No dating, sex, marriage or having children with men: South Korea’s extreme feminist movement “4B” has gone viral in America and beyond since Donald Trump won the US presidential election.
WHAT IS 4B?
In Korean, 4B stands for the “Four Nos”: dating, sex, marriage and childbearing with men.
Photo: AFP
The movement emerged in the mid-2010s in South Korea, against a backdrop of persistent pay disparity, entrenched gender roles and an epidemic of cyber sex crimes and sexual violence against women. Yet it has largely remained a fringe campaign.
Adherents like Baek Ga-eul, 33, say it has allowed them to be a “complete human being, not just a being reserved for a man or children.”
The movement arose because South Korean women — who do 3.5 times more work in the home per week than men, official data shows — cannot “accept the expectation to perform both paid labor and the majority of household duties,” she said.
In addition, women were fed up with “a male culture that pretends to be proper toward women while, behind closed doors... shares sex videos of their girlfriends with their male friends.”
WHY IS IT TRENDING?
As it became clear Trump had won the Nov. 5 US presidential election, 4B became one of the top trending search terms on Google in the US and elsewhere, with search volume increasing to the maximum on the interest scale, Google analytic data shows.
Videos about the movement were soon being widely shared on TikTok and Facebook, Newswhip data shows, with footage of women shaving their heads to protest Trump’s victory and breakdowns of the 4B movement particularly viral.
The election was seen by many as a referendum on women’s rights, in particular over Trump’s appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices which resulted in the end of national abortion rights protections.
It made American women “realize that men do not regard women as equals,” Baek said.
“How can women love, marry, or have children with men who so openly hate and disregard us?”
“It was only a matter of time before the 4B movement extended beyond South Korea to the world,” she said.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SOUTH KOREA?
The wealthy country has one of the world’s lowest birth rates and plummeting rates of marriage.
Nearly 42 percent of South Korean households are headed by a single person, official figures show, and this is likely to rise.
Moreover, a 2021 study by Yonsei University found that more than 40 percent of Seoul residents in their 20s hadn’t had sex in a year.
Men cited not having a partner as their primary reason — but for women it was a “lack of interest.”
“South Korean women are still participating in the 4B movement in their own ways,” said one adherent who goes by JH. Even though “there are many Korean women who are not interested in feminism or have never even heard of the 4B,” they are inadvertently participating anyway, the 27-year-old said.
WHAT WILL IT ACHIEVE?
Sexism is entrenched in South Korea, said JH, who said she was bullied at work for involvement in the “Escape the Corset” feminist movement which rebels against strict beauty standards by, for example, encouraging women not to wear makeup. She eventually lost her job.
“What I went through is not unique for women in a misogynistic Korea,” she said.
“Boycotting men” is one of the most effective ways to show the severity of sexism in the country, said Kang Ji-young, another 4B participant.
The movement has grown out of “South Korean women’s painful contemporary experiences” said Keung Yoon Bae, a Korean studies professor at Georgia Institute of Technology in the US.
“It’s ultimately most accurate to view the movement as a symptom, one that reflects the untenable nature of pre-existing patriarchal norms of Korean society in light of the vastly increased number of high-achieving, well-educated women,” she said.
NEW ELECTION TREND?
In the US election, “voting patterns were strongly divided by gender across racial groups,” said Sharon Yoon, a Korean studies professor at the University of Notre Dame in the US, adding it was similar to South Korea’s 2022 presidential election. In South Korea, data indicates that men and women are increasingly ideologically opposed — with young men skewing far more conservative, which helped to propel President Yoon Suk-Yeol to power in 2022, after he promised to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality.
“The gendered divide that we are seeing in voting behavior is not particular to a country, but is pointing to a global trend of gendered backlash among a growing base of economically precarious men,” she said. “The rise of President-elect Trump will also trigger a strong response from American women,” she said.
“Their expressions of solidarity with Korean women in the 4B movement should be seen as one, but not the sole, manifestation of this emerging trend.”
Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 People may call Taipei a “living hell for pedestrians,” but back in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens were even discouraged from crossing major roads on foot. And there weren’t crosswalks or pedestrian signals at busy intersections. A 1978 editorial in the China Times (中國時報) reflected the government’s car-centric attitude: “Pedestrians too often risk their lives to compete with vehicles over road use instead of using an overpass. If they get hit by a car, who can they blame?” Taipei’s car traffic was growing exponentially during the 1960s, and along with it the frequency of accidents. The policy
Hourglass-shaped sex toys casually glide along a conveyor belt through an airy new store in Tokyo, the latest attempt by Japanese manufacturer Tenga to sell adult products without the shame that is often attached. At first glance it’s not even obvious that the sleek, colorful products on display are Japan’s favorite sex toys for men, but the store has drawn a stream of couples and tourists since opening this year. “Its openness surprised me,” said customer Masafumi Kawasaki, 45, “and made me a bit embarrassed that I’d had a ‘naughty’ image” of the company. I might have thought this was some kind
What first caught my eye when I entered the 921 Earthquake Museum was a yellow band running at an angle across the floor toward a pile of exposed soil. This marks the line where, in the early morning hours of Sept. 21, 1999, a massive magnitude 7.3 earthquake raised the earth over two meters along one side of the Chelungpu Fault (車籠埔斷層). The museum’s first gallery, named after this fault, takes visitors on a journey along its length, from the spot right in front of them, where the uplift is visible in the exposed soil, all the way to the farthest
The room glows vibrant pink, the floor flooded with hundreds of tiny pink marbles. As I approach the two chairs and a plush baroque sofa of matching fuchsia, what at first appears to be a scene of domestic bliss reveals itself to be anything but as gnarled metal nails and sharp spikes protrude from the cushions. An eerie cutout of a woman recoils into the armrest. This mixed-media installation captures generations of female anguish in Yun Suknam’s native South Korea, reflecting her observations and lived experience of the subjugated and serviceable housewife. The marbles are the mother’s sweat and tears,
RSS