122,000 followers.

However, it is worth remembering that the divide between left and right in this country is not accurately reflected across gender lines. While we won't know what the numbers are until later, early polls show that 45 percent of women and 53 percent of white women voted for Trump. Trump surrounds himself with empowering women, and people like Marjorie Tyler Greene gleefully shout misogyny through the floors of Congress.

One possible lesson from the era of the Women's March—that feminist response to Trump's first term—is this: gathering in a large group as a pure expression of anger is not always sustainable. The Women's March failed due to the fierce power struggles that traditionally occur among large left-wing groups in the United States.

Perhaps it is time for American feminism to flesh out and discipline its action points. 4B is specific and disciplined, making it difficult to translate out of its cultural context and into America. It is very clear about its goals, which are to achieve personal autonomy through the power of one's own denial, rather than demanding it in elections or in interpersonal relationships.

One question that American feminists might take from 4B is this: What will you work toward? And what will you do to get there?