Why feminists in the US are shunning marriage, sex and children after Trump’s win
A radical feminist movement in which women shun marriage, dating and sex with men is taking hold among young liberal Americans in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory.
Originating in South Korea and known as 4B, which means “four nos” in Korean, its tenets are: no dating, no sex with men, no marriage and no children.
Other principles include ditching beauty products and avoiding social interactions with men altogether.
“The women in South Korea are doing it. It’s time we join them,” said one post on X. “Men will NOT be rewarded, nor have access to our bodies.”
The women are furious that Mr Trump, whose Supreme Court appointees ended federal protections for abortion and who was previously found liable for sexual abuse, has for a second time prevented a female presidential candidate from reaching the Oval Office.
“Ladies, we need to start considering the 4B movement like the women in South Korea and give America a severely sharp birth rate decline,” said another post on X. “We need to bite back.”
Magnified by the US, the call to action is going global. Google searches for the term have spiked in Turkey and Malaysia, while women in India, Pakistan, Egypt and Brazil are calling for similar movements there too.
“Seeing the 4B movement spreading internationally brings me immense joy and pride as a Korean feminist,” said one activist. Another said it was a way to “repay the gratitude they owe to the suffragettes”.
Sexism and misogyny
For one Korean practitioner of 4B, the misogyny started at a young age.
In her primary school, she said the boys in her class would openly discuss the pornography they had watched online, comparing the size of the women’s breasts with those of her classmates.
By the time they were teenagers, the boys were creating group chats to target, taunt and sometimes physically harass schoolgirls. As the casual sexism continued throughout high school, college and into the workforce, one common factor was evident.
So for more than three years, she has cut out men from her life.
“The moment I decided I had to stop everything with Korean men was when I realised that my partner was no different from the terrible men I had encountered from elementary school to adulthood,” said the woman, who is in her 20s and lives in Seoul, but asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals.
While South Korea’s K-pop acts and Oscar-winning movies have made it into a global cultural powerhouse during the past decade, its society is deeply divided over widespread misogyny, gender discrimination and violence against women.
The typical female worker in South Korea earns 31.2 percent less than her male counterpart, the worst gap of any advanced economy. The pay gap is more than double the OECD average.
And South Korea ranks dead last among advanced economies on the Economist’s glass-ceiling index of opportunities for professional women, a position which it has not improved in eight years.
Though crime rates in South Korea are low overall, 90 per cent of victims of violent crime are women, according to the supreme prosecutors’ office.
In one notorious case, a Korean man who stabbed a young woman to death in Seoul’s plush Gangnam neighbourhood in 2016 said: “I did it because women have always ignored me.”
A government survey in 2022 found almost two-thirds of Korean women felt unsafe when they were alone in public at night.
Also prevalent are hidden spy cams, which take images of women in toilets, changing rooms and other private spaces without their consent, according to Human Rights Watch.
During the past decade, South Korea’s feminists began a “beauty resistance campaign”, seeking to resist pressure to conform to an idealised standard of womanhood, according to Hyejung Park, a feminist academic.
As women shared their experiences of harassment online, some spurned make-up and dresses, cut their hair short, and started trolling men online – mirroring the misogyny they had experienced.
“South Korean women rose up because the law had collapsed,” said Zoe, a woman living in Seoul. Like many other women, she asked not to use her real name because of fear of retaliation from Korean men, likening the atmosphere to a “modern-day witch hunt”.
Women face cyberbullying and harassment, often losing their jobs, if they declare support for feminists. In the past few years, a YouTube streamer and a K-pop singer who both defended women’s rights took their own lives after being mobbed by trolls online.
“Korean men, including even young boys, are rapidly absorbing misogynistic culture from online communities, and many Korean men view feminism as an ideology comparable to Nazism,” said one university student in Seoul who has practised 4B for four years.
“Women (including me) simply do not want to be romantically or even amicably involved with such men.”
In 2022, Yoon Suk Yeol capitalised on the anti-feminist backlash to win the presidency, pledging to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.
Mr Yoon accused the ministry of treating men like “potential sex criminals” and promised to introduce tougher penalties for false claims of sexual assault.
But South Korea’s women are having the last laugh. The country’s fertility rate fell to a record low of 0.72 last year, according to Statistics Korea, the lowest of any nation in the world and below the level required to keep the population stable.
“Countries that treat women as invisible, like South Korea, will eventually disappear,” said Zoe.
