SEOUL — The election of Donald Trump has sparked a surge of curiosity in the USA in South Korea’s 4B motion, a radical feminist campaign that preaches the 4 B’s: bi-hon (no marriage), bi-yeonae (no courting), bi-sekseu (no intercourse) and bi-chulsan (no childbirth).
Since Nov. 5, there have been greater than 500,000 Google searches for “4b motion,” whereas on TikTok, Instagram and X, help for the trigger has been trending amongst younger ladies voters who’re vowing to swear off males.
“Girls, we have to get thinking about the 4B motion like the ladies in South Korea and provides America a severely sharp beginning fee decline,” learn one submit on X with over 450,000 likes.
“We will’t let these males have the final snort… we have to chunk again”
“Reminder that the 4B motion, and the separatist motion typically, isn’t nearly avoiding males—it’s additionally about supporting and investing in ladies,” learn one other.
Right here’s what to know in regards to the motion and its influence in South Korea:
What’s the 4B motion and when did it come about?
Whereas its precise origins or founder is unknown, students and activists agree that the 4B motion started in South Korea someday after 2015, as a part of a wider wave of youth-led radical feminism popularized by on-line boards.
Its emergence coincided with a number of main occasions which have fueled a wider reckoning of South Korea’s gender inequalities within the office and violence in opposition to ladies.
Considered one of these occasions was the homicide of a younger lady in a public rest room in Seoul’s rich Gangnam district in 2016. The assailant, a 34-year-old male with a historical past of psychological sickness, later testified to police that he had stabbed the girl — whom he didn’t know — as a result of he had been shunned by ladies prior to now.
A girl enters a sales space to forged her early vote for a presidential election at a neighborhood polling station in Seoul in March 2022.
(Ahn Younger-joon/Related Press)
The motion was spurred additional by the #MeToo motion’s arrival in South Korea in 2018, the 12 months that additionally noticed mass public protests in opposition to the widespread circulation of nonconsensual pornography.
“For girls, love, courting, marriage and childbirth had been not perceived as refuges of peace and security, however the web site of publicity to male violence and subordination,” feminist scholar Yoon-kim Ji-young wrote in 2020, describing the 4B motion as “the entire severing of any emotional, psychological, monetary or bodily dependence on males.”
In recent times, some adherents have expanded the motion right into a variant often known as 6B, which additionally requires bi-sobi (no consumption of merchandise that endorse misogyny or have interaction in sexist advertising) and bi-dop-bi — solidarity between single ladies.
Regardless of bursts of virality and media protection, the motion continues to be removed from mainstream, and given its decentralized on-line existence, there isn’t a concrete information on what number of South Korean ladies actively determine as “4B.”
One of the vital frequent methods for adherents to sign their dedication is to share social media posts with 4B-related hashtags, equivalent to funding ideas for ladies’s monetary independence and images showcasing fortunately single lives.
Some cities, Daejeon and Gwangju amongst them, even have 4B-themed offline communities the place followers can socialize by sports activities, ebook golf equipment or skills-building workshops.
Some feminist students and activists in South Korea have criticized these lifestyle-oriented points of the 4B motion, arguing that particular person acts of opting out in the end do little to meaningfully advance ladies’s intercourse and reproductive rights in society at massive. “On the heart of younger ladies’s dedication to 4B is the need to deal with themselves,” feminist scholar Cho Joo-hyun wrote in 2020.
“The logical endpoint of that’s changing into a profitable particular person in neoliberal society,”
The place does South Korea stand on gender equality?
By many gender equality metrics, South Korea lags behind a lot of the industrialized world.
The wage hole between women and men is the largest among the many 38-member Group for Financial Cooperation and Growth (OECD), a gaggle of rich international locations, with South Korean ladies paid on common a 3rd lower than their male counterparts. Within the World Financial Discussion board’s 2023 International Gender Hole Index, which measures gender parity throughout financial alternatives, schooling, well being and political management in 146 international locations, South Korea is ranked one hundred and fifth.
Disparities stay stark within the dwelling as nicely. In households the place each spouses work, ladies spend a mean of 187 minutes a day on home work whereas males spend just below one-third of that — 54 minutes — in keeping with authorities information from 2019.
Violence in opposition to ladies has additionally been criticized as an space of lengthy neglect. Courting violence has seen a pointy enhance within the nation of 51 million, rising from 49,225 reported instances in 2020 to 77,150 final 12 months, in keeping with police. As well as, ladies within the nation are victimized by deep-fake pornography on the highest charges on this planet, in keeping with an evaluation of on-line content material between July and August final 12 months by U.S.-based cyber-security agency Safety Hero.
In South Korea’s final election, conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol’s marketing campaign was extensively criticized for making misogynist appeals to younger male voters, with Yoon denying that structural sexism exists and promising to boost penalties for false rape accusations.
Has the 4B motion managed to drag down South Korea’s birthrate?
Regardless of claims on social media that the 4B motion is behind South Korea’s dismal fertility fee, there may be little proof to again this up.
South Korea’s fertility fee — the typical variety of youngsters a lady has in her lifetime — at the moment sits at 0.72, the bottom on this planet and much beneath the two.1 wanted to keep up a secure inhabitants. Like most superior economies, South Korea’s fertility fee has steadily been falling since 1980. Researchers have attributed its first important dip in 2001 — to “lowest-low” ranges of underneath 1.3 — to the labor market shocks attributable to the 1997 Asian Monetary Disaster.
In more moderen years, rising housing and child-rearing prices in addition to office pressures forcing ladies to decide on between motherhood and their careers have pushed the determine down even additional.
And whereas it’s true that younger South Koreans are more and more disillusioned with marriage in favor of childless or single life, these modifications will not be unique to ladies. At the moment, simply 28% of South Korean ladies and 42% of males of their 20s see marriage as obligatory, dropping from round 50% and 70% in 2008, in keeping with authorities information.
