South Korea's 4B movement: what is it and could it take off in the West?

A South Korean movement of women opting out of dating, sex, having babies and marriage with men is gaining renewed traction in the US following Donald Trump's re-election.

After the election result last week, searches for the 4B movement on Google in the US skyrocketed by about 3,000%.

Young women across social media platforms are discussing the South Korean movement, saying they are "enraged and fed up", according to CNN. Most of their male counterparts voted for Trump, a man who has been "found liable for sexual abuse and whose appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices led to the overturning of national abortion rights". Women are "swearing off men – and they're encouraging others around the country to join them".

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What is the 4B movement?

The 4B movement "sounds like something out of a Greek drama", wrote Helen Coffey in The Independent, "when the women band together to end the Peloponnesian war by going on a sex strike", but it is "both real and happening". The core beliefs are: no sex, no childbirth, no dating and no marriage with men. In Korean, the four words begin with 'bi': bisekseu, bichulsan, biyeonae and bihon.

It began in South Korea in the mid-2010s, springing from previous online feminist movements, including the "Escape the Corset" movement that called for women to liberate themselves from oppression, and South Korea's #MeToo movement.

But it also has roots in South Korea's "rapid economic transformation" and the challenges it posed for young people in the 2000s, said gender and women's history scholar Ming Gao in an article on The Conversation. That economic insecurity is "compounded by systemic gender inequality", with South Korea consistently having the worst gender pay gap in the OECD. Women earn 31% less than men, almost triple the average of 11.6% across comparable countries. The incidence of intimate partner violence was found to be 41.5% in a 2016 survey, compared with a global average of 30%. "Against this backdrop, traditional life paths – marriage, childbearing and homemaking – have become less appealing."

South Korea's birth rate – among the lowest in the world – has also played a part. In 2016, the government launched a pink birth map "visualising the number of women of reproductive age in each district", which "sparked outrage". Women proclaimed: "A woman is not a baby-making machine."

One noteworthy aspect of the 4B movement is that many of its members engage with it anonymously, said London's The Standard. Its followers say it's a "way of life that allows them to boycott a system that encourages gender inequality".

How widespread is it?

The 4B community has "provided a refuge for Korean women", but it is "unclear how widespread or popular" it is, given its "fluid online and offline nature and its evolution over the years", said The Cut.

But women in South Korea are expected to "defer to their fathers and to adhere to rigid beauty standards". In the view of 4B followers, South Korean culture is "hopelessly patriarchal", often "downright misogynistic".

The movement is "not organised or centralised", said Modern Diplomacy; "there are no leaders, no official website, and no physical headquarters". But what's clear is that, despite the government investing more than $200 billion (£156 billion) over the past 16 years to support "traditional patriarchal institutions" and combat the country's low birth rate and oncoming demographic crisis, South Korean women are "increasingly distancing themselves from marriage or the obligation to become mothers".

Like any social movement, 4B has "its own internal rifts and divisions", said Joanna Bourke, a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, and the author of "Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence", in The Cut. Members are at odds over whether 4B women can be friends with men, or with women who still want to date men, and there are concerns over the movement's exclusion of trans women.

How might it grow and spread? 

The 4B movement "began as a protest, but it has morphed into a global awakening" after having been "sensationalised" by Western media, said Isha Sharma in USA Today.

According to Katharine Moon, a political science professor at Wellesley College, the difference between a potential 4B movement in the US and what already exists in South Korea is "the centrality of marriage", said The New York Times. In South Korea, not being married can "result in women becoming social pariahs", said the paper, or not being socially recognised as adults. This makes rejection of marriage a more "radical statement" for South Korean women than American, said Moon. In the US, the surge in interest is a "temporary means to bring attention to the precarious situation of women", rather than "a total commitment" to life without men. In South Korea, "it's a way of life".

But the ideas are "starting to strike a chord in the US", said Ming on The Conversation. It has also inspired a similar movement, 6B4T, which incorporates the rejection of consumerism and is gaining attention in China.

It is also tapping into a growing celibacy movement around the world. In the US, the "boysober" trend has already seen young women eschewing dating, said The Guardian. Globally, multiple studies show that "more and more young people seem to be – quite happily – opting out of sex".