4B, the protest movement that boycotts men, explained
As Democrats struggle to come to terms with the results of this week’s election, some young women are looking abroad for inspiration. Across social media, women are exploring an idea called 4B, a protest movement in South Korea that calls for women to boycott men.
“Now I am, how you say this, a ho, but I really want to get behind this 4B movement,” begins one TikToker, going on to say that she approves of women withholding sex from men. ”After this election where women were pretty much told to their faces that no one gives a shit about them, don’t forget, ladies, we do have power. And you know the kind of power I’m talking about. Giving up 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 spiked after the election. Some of the social media posters are clearly joking out of a combination of rage, stress, and sadness, but others are more serious.
“Once you can get out of your mind that you will not be missing out by engaging in this behavior, you will be better off,” says one earnest TikToker. “I encourage you to reclaim your power and have really honest conversations with yourself about whether being in a romantic relationship with men at this point in time is worth it.”
For a certain cohort of young American women, the decisive victory of Donald Trump appears to represent a breaking point. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the reelection of the man who destroyed it, and the virulent glee of a number of his male supporters at both, some are toying with the idea of simply opting out of dealing with men altogether. Trump was elected in part by a generation of men steeped in hyper-macho rhetoric about putting women in their place from figures like Andrew Tate. To the women distressed with the ascendance of these toxic bros, a Lysistrata solution seems not only justified but also potentially effective.
The birth of 4B
The 4B campaign developed primarily among feminist Korean Twitter users in 2017 and 2018 in conjunction with South Korea’s Me Too movement. It stems in part from the earlier and more popular tal-corset or Escape the Corset movement, which called for participants to cut their hair short or shave their heads, give up makeup, and abandon overtly feminine clothes.
Named after the Korean prefix bi, or no, adherents are asked to follow four prohibitions: no heterosexual marriage, no heterosexual dating, no heterosexual sex, and no childbearing under any circumstances. While it’s hard to know how many South Korean women participate in 4B, the group self-reports a membership of 4,000 followers. It’s niche, but it’s made itself heard in Korea and around the world.
Both 4B and Escape the Corset are born of a society with strict gender norms and stringent beauty standards, and developed as a response to what participants see as the dehumanization of women in their culture.
One inflection 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 test themselves before returning home. The whole MERS epidemic, the theory went, was the fault of two thoughtless, selfish, and flighty women. The internet lit up with violently sexist hate speech — but the story was untrue.
Groups of women, outraged by the misogyny, started gathering on a MERS forum to talk about how they were done with men. In time, those online communities began to spill out into dedicated feminist websites, real-world rallies, and, eventually, the Escape the Corset movement.
The beauty expectations of South Korea are famously strict; the country is home to the most plastic surgeons per capita of any other country in the world by far. As women joining the Escape the Corset movement began opting out of the beauty industry, they had a measurable effect on South Korea’s economy, with women in their 20s buying significantly fewer cosmetics, hair products, and other beauty products in 2018 than they did in 2016, and plastic surgery expenditures going down by $58.3 billion in the same time period.
New fronts kept opening up in Korea’s gender wars over the next several years. In 2016, a 34-year-old man brutally stabbed to death a random woman in her 20s in Seoul’s busy Gangnam neighborhood, saying, “I did it because women have always ignored me.”
If women’s sole social value was to be breeding animals and sexual objects, declared practitioners of 4B, then they would simply decline either to breed or to self-objectify.
The same year, the South Korean government unveiled a new initiative targeted at improving the country’s birth rate with a “birth map,” rendered in shades of pink to rank towns and cities by the number of women of childbearing age. “They counted fertile women like they counted the number of livestock,” wrote one feminist blogger at the time.
More protests erupted in 2018 after a woman was imprisoned when she photographed a nude male model in her art class after he declined to cover his genitals during a class break, sharing the pictures on the internet to shame him. In South Korea, molka, or digital sex crimes involving nonconsensual images of women, had become a flourishing industry, supplied by men armed with pinhole cameras waiting to videotape unsuspecting women in bathrooms, subway stations, or motel rooms. Despite a vocal protest movement pushing for stricter laws, only 9 percent of molka perpetrators, mostly men, receive jail time.
In 2018, however, 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 under which South Korean law enforcement operated. Men who committed crimes against women were ignored or given a slap on the wrist, while women who committed those same crimes against men got the book thrown at them.
For all of these problems — the sex crimes committed with impunity, the dehumanizing government initiatives, the law enforcement that only punished women — a solution became, eventually, 4B.
If women’s sole social value was to be breeding animals and sexual objects, declared practitioners of 4B, then they would simply decline either to breed or to self-objectify. They would opt out. They wouldn’t just forswear makeup. They would forswear marriage and sex and children. They would devote their lives to building their autonomy.
4B in the US?
The tenets of 4B are extremely different from the kinds of feminism that tend to flourish in the US, where popular culture places a premium on choice and empowerment. Mainstream feminist campaigns here usually celebrate women’s ability to make their own decisions and do whatever makes them feel best as individuals.
The point of 4B and Escape the Corset, however, is not to make women feel more fulfilled or more at home in their bodies. It is also not to put pressure on men as individuals to reform their ways. The point of 4B is to send a message about the structure of society — to say that it’s not acceptable that you are valued only for your fertility and sexual appeal — and to ensure your independence.
In an academic paper about the movement, author Hyejung Park translates a 2019 video from the South Korean activist group SOLOdarity: “It is true that tal-corset [Escape the Corset] comes with some inconveniences,” the activists allow. “When your hair is short, you might have to get a haircut more frequently, and you might need to buy a whole new wardrobe for tal-corset. Nevertheless, we practice tal-corset because it is not about being more comfortable. It is about not being a doll, a second-class citizen.”
It supposes a world that so emphatically decenters men and their desires for women that men themselves disappear from a woman’s life.
The idea of refusing to wear skirts for the sake of your politics, even if you like them, is an attitude that has been out of favor in American feminism since the end of the second wave in the 1970s. Still, there is a discipline and a radicalism to this form of activism that you can easily understand feeling attractive for America’s angry young women in this moment. It supposes a world that so emphatically decenters men and their desires for women that men themselves disappear from a woman’s life. After the US elected a symbol of masculine aggression and violence to our highest office for the second time, a person can see the appeal.
The idea of such severe and uncompromising protest also makes sense considering the reams of smirking rape jokes that the mere discussion of 4B online has provoked. Many American 4B TikToks have comments from men under them crowing, “Your body, my choice,” a refrain that young fans of far-right influencer Nick Fuentes have reportedly taken to parroting in schools.
“[W]omen threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say,” went a post from one X account with 122,000 followers.
It’s worth remembering, though, that the divide between left and right in this country does not neatly map across gender divides. While we won’t know until later how the numbers break down, early exit polls say that 45 percent of all women and 53 percent of white women voted for Trump. Trump surrounds himself with enabling women, and the likes of Marjorie Tyler Greene gleefully shriek misogyny across the floors of Congress.
A possible lesson of the Women’s March era — that feminist reaction to the first Trump term — is this: Uniting in a large group as a pure expression of rage is not always sustainable. The Women’s March collapsed because of vicious infighting, which is traditionally what happens to large leftist groups in the US.
Perhaps it’s time for American feminism to get specific and disciplined about what its action points are. 4B is specific and it is disciplined, which is part of what makes it difficult to translate out of its cultural context and into America. It is very clear on its goals, which are to take personal autonomy through the force of one’s own denial, rather than to ask for it at the polls or in interpersonal relationships.
A line of inquiry American feminists might take from 4B is this: What are you going to work toward? And what are you going to do to get there?