CATALYST PLANET - 4B: Why are American Women Swearing Off Men?

American women are participating in the 4B Movement which originated in South Korea, swearing off dating, marriage and sex.

Women in South Korea at a 4B protest. Free Malaysia Today. CC BY 4.0.

In the wake of Donald Trump winning the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, social media flooded with thousands of posts from women announcing that they were swearing off men as part of the 4B Movement. But what exactly is the 4B Movement, and what does it hope to accomplish?

Originating in South Korea, the feminist 4B Movement derives its name from its four tenets, which all start with the Korean prefix “bi” (or “no”) and denote a denial of something. Indeed, these four “Bs” are: don’t have children (bichulsan), don’t have sex with men (bisekseu), don’t date men (biyeonae) and don’t marry them either (bihon). The movement began in the mid-to-late 2010s as a protest against rising anti-woman sentiments among the nation’s men — especially following the hate-motivated stabbing of a young woman in Seoul in 2016. By withholding heterosexual attachments and exacerbating the nation’s flagging birth rates, South Korean women hope that the movement will provoke the nation’s leadership and male population into caring more about women’s rights. “I think a lot of women, through not participating in marriage and childbearing or relationships with men see a value in dropping the numbers to show through these statistics that women are not going to participate in [any] national agenda unless you listen to where women are coming from,” as Yale sociologist Meera Choi told The Times.

In South Korea, 4B is primarily a fringe movement. Its practices are so elusive and decentralized that the best estimate we have for its total number of participants is anywhere between 5,000 and 50,000, a wide range that highlights researchers’ uncertainty. However, since Nov. 5, 2024, some women in the United States have expressed a desire to introduce the movement mainstream in the West. Immediately following the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, many expressed shock and fear that Donald Trump — a figure with a well-documented history of sexual misconduct — had again achieved the highest office in the country. Particularly, some were distressed by the sheer number of men that had turned out for Trump, believing their votes to represent endorsements of or even apathy toward Trump’s misogynistic behaviors (“Among men, who made up 47% of the electorate,” NBC News reported, “Trump won 55%”).

Trump supporters at one of his rallies in August 2024. Greg Skidmore. CC BY 2.0.

For these women, 4B’s appeal of sticking it to the government and an indifferent, if not overtly hostile, male population was immediate. “Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not be able to have access to abortion. They can’t have both,” Michaela Thomas told The Washington Post, referring to Trump’s first-term Supreme Court nominations who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. “Young women don’t want to be intimate with men who don’t fight for women’s rights; it’s showing they don’t respect us.”

4B’s popularity quickly caught on across social media. “Good luck getting laid, especially in Florida! [...] Me and my girlies are participating in the 4B Movement,” user @brielleybelly123 posted to TikTok. User @rabbitsandtea also posted on the platform: “Doing my part as an American woman by breaking up with my [R]epublican boyfriend last night and officially joining the 4B [M]ovement this morning.” Some liberal men have also expressed support for 4B. “The best way to show the importance of taking away women’s rights is to make sure men are affected as much as possible alongside them,” a Buzzfeed commenter wrote. As Instagram user @nosybystanders told her female fanbase: “Why exactly are you going to keep be[ing] subservient to a nation that [literally doesn’t] care about you?”

#GrabAmericaBack Protest sign — An anti-Trump women’s march following his election in 2016. Fabrice Florin. CC BY 2.0.

4B finds footing in an America currently experiencing a widening political gender gap. Young women are becoming more liberal as men drift further to the right and deeper into conservatism. In October 2024, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that “young women — those ages 18 to 29 — favored Vice President Kamala Harris for president by 38 points. And men in the same age group favored former President Donald J. Trump by 13 points. That is a whopping 51-point divide along gender lines, larger than in any other generation.” As Claire Cain Miller reported, this is partly because young women have been “politically galvanized” by “t the triple punch of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Mr. Trump, the #MeToo movement and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.” On the other hand, young men feel increasingly “unvalued” by young women and “see former President Donald J. Trump as a champion of traditional manhood.” In terms of the 4B Movement, participants know firsthand how this male-harbored resentment can manifest in internet trolls’ hate comments.

Under @brielleybelly123’s video, @user813858060727 commented, “Thanks for not reproducing. You’re doing us all a favor.” Elsewhere, beneath a separate post under the 4B Movement hashtag, TikTok user @feronity commented, “Took a fu—kin new president just to stop being wh—res.” In the context of this vitriolic pushback — coupled with increased threats of “Your Body, My Choice” among young right-wing men — it becomes less surprising that women are joining the 4B Movement.

Women protesting at Womens March — A protestor carrying an anti-Trump sign at the 2017 Women’s March. CC0.

Some of the online discourses surrounding women’s participation in the 4B movement are likely exaggerations: not every woman who posts about partaking in 4B is likely to completely follow through with its tenets, especially in the long term. For all of the buzz that it’s created in the U.S., 4B has never been among the top 100 trending hashtags on TikTok, signaling that hype for the movement has been largely sensationalized. But so long as Trump continues to campaign on misogynistic rhetoric and policies — and men continue to listen — the underlying sentiments of 4B will remain real, and so will their implications for increasingly fed-up women.