No to dating, sex, marriage or raising children with a man: since Donald Trump’s victory in the American elections, the radical South Korean feminist movement “4B” has gone viral in the United States.
What is 4B?
In Korean, 4B means “four no’s”: no to dating, no to sex, no to marriage, and no to raising children with a man.
This movement emerged in the mid-2010s in South Korea against a backdrop of persistent wage disparities, entrenched specific roles in couples, and an epidemic of cybercrime and sexual violence against women.
Fans like Baek Ga-eul, 33, say 4B has allowed them to be “a full human being, not just a being reserved for men or children.”
The movement emerged because Korean women — who do 3.5 times more housework than men, according to official data — cannot “accept being expected to work and care for the majority household chores” declared Mme Baek.
Furthermore, women are fed up with “a male culture that pretends to behave properly towards women, and then shares sexual videos of their girlfriends with their male friends.”
Despite everything, 4B has remained a largely marginal movement in this country which has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, where the number of marriages is plunging and where 42% of South Korean households consist of only one only person according to official data.
Why is the movement going viral?
With the re-election of Donald Trump on November 5, 4B suddenly appeared as one of the most searched keywords on Google in the United States and elsewhere.
Videos talking about the movement have been widely shared on TikTok and Facebook, according to data from the company Newswhip, with images of women shaving their heads to protest Trump’s victory and videos explaining the 4B movement particularly viral.
For many, these elections were seen as a referendum on women’s rights, particularly because of Mr. Trump’s appointment of three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, which led to the end of the federal guarantee of the right to abortion. .
American women have “understood that men do not consider them as their equals,” activist Baek Ga-eul told AFP.
What is its purpose?
Sexism is deeply rooted in South Korea, explains a member who calls herself JH, who says she was persecuted at work for her involvement in “Escape the Corset”, a feminist movement rebelling against beauty standards by encouraging example women not to wear makeup.
She ended up losing her job.
“What I experienced is not an isolated case for women in misogynistic Korea. »
“Boycotting men” is one of the most effective ways to show the severity of sexism in the country, said Kang Ji-young, another participant in the movement.
4B emerged from the “painful contemporary experiences of South Korean women,” says Keung Yoon-bae, a professor of Korean studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States.
“It is ultimately more accurate to view the movement as a symptom, reflecting the unsustainable nature of Korean society’s pre-existing patriarchal norms in light of the dramatic increase in the number of successful, well-educated women,” she said. declared.
A new electoral trend?
In the US election, “voting trends were sharply divided along gender and racial groups,” Sharon Yoon, a professor of Korean studies at the University of Notre Dame in the US, told AFP. adding that this situation was similar to the 2022 South Korean presidential election.
In South Korea, data indicates that men and women are increasingly ideologically opposed. The men are aligning with the conservative trend, which helped President Yoon Suk-yeol come to power in 2022 after promising to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality.
“The gender gap we see in voting behavior is not country-specific, but indicates an overall trend of sexist backlash among a growing base of economically precarious men,” the professor added.
“The rise of President-elect Donald Trump will also provoke a strong response from American women. »
“Their solidarity with the Korean women of the 4B movement should be seen as one manifestation of this emerging trend, but not the only one,” she concludes.
