4b movement

Overview

The 4B Movement (4b 운동) is a radical feminist lifestyle choice originating in South Korea as a means to reject traditional gender roles and the extreme systemic patriarchy that makes up South Korean society. The movement advocates for rejecting the “Four Nos” which include heterosexual dating, marriage, sex, and childbirth. The movement encourages women to completely reject the traditional roles women are expected to follow and focus on their own independence, career, and personal growth. 6B4T is a variation of the 4B movement which expands on the four original tenets.

Background

The 4B Movement takes its roots in online communities such as Megalia and WOMAD during a period of intense gender tensions in South Korea, a country that is plagued with systemic gender inequality. The 4b movement developed primarily in online spaces as a direct response misogyny in Korean society.

Feminist reboot

In February of 2015, feminism in South Korea went through a revival after the hashtag #IAmAFeminist trended on Twitter. This hashtag sparked conversation surrounding feminist issues and encouraged online organizing. In August of the same year, the MERS Gallery on the website DC Inside was used by Korean male users to spread false rumors that two Korean women infected with Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome chose not to quarantine and instead continued shopping in Hong Kong. These rumors sparked intense misogynistic hatred towards these women and to Korean women in general. Female users of DC Inside decided to respond to the hatred inside of the MERS Gallery by mirroring their misogyny.

Megalia is a now-defunct website that started in August of 2015 as a response to the misogyny many women face by Korean men, particularly on websites dominated by men such as DC Inside. “Megallians”, as users of the website were often called, turned to a strategy of “mirroring”, where they would mimic and invert the misogynistic language and behavior typically aimed at women and direct it towards men instead. This tactic was seen as divisive and offensive by many, which led to a lot of public backlash. The website shut down in 2017. WOMAD is a more radical split from Megalia created in 2016 after differing opinions arose regarding the inclusion of gay men, transgender identified men, and others who were not explicitly women. While Megalia included groups other than women in their activism, WOMAD took a more radical approach and created an explicitly women-only space. They also strongly discouraged watering down the feminist movement to include other movements in their activism.

Core Principles

The basis of the movement lies in rejecting the Four Nos:

1. No Dating (비연애)
2. No Marriage (비혼)
3. No Sex (비성관계)
4. No Childbirth (비출산)

Backlash

After gaining international attention due to Donald Trump's presidential victory in November 2024, the 4B movement has received criticism from trans rights activists, who label the movement as "transphobic" and "homophobic". Ju Hui Judy Han, an assistant professor of Gender Studies at UCLA told the LGBT magazine Them that she would hate for a TERF movement to grow in South Korea. Han also compared the movement to political lesbianism, stating “We call it 4B now, but it's political lesbianism,”. Political lesbianism as a political movement and ideology encouraged women regardless of their true sexual identity to become lesbians and reject relationships with men. The 4B movement was developed in South Korea and does not encourage lesbianism as a way to decenter men from women's lives. While there is no evidence that the 4B movement itself is "transphobic" or "homophobic", many trans rights activists attempt to paint it that way since gender critical radical feminists are among 4B's most prominent followers. By calling the entire movement transphobic and homophobic, it dissuades people from openly following the movement and from doing any actual research on it.

Wikipedia

The Korean American male user seafooddiet is the most prominent editor to the Wikipedia page for the 4B Movement. As of January 26th, 2025 he has made 94 edits and has added 5,955 bytes of text to the article. Seafooddiet is primarily responsible for writing the entirety of the section which argues that the 4B Movement is transphobic. His contribution to the article only extends to the biased criticism section.

See Also

• Female separatism