Could South Korea’s 4B movement destroy heterosexual relationships?

As the trend of women swearing off men garners viral social media attention, the country’s birth rate has hit a record low. Helen Coffey investigates whether shunning straight sex and marriage could become a global phenomenon

South Korea’s gender divide is on the increase (AP)

It sounds like something out of a Greek drama – more specifically, out of Lysistrata by Aristophanes, when the women band together to end the Peloponnesian war by going on a sex strike. But the 4B movement is both real and happening in the 21st century. And it’s less to do with ending a war, and more to do with ending misogyny.

Purportedly starting in South Korea in 2019, the movement is called 4B because it refers to four types of “bi” or “no”: bihon means no heterosexual marriage; bichulsan, no childbirth; biyeonae, no dating; and bisekseu, no heterosexual sexual relationships. Five years on, the premise has garnered viral attention on social media, with countless TikTok videos on the subject attracting millions of views.

It might sound extreme, but in light of the fact that the country’s incidence of intimate-partner violence was found to be 41.5 per cent in a 2016 survey by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, compared to a global average of 30 per cent, it perhaps feels more of a proportionate response than at first glance. Added to that is South Korea’s gender pay gap, the largest in the developed world – women earn 31 per cent less than men, almost triple the average of 11.6 per cent across other “rich” countries.

Despite the above, current president Yoon Suk Yeol claimed during his election campaign that structural sexism no longer exists in South Korea, and pledged to abolish the ministry for gender equality (something he hasn’t managed to achieve after being blocked by the Democratic Party, which holds a parliamentary majority). This is the same man who blamed feminism for the country’s low birth rate; it currently sits at 0.72 per woman, the lowest in the world, after falling a further 8 per cent in 2023. If the trend continues, Korea’s population is estimated to halve by the year 2100.

The 4B ideology seems partly a product, then, of a growing political divide between men and women, with antagonism towards feminism from the former camp provoking backlash from the latter, and vice versa. In the 2022 election, 59 per cent of males under 30 voted for Yoon, the conservative candidate, compared to just 34 per cent of women in the same age group. This week, South Korea’s liberal opposition party won a landslide majority in the country’s general election to retain control of parliament; it remains to be seen whether the voting gender divide was even more pronounced this time around.

“For a long time, patriarchal norms governed South Korean society. But those social norms dissolved with democratisation, and I don’t think we have established new norms that can fill the vacuum,” polling expert Jeong Han-wool, who heads the firm Research Institute of Korean People, told WPR.

Women are now more likely to be better educated than their male peers (nearly three-quarters go into higher education compared with less than two-thirds of men), but the income gap has yet to diminish. Meanwhile, nearly 70 per cent of Korean men in their twenties believe discrimination against men is “serious”, according to one survey from 2019, while a separate poll in 2021 found that more than 66 per cent of young men said they cannot accept feminists as neighbours, colleagues, friends or family.

Proponents of the 4B movement are swearing off sex and dating (Getty/iStock)

Amid this polarising hotbed of opposing ideologies, various movements have sprung up. “Kimchee women” started being used as an insult against educated women on social media and online forums, referring to “the stereotype of Korean women as selfish, vain, and obsessed with themselves while exploiting their partners”, according to Korean feminist academic Euisol Jeong in her doctoral thesis, “Troll Feminism”. “Ilbe”, a vehemently misogynistic online community, also gained momentum in 2015. These men believe women shouldn’t be demanding further rights when they already benefit from, for example, avoiding the country’s compulsory military conscription – men are forced to serve for 18 months.

Countermovements ensued, including “escape the corset”, which saw women chop off their hair and eschew make-up in a rejection of modern beauty standards. It goes hand in hand with, and is sometimes a precursor to, women joining 4B, as Anna Louie Sussman highlighted in an illuminating piece for The Cut. She interviewed Han, a South Korean maths tutor and 4B proponent, who believes that until women have real economic power and influence, they “will still be utilised – their bodies will be utilised to reproduce”. It’s hard to argue with this, considering the Korean government released an online “National Birth Map” in 2016 detailing how many women of child-bearing age (which they classed as between 15 and 49 years of age) lived in each region. It was subsequently taken down after huge backlash from women, who accused the government of trying to shame them into having babies.

Joanna Bourke, a professor of history at Birkbeck and the author of Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence, says that the 4B movement makes sense in this context. “It didn’t surprise me that certain young women were saying, ‘enough is enough’. South Korea has some of the highest rates of misogyny and gender-based violence in the developed world. That’s quite striking when combined with a political pro-natalist message – that women’s role is to give birth, to create more Koreans.”

This rhetoric has become more pronounced since the pandemic. “It legitimises male views about women’s roles – to marry men, take care of them sexually, domestically and in terms of reproduction,” adds Professor Bourke. “The government is reinforcing misogyny within society and, in doing so, sending out a message that it’s OK to discriminate against women who are independent. It’s OK to be violent if your wife says ‘no’ to sex or doing the cleaning or won’t cook the food you like.”

It didn’t surprise me that certain young women were saying, ‘enough is enough’

The idea of women opting out of heterosexual relationships as a political act is nothing new. In the UK, the first-wave feminists of the 1870s to the early 1900s – usually wealthy, middle-class women – often rejected the idea of marrying men and having children in favour of living with other women. The same was true of certain radical groups of second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Cell 16, who advocated for feminist heterosexual separatism, denying men access to women’s bodies. “They took a stance of political, not sexual, lesbianism – it was a political statement,” says Professor Bourke.

So is there any evidence that 4B, or a voluntary female celibacy movement like it, is taking root in the West? The widespread #MeToo movement on social media certainly created a shift, allowing women across the world to share their experiences of male-perpetrated sexual harassment and violence, often for the first time, in an environment that felt safe and empowering. It made women aware that they were not alone; “#MeToo showed the world that we share these problems and therefore we can do something about it – that’s a powerful thing for women to realise,” says Professor Bourke.

This could potentially have contributed to more women becoming voluntarily celibate in the US, Dr Justin Lehmiller, a Kinsey Institute research fellow and host of the Sex and Psychology podcast, told The Guardian: “In this #MeToo and post-Roe era [with the rollback of reproductive rights] we find ourselves in, the perceived risks associated with sex are higher, particularly for women. And, when you factor in the orgasm gap and the fact that women’s pleasure still isn’t on a par with men’s, some women are asking themselves whether sex is even worth it.”

Dr Karen Cuthbert, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Glasgow, interviewed a number of voluntarily celibate British women for her paper “Neither ‘incel’ nor ‘volcel’”. While a huge amount of attention has been given to men’s celibacy in recent years – particularly the deeply misogynistic and sometimes violent incel (involuntary celibate) community – little has been written on women’s sexual abstinence.

The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements gave women and girls the power to speak out (Getty)

“Male celibacy is much more of a spectacle than female celibacy,” agrees Dr Cuthbert. “Women’s celibacy is less interesting to us as a society in many ways because there are lingering ideas that women don’t really care about or want sex anyway, so being celibate isn’t anything out of the ordinary.”

Unlike the first and second-wave feminists for whom swearing off marriage and men in general was a liberating, political act, the women Dr Cuthbert spoke to felt they had been left with no other option because of men’s poor behaviour. “They had had too many bad relationships or bad encounters with men to the extent that they had ‘opted out’ of sex altogether,” she recalls. “In order for them to feel OK existing in the world, and to get some mental peace – and in some cases, actual physical protection of their own bodies – they felt that they had to give up on intimate and sexual relationships with men.”

She adds that, although it was technically their “choice”, for most women it was a decision “that they had felt compelled to make. Their hands were forced because of a lack of acceptable alternatives.”

As for a deliberate turning away from men as a political act, there’s little evidence that British women will follow in 4B’s footsteps. “The idea could definitely see some traction, but I doubt any explosions in popularity will happen,” says Dr Cuthbert. “It may be because of the different societal contexts – while South Korea actually scores very highly on lots of indicators of institutional gender equality, it is also a context that is very pro-natal, with the state encouraging women to have children, as well as a context that has very constrictive beauty ideals and standards, including high cosmetic surgery rates among young women.”

Male celibacy is much more of a spectacle than female celibacy

Dr Karen Cuthbert, lecturer in sociology at the University of Glasgow

She points out, depressingly, that the patriarchy’s degradation and suppression of women is nothing new – and yet women have continued entering into relationships with men since time immemorial: “Celibacy is still the least likely course of action, as most women – including young women – adopt a tired kind of inevitability as part of their heterosexuality.”

Still, even if not a conscious decision, the data shows a significant trend for women marrying and having children later, or simply not at all. Recently released Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates from 2022 revealed the percentage of over-16s in England and Wales who are married or in a civil partnership has fallen below 50 per cent for the first time on record. Figures also showed that the UK’s birth rate fell to 1.49 children per woman in 2022, the lowest it’s been in two decades – and well below the rate needed to maintain a steady population (2.1).

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. It may not be 4B but, unless something changes, the consequences might not be so different down the line.