4B movement

4B (or "Four Nos") is a radical feminist movement which is purported to have originated in South Korea in 2019. Its proponents refuse to date men, get married, have sex with men, or have children.

Tenets

The "Four Nos" are:

• no sex with men (Korean: 비섹스; RR: bisekseu),
• no giving birth (비출산; bichulsan),
• no dating men (비연애; biyeonae), and
• no marriage with men (비혼; bihon).

Proponents

Jung Se-young and Baeck Ha-na, two proponents, criticize marriage as reinforcing gender roles in South Korea. The movement draws some amount of inspiration from the novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, as do South Korea's MeToo and "Escape the Corset" movements. The 4B movement claimed to have 4,000 members in 2019.

History

The term 4B emerged from Korean feminist circles on Twitter around 2017 to 2018. These groups articulated their principles on the Korean feminist Wiki site Femi Wiki, where they originally defined 4B as "The motto of radical feminism, which means 'non-marriage, non-procreation, non-relationship, non-sex.'"

The 4B movement gained broader recognition on Twitter in 2019 and through various feminist social media accounts. One notable feature of the 4B movement, as with other Korean digital feminist movements, is that members often identify themselves as "anonymous women," as it is conventional not to disclose personal details online.

This digital movement functions as an online community where women engage in open discussion about navigating and envisioning a future without men. It serves as a platform for women to vent their frustrations and concerns about living in a conservative society while fostering a sense of solidarity. Additionally, the platform aims to motivate and inspire women to protest against dating, engaging in sexual relationships, getting married, and having children. Through a robust online presence, the movement seeks to raise awareness and recruit more advocates to amplify its impact.

Although the exact membership remains uncertain, some unverified estimates suggest a range of 500 to 4,000 claimed participants.

The 4B movement in South Korea emerged from a series of previous online social movements that gained traction on social media.

Escape the Corset Movement

The "Escape the Corset" Movement that started in 2016 served as a source of inspiration for the 4B movement. The movement calls for women to liberate themselves from sexual, social, bodily, and from psychological oppression. The word "corset" is used by Korean feminists as a metaphor for the societal mechanisms that bind and repress women, including toxic beauty standards. Notably, South Korea has the 10th largest beauty market globally and is the third-largest exporter of cosmetics. In a society where beauty holds immense cultural and economic significance, members of the "Escape the Corset" Movement criticize and resist cosmetic procedures, demanding skincare or makeup rituals, and the adoption of trendy clothing, all seen as perpetuating consumerism and misogynistic social norms. In protest, they express their defiance by destroying makeup, forgoing cosmetic enhancements, shaving their heads, and rejecting fashionable attire. Escape the Corset's analysis and approach to protest deeply influenced the 4B movement.

South Korea's #MeToo movement

Although the #MeToo movement originated in the United States in 2006 and gained popularity in 2017, many other countries, including South Korea, created #MeToo movements of their own. The #MeToo movement in South Korea, like those in other countries, encouraged women to express their experiences of sexual harassment to inspire social change. Shortly after its inception in late 2017, several hundred women stepped forward with claims of sexual harassment and violence. This movement also led to women who were forced into sex work as a result of World War II and the Japanese occupation of Korea to speak out for the first time and in large numbers. The Korean #MeToo movement also focused on femicide, non-consensual pornography, and misogynistic practices in the workplace.

The #MeToo movement also inspired various online hashtag campaigns, most popularly the #WithYou tag, to signal solidarity with survivors of sexual assault who had spoken up in the #MeToo movement. These various hashtags inspired the formation of women's activist groups, such as Citizens Action to Support the #MeToo Movement, who campaigned to end gendered oppression and support victims of sexual abuse in South Korea.

Purpose

The 4B movement is meant to serve as a direct opposition to South Korea's patriarchal state and combat its pro-natalist policies, which view women's bodies and reproductive abilities as tools for the state's future. Feminists who engage in the 4B movement are known to actively resist the various ways in which gendered expectations are enforced in a conservative society, specifically relating to child-rearing, relationships, and employment. This resistance involves not only withdrawing from dating but also rejecting prevalent gendered beauty standards and their associated consumerist practices in South Korea. In a conservative and traditional society, alternative forms of protest in the 4B movement include defying rigid beauty norms and traditional gendered expectations by shaving heads and choosing not to wear bras.

Members of the movement challenge the conventional life trajectory of marriage and family, while also condemning gender discrimination prevalent in the Korean job market, where women earn 31% less than their male counterparts, regardless of their marital or parental status. The movement serves as a response to the nation's profound demographic crisis. 4B feminists reject this instrumentalization of women's reproductive capacities and choose to distance themselves from a society they perceive as irredeemable.

While 4B advocates aspire to instigate societal change through in-person demonstrations, online activism, and by exemplifying an alternative lifestyle for other women, their focus is not on changing the perspective of men, as they are seen as oppressors.

Four activities

Bihon (marriage)

Since 2005, a feminist activist group, UnniNetwork, has promoted bihon as a political agenda to challenge the centrality of the heteronormative family model of marriage in Korea. They sought to replace "mihon", 'not married', with a more neutral term, "bihon", 'single'. However, their feminist bihon discourse did not gain major traction. On the other hand, the 4B movement employs "bihon" as a tool to actively protest against the prevailing culture of marriage.

Although the practice of gyeolhon, or "marriage" in English, was commonplace in Korea prior to the 1990s, the rate at which heterosexual couples are wedded in the country has drastically decreased.

Bichulsan (childbirth)

South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world. With the fertility rate at just 0.7 (as of 2023) each South Korean woman on average will have fewer than one child in her lifetime. This is significantly below the 2.1 threshold required to maintain a country's population.

The demographic crisis is so pronounced that the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle anticipates the nation's population, which is around 51 million, might decrease to about half the size by the end of the century. This crisis is due to economic insecurity experienced by young adults, high child-rearing costs and property prices, and is exacerbated by the country's deeply ingrained patriarchal culture. These factors contribute to women's reluctance to embrace traditional roles of marriage and motherhood.

Having the world's lowest fertility rate, the South Korean government has adopted pro-natalist policies aimed at incentivizing an increase in childbirths, such as stipends for new parents, increased maternal and paternal leave, and child care subsidies.

A 2022 survey reveals that 65% of women, compared to 48% of men, do not want children. The country has experienced the lowest fertility rate globally for three consecutive years. This has led the country to demographic challenges, such as the "dead cross" where deaths surpass births. Half of South Korea's cities, counties, and districts face the risk of losing a substantial number of residents.

Biyeonae (romance) and bisekseu (sexual relationships)

Women of the 4B movement additionally refuse romance and sexual relationships, because they see it as an extension of the patriarchal family structure. By embracing singlehood, they reorient themselves towards imagining futures for themselves outside of marriage and deny their bodies as reproductive centers for the pronatalist state.

Social media controversy

In the spring of 2024 in the Northern Hemisphere, South Korea's 4B movement was a popular topic on Western social media, and some English-speaking users on TikTok claimed that Korea's low birth rate was due to the 4B movement. Others claimed that the 4B movement's scale and impact are massively exaggerated.

See also

• Shakers, an 18th-century religious movement whose members also refused marriage, sex and child-rearing against the wider culture
• Sampo generation
• 6B4T movement
• Feminism in South Korea
• Female separatism
• Radical feminism in South Korea
• Gender inequality in South Korea
• Lysistrata
• #MeToo movement
• WOMAD
• Total fertility rate
• Political lesbianism
• Men Going Their Own Way, a similar movement with the genders reversed