Oct 28

4B Movement

Movement Overview:

The 4B movement is a primarily online feminist movement in South Korea which seeks to withhold sex, dating, marriage and childbearing from men, and convince other women to do the same. The name of the movement comes from the fact the names of sex (bisekseu - 비섹스), dating (biyeonae - 비연애), marriage (bihon - 비혼) and giving birth (bichulsan - 비출산) all begin with a B sound in Korean. The movement is also referred to as the 4 Nos, since women who adhere to it say “No,” to these four things.

Like many movements that are born on the internet, 4B is more of a collection of shared ideals than a hierarchical group with leadership; there isn’t even an official website for the movement (8). Most of the people professing ideas of the movement would likely refer to themselves simply as “feminists” and not necessarily say that they are in an organized group. It has been claimed that the movement has anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000 members, but due to the online nature of the movement it is impossible to put a concrete number down (3)(4)(6).

History & Foundations

Compared to many Western countries, South Korea is very patriarchal. In addition, looks and beauty are obsessed over in South Korea, and 24% of all cosmetic surgeries on Earth take place in South Korea, with the cosmetic surgery industry being worth over 10 billion dollars. In South Korea, similarly to many East Asian countries, one must usually attach a picture of one’s face to job applications so becoming “prettier” can even be a necessity for employment (1). If women do end up getting a job, they don’t have much to look forward to, as the gender pay gap in South Korea is the highest in the developed world (5).

As with most societies, beauty standards are generally harsher for women than they are for men in South Korea, which leads to 46% of female college students having had a cosmetic procedure done (1). Seoul, for example, is reportedly littered with cosmetic surgery advertisements such as TV screens and billboards hawking procedures to achieve South Korea’s female beauty standards of “round doe-like eyes, flawless porcelain skin, a slim sub-110-pound body, and a small V-shaped face.” (2). These beauty standards being more harshly enforced on women than men can be highlighted by a Gallup Korea poll which found that 31% of South Korean women in their 30s had plastic surgery compared to 4% of their male counterparts (2).

In addition to beauty standards and other non-physical forms of discrimination, South Korea is well above the worldwide average on physical abuse of women as well. The rate of intimate partner violence in the country is 41.5% compared to 30% in the rest of the world (5). The rate of women victims of murder, robbery, arson, and rape rose 16 percentage points from 72.5% in 1995 to 88.7% in 2014. A Statistics Korea survey showed 67.9% of women responding that they felt “fearful” of crime in 2010. By 2014, the percentage was up to 79.6% (7).

In 2016, a young woman was murdered by a man in a public bathroom. Despite the fact that the man was quoted as saying that he killed the woman because “women always ignored [him],” police did not classify the murder as a hate crime. This caused widespread indignation among South Korean women and catalyzed many online feminist groups, including the birth of 4B as a named movement (6)(7).

Objectives & Ideology

4B doesn’t necessarily have a wide societal end goal, because it is seen more as not fighting the patriarchy, but swearing off men for good (5). Once a woman makes this decision, they have already achieved their objective.

The ideology of 4B is firmly feminist, but some adherents are much more radical about their feminism than others. There is internal debate in the movement about whether people who follow 4B can be friends with men at all, or be friends with other women who date men (5).

Capabilities

The biggest capability 4B has is the ability to organize women online for in-person protests. The online sphere serves to spread the message of 4B and galvanize women to its cause. However, since 4B is not a hierarchical movement, at the end of the day the capabilities are very reduced beyond encouraging women to get out and protest.

Approach to Resistance

In 2018, after a woman was sentenced to 10 months in prison for posting a nude photo of a male art model to the internet, between 20-55,000 women took to the streets of Seoul. Spy-cams (where someone is secretly filmed in a voyeuristic manner) and revenge porn are common crimes in South Korea, but most men are not punished to the levels that this woman was, and many South Korean women pointed to this incident as an example of the hypocrisy between how men and women are treated in South Korea.

The number of spy-cam crimes rose from 1,100 in 2010 to more than 6,500 in 2017. Organizers said that women live in constant fear of being secretly filmed in South Korea. The prevalence of these crimes have made the country, like Japan, mandate that all smartphone cameras make a loud shutter sound that can not be turned off. Some of the protestors shaved their head as a demonstration against the societal expectation of how a South Korean woman should look (6)(10).

Relations & Alliances

The 4B movement is closely related to the Escape the Corset movement. Escape the Corset is a larger and less radical movement that seeks to change South Korea’s societal expectation around female beauty standards. Women who espouse the movement often cut their hair short and don’t wear makeup (6).

Besides Escape the Corset, 4B is generally associated with the broader feminist movement in South Korea, albeit the more radical set.

Standing against 4B, there has been a long-standing anti-feminist movement in South Korea that predates 4B. The anti-feminists say that women’s pay gaps are exaggerated (despite being the widest in any country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), and women’s issues receive too much attention (11).

Men have shown up to feminist protests as counter protestors, with the New York Times reporting, “Dozens of young men, mostly dressed in black, taunted the protesters, squealing and chanting, “Dozens of young men, mostly dressed in black, taunted the protesters, squealing and chanting, “Thud! Thud!” to imitate the noise they said the “ugly feminist pigs” made when they walked. “Out with man haters!” they shouted. “Feminism is a mental illness!””

Man on Solidarity, one of the largest of these groups, has a YouTube channel with over 450,000 subscribers (12).

Another big sticking point for anti-feminists is the fact that military service is mandatory for men in South Korea but isn’t required for women, but feminists argue that women are often forced to drop out of the workforce when they give birth (9)(11).

Works Cited:

Additional Resources

MODERN INSURGENT

4B Movement

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