What’s 4B? A South Korean feminist movement reaches the U.S. : NPR

Following President-elect Trump’s victory — which was fueled by male voters and to many appeared like a referendum on reproductive rights — some younger American ladies are speaking about boycotting males.

The thought comes from the South Korean motion generally known as 4B, or the 4 No’s (bi means “not” in Korean). It requires the refusal of courting males (biyeonae), sexual relationships with males (bisekseu), heterosexual marriage (bihon) and childbirth (bichulsan).

Curiosity within the 4B motion has surged within the days because the election, with Google searches spiking and the hashtag taking off on social media. Scores of younger ladies are exploring and selling the thought in posts on platforms like TikTok and X.

“I believe it’s time for American ladies to take part in our personal 4B motion,” one girl posted on TikTok. “If males gained’t respect our our bodies, they don’t get entry to our our bodies.”

“Girls, we have to get thinking about the 4B motion like the ladies in South Korea and provides America a severely sharp beginning fee decline,” reads one tweet with over 470,000 likes. “We are able to’t let these males have the final snort… we have to chunk again.”

“It’s time to shut off your wombs to males,” reads another viral post. “This election proves now greater than ever that they hate us & hate us proudly. Don’t reward them.”

A number of current tweets from far-right males with massive social media followings would appear as an example their level.

Nicholas Fuentes, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier — whom Trump was criticized for hosting at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022 — tweeted, “Your physique, my selection. Perpetually,” because the outcomes turned in Trump’s favor on Election Night time. The tweet bought 40,000 likes.

Social media customers have since noticed a pattern of men commenting that phrase, or comparable, on ladies’s TikTok posts.

One other, Jon Miller, who describes himself as a average and “honest & balanced political commentator,” tweeted on Wednesday, “ladies threatening intercourse strikes like LMAO as when you have a say.” The submit has gotten over 50 million views, sparked appreciable backlash and was appended with a group word clarifying that intercourse with out consent is rape.

Ju Hui Judy Han, a gender research professor on the College of California Los Angeles who additionally focuses on Korean research, says the rising curiosity in 4B at this second is comprehensible.

“Clearly, that is about American ladies looking for sources of leverage, sources of empowerment that may, within the short-term, make them really feel like they’ve some company … in these dire occasions, with the election and Roe v. Wade behind us,” Han instructed NPR.

That mentioned, she was shocked to see it take off so instantly this week, largely as a result of the motion is so particular to South Korean society and what she describes as its “tradition of obligatory marriage” and childbirth.

The place did 4B come from — and will it catch on elsewhere?

For context, gender inequality is deeply rooted in South Korea

Han describes 4B as a comparatively small motion that started as an offshoot of the rising feminist motion in South Korea, pushed by structural misogyny and gender discrimination.

South Korea ranked 99 out of 146 within the World Financial Discussion board’s 2024 Global Gender Gap Index, and for many years has had the largest pay gap among the many nations within the Organisation for Financial Co-operation and Improvement (OECD) — it was 31% in 2021, in comparison with about 16% within the U.S.

The Economist’s glass-ceiling index ranked it the worst OECD country for working ladies in 2022, partly due to strict maternity depart insurance policies that power many ladies to decide on between profession and household. That’s one of many causes South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world, right down to 0.78% in 2023.

The low fertility fee has been a supply of alarm amongst Korean policymakers, and criticism by anti-feminists who blame 4B and different comparable actions, Han says. However she says it might be a stretch guilty 4B for inflicting the decline in childbirths, and actually, sees it as a response.

“It’s about younger ladies saying to policymakers: ‘You need us to get married and have kids, it’s a must to make this world a greater place for us to reside,’ ” she mentioned.

President Yoon Suk-yeol, who was elected in 2022, campaigned partly on abolishing the Ministry of Gender Equality and Household, which coordinated and carried out insurance policies selling ladies’s rights. That transfer was condemned by many ladies in South Korea and human rights groups internationally.

South Korean ladies carry flags studying “feminist” as they march throughout a rally to mark Worldwide Girls’s Day in downtown Seoul in March.

Jung Yeon-je/AFP by way of Getty Photos

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Jung Yeon-je/AFP by way of Getty Photos

Excessive-profile incidents spurred feminist actions like 4B

A sequence of occasions over the previous near-decade fueled the South Korean feminist motion and the rise of 4B.

Certainly one of them was the 2016 homicide of a 23-year-old girl in a public lavatory in Seoul’s central Gangnam Station, which the perpetrator later said he did as a result of “ladies have all the time ignored me.”

“Quite a lot of feminists and quite a lot of ladies got here collectively and posted sticky notes all around the station speaking about their very own tales,” says Shruti Sivakumar, an Indiana College senior who’s writing her capstone on the 4B motion. “And that was simply kind of a reboot, I suppose, of feminist activism in Korea.”

In the meantime, South Korea skilled an increase in what the nation calls “digital sex crimes,” with hidden cameras recording ladies in public areas like bogs and altering rooms and importing the footage to pornographic web sites.

These components, mixed with a presidential corruption scandal in 2016, noticed hundreds of thousands of South Koreans protesting within the streets for numerous causes, Han says, and ladies’s rights was certainly one of them. These protests continued within the years that adopted because the #MeToo motion took maintain within the U.S. and all over the world.

There was additionally an increase in on-line feminist activism across the identical time, together with the controversial social movement generally known as Megalia. One other, known as Break the Corset, noticed younger South Korean ladies smashing their make-up palettes and reducing their hair quick in defiance of magnificence requirements.

Enter 4B, someplace round 2019. It doesn’t have an elected chief or membership construction. It spreads on social media and thru phrase of mouth, and there’s no method to know precisely what number of ladies have participated.

“It’s not a church, it’s not a cult. It’s extra, I believe, type of a way of thinking and a set of priorities,” Han mentioned. “What I believe is most necessary is that it’s about ladies recognizing that they’re in a collective battle, and that there’s a collective sense of frustration.”

4B is a dedication not with out penalties

Han says given the dire scenario in South Korea — together with a notably high suicide rate amongst ladies of their 20s — the 4B motion isn’t coming from a playful or flippant place.

Equally, Sivakumar describes it as a “final resort” for ladies who’re making an attempt to disentangle their lives from the patriarchy within the title of lasting social and financial independence.

“It’s not meant to be a motion or a type of activism that you simply’re capable of simply choose up for one month and simply drop as quickly as you discover somebody that you simply actually like and need to speak to,” she added. “It’s imagined to be kind of a type of sacrifice, that for the remainder of your life you’re going to be impartial from males.”

That dedication can include penalties.

Feminists — together with 4B contributors — in South Korea have confronted appreciable backlash, particularly from males, Han mentioned. For instance, the nation’s president final yr urged that feminism is to blame for blocking “wholesome relationships” between women and men.

Han thinks it seemingly that American ladies exploring 4B may see backlash from their quick circle only for “exercising their proper to do these apparent issues.”

“Declaring your self to be a feminist in an anti-feminist world can have penalties,” Han mentioned. “I believe any kind of refusal to take part in the established order may clearly have some unfavourable penalties.”

As some social media customers have identified, 4B is as a lot about reducing ties with males as it’s supporting other women. Sivakumar says the supposed goal is ladies’s autonomy quite than essentially looking for to punish males, calling it an “particular person effort on behalf of ladies.”

The help of a collective is what makes the motion so highly effective, Han mentioned, including that she hopes it can result in extra hands-on organizing for social change.

“One particular person refusing to have intercourse is only one particular person refusing to have intercourse,” Han mentioned. “However after they acknowledge different ladies doing the identical factor or desirous to share their frustration and their pursuit of company in doing one thing collectively, now that’s a begin of one thing else.”

Might 4B catch on within the U.S.?

A protest signal is pictured on a wall in an Arizona constructing earlier than the election. Abortion rights had been one of many prime points at stake for a lot of voters.

Olivier Touron/AFP by way of Getty Photos

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Olivier Touron/AFP by way of Getty Photos

Many within the U.S. see Trump’s victory as a referendum on ladies’s rights.

The previous president has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women courting again a long time and was discovered liable for sexual abuse by a jury. Regardless of saying he opposes a nationwide abortion ban, Trump has bragged about appointing the Supreme Court docket justices who led to the reversal of Roe. His working mate, Vice President-elect Vance, drew widespread ire for his feedback about “childless cat ladies” over the summer season.

And Vice President Harris had made protecting abortion rights a central characteristic of her in the end unsuccessful marketing campaign to change into the primary feminine president.

Trump made slender positive factors amongst each men and women in comparison with 2020, in response to the Associated Press — however gained males in each single age group. Exit polls present 55% of American men voted for Trump.

“I fully see the attraction proper now after the election, I’m simply so offended with males as a complete,” mentioned Keara Sullivan, a 25-year-old comic based mostly in Brooklyn who has been listening to loads about 4B on-line in current days.

Sullivan feels strongly that ladies “ought to cease courting and marrying and having intercourse with males who actively vote in opposition to their human rights.” However she has considerations about points of the 4B motion, together with worrying that ladies abstaining from intercourse could possibly be seen as taking part in proper into ultra-conservatives’ needs.

Even so, Sullivan thinks it’s a superb factor that individuals are speaking a couple of U.S. 4B motion. She’s already seeing ladies who usually are not normally outspoken about feminism becoming a member of the discourse for the primary time — and, like Han, hopes it can result in extra direct motion.

“I’m hoping that this newfound sense of solidarity ladies are discovering on social media can propel us into extra direct feminist organizing and disruption that makes particular calls for of our authorities,” Sullivan mentioned.