Maria woke up the morning after feeling “itchy.” He grabbed a razor and began shaving his head while he shaved. “I’m giving up on the United States,” she said while trying to shave her hair until she gave up, grabbed a pair of scissors, and started cutting off piece after piece. “Fuck being everything the patriarchy wants us to be, because they clearly don’t care about us,” he continued in the three and a half minute video, which has already accumulated more than four million views. “If you’re a man, I’m not going to talk to you. I will be promoting the 4B movement from now on,” he stated.
But what did he mean by the “4B movement”? Trump’s election as the next president of the United States has triggered a flurry of social media posts about the South Korean-born 4B feminist movement, which advocates for women to renounce men entirely. Maria —@girl_dumphim on TikTok, or “girl, leave it” in Spanish — explained it in her video: “Women, stop dating men. Stop having sex with men. Stop talking to men. Divorce your husbands, leave your fucking boyfriends, leave them! “They don’t give a shit about us.”
Since Tuesday’s election night alone, there has been a 4,000% increase in searches for the “4B movement” on Google in the United States, making it one of the top trending topics on the online search engine in the last 72 hours. . The five territories with the highest percentage of interest – Washington DC, the country’s capital, Colorado, Vermont, Minnesota and Maine – are all Democratic strongholds, which indicates that it is mainly progressive women who are interested in the movement, disappointed with . TikToker Maria, for example, lives in New York, according to what she says in her video.
For Harris and many of her supporters, women’s rights were at the center of this election. The vice president’s campaign opted to focus on the fight for reproductive rights and assumed that this would mobilize the female vote in her favor and against Trump. However, women, despite his misogynistic speech and the fact that he was responsible for . That shift to the right saw Harris win the women’s vote by eight points, while President Joe Biden won it by 15 points in 2020, according to exit polls.
Many progressive women therefore see Trump’s victory, as well as the failure of three referendums that would have protected abortion rights, Nebraska and South Dakota, as an indication that their reproductive rights are in danger. Although Trump has been in favor of allowing the States to continue to legislate on abortion, many of them are concerned that abortion, or at least a national law that restricts it after 15 weeks of gestation, in line with what has been raised on previous occasions. Furthermore, they are alarmed that a man convicted of sexual abuse and accused of rape is president.
To deal with this, they are turning to the 4B movement. Another TikToker (@rabbitsandtea) posted on Wednesday: “Doing my part as an American woman by breaking up with my Republican boyfriend last night and officially joining the 4B movement this morning.” Her post already has more than 9.4 million views and since Wednesday she has shared more than 10 additional videos explaining her decision after receiving an avalanche of comments disparaging her.
Inspired by , the 4B trend began to gain traction in South Korea in 2019, following a wave of protests against the country’s misogynistic culture and its deep-seated inequalities in gender rights. Then it grew during the 2021 presidential elections, when, who campaigned on the promise of abolishing the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family and who insists that structural sexism does not exist in the country. South Korea has the largest wage gap between men and women in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the lowest birth rate in the world: Korean women of reproductive age have less than one child on average, according to data from the year past.
Those four B’s to which the movement refers are the rejection of heterosexual marriage (bean in Korean), to have children (Bichulsan), to dating men (biyeonae) and to have sexual relations with them (bisexual).
In the United States, beyond TikTok, content about this movement has emerged on other platforms such as X, Instagram, Reddit or Facebook. “Girls, we have to start looking at the 4B movement like women in South Korea and give America a severe decline in the birth rate: no marriage, no having children, no dating men, no sex with men. We cannot let these men have the last laugh, we have to fight back,” it reads with more than 20.4 million views.
In addition to disowning men, some users have also called on social media for women to sign up for self-defense classes, support female-operated businesses, and cultivate the female relationships and friendships in their lives. “A reminder that the 4B movement is not just about avoiding men, but also about supporting and investing in women,” .
Although the movement has been gaining more interest and popularity on an international scale in recent years, especially as young women around the world have become aware of its existence through social networks, it remains a very minority trend outside from South Korea. Experts agree that in the United States, specifically, this is a reaction to Trump’s election more than anything. “It is a temporary means to draw attention to the precarious situation of women, with Trump and his rise to power,” she explained to The New York Times Katharine Moon, professor at Wellesley College and expert on women’s movements in East Asia. “So it’s not really about a full commitment to a man-free lifestyle. Whereas, in South Korea, it is a way of life.”
