The History Of The 4B Movement Explained - Grunge (2024)

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Following Donald Trump's 2024 presidential election victory, those in the West may have caught wind of South Korea's 4B movement. Gathering steam since the mid-2010s but having roots going back decades, the campaign took off in response to a series of crimes against women: The murder of a woman in a public restroom in Gangnam, Seoul, an outbreak of hidden camera "molka" crimes committed against women, a surge of deepfake porn that The Guardian says has made the country "the world's digital sex crime capital," and more. The "B" in "4B" is a homophone for "bi (비 / 非)," meaning "no," similar to the English prefixes "un," "non," or "anti." The 4 "B's" are bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no romance), bisekseu (no sex).

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The precise origins of the 4B movement can't be pinned down to one person on one day, no matter how certain individuals have come to represent it, like activistsBaeck Ha-na and Jung Se-young.Rather, it is the culmination of a growing sentiment of resentment amongst Korean women arising from fundamental aspects of Korean culture and society, especially itsultra-traditional stance on gender roles.Add to thisthe growing involvement of women in the workplace since the 1980s, the concurrent decline in birth rates, the current birth rate crisis, governmental pressure on women to have children, and you've got a recipe for a full-on movement. And now, that movement has started to catch on elsewhere, including in the United States.

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Much like many other cultures, South Korea's traditional values espouse a clear gender divide: Women stay at home and raise kids and men go to work and support the family. But, starting with the formation of the Republic of Korea (the current South Korea) in 1948, things began to change. Asia Society tells us that from 1966 to 1998, the number of women who attended high school skyrocketed from20% to 99.5%, and the number of women in universityrose from 4% to 61.6%. They started entering the workforce during this time, and from 1975 to 1998, the percentage of women in managerial roles rose from 2% to 12.6%. Meanwhile, Korea passed itsEqual Employment Act in 1987 and established theMinistry of Gender Equality in January 2001 to help ensure that women had fair access to work opportunities.

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At the same time, problems persisted. By 1992, The Straits Times says that women only earned about half as much as men (47%) in similar roles. That number breached 60% by 2004, but to this day it remains the largest gender pay gap in the world amongst OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries at 68.8%. According toThe Diplomat, part of this inequality stems from attitudes related to maternity leave,whereby companies view women as risky and unreliable hires compared to men. Career-wise, men fall behind earlier on because of mandatory military service, but they catch up later.Overall, this predicament has contributed to Korea's plummeting birth rate, which sits at the heart of the 4B movement.

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South Korea's birth rate has dropped precipitously since 1982, to the point where it's now the lowest amongst all OECD nations at a projected 0.68 children per woman for 2024, per The Diplomat. The Korean Journal of Women Health Nursing says that the country dropped below its population replacement rate of 2.1 by 1983, meaning that not enough people were born to replace those who died. And by 2019, Korea became the only country in the world where women were expected to give birth to less than one child — 0.92 — on average.

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These are rightfully concerning figures for any country, especially becauseBoston Consulting Group says the percentage of its elderly people (65-plus) will surpass 20% by 2025. Korea's "super-aged society" requires financial and physical support even as the workforce granting that support — and economic prosperity on a whole — shrinks, and it will continue to because of the nation's birth rate crisis.The Korean government hasn't been passive about these issues, and as early as 2005 implemented aBasic Plan for Aging Society and Population Policy that it updates every five years.

Timesays that the government has spent about $280 billion trying to remedy this problem so far, including giving monthly stipends of around $740 per month to families with children less than 1 years old. By the mid-2010s, pushback against this "ideology of turning women into birth tools" grew, as Women's News says. This was especially true after the government released a heat map showing the number of women of childbearing age per district across the country— right around the time when the 4B movement took form.

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If traditional Korean attitudes toward gender roles, inequalities in pay, and the country's collapsing birth rate provided the seed and soil for the 4B movement, crimes against women in the mid-2010s provided the water. While there are plenty of places to start, we couldn't do worse than the Ilbe Storehouse, a self-described "extreme right" websitethat doubles as a hub for misogyny that goes far beyond online name-calling (per The Dankook Herald). Coming into prominence from 2014 to 2015,The Cutsays members of the Ilbe Storehouse deride the "gold-digging and shallow"women of their nation to the point where they do things like post pictures of users molesting them in real-life.

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In 2016, an Ilbe membermurdered a woman in a public bathroom at Gangnam Station, Seoul. According to The Cut, he told police he killed her because "women had always ignored him." The authorities didn't label the murder a hate crime, a decision that enraged Korean women on online forums, chat groups, social media, etc. Meanwhile, in 2018,The Guardian reported that cases of "molka" — secretly taken pictures or videos of women — rose from 1,110 in 2010 to 6,600 in 2014. Ninety-eight percent of all perpetrators were men.

In response, as The Conversation says, 2018's Tal-Corset movement ("Escape the Corset") saw Korean women eschew typical beauty standards. This is a massive deal in a country wherethe International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS) sayone in three women between the ages of 19 and 29 have had the procedure, and it's often given as a graduation gift for finishing high school. Escape the Corset segued directly into 4B.

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The 4B movement emerged in its formalized bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no romance), and bisekseu (no sex) form in 2019 as a result of everything we talked about so far. Articles on Vice, ABC,SBS, and more all point to the same #NoMarriage hashtag arising online by July that year.As Yue Qian, assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, told ABC, "Women have gained more opportunities outside marriage, but within marriage, men have not increased their contributions.As a result, for many women being married is no longer an attractive option."

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But rather than remain confined to the realm of cursory online activism, 4B followers put their beliefs into action. In 2019, Beauty Nuryreported that Korean cosmetic sales were down amongst 24.2% of people in their 20s. The biggest stated reason among women was that they "don't feel the need to put in a lot of effort to look good." Meanwhile, The Conversation cites two common 4B slogans: "My womb is not national property,"and, "Awoman is not a baby-making machine." The Feminist Currentin 2020 gave a high estimate of 50,000 active 4B members, while The Cut said lower estimates reached 5,000.

While 4B is egalitarian in nature, two women stood out for their early online contributions to the movement:Baeck Ha-na and Jung Se-young, who rose to prominence through their YouTube channel, SOLOdarity (which has since shut down). As Baek told Bloomberg in 2019, "Society made me feel like a failure for being in my 30's and not yet a wife or a mother."

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U.S. interest in the 4B movement hit the stratosphere following news of Donald Trump winning the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Google Trends shows a massive jump in searches for the term "4B" after November 5, peaking on November 7 at an increase of 3,000%, per The Week. A host of issues contributed to this interest, especially the U.S.Supreme Court's 2022 reversal of 1973's Roe v. Wade decision, which sent the issue of abortion rights back to the state level.

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As a result, some women in the United States are adopting the 4Bs for themselves as a form of protest: no marriage, romance/dating, sex (of the heterosexual variety), or childbirth. As CNN says, these women are "swearing off men — and they're encouraging others around the country to join them." Taking the election of Donald Trump as indicative of deeply rooted hatred toward women within the U.S., one 36-year-old St. Louis woman summarized her adoption of 4B to the outlet: "If you're going to hate us, then we're going to do what we want."

At the same time, Al Jazeera reports that someXusers have added fuel to the fire by inverting the pro-abortion "My body, my choice" slogan into, "Your body, my choice." South Korean feminist academicEuisol Jeong said that anti-abortion legislation in her country produced the opposing slogan, "No right, no sex," which is another way to summarize the current state of the 4B movement in the U.S.

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