This article was originally published by The 19th on November 7, 2024.
In the hours following former President Donald Trump’s election victory, Google searches related to 4B, a South Korean fringe feminist movement that rose to prominence in the mid-to-late 2010s, surged in the United States.
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It’s called “4B” because “B” is an abbreviation for “no” in Korean, and a series of “nos” is what the movement calls for.
No sex.
There are no dates.
There are no men to marry.
I don’t have any children.
Young women on Instagram and TikTok are a key demographic that has recently gained attention in the United States. The idea behind this movement is individual resistance to what is defined as a conservative political environment and the erosion of reproductive rights.
Michaela Thomas, a 21-year-old artist from Georgia, told The Washington Post she first heard about the 4B movement about a year ago.
“Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not have access to abortion,” Thomas told the Post. “You can’t have both. Young women don’t want to be intimate with men who don’t fight for women’s rights. It shows they don’t respect us.”
The concept of a “sex strike” is not new. The ancient Greek play “Lysistrata” focuses on women who vow to stop having sex to protest the Peloponnesian War. In South Korea, the 4B movement took root at a time when the country was independently considering issues of gender violence and equality. (This country has one of the highest wage disparities in the world.)
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In the United States, an ideological divide is widening between young men and women. According to the Financial Times, women between the ages of 18 and 30 are 30 percent more liberal than men of the same age. Some experts point to the #MeToo movement of 2018 as a major trigger for the rise in feminist values among women and the subsequent backlash among young men.
