What? Liberal women jump on board a fad without knowing what it actually is? Shiver me timbers. As a man, I’m pretty happy that I won’t have to interact with these women.

Donald Trump’s reelection has triggered a wave of social media posts and search interest in the “4B” movement, a fringe feminist trend that started in South Korea in 2018. Partially inspired by the #MeToo movement in the United States, 4B encourages women to cut ties to men altogether.

 

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4B (4非) is shorthand for four Korean words that all start with bi- or “no”: bBihon, the refusal of heterosexual marriage; bichulsan, the refusal of childbirth; biyeonae, refusal to date; and bisekseu, the rejection of heterosexual relationships between men and women. The 4B movement essentially encouraged women to boycott all types of relationships with men — both romantic and platonic. 4B was also born out of another Korean feminist movement, tal-corset (“escape the corset”), in which women rejected societally imposed beauty standards by cutting their hair short and not wearing makeup in public.

 

It’s also worth noting that a number of Korean women on social media have emphasized that the 4B movement is pretty radical and not as mainstream as some Western coverage is making it out to be. It also has faced some backlash for allegedly being exclusionary to LGBTQIA+ women since the focus is on cisgender heterosexual relationships.