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

A movement that involves women opting out of dating, sex, having babies and marriage with men is growing in popularity as South Korea's birth rate hits a record low.

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 in the 21st century".

What is the 4B movement?

The movement reportedly began in South Korea in 2019. The core beliefs are four "no" rules: no sex, no childbirth, no dating and no marriage with men. In Korean, the four words begin with 'bi': bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae and bisekseu.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

It means women "aren't fighting the patriarchy" but "leaving it behind entirely" and sprang from a number of previous online movements, including the "Escape the Corset" Movement that called for women to liberate themselves from sexual, social, bodily, and psychological oppression, and South Korea’s #MeToo movement.

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. One article estimated 50,000 adherents, but others have put the movement's numbers at fewer than 5,000.

The lifestyle "might sound extreme", said Coffey, but the country's incidence of intimate-partner violence was found to be 41.5% in a 2016 survey, compared to a global average of 30%. So it "perhaps feels more of a proportionate response than at first glance". South Korea's gender pay gap is the largest in the developed world: women earn 31% less than men, almost triple the average of 11.6% across comparable countries.

Women in Korea are "generally expected to defer to their fathers and to adhere to rigid beauty standards", said The Cut. In the view of 4B followers, Korean men are "essentially beyond redemption", and Korean culture, "on the whole, is hopelessly patriarchal", often "downright misogynistic".

Despite, or perhaps as part of, all this, President Yoon Suk Yeol claimed during his election campaign that structural sexism no longer exists in South Korea. He has previously blamed feminism for the country’s low birth rate, which is 0.72 per woman, the lowest in the world.

Therefore, Joanna Bourke, a professor of history at Birkbeck and the author of "Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence", told Coffey, it doesn't surprise her that "certain young women were saying, 'enough is enough'".

Like any social movement, 4B has "its own internal rifts and divisions", with members 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. Also, "for a movement born of rage", there is the challenge of what happens when "the rage mellows or when other concerns take priority".

How might it grow and spread?

Could 4B become a "global phenomenon" and take off in the UK, wondered Coffey. There is a precedent for women opting out of heterosexual relationships as a political act here: the first-wave feminists of the 1870s to the early 1900s often "rejected the idea of marrying men and having children in favour of living with other women", said Coffey, and the same was true of "certain radical groups of second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s".

Although "there's little evidence that British women will follow in 4B's footsteps", as women's "education levels, financial independence and sense of agency continues to increase", so does "the likelihood that they won’t settle for just playing a domestic role for a partner who doesn’t meet their expectations".

So, it may not be 4B that grows in Britain, but, "unless something changes", the consequences "might not be so different down the line".