The rise in attention to the South Korean 4B movement these last couple days is so thrilling. I see so many women talking about it on tiktok, entire comment sections flooding with “4B movement now” whenever a woman complains about her shitty moid of a partner, coupled with detailed chroniclings of the ever-decaying state of the male loneliness epidemic.

i hate it here ……….they’re allowing men……in a movement about separating from them lmaoooo

it's not accurate to act like the feminist movement in rok is free of terfs/only has incidental issues with transmisogyny. there's rampant transmisogyny in rok feminism. there's not a lot of english-language scholarship about it, but look up the kind of rhetoric and policy that was on sites like megalia/WOMAD, or the trans woman who was accepted to a women's university but got harrassed into withdrawing by terfs/conservatives in 2020. i'm sure you mean well but your post is irresponsibly misleading about the content and ideology of current-day korean feminism

I never said RoK doesn't have TERFs or a widespread radfem problem.

We in the USA have them and depending on where you are a transwoman might get the same treatment. There have been 538 pieces of anti-trans legislation presented in the USA this year alone. Florida specifically is turning into a straight up anti-trans fascist state.

TERF/radfem ideology is gaining ground in the USA and theyve actually been the people pushing a lot of these bills through with supporters like the heritage foundation. For example:

Several other states are starting to follow suit now that they see whats possible. US progress is deeply turning backwards. This is largely being allowed to happen by a public who isn't fighting back. The only people really talking about any of this is in fact trans people or the people close to them.

That said, radfems and such shouldn't be made out to be the face of feminism.

They're not and I would never say they are because there are Actual feminists fighting against them and trying to stop them from co-opting feminism.

Radfeminism is gaining ground, sure, but I'd still never say that it's representative of US feminism or even feminism really.

Feminism is about gender equality. TERFs/Radfeminism is about gender separatism, defining women by their sexual ability, and catering to patriarchal views of gender as a "rebellion" against actual feminism. Ask a radefem what defines them and they'll say their uterus.

Does your ability to create babies for the patriarchy define you as a woman? Of course not.. especially when feminists have been seeking to destroy that idea.

How can you be feminist and fundamentally disagree with it's premise?

It's more like anti-feminsim than anything else. Especially when we consider that feminists have fought generations to be defined by more than their sex, that the genders are equal and have equal abilities, that women have a Right to be in spaces considered for men, and try so hard to fight against the way that patriarchy defines women as maids, wives, and breeders who should be pretty and thin.

Anyone who steps outside that definition should be celebrated as a success story. Proof that the gender binary is bigger and more complicated than believed. Proof that women and womenhood are too expansive and too complex to be limited by such a small minded definition.

That to say.... Just because it's a massive problem...doesn't mean that radfems are the face of feminism. And saying that doesn't mean I'm ignoring their existence either.

I just wouldn't ever ever validate them successfully co-opting feminism. And I wouldn't Let them have it either by saying "well I guess there's so many radfems in this movement that I guess it's their's now" either.

All this to say, I'm aware. It was actually kinda difficult to find resources on the 4b movement that weren't transphobic.

The point is fighting patriarchy tho right? That means fighting transphobia. And since there ARE Korean women and other people doing that and talking about it, I'm going to focus on progress. Not whatever the fuck radfems are doing.

And I'm going to trust that as feminism makes more strides in gender equality that the groups of radfems will shrink. And that are more people will see radfems/TERFs less and less like feminists and more and more like the Patriarchy Preservers they are.

Guys how do I let go of the yearning and longing for a relationship, with a man to be particular? Because, I know, I know how shitty it is, I'm aware of that. I've been single for 11 months and never thrived as much as I do now. Nonetheless, I see all the romanticization and glorification of straight relationships and a part of me falls for it. I guess it's just the human in me, but I do not want it to be that way.

I hope no one is falling for the same horseshit Korean misogynist men try to barf up when they want “logical” westerners to be on their side regarding 🤏. The thing that always strikes me when they fear-monger about the defunct megalia website is this: if these women writing “cruel” things online and engaging in mirroring techniques is enough to brand them man-haters and have them become some eternal boogeywomen, why aren’t the men stabbing, killing, raping, witch-hunting, sexually trafficking and beating women - because they are women - branded as extreme women-haters in turn? Surely these targeted attacks that have happened, and continue to happen frequently, are enough to label these men extremist misogynists whose actions and texts are dangerous to Korean society? But instead, as we have seen recently, their deranged misogynist thoughts are carefully listened to and their delusions are catered to by major companies.

Secondly, these guys like to portray the women they go after as having dangerous opinions by saying, oh the pinched fingers means they’re megal and therefore it’s a secret signal for all these “hateful” thoughts. However the “radical, hateful thoughts” the men trawl through these women’s social medias to find have always ended up being basic women’s rights: the right to have an abortion, being against sex trafficking, being against molka, condemning misogynist hiring practices, etc. These extremely basic tenets of feminism are what these men consider radical and dangerous to society. When they try to pull the wool over your eyes by saying “feminism is different in korea it’s extreme and evil” THESE are the things they mean. Saying “it’s a megal symbol for crazy female supremacy” is a smokescreen for misogynist men to punish women who want basic human rights. The smaller group of women engaging in 4B there try to live their lives in a female-centered way, away from men. These are the women that misogynist men revile so much that simply existing as a woman with short hair is enough for them to violently attack you with a knife. So how does this make sense? The women branded as evil misandrists live their lives avoiding men and uplifting other women. The men who hate women do the complete opposite: they go out of their way to physically and sexually assault women and get them fired from their jobs. The misogynists in that group who witch hunt women are not labeled extremists, but rather catered to by companies like Nexon. Don’t fall for their shit.

Let this be a reminder that even the men who seem nice and say they believe in equality and kindness ARE STILL SECRETLY MISOGYNISTIC!

Any form of harmless protests or striking is encouraged. If you cannot afford to protest, simply wear red on this day.

Wish I could take credit for this, but I can't. I unfortunately also don't know who made it first, so if someone knows who, do let me know so I can give proper credit and link to the original.

With that being said... YES! 🐻

South Korean radical feminist poster 6B4T movement, 2020

i love the 4B movement

we need to make it global

The rise in popularity of single childfree women should signal that we need to start preparing. I've spoken about this before but want to address a common concern of safety regarding maIe retaliation. At this point some women may think they'll be safer trying to get a maIe but the statistics show otherwise. There's a reason women fought for rights in the first place, we all know that maIes as a collective are horrible beings. If maIes were pleasant to be around & reproduce with, they wouldn't need to force women into it.

Now I dont have all the answers in terms of what to do in the face of maIe retaliation but where to start:

1 - Move in silence. MaIes dont need to know our every move. MaIes have enough power as is, them knowing our strategy on top of that wont help. Hell, play dumb sometimes. This also applies to other women, if they push marriage & kids bs be measured in your response, in the end you know your truth. At the end of the day most of these women are also aware of the danger maIes pose.

2 - Organise. This is tough, extremely tough i can't lie. For one we're scattered all over the world & people in our real lives wouldn't have the committment to this nor believe in deviating from the nuclear structure but it is something needed. Even if it's just online, find or build networks with likeminded women. I say this as a lone wolf but infrastructure & network is needed because the government will make it harder to survive alone so some would need to be able to lean on each other for support even if it's just verbal. Practice separatism as far as you can. Take up learning how to defend yourself. If you're serious about this; be prepared to break the rules at some point because playing nice & by the law wont work. These things are set up by men for men and it wont help us. I'm not saying go out there & purposefuly break the law or put yourself in harms way, just saying prepare. It sounds far out now but the current system cant be counted on, blind eyes are turned when maIes abuse women, women are punished for defending themselves under the system. Even if you dont want to go down the route of community, learn to take care of yourself & hold your own down.

3 - Stop arguing with maIes. This doesnt mean that xys are right, I say this a lot but maIes are fully aware of everything. Arguing with maIes online is a waste of time, time that can go to building for yourself or likeminded women. MaIes denying female oppression is part of the game to keep you wasting your energy on them as opposed to working on yourself. It's to keep you in their hands; doesn't matter whether you're right or not, how many statistics you throw at them, you're still biting their bait.

4 - Stack up on resources & money. If you have resources & money and the priviledge to save then start now. If/when things go downhill it wont be a snap thing but a transition so this window needs to be used to the best of our advantage. Take advantage of the privileges you have now to set yourself for the future because that could very well be gone.

I doubt we'd win tbh but I'd rather die trying than live submitting. I will mention that I know it's scary but we have to think forward. Bear in mind the system has never worked for women, some will say things like "but when women leave maIes get more violent" but there is no safety in the first place. Women are sexually harrassed & assaulted any where at any time with no protection already. Women are constantly told of all the things they should or shouldn't do to avoid maIe violence and it doesnt work anyways, maIes will continue to abuse women & girls. No amount of listening & obeying has helped women because it doesn't matter what the reason for maIe violence is, if they cant find a reason they'll create a reason because their motive is to make women suffer in addition to reproduction & having labour.

Now I know many will speak about the violence of maIe retaliation which I'll address in part 3. This is part 2 of 'the rise in single childfree women' group of posts.

Part 1

A World Without Men: Inside South Korea’s 4B Movement

For Youngmi and many others who subscribe to its basic premises, 4B, or “practicing bihon,” is the only path by which a Korean woman today can live autonomously. In their view, Korean men are essentially beyond redemption, and Korean culture, on the whole, is hopelessly patriarchal — often downright misogynistic. A 2016 survey by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family found the incidence of intimate-partner violence at 41.5 percent, significantly higher than the global average of 30 percent. While 4B’s adherents may hope to change society — through demonstrations and online activism, and by modeling an alternative lifestyle to other women — they are not trying to change the men whom they view as their oppressors. It is too soon to tell whether this movement can survive and thrive over the long haul. But its ideas and actions have already affected the country’s online discourse, its politics, and most of all, individual women’s lives.

“Practicing bihon means you’re eliminating the risks that come from heterosexual marriage or dating,” Yeowon, a 26-year-old office worker, told me on a café terrace in the seaside southern city of Busan. We talked over coffee and pastries, along with Yeowon’s girlfriend and another of their friends, all of them wearing wide black pants and black sweaters and sporting cropped short haircuts. Those risks Yeowon alluded to might seem familiar — trading career for child-rearing and housework, as well as the threat of physical violence — but in Korea, Yeowon said, marriage presents an existential threat.

Racism is definitely a factor in this 4B discourse, but I think there is something to be said of (ostensibly pro-trans) western cis feminists being so ready to accept political lesbianism as long as you dress it up in anything but 2nd-wave radfem aesthetics and don't use the dreaded L word.

I think most libfems have not seriously reckoned with their conception of gender as it relates to feminist praxis besides reblogging one "trans rights" post and letting trans women attend rallies. Pop feminists especially can't conceive of a world without patriarchy or gender and merely want to reform the cishet dating meta more in favor of (cishet) women.

Hence "omg this is just like Lysistrata" and "well WOMEN can participate in this since we make up 99% of the movement and you trans women can just do your own thing idc". "Majority" here is just a dogwhistle for "Principal Contradiction aka the only ones who matter".

By Hawon Jung

After trying for over a year to persuade more South Korean women to have babies, Chung Hyun-back says one reason stands out for her failure: “Our patriarchal culture.” Ms. Chung, who was tasked by the previous government with reversing the country’s plummeting birthrate, knows firsthand how tough it is to be a woman in South Korea. She chose her career over nuptials and children. Like her, millions of young women have been collectively spurning motherhood in a so-called birth strike.

A 2022 survey found that more women than men — 65 percent versus 48 percent — don’t want children. They’re doubling down by avoiding matrimony (and its conventional pressures) altogether. The other term in South Korea for birth strike is “marriage strike.”

The trend is killing South Korea. For three years in a row, the country has recorded the lowest fertility rate in the world, with women of reproductive age having fewer than one child on average. It reached the “dead cross,” when deaths outnumbered births, in 2020, nearly a decade earlier than expected.

Chung Hyun-back, who was South Korea’s gender equality minister in 2017-18, tried unsuccessfully to raise the country’s plunging fertility rate. Among the obstacles she says are to blame is the country’s “patriatchal culture."

Now, about half of the country’s 228 cities, counties and districts risk losing so many residents they might vanish. Day care centers and kindergartens are being converted into nursing homes. Ob-Gyn clinics are closing, and funeral parlors are opening. At Seoksan Elementary School, in rural Gunwi County, the student body has shrunk from 700 pupils to four. When last I visited, the children couldn’t even form a soccer team.

Young Koreans have well-documented  reasons not to start a family, including the staggering costs of raising children, unaffordable homes, lousy job prospects and soul-crushing work hours. But women in particular are fed up with this traditionalist society’s impossible expectations of mothers. So they’re quitting.

President Yoon Suk-yeol, elected last year, has suggested feminism is to blame for blocking “healthy relationships” between men and women. But he’s got it backward — gender equality is the solution to falling birthrates. Many of the Korean women shunning dating, marriage and childbirth are sick of pervasive sexism and furious about a culture of violent chauvinism. Their refusal to be “baby-making machines,” according to protest banners I’ve seen, is retaliation. “The birth strike is women’s revenge on a society that puts impossible burdens on us and doesn’t respect us,” says Jiny Kim, 30, a Seoul office worker who’s intent on remaining childless.

Making life fairer and safer for women would work wonders toward reducing the country’s existential threat. Yet this feminist dream seems increasingly far-fetched, as Mr. Yoon’s conservative government champions regressive policies that only magnify the problem.

South Korea’s demographic crisis was once inconceivable: As late as the 1960s, women had six children on average. But the state, pursuing economic development, carried out an aggressive population control campaign. In about 20 years, women were having fewer than the 2.1 children needed for replenishment, a number that’s only continued to drop. The latest available data from South Korea’s statistics agency put the fertility rate at 0.81 for 2021; by the third quarter of 2022 it was 0.79.

Recent governments have indeed been alarmed by a rate that’s seemingly approaching zero. Over 16 years, 280 trillion won ($210 billion) has been poured into programs encouraging procreation, such as a monthly allowance for parents of newborns.

Many women still say nope. No wonder. There’s little escaping suffocating gender norms, whether in pregnancy guidelines to arrange clean undergarments for your husband before labor, or the dayslong kitchen drudgework for holidays like the Chuseok harvest festival. Married women are saddled with the lion’s share of chores and child care, squeezing new mothers so much that many give up professional ambitions. Even in dual-income households, wives daily spend more than three hours on these tasks versus their husband’s 54 minutes.

Discrimination against working mothers by employers is also absurdly common. In one notorious case, the country’s top baby formula maker was accused of pressuring female employees to quit after getting pregnant.

And gender-based violence is “shockingly widespread,” according to Human Rights Watch. In 2021, a woman was murdered or targeted for murder every 1.4 days or less, according to the Korea Women’s Hotline. Women have dubbed the act of ending a relationship without getting a vicious reaction a “safe breakup.”

But women haven’t passively accepted the toxic masculinity. They’ve organized raucously, from Asia’s most successful #MeToo movement to groups like “4B,” which translates to the “Four nos: no dating, no sex, no marriage and no child-rearing.” The country’s feminist movements have won the decriminalization of abortion and harsher penalties for an epidemic of spycam-porn crimes.

Many young Korean men, however, have declared themselves victims of women’s activism. President Yoon rose to power last year by leveraging this resentment. He echoed the dog whistle of men’s rights advocates, declaring that structural sexism no longer exists in South Korea and vowing tougher punishment for false reports of sexual assault.

Mr. Yoon’s government is removing the term “gender equality” from school textbooks and has canceled funding for programs to fight everyday sexism. “If you find gender equality and feminism so important, you can do it with your own money and time,” said one lawmaker in his party.

The government is also working to dismantle its own headquarters for women’s empowerment — the gender equality ministry. Established in 2001, it’s been transformative in normalizing parental leave for fathers and helping more women achieve workplace seniority.

Comments by the gender equality minister under the Yoon administration illustrate its abandonment of women. In September, Kim Hyun-sook rejected the idea that misogyny was at play when a Seoul Metro worker stabbed a female colleague to death in a subway bathroom after stalking her for years. Ms. Kim also initially declared that the rape and killing of a college student on campus last June was not violence against women and shouldn’t be used to fan “gender conflict.”

So far, none of the measures implemented by successive governments have flipped the trends in marriage and childbearing. Worse yet, the current government seems to be actively undermining efforts that gave women hope. “This is a historical regression,” says Ms. Chung, who was the gender equality minister from 2017 to 2018. Society can’t end the birth strike without acknowledging women’s grievances, she says.

Motivating Korean women to reconsider marriage and children involves infusing every aspect of their lives with agency and equality. A feminist approach would remove obstacles to motherhood simply by enforcing existing laws against workplace discrimination. It would destigmatize births outside of marriage and make domestic duties everyone’s responsibility. It would condemn gender violence as reprehensible. A feminist approach would admit there’s a systemic problem.

It’s clear that countries with a disproportionate division of child care or lacking national paid parental leave, like Japan and the United States, also have plunging fertility rates. It’s the same with China, where women inspired by South Korea started their own “Four nos” movement; government data this month reveals its population is shrinking, too. But countries with cooperative fathers and good family policies, like Sweden, or that recognize diverse companionships, like France, have been more successful at stabilizing or even bumping up births.

The United Nations projects that South Korea’s 51 million population will halve before the end of the century. Survival of the nation is at stake.

Hawon Jung (@allyjung) is the author of the forthcoming “Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide,” and a former Agence France-Presse reporter in Seoul. She splits her time between South Korea and Germany.

I'm seeing a lot of conversation about the 4b movement breeding transmisogyny; i think this is a consequence of radicalisation without concerted poli ed. misandry isn't going to fix the world. there are ways to hold men accountable without seeing them as a lost cause but that would require intersectional feminist/womanist men to take responsibility. misogynists don't listen to *non* cis men. if you're concerned about transmisogyny, share gender theory lit, talk about gender theory, deconstruct on the basis that binary gender as a state apparatus is a consequence of colonialism/imperialism. yes even in Asia