How to Decimate a Heritage: A Brief Overview of the 4B Movement in America

By Kate O'Hanlon

This November Donald J. Trump was elected for a second non consecutive term, making him the first convicted felon in the Oval Office. His campaign largely centred around ‘Project 2025’ which proposed an expansion of presidential powers as well as the imposition of ultra conservative social morals and mores which would primarily affect women’s civil liberties. Approximately 45 million men from a shockingly wide range of ethnic and class groups, as well as a surprising number of young men, voted for Trump. This choice by a significant number of American men has left the world in a state of shock, as liberal American women broadly feel betrayed by family, friends and neighbours because their own bodily autonomy is something that these Trump supporters are supposedly apathetic to. This is where the 4B movement comes in.

Originally founded in South Korea, the 4B movement began as a reactionary movement to the increasingly authoritarian pressure on young women to meet societal expectations, such as taking on domestic roles in marriage like housekeeping and motherhood, as well as a dramatic increase in intimate partner violence and hidden camera pornography. The “B” stands in lieu of the Korean word bi, which means “no” and reflects the movement’s four principles: bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating) and bisekseu (no sex). While this movement has been relatively popular in South Korea since 2019, it came to the forefront of the western imagination when a convicted felon was voted in over a well respected prosecutor on what some Americans believe to be the merit of racial and gender biases.

Trump's extensive and well documented history of misogyny makes it difficult to separate his supporters from the devastating effects of his policies. A lot of American feminists feared that a vote for Trump was a vote against the protection of women’s rights. This worry manifested itself nearly immediately on social media. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focussed on extremism found a “4,600% increase in mentions of the terms ‘your body, my choice’ and ‘get back in the kitchen’ on X 24 hours after Trump was elected. Known misogynists like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate provoked their followers to the point where men online were calling for the creation of “rape squads” to “keep women in line”, saying things like “you no longer have rights” in Trump's America. While this is taking place online for now, how long until this sentiment seeps off of our keyboards and onto the streets?

In response to all of this, the 4B movement began to trend across most social media platforms, primarily TikTok and Instagram. At the time of writing this article, exactly 7 days after Trump's election, the 4B movement hashtag has been attached to 24.8K videos on TikTok alone. The movement has brought attention to women’s growing discontent with the power imbalance within heterosexual relationships and their anger at the normalisation of online misogyny. ‘Manosphere entrepreneurs’ like Tate and Fuentes have been profiting off of feeding into young men’s resentment towards women for years. The internet provides easy access to malleable young minds and this election has shown us the effects of voting demographics who are allowing their ‘for you page’ to fill in their ballot paper.

As one woman (who chose to remain anonymous) said to Guardian reporters: “It’s heartbreaking to know that in this country you only matter if you’re a straight white man… It’s just devastating that we’re at this point. So I will not let another man touch me until I have my rights back”. The 4B movement, which in this case could be more aptly described as a reactionary movement, has been labelled misandrist or ‘man hating’. While these criticisms are valid, especially since the movement's principles alienate men who don’t align themselves with the values of the far right, they ignore the actual danger faced by women if they engage in sexual relationships under Trump’s administration. Multiple women have already been killed because they didn’t have access to medical care under the strict abortion laws that came into place when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Women like 18 year old Nevaeh Crain have died waiting in emergency rooms begging medical staff to “do something”. There are hundreds of stories circulating where women died from completely preventable complications because of the fear surrounding the consequences of performing reproductive health surgery or just the blatant stigma in American medical spaces.

However this movement does limit women to just their sexual power and ignores whatever political or economic sway they may have, which in its own way can be quite demeaning. Kami Rieck of the New York Times states that women would instead “be best served by rejecting unequal household duties, engaging in a consumer strike or boycotting discriminatory companies”. The 4B movement isn’t exactly a new concept, as sex strikes have taken place as far back as Ancient Greece and in the last century have been held in Liberia, Kenya, Colombia, the Philippines, Belgium and other countries. While they do garner a great deal of media coverage they often don’t do much more than that. The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee, who was an active proponent of and participant women’s protest movements wrote in her memoir that sex strikes “had little or no practical effect.” But could this incarnation of the 4B movement be different?