In the hours following former President Donald Trump’s election victory, Google searches related to 4B — a fringe South Korean feminist movement that made a name for itself in the mid to late 2010s — surged in the United States.
It’s called “4B” because “B” is a shorthand for the word “no” in Korean — and a series of “nos” is what the movement calls for.
No sex.
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No dating.
No marrying men.
No children.
Young women on Instagram and TikTok are the primary demographic behind the recent American surge in interest. The idea behind the movement is individual resistance against what it defines as a conservative political environment and the corrosion of reproductive rights.
Michaela Thomas, a 21-year-old artist in Georgia, told The Washington Post that she first heard about the 4B movement about a year ago.
“Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not be able to have access to abortion,” Thomas told The Post. “They can’t have both. Young women don’t want to be intimate with men who don’t fight for women’s rights; it’s showing they don’t respect us.”
The concept of a “sex strike” is not new. The ancient Greek play “Lysistrata” highlights women swearing off sex to protest the Peloponnesian War. In South Korea, the 4B movement took root at a time when the country was undergoing its own reckoning with gender violence and equality issues. (It is a country with one of the widest wage gaps in the world.)
In the United States, there is a growing ideological divide between young men and women: Women aged 18 to 30 are 30 percent more liberal than men of the same age, according to The Financial Times. Some experts point to the 2018 #MeToo movement as the key trigger in the rise in feminist values among women and the subsequent backlash among young men.
