For some women in the U.S., the 2024 election acted as a referendum on the future of their reproductive rights, with Donald Trump’s victory putting those freedoms at risk.
They say Trump — who has been found liable for sexual abuse of magazine writer E. Jean Carroll and bragged about how he was able to “kill” Roe v. Wade during his last presidency — and the government he represents could lead to a systemic attack on their bodily autonomy.
Now, many women say they’re turning to 4B, a South Korean radical feminist movement that boycotts men, as a way to reclaim agency over their bodies.
Discussion around the movement has become increasingly popular on social media sites like TikTok and Instagram. Following Trump’s presidential victory, online searches for the movement surged on Google across the U.S.
“I think if we stop engaging in these romantic pursuits and sexual pursuits with men, that’ll kind of tell them, ‘Hey, our bodies aren’t really up for debate,'” said Misa, a 22-year-old TikTok and Twitch streamer from the U.S.
“Women decided that they were no longer going to continue to opt in to patriarchy, but rather they would find some ways to take their own agency,” said Nadia Brown, chair of women’s and gender studies at Georgetown University.
Here’s what you need to know about the movement.
What is the 4B movement?
4B is a relatively niche and mostly online movement that began in South Korea in the late 2010s. The four Bs represent bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae and bisekseu, which mean the refusal of marriage, childbirth, romance and sex with men, according to a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Gender Studies by researchers from Seoul-based Yonsei University.
(CBC News reached out to one of the authors of the paper, Jieun Lee, assistant professor at Yonsei, for comment, but did not hear back in time for publication.)
South Korea, like many countries globally, has become increasingly gender-polarized in recent years. Young voters split by gender for the first time in its last presidential election in 2022, electing Yoon Suk Yeol, who has blamed feminism for the country’s low birth rate. Yoon has also pledged to abolish its gender equality ministry, which activists have called state-sponsored anti-feminism.
Several instances of high-profile gender-based violence and digital sex crimes also contributed to the issue. In 2016, a man murdered a young women because “women have always ignored him.” The incident caused controversy when police did not charge the man with a hate crime.
Organizations like Human Rights Watch have further criticized South Korea’s “pervasive and systemic discrimination against women and girls,” citing its extreme gender wage gap: Women were paid 31.2 per cent less than men in 2022, according to the Korea Times.
The country also has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and politicians have offered many financial incentives to couples who have children.
However, in addition to the high cost of living and an extremely competitive workforce, many women feel they wouldn’t receive equal support from their spouses in managing the household, and are pursuing alternative lifestyles.
A near-decade of these various factors may have fuelled the rise of movements like 4B, although its actual popularity is unclear. Critics call it reactionary, and exclusionary of transgender women and women who are already married or have children.
Why is it gaining traction in the U.S. now?
In the hours after Trump’s victory, young American women began posting support for 4B online.
“There’s a lot of men out here who like and enjoy sex from women but they don’t actually like who we are…. They only see us as sexual objects,” said one TikTok user.
During his previous presidency, Trump appointed three of the justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who formed the conservative majority that overturned federal abortion rights in 2022. In this recent election campaign, Trump claimed that he would “protect women” and ensure they wouldn’t be “thinking about abortion.”
Voters in Missouri cleared the way to undo one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the U.S., one of seven victories for abortion rights advocates, while Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota defeated similar constitutional amendments.
Brown said that women who have used their formal access to power through voting to no avail, will now use things that are “much more informal” as a way to try and retain power.
Misa said she’s supporting the movement by not engaging romantically with men: “I just think women are tired of having their bodies politicized and debated.”
What does celibacy have to do with feminism?
Sexual abstinence has long been used as a form of feminist protest.
Suffragettes attempted to gain political rights through celibacy by “leveraging men’s desires that women perform sexual acts, domestic chores and, most significantly, maternal duties,” according to The Politics of Women’s Suffrage.
Some Black women similarly abstained from sex when Black men were granted the right to vote in America, said Brown, to try and persuade them to use their votes to support Black communities and not keep women subservient.
It’s similar to the protests we’re seeing now, she said.
“You have a real recognition that this president and his ilk will be responsive to things like sex strikes because they are motivated by seeing women only through a very narrow lens that leads to their own sexual gratification.”
‘More incidents of sexual violence’
In the days following Trump’s victory, women have reported an increase in online hate and misogynistic comments.
Nick Fuentes, a self-described incel whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed a white nationalist, wrote on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.”
Trump “facing no real consequences” for being found liable of sexual abuse, “and not stopping the trajectory of their career emboldens other people to say, ‘Well, this isn’t of consequence,'” said Shana MacDonald, the O’Donovan Chair in Communication at the University of Waterloo, who researches feminist media and online hate.
“We have this emboldened set of thinkers who are going out into the world and setting up a set of standards for how we treat women that are going to really negatively impact the next generation of women.”
As abortion rights amendments continue to fail in many states, Brown fears that there could be “more incidents of sexual violence” and that the recourse available for women to take is increasingly limited.
“There are little functional policies in place to make victims of sexual assault and sexual violence whole,” she said.
“The real downside is creating a class of women who are using their agency but are going to be victimized even further.”