The 4B movement is still holding strong; gaining more members, influencing global structures, and receiving even more opposition — or is it? Some videos claim that this movement has enraged men all over the manosphere, and will continue to do so until we see some real change — or die trying.
But something about the hype online feels…off. Let’s get into it.
What is the 4B movement?
If you haven’t yet encountered this term before, you’re not the only one. B, or ‘bi’, is a Korean character that essentially means ‘no’. So, the 4B movement is about a ban on four things. The core tenets of this movement are :
- Bihon (no marriage)
- Bichulsan (no childbirth)
- Biyeonae (no romance with men)
- Bisekseu (no sexual relationships with men)
But what led to this?
Well, it’s South Korea in 2016. A man murders a young woman with the flimsy rationale that women always ignore him. It wasn’t about that woman. It was a hate crime against women in general, but it wasn’t treated that way in the courts. Seeing that the courts did not appropriately defend women, women decided to defend themselves.
They created an online space, Megalia, through which they were able to effectively organise to take down a website that was posting non-consensual recordings and deepfakes of women. Internal conflicts on the website led to some members creating a separate, TERF-y website, WOMAD, and ultimately, Megalia ceased to exist. The term 4B had been circulating on both of these platforms since the mid-2010s, as an extension of other movements.
Roots and shoots of the movement
South Korea already had a popular 2B movement, which was: no marriage and no children.
But it wasn’t just feminist women subscribing to this, nor was it really a personal refusal. It was an acknowledgement that these things were not attainable for the new generation, for several reasons.
Economic shifts made it so that owning a home was not a realistic expectation for most young people to have. Two incomes wasn’t enough. And when you have two incomes, unless you’re getting into a polycule (not exactly common in South Korea), there’s no time to then have children.
Add to that the very real threats of a climate crisis and global overpopulation, and people didn’t feel it was a good decision to bring people into this world. This isn’t isolated to South Korea. This set of circumstances can be found in countries around the world. North America is experiencing the same pressures, albeit in a different flavour.
The 4B movement has since sprouted more extreme forms as well. For example, the 6B4T adds restrictions of religion, idol-worship, and buying sexist products while also explicitly adding a core value of supporting other women in the movement. These movements help to highlight how deeply embedded misogyny actually is in society, and seek to militantly opt out of it all.
4B in Trump’s America
When Trump was re-elected in 2024, suddenly the 4B movement made it into the American zeitgeist.
A flurry of posts talking about this movement ripped through TikTok and Instagram. There was excitement and empowerment at a time when the women of America were watching their rights being taken away shockingly quickly, with a new sentence extending the torture another couple of years.
These videos gained hundreds of thousands of likes and were briefly picked up in the news cycle. Discussions of de-centering men started gaining traction, and it seemed like a growing number of women were choosing to stay single and focus on themselves and their own stability.
Now, it seems, the movement is gaining popularity again. According to Google, the ‘4B movement’ as a search term had its highest peak (by far) during that week in November 2024 before returning back to baseline. However, since then, the term has been growing steadily and had a sudden boost this summer.
Escape the corset: fashion-based resistance
While 4B was developing, another movement took hold: Escape the corset. This was a fashion aesthetic rooted in women’s liberation. Not unlike the burning bras of the 70s in North America, South Korean women were refusing to play the pick-me game for the male gaze.
The aesthetic was a rejection of costly beauty products, at a time when Korean beauty was a global trend. Women were smashing their makeup, shaving their heads, and wearing less restrictive clothing. Fashion was exposed as one of the primary forms of self-oppression, and it became an aesthetic that we are seeing in North America today in the rejection of the clean girl aesthetic and adoption of man-repellent styles.
Questioning aesthetics and exploring your options is a healthy response to the highly manufactured looks on social media and celebrity culture. It’s a good idea to experience yourself in the world as a nonconformist, especially if you’ve relied on conformity or been forced into it your whole life. Let yourself be as “ugly” as you can get, and see that the world still turns. Remove the power that beauty holds over you so that you can engage with it from a place of knowing.
How popular is it actually?
Here’s the thing: we don’t know.
It’s difficult to put a number on it because we really can’t track how many people are making a choice not to engage with men, vs not marrying and having children for the myriad of other reasons people today are opting out. Some estimates place the number of members at around 5000 in South Korea.
Megalia was able to compile a petition with 70,000 signatures, so their reach could be greater than that, but not everyone connected to Megalia subscribes to the 4B movement. In the US, hundreds of thousands of likes might translate to a few thousand converts, or perhaps could grow and multiply offline if brought into in-person conversations, but there would be no way of tracking that.
However, if this was going to be a successful movement to achieve real social change, it would have to be much more widespread, and much more centrally organised with clearly defined objectives that would open up the floor to negotiations.
If 4B is the psy-op, who or what is the target?
TikTok influencer, Phina Jana, stated in a video that the 4B movement’s influence was inflated in order to blame feminism for the declining birth rate, rather than admit the very real problems with
@phinajana A bit of background #4b #4bmovement #feminism #korea
the economy. One could see how demonising 4B as a feminist movement might inhibit young women from wanting to be associated with feminism. When fewer women are aware of their own oppression, they’re more likely to stick with it. To stay in the cage.
In North America broadly, but particularly in the US, women are seeing a rise in misogynistic viewpoints being given a microphone. Rights that women thought they would always have are being stripped away. We need feminism now, and destabilising it serves the current power structure.
Just like in South Korea, blaming 4B for the USA’s declining birth rate serves to distract from the real issues. Lack of health care, lack of support for mothers, poor and stagnant wages while the cost of living increases in a world that scientists warn may not exist much longer; these are the real issues.
Motivation matters
If you are drawn to the 4B movement as a form of punishment, you might want to take a step back and engage in some self-reflection. Punishment isn’t an effective form of behaviour modification, and revenge highs don’t last.
However, if you are recognising that your experiences with men have been so harmful that you need to create a sense of safety for yourself, this might be a reasonable set of principles to follow, at least temporarily, while you cultivate a life of joy and fulfilment.
Sex, romance and especially bigger commitments like marriage and children, are more likely to go well if the foundation is solid. You build a solid foundation by knowing yourself very well, and communicating important details with your partner who also knows themselves very well and can communicate effectively with you. These are not small things.
You may never fully know yourself within your lifetime, but there is a lot to be learned about yourself before entering into a serious commitment with another person. You need to know your limits. You need to know and trust what your body tells you. You need to be able to engage in relationship repair, and recognise that some harm is unavoidable, but other sorts of harm are not worth working through, especially for women. Taking time to work on your relationship with yourself, your family, your friends and your community will help you to advocate for yourself and recognise how a healthy relationship feels — and when to leave.