The Rise of 4B in the Wake of Donald Trump’s Reëlection

Last week, here in Seoul, I was trying to digest the aftermath of the election when I began to notice that my American peers were looking this way, in search of guidance from South Korea. On TikTok, X, and Instagram, women of all ages were committing themselves to some version of South Korea’s 4B movement, each “B” (the prefix 비 or bi) indicating a negation or disavowal: no marriage, no kids, no sex, no dating, all defined in heterosexual terms. “Good luck getting laid, especially in Florida! Because me and my girlies are participating in the 4B movement,” one American TikToker said. “Why exactly are you going to keep becoming subservient to a nation that doesn’t literally care about you?” another asked, backgrounded by an article about the fertility rate in South Korea. A piece in Vanity Fair was headlined “MAGA Has a Penis Obsession. 4B Feminism Is a Logical Response.”

A “Lysistrata”-style political sex strike in the U.S. is unlikely to take off. But there hasn’t really been one in South Korea, either. I wouldn’t describe 4B as a movement or an ideology as much as a feeling, a name for what many women are doing (or not doing), intentionally or not. The country has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, and the marriage rate has fallen by forty per cent in the past decade. Many straight women, twentysomething through middle age, have given up on the layers of bullshit that come with dating and reproduction: sexist dudes, in-law drama, holiday rituals, dead-end job prospects. There’s also the untenable cost of family housing and childhood education in Seoul and other major cities. 4B is catchy and provocative, but it’s also way too slight to help us through this moment of crisis.

I first heard of 4B a few years ago, when I was reporting on Korea’s version of the #MeToo movement. There was a mood of indignant excitement—a feminist revival that had been triggered by an accumulation of violence. In 2016, a man had randomly murdered a young woman in Gangnam, a busy, prosperous neighborhood in Seoul; spy-camera pornography rings were proliferating; abortion was illegal; sexual harassment was common in schools and workplaces; the gender pay gap was extreme; marriage and pregnancy marked the end of most women’s careers. The nation had its first woman President, Park Geun-hye—unmarried, childless—but she was the corrupt, inept daughter of a former military dictator. Millions of people took part in street demonstrations that led to her impeachment and to the election of a liberal successor, in 2017. A much smaller number of Koreans gathered regularly, the following year, to protest femicide, sex discrimination, and other symptoms of patriarchy. Women delivered testimonies, taking down some very famous men. Abortion was decriminalized (though access is still limited). There was a boom in feminist books, and the L.G.B.T.Q. community became much more visible. Amid these sprawling shifts, some radical feminists looked back to the separatists of the nineteen-seventies, who had responded to the existing world by forming little worlds without men. Online, Koreans coined the term 4B to describe, and prescribe, a refusal of gendered expectations. “Even if people aren’t 4B, they might choose 2B or 3B for themselves, kind of like an unspoken movement,” Park Eun-hye, a twenty-two-year-old art student, told me last week. “Because society is the way it is, people have ended up making that choice.”

The conditions under which 4B started to trend in the U.S. are both the same and uniquely dismal. It’s the 2017 pussy-hat moment all over again, only worse. Donald Trump’s reëlection has made women understandably fearful about their protection from discrimination, their ability to get an abortion, their physical safety. There’s also the more atmospheric awareness of just how many men did not mind that Trump, despite uniformly denying any wrong-doing, is a credibly accused rapist who has routinely denigrated women—across a number of key states, fifty-five per cent of men voted for Trump, compared with forty-five per cent of women. Or how many men support the ugly new meme “Your body, my choice.” And it now seems that Trump is attempting to fill his cabinet with men suspected of sexual misconduct: Pete Hegseth, his intended nominee for Defense Secretary, had paid to settle allegations that he trapped a woman against her will in a hotel room and sexually assaulted her; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who could lead the Department of Health and Human Services, allegedly groped a woman he’d hired as a babysitter. Trump’s pick for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration on Thursday, after new reports emerged that he had paid for sex, multiple times, with a seventeen-year-old girl. (Both Hegseth and Gaetz deny the allegations.)

Not long into Korea’s feminist upsurge, a backlash arrived. Men resisted the critique of patriarchal norms and accused feminists of reverse bias. It was men, after all, who were subject to unholy working hours and mandatory military service. The minority of men who sympathized with the feminist cause felt excluded from the movement; some trans and queer people did, too. I remember one earnest college student telling me how much he missed his friendships with the opposite sex. I wasn’t sure what to think of his comments at the time, but the gender divide apparently hardened. In 2022, the conservative politician Yoon Suk-yeol used this chill to his advantage, mobilizing millions of young male voters to win the Presidential election—not unlike Trump in 2024. Yoon has since hollowed out the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family and refocussed government efforts on population decline. He moved the President’s office to the headquarters of the defense ministry. His over-all tenure has been marked by allegations of petty grift, tax cuts for the wealthy, and attacks on the press and civil society.

Though 4B as a creed remains fringe, the desire it encapsulates—to gain distance from men by opting out of traditional family-making—is clearly real and widespread. I don’t consider it my business to judge what any woman does with regard to sex or dating, marriage or reproduction. I do worry, however, about the broader social impulse toward separation, of writing off men (or women or any other category of people) and calling it a movement. “I realize that, to make change, it’s necessary for feminists to speak out, but I think we have to be careful about taking it too far into hatred,” Kim Si-won, a recent college graduate and aspiring filmmaker, told me. “I wish that women and men could live together without that kind of animosity.” Both in Korea and in the U.S., there’s a temptation to treat 4B as a substantive doctrine rather than a life-style choice. Yet there isn’t a specific politics inherent to these refusals. It will take additional, collective steps to defend reproductive health care and the rights of migrant and low-wage women workers, queer people, and survivors of sexual assault, among others endangered by Trump and his global allies.

A few days ago, at the National Assembly complex in Seoul, I attended a discussion and press conference on a campaign to abolish the statute of limitations for crimes of incest. A coalition of women’s groups had launched the effort back in 2019, when the feminist movement was still very much in the news; progress has since slowed. I looked around at the forty or so people in the room—organizers, researchers, survivors, reporters—and realized that, other than some videographers, there were no men there. 4B did not come up, but the state of the women’s movement, compared with ten or twenty years ago, did. “If you were to ask me whether gender consciousness has improved,” Jung Choon-saeng, a member of the National Assembly and a critic of Yoon’s policies, told the audience, “I’d have to say that, because of the current backlash, it’s, in fact, got worse.”

This history was on my mind when I went to see a friend, an older feminist writer. She had never heard of 4B, but wasn’t surprised that a name had been put to such an obvious sentiment. We talked about the transmission of second-wave feminist ideas—from the U.S. to South Korea and now back again. I looked up some pamphlets from that time, including one by the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, published in 1972. It affirmed the need for “personal lifestyles of liberation,” as well as a “structural analysis of our society and its economic base”—the personal made political. “Under certain circumstances, working with men is feasible, desirable and necessary to achieve our vision,” the authors argued. Separatism “as political position is illusory.” ♦