Once I sit down at a bar in Brooklyn with my cousin — a current school grad from Korea who’s visiting America for the primary time — I’ve one burning query: How’s your love life? She retains her ballcap pushed down low and presses her lips into a decent line.
“I’m not ,” she says. “I simply don’t belief males. You don’t know what they’re pondering as of late — whether or not they’re one of many guys with misogynistic ideas. It’s so normalized. Why would I even danger it?” she says.
She doesn’t need to date. She feels no have to get married. Her preferrred life is to kind a tight-knit neighborhood with different single girls. “It’s not simply me,” she says. “All my associates not often date as of late for that cause. These points are all we speak about after we get collectively.”
My cousin and her associates aren’t alone. Throughout Korea, younger girls are swearing off males, influenced by the 4B motion, a radical feminist marketing campaign that originated in Korea within the late 2010s. The 4 Bs stand for bi-hon (no marriage), bi-yeonae (no relationship), bi-chulsan (no birthing) and bi-sex (no intercourse).
The motion shaped in response to rising gender inequality and violence in opposition to girls: Korea has one of many largest gender pay gaps on the earth, and brutal murders of girls — in subway stations, on rooftops and in their very own houses, typically by the hands of males they had been relationship — headline information reveals day by day. Amid a lot political turmoil and bloodshed, 4B activists say the one solution to make girls protected — and persuade society to take their security critically — is to swear off males altogether till one thing adjustments.
And now, within the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, 4B goes viral on U.S. social media amongst girls who’re livid with the boys who helped the previous president clinch a win. On TikTok alone, prime movies have gained tens of millions of views, and one broadly shared tweet in regards to the 4B motion post-election now has 450,000 likes and 21 million views at time of writing.
It’s too quickly to say if the 4B motion is right here to remain in the US. However even when it isn’t, the surge in curiosity says one thing in regards to the social forces unleashed by the 2024 presidential election. An uptick in misogyny has already been evident — simply have a look at the “your physique, my selection” feedback by males on-line — much like what’s been seen in Korea, suggesting that this type of feminist response might take maintain. And even when girls don’t explicitly tackle the 4B label en masse, the motion’s message of bodily autonomy, and the anger that drove the dialog within the first place, might have a significant influence not simply on American politics, however on American life total — simply because it has in Korea.
Consider the motion as a labor strike, says Soha, a Korean feminist who offered solely her on-line nickname for worry of being harassed for supporting feminism. She says it’s about rejecting the extra work girls put in to enchantment to males, preserve a family and observe patriarchal values — the sort of work that’s extra widespread in South Korea’s extra socially conservative society. It’s the kind of labor all girls can establish with and push again in opposition to with one highly effective voice. Many ladies eschew the 4B label, typically in worry of harassment, however nonetheless reside by its rules. My cousin describes it as an act of survival, a solution to protect girls from quickly rising violence, keep away from poisonous conversations with misogynistic males and resist an anti-feminist authorities that’s actively making an attempt to roll again girls’s rights.
Simply as gender has turn into a political predictor in Korea, it’s shaping elections in the US. The turnout demographics from the U.S. presidential election are nonetheless being sorted out, however a couple of issues are crystal clear. The Republican ticket used male identification and gender grievances as a profitable political software, courting the “bro” vote and attributing Kamala Harris’ success to her identification. Younger males helped Donald Trump win the election. Many younger girls are distraught. It’s an acceleration of the already widening gender hole in American politics, together with an rising variety of younger males rejecting feminism. An NBC Information ballotdiscovered that 57 p.c of girls backed Harris, in comparison with 40 p.c of males — with girls sprinting to the left whereas males flirt with the appropriate.
Some U.S. girls are searching for each revenge and aid from the implications of a Republican trifecta, together with a rollback of reproductive rights and a broader cultural acceptance of sexist rhetoric. For some on-line, the reply is true in entrance of them: the 4B motion from South Korea.
Just like the U.S., South Korea’s gender divide performed a putting position in South Korea’s most up-to-date presidential election. Yoon Suk Yeol, then the conservative candidate, secured a victory in 2022 by catering to younger males who felt left behind throughout a speedy push for gender equality, particularly after the nation’s #MeToo reckoning in 2018 tanked the careers of a number of actors and politicians. Younger males cheered on Yoon’s declarations of being an “anti-feminist,” saying that “structural discrimination primarily based on gender” doesn’t exist, even if the nation usually ranks close to the underside within the World Financial Discussion board’s gender equality index. To at the present time, younger males understand that discrimination in opposition to males is extra severe than in opposition to girls, although 50 p.c of girls between the ages of 19-29 say they’ve skilled sexual discrimination at work, in comparison with 30 p.c of their male friends. From 2021 to 2023, feminine sexual assault victims noticed a 15 p.c rise. Many American girls worry the identical might occur right here.
4B messaging is already echoing on U.S. social media. One X consumer advertises the 4B motion as a solution to “take management of your life below *him*.” One other consumer writes, “We have to get thinking about the 4B motion … We will’t let these males have the final snigger … we have to chunk again.” One TikToker has posted she’s becoming a member of the 4B motion after breaking apart along with her Republican boyfriend.
“Once I noticed the motion go viral within the U.S., I believed, even U.S. girls have to be at their restrict,” says Yeonhwa Gong, a Korean 4B follower who has written on the subject. “However I don’t really feel too dangerous that it has come so far — if something, I consider it as a needed motion that had been pushed again for some time and is now lastly taking place.”
For ladies who undertake the 4B mindset, not even males who declare to be on the identical political spectrum can present a protected house. With so many males opposing feminism, and even a video on how pro-Trump males might disguise their political opinions from the ladies they date going viral, how are you aware if he’s telling the reality? “Quite a lot of girls are simply bored with males, and worrying about ‘what if?’” my cousin instructed me. “I had thought in some unspecified time in the future I’d need to discover a good man, irrespective of how laborious that might be. At this level now although, I don’t really feel that want.”
The 4B motion might sound too radical to get far within the U.S., however the truth that it’s gained traction means that at the very least a lot of younger girls really feel extra weak for the reason that reelection of Donald Trump than they did earlier than it. The 4B discourse within the U.S. “prompts us to mirror on how a lot society has taken as a right or neglected the rights and the freedoms that ladies rightly deserve,” says Hyejin Jeon, a College of Maryland doctorate scholar from Korea who’s at the moment analyzing her nation’s feminism actions.
If the motion takes maintain, it might doubtlessly result in among the similar outcomes as have been seen in Korea, the place girls are reconsidering dates with males out of suspicion and lack or belief, younger persons are marrying and having youngsters at decrease charges, and each women and men are expressing deep loneliness. Politicians might make the most of the divide for their very own positive factors, leaning more durable into gender-divide politics, and even outright sexist rhetoric. And even girls could flip in opposition to each other; American girls are already arguing in regards to the inclusivity of the motion, with some saying that ladies with male companions haven’t any half in 4B. Such discourse has lengthy fractured feminist teams in Korea, based on Minyoung Moon, a Clemson College lecturer who revealed a report in regards to the backlash in opposition to feminism in South Korea. Married girls are seen as “serving the wants of males,” she says, alienating the group from what might be a extra inclusive motion.
After which there’s the hazard of backlash from the appropriate. “The long-term impact I see may be very detrimental, as a result of they selected the novel technique, giving males and anti-feminists cause to hate them much more,” Moon says. “And after I have a look at the 4B motion … on YouTube, I already see the conservative social gathering folks bashing in opposition to liberal girls.”
Nonetheless, at the very least for now, the motion seems on the upswing in each nations as girls say that the mannequin of life they’d anticipated — relationship, marriage, home, youngsters — appears to be like, more and more, like a entice set by males who don’t see them as equals. And ladies like my cousin need options.
“To reside with associates which are near me, to have the power to reside by myself — dwelling like that’s my dream,” she says.
