What is the 4B movement and why is it on the rise after Trump’s victory?

Following Donald Trump’s devastating triumph in the presidential election, a feminist movement from South Korea has been taking off among young women on social media.

Right up until the polls opened on Tuesday (5 November), political pundits were saying the race for the White House was too close to call.

But, as the night went on, it was clear Trump had galvanised voters and went on to win way in advance of the 270 electoral college seats needed become president, while the Republicans won back the senate and are well-positioned to retain their majority in the house of representatives.

Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris focused much of her campaign on abortion rights and securing the female vote while Trump – who appointed the three conservative supreme court judges who cleared the way to overturn abortion rights landmark case Roe vs Wade during his first term in office – was pretty unclear what women’s rights would look like if he won a second term.

In response, a movement which involves women cutting off sexual relationships with men, in protest against misogyny, has been growing online.

4B women swear off childbirth and marriage

While its exact origins are unclear, the 4B movement is a feminist movement from South Korea that initially gained popularity in 2019, with members swearing off heterosexual relationships with men and the heteronormative steps that come with them, such as childbirth and marriage, as a form of protest.

Anna Louie Sussman wrote in a piece for The Cut about the movement that the phrase 4B refers to four different Korean words which begin with bi-, or “no”.

These are:

• Bihon: refusing heterosexual marriage
• Bichulsan: refusing childbirth
• Biyeonae: abstaining from heterosexual dating
• Bisekseu: refusing to engage in heterosexual sexual relationships

Sussman wrote: “It is the only path by which a [South] Korean woman today can live autonomously. In their view, Korean men are essentially beyond redemption, and Korean culture, on the whole, is hopelessly patriarchal, often downright misogynistic.” 

Why is the movement on the rise now?

Women’s issues were front and centre in the presidential election, with protecting access to abortion at the top of Harris’ agenda at time when many US states were curtailing that right. This dynamic sits within the context of rising sexism from “alpha male” influencers and Trump’s long history of misogyny where his infamous “grab ’em by the p***y” comment is just the tip of the iceberg.

President-elect Trump’s record of sexism is long and complicated, ranging from not just how he talks about women generally as a group but his actions and how he addresses specific women individually, usually highly qualified women in powerful positions.

Throughout the election cycle he refused to pronounce Harris’ first name correctly – it’s really not difficult – and used derogatory nicknames such as “Crazy Kamala”. This is nothing new, he called Hillary Clinton “crooked” and “crazy”, fellow Republican Nikki Haley “bird-brain” and Democrat senator Elizabeth Warren “goofy”, among less pleasant things, and that’s not to mention what he called New York attorney general Letitia James.

Trump has no qualms when talking about women’s bodies, he previously made comments about businesswoman Carly Fiorina’s and actress Rosie O’Donnell’s physical appearances, labelling the latter a “slob”.

Even members of his own family aren’t spared. “She does have a very nice figure. If Ivanka weren’t my daughter perhaps I’d be dating her,” he has said.

Last year, when the election was still far off, Trump was found liable of sexually assaulting and defaming Elle columnist E Jean Carroll after a civil case.

Carroll said she had run into the business mogul in the department store Bergdorf Goodman in either late 1995 or early 1996. She claimed he forcefully kissed her and proceeded to sexually assault her in a changing room, an incident which lasted less than three minutes. Trump was found not liable in regard to an allegation of rape.

It was no surprise then that Trump’s campaign gained support from controversial figures such as podcaster Joe Rogan and influencer Andrew Tate – the latter being the face of the extreme misogyny movement, content of which has been watched billions of times.

As the polls on election day show, demographics matter and are deeply illuminating.

“Ahead of the US election, pundits predicted a history-making gender gap, and early exit polls support that prediction: women aged 18-29 went overwhelmingly left, while Trump picked up ground with their male counterparts compared with 2020,” Alaina Demopoulos noted for The Guardian.

How big is the 4B movement?

Following Trump’s win, searches – and the creation of – content and information about the movement rose swiftly.

Posts on X/Twitter, mentioning 4B have been engaged with more than one million times and might have reached upwards of 45 million accounts, Sky News reported.

On TikTok, videos discussing the movement have amassed millions of views in less than 24 hours.

Google Trends also shows that searches for the term have leapt up considerably since election day.

What has the 4B movement’s impact been?

In the US, as the movement only just begins to gain traction, any impact is unlikely to be fully realised for many months at the very earliest.

South Korea currently has the lowest fertility rate in the world and fell by another eight per cent in 2023, but the factors behind that go far beyond the 4B movement and date back decades.

As the BBC reported in February, the cost of private education, the work culture of long hours and the country’s pay-gap, despite women in South Korea being some of the most highly educated in the world, make the notion of having children increasingly unappealing.

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