‘No sex with Trump voters’: The ABC of the 4B movement

While the 4B movement originated in South Korea a few years ago, not having sex with men as a political protest is not a new idea. We take a look at 4B, its history, and criticism.

What is the 4B movement?

4B stands for four bis, or no in the Korean language: bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, and bisekseu, meaning the refusal of (heterosexual) marriage, childbirth, romance, and sexual relationships, respectively.

The 4B movement belongs to the strain of radical feminism that believes that heterosexual relationships at their heart remain structures of oppression, and women need to break free of them to be truly independent and happy. In the Indian context, consider this — marriage often involves dowry, the burden of running the married home and raising the child is disproportionately on women, many women are penalised at their workplaces for motherhood duties, and intimate partner violence is common. While women are supposed to endure all this for the sake of love and duties, there are very little expectations from men except earning money.

The proponents of the 4B movement believe that unless men work more actively for a gender-just society, women should not reward them with children, love, and emotional and other forms of labour.

The movement started in South Korea around 2016, when a young woman was murdered in a Seoul subway station. Her killer said he had “felt ignored by women”. This was also the time when multiple women in South Korea reported having been filmed by spycams in washrooms or while having sex, by strangers as well as men known to them. In many cases, the police were hostile to the victims. The MeToo movement gave further impetus to women talking about their struggles and their rights more vocally.

4B is largely an online movement and it is difficult to measure its impact. South Korea does have very low birth rates, but that can be attributed to a range of factors.

But how does this help women?

In criticisms and backlash online, 4B is often shown as a deranged movement of women who hate men and want to destroy family life. However, there is more to 4B than just saying “no” to men.

“The 4B movement encompasses not only criticisms of the pro-natalist turn in state policy and protests against it, but also various forms of self-help discussions and practices that are explicitly oriented towards women’s individual futures,” an article by Jieun Lee and Euisol Jeong of Yonsei University, Seoul, says. “…the 4B movement has given young feminists the opportunity to envision the future that they had been discouraged from imagining,” the article adds.

Essentially, the movement wants women to imagine more roles for themselves than just wife and mother. Women not bogged down by domestic duties and not being controlled by a man can focus on their own aims, hobbies, comfort and happiness, the movement’s followers believe. They also advocate women building strong solidarities with other women. This includes, but is not limited to, lesbian relationships. Women can depend on each other for comfort, companionship and emotional support, while working together to achieve common goals.

4B is sometimes expanded to 6B4T, which advocates staying away from firms perceived as misogynist, rejecting the fandom culture, rejecting beauty standards that conform to the male gaze, etc.

Is 4B a new idea?

Not at all. Before 4B and Trump, the American social media had seen a trend called ‘boysober’, where women were staying away from romantic and sexual relationships with men to prioritise their own happiness, well being, and safety.

In the 1960s to 1980s, strains within second wave feminism had also advocated political lesbianism and ‘separatist feminism’, which basically believed women should stay away from the gender that oppresses them.

Possibly the best-known paper capturing these ideas is ‘Love Your Enemy’, co-authored by Sheila Jeffreys and others in 1979. The paper in effect said that instead of keeping all women in a giant slave camp, heterosexual marriage has provided each man with his personal assistant, and disguised it as love.

“The heterosexual couple is the basic unit of the political structure of male supremacy. In it each individual woman comes under the control of an individual man. It is more efficient by far than keeping women in ghettoes, camps or even sheds at the bottom of the garden. In the couple, love and sex are used to obscure the realities of oppression, to prevent women identifying with each other in order to revolt, and from identifying ‘their’ man as part of the enemy,” the paper said.

Exhorting women to stay away from such relationships, the paper said, “Any woman who takes part in a heterosexual couple helps to shore up male supremacy by making its foundations stronger.”

Needless to say, the paper prompted immense backlash, from both men and women.

Apart from this, there was the Cell 16 movement in the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which advocated that women should stay celibate, stay away from men, and learn martial forms of self defence such as karate.

Why do some non-sexist people also oppose 4B?

Apart from sexist and violent comments on social media, 4B and its predecessor movements have seen thoughtful and reasoned criticism too. Some point out that just cutting off contact with men is not a solution — this puts the onus of staying away from men on the woman, instead of demanding change and accountability from men. Believing men as incapable of reform can play into the ‘boys will be boys’ school of thought, it is argued. Meaningful change can come by raising awareness and a sense of responsibility among men, and this can happen by pushing back from within relationships, it is pointed out.

Others point out that such totalising movements can be exclusionary of transgender rights.

Yet others say that these movements rob women of choice: one can be frustrated with inequality but still want children, or in the case of heterosexual women, sexual pleasure.