The 4B movement originated in South Korea, and encourages women to opt out of marriage (bihon), childbirth (bichulsan), romance (biyeonae), and sexual relationships (bisekseu). Born out of protests against South Korea’s culture—instances of dating violence, revenge porn, and gender wage gaps are widespread—the movement has grown in recent years. South Korea has the lowest birth rate of any country, and despite government incentives, many women still feel the country’s patriarchal structure makes the cost of motherhood too high, and refuse to be “baby-making machines,” according to reporting from the New York Times.
Although it started in the late 2010s, the movement didn’t really gain attention in the US until earlier this year. New York magazine published a long feature on it in March in which writer Anna Louie Sussman laid out the ways in which 4B adherents were, as Barbieri demonstrated on TikTok, cutting their hair and eschewing beauty products. “The blowback and fear that 4B practitioners experience underscores their conviction that Korea is still a frightening place for women,” Sussman wrote, noting the threats and attacks women, and specifically 4B protesters, receive.
Some creators who spoke to WIRED were already participating in the movement before the election. Dalina, who uses they/them pronouns and asked to withhold their last name for privacy reasons, was casually seeing a man when, they say, “he made a joke along the lines of like, ‘I considered coming inside of you.’” Dalina says at that moment their blood ran cold. “I thought, ‘Why does that sound like a threat?’ It’s like, because it is a threat … He also knew that it was a threat.”
Since then, Dalina, who goes by @senoracabrona on TikTok, says they have sworn off romantic and sexual entanglements with men. Their video, including text telling women to look up the 4B movement, has garnered more than 130,000 views on TikTok.
With the election of Trump, and all the threats to reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights and misogyny that entails, women online seemed to be channeling the fear they felt into action in similar ways.
Barbieri says when she posted her original 4B video it was the result of something she’d been investigating for several months via her involvement in feminist spaces on Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram. After her post went up, she got several negative comments from men, but was surprised to find a lot of support, particularly from women interested in the movement.