aAs Donald Trump secured victory in the US presidential election, an unexpected phenomenon began trending on social media. Young American women have announced their participation in the “4Bs'' (a South Korean fringe feminist movement that advocates against marriage, childbirth, dating, and sex).
The movement has sparked intense global interest, with posts on TikTok and ViralX racking up millions of views and ushering in a women's rights revolution.
However, the situation is more complex within South Korea, where the feminist movement is under attack in some places.
“I had never heard of 4B until recently,” said Lee Min-ji, an office worker living in Seoul, who was surprised by the international attention. “I understand where the anger comes from, but I don't think avoiding all relationships with men is the answer.”
Park So-young, who works as a publishing expert in Seoul, says she doesn't date because she prioritizes her professional life.
“Like me, most of my female friends are now more focused on their careers than relationships, but that's not 4B's fault, it's just the reality of being a young Korean professional,” she says. .
rebel against a disparate society
The name 4B comes from four Korean words starting with “bi” (meaning “no”): bihong (not getting married), bicheolsan (not giving birth), biyeonnae (not dating), and biseksu (not having sex) . Similar to past “separatist” feminist movements, 4B represents a rejection of heterosexual relationships as a means of resisting patriarchal structures.
The movement emerged in the mid-2010s amid a rise in online feminist activism in South Korea, the country where women face the widest range of issues. Gender pay gap across OECD countries And deep-rooted discrimination.
Several high-profile incidents have galvanized feminist activism in recent years. In 2016, a woman was murdered An unknown man near Gangnam Station claimed that he did this because the women were “ignoring” him. The incident sparked nationwide protests Violence based on misogyny.
Digital sex crimes, from the prevalence of illegal hidden camera filming to the latest epidemic of AI-generated deepfake porn targeting young women, are further fueling feminist movements.
Online activists are also challenging South Korea's strict beauty standards. In 2018, some young women began posting videos of themselves destroying their makeup and cutting their hair short, in what became known as the “Escape the Corset” movement.
However, there was such a backlash that the word “feminism” itself was used. actually become slanderous In South Korea, it has a meaning far removed from the Western idea of protecting gender equality.
“Unlike the long history of feminist movements in Western countries, South Korea has experienced these changes in a very compressed way,” said Go-eun Jeong, an assistant professor of sociology at Korea University. “This has led many to see feminism only in its most extreme form.”
President Yoon Seok-yeol, who took office in 2022, has courted disaffected young male voters by denying the existence of structural gender discrimination and promising to abolish the country's Ministry of Gender Equality, and has launched an anti-feminist campaign. He partially pushed his emotions to victory.
“4B is like a feminist statement expressing the dissatisfaction and dissatisfaction of young digital feminists with Korean society,” explains Minyoung Moon, a sociology lecturer at Clemson University who studies Korean online feminism. “However, its radical nature has contributed to a serious backlash, with many young men and some women equating all feminists with man-haters, which has deepened social divisions. Masu.”
Lee Jeong-eun, who lives in Busan, said women who openly identify as feminists face backlash both online and offline. “You're being demonized,” she says.
This concern is not unfounded. Last year, a female employee at a convenience store in Jinju City attacked violently A complaint by a man who assumed his girlfriend was a feminist just because she had short hair led to a court ruling that recognized misogyny as a motive for a hate crime for the first time.
This hostile environment led many young Korean women to practice this practice. what scholar Like Moon and Jung's term “quiet feminism,” it embraces feminist principles privately while avoiding public identification with the movement.
Effects that are difficult to measure
South Korea's digital environment plays an important role in the expression of the 4B movement. Anonymous online forums and social media serve as sheltered spaces for feminist discourse that is difficult to voice openly. However, the online nature of the movement makes it nearly impossible to measure the true scale and impact of 4B.
While 4B received relatively little mainstream attention in South Korea and before President Trump's victory, some overseas media outlets have focused on 4B as South Korea, where the number of children per woman will reach 0.72 children in 2023. The country is on track to tie the world's lowest birth rate on record. That could be a problem, he says. month.
“South Korea's low birth rate is a complex issue, and we cannot simply claim that Korean women boycotting men is contributing to the low birth rate,” Moon said.
The birth rate has become It's been falling for decades And it can often be attributed to factors such as: The financial burden of raising children, high housing costs, Fierce education competitionand Changing priorities. “There may be a cultural connection to women's distrust and dissatisfaction with Korean society, but a correlation has not been proven,” Moon said.
For Jung, the global attention to the 4Bs reflected a change in the way the feminist movement spread globally. “Many social movements in Asia have historically been influenced by the West, as we saw with the #MeToo movement,” she says.
“Now we are witnessing the potential impact of a movement originating in South Korea on Western society.”
