On May 17, 2016, a young woman was stabbed to death in a public bathroom near Gangnam Station by a man who claimed he killed her because he felt he had been ignored by women. This horrendous act of violence triggered widespread protests and what Jinsook Kim has termed “sticky activism”, after the tens of thousands of sticky notes that covered the wall at Gangnam Station’s Exit 10. Yet the crime was never officially recognised as a femicide. Much of the Korean media, along with the police, described it as a mutjima sarin, which roughly translates to “random killing” or “motiveless crime”, stating that the murder was not motivated by gender-based hate but was instead the tragic act of a mental health patient with a history of schizophrenia. MBC Newsdesk, the nightly newscast of one of South Korea’s major broadcasters, went as far as to describe the murder as “presumed the result of paranoia, not misogyny”.

However, the question being asked all over social media and among women was why women were disproportionately the victims of these “mutjima” crimes, and if the man’s paranoia made him hate women, then where did that idea take form in the first place? After all, psychotic episode or not, paranoid delusions are not formed in a vacuum. As the newspaper Hankook Ilbo observed, the Gangnam Station murder “is not the first incident of femicide, but it seems to be the first incident to be called femicide.” The right-wing insurgence and the gender war that have been playing out worldwide have since pushed women to lead several forms of feminist protest to reclaim their safety and autonomy in patriarchal, heteronormative societies that continuously dismiss and disregard them.

From Megalia to 4B

The 4B movement emerging out of South Korea is a response to similar societal expectations of hegemonic femininity that reduce women’s bodies and their labour to national or societal duties, while subjugating them through institutional discrimination and violence against women. Jinsook Kim explains that “B” (bi) in Korean means “no” or “not to do”. Therefore, 4B refers to rejecting four essential expectations of women: saying no to marriage (bihon), childbirth (bichulsan), dating (biyeonae), and heterosexual sex (bisex).

While a lot of social media discourse incorrectly traces the emergence of 4B to the Gangnam Station murder, it was definitely one of the major incidents that brought Korean feminism into mainstream media, and it later became part of how 4B was introduced to international audiences, especially in the USA. Nicole Dular states that the movement itself can be traced back to the online platforms Megalia and WOMAD, where women adopted a labour-strike attitude toward gender-based expectations as a form of resistance. Since women’s bodies and lives had been turned into national currencies, sites of violence and sites of unconsented pleasure, women decided to speak out by withholding their bodies and emotions from men, just as workers withhold their labour.

Megalia itself was born out of misogyny. In 2015, during South Korea’s MERS outbreak, a fabricated story blaming two women for spreading the virus went viral on male-dominated forums, and women responded by “mirroring”, turning the slurs used against them back on men. As Youngmi Kim notes, users of the misogynist forum ILBE popularised samilhan, the idea that “women should be beaten every three days”; Megalians retorted with sumshwilhan, that “men should be beaten up every time they breathe.” Vulgar as it was, the strategy exposed just how normalised misogyny had become. The same community also raised 10 million won in a few hours to support the campaign that eventually shut down Soranet, a website sharing hidden-camera footage and images of sexual abuse.

However, understanding 4B as a mere tit-for-tat resistance is to disregard the geopolitical and historical background that informed this movement. While Korea has been hailed as an economic miracle owing to the rapid technological development in the country, it is still deeply archaic in terms of gender norms. For more than two decades, South Korea has had the largest pay gap according to the OECD, and according to Human Rights Watch, women do four times as much unpaid work as men. Many women are still expected to bear the burden of motherhood alone and leave the workforce after childbirth. As Youngmi Kim points out, the young women who built these online spaces were often the daughters of fathers laid off after the 1997 financial crisis, who grew up watching their mothers go out to work and still come home to do all the housework.

Violence, online and off

Beyond economic disparity, violence against women is also widespread. From molka (spy-cam) videos to the Nth Room scandal and deepfakes, crimes against women have become rampant in both online and offline spheres. In its report My Life Is Not Your Porn, Human Rights Watch notes that in a 2017 survey of 2,000 South Korean men, nearly 80% of respondents admitted to having perpetrated violence against an intimate partner. In spy-cam cases, 80% of those targeted are women, and in 2016, 98% of the perpetrators were men.

However, the horror doesn’t end here. It is almost encouraged through technological advancement. Korean markets, and even global ones, are flooded with increasingly disturbing spy cameras disguised as everyday objects like clocks, pens, clothing hooks, and coffee cups. Human Rights Watch documents the case of Lee Ye-rin, who not only was harassed by her married supervisor but also given a spy cam disguised as a clock to keep in her room. The way Ye-rin reports that she found out about the spy cam is equally chilling. One day, when she moved the clock to a different spot, her boss commented on it; later, when she stayed up one night googling about such things, he shamelessly brought it up in their next meeting. He had no shame about giving his employee a disguised spy cam that streamed her bedroom to his phone 24 hours a day for over a month. In the article, it's reported that even a year later, she was still taking medication for depression and anxiety. “What happened took place in my own room,” she said, “so sometimes, in regular life, in my own room, I feel terrified without reason.”

We might run out of words before we run out of examples like hers. From Meta glasses to cheap cameras deliberately made to look like everyday objects, with almost no supervision or laws to control their usage, women are subjected to a state of constant insecurity, exploitation, and unsolicited surveillance.

Refusal as resistance

With the anti-gender backlash as rampant as it is, and people lamenting feminist ideologies as an attack on traditional customs and social order, it is no surprise that so-called radical movements like 4B in Korea, or 6B4T in China, have emerged with a focus on personal lives. South Korea is no exception to this backlash. As feminist activism has grown, so has the popularity of incel platforms dominated by young men and conservatives. For instance, in July 2023, male fans of the Korean game Limbus Company were outraged that a female character in its summer event wore a full-body wetsuit instead of a bikini typical of such games. Convinced a “feminist influence” drove the design, they combed through the developers’ social media. However, when they learned a man designed the costume, they turned on the female story illustrator after finding an old retweet on her personal account supporting protests against illegal spy-cam filming. After doxxing the female employee, review-bombing, and reports of threats, the developer, Project Moon, fired her for breaching a rule against expressing “controversial opinions” on personal social media. She had not even designed the outfit. In South Korea, it seems, supporting women’s safety is enough to cost a woman her job, but are we surprised that South Korean women are forced to go through a misogynistic ideological litmus test when the country’s President Yoon Suk-yeol denied structural gender discrimination and promised to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family? Therefore, feminist scholars like Cynthia Enloe, whose “the personal is international” serves as a core value for movements like 4B.

In what Johan Galtung calls a triangle of violence, women experience not only direct violence in the form of harassment and abuse, but also structural violence, where they are pressured into marriage and motherhood, and made disproportionately responsible for carrying the emotional and physical burden of maintaining the family. These two stages of violence are compounded by cultural violence, where women not only have to deal with workplace sexism but are also given less importance under the assumption that their career will always be second to their familial responsibilities. However, when mothers choose to work in an economy of rising prices, they are judged for not being available enough. Women are forced to exist in a society where the norms and beliefs that make this deep gender disparity appear natural and normal. Therefore, 4B’s structure of refusal is much more than just a coping mechanism. In fact, it is a significant form of resistance. 4B women are not looking for acceptance or assimilation. Rather, they wish to reject patriarchal norms and adopt a stance of non-cooperation. By refusing so-called gendered responsibilities, 4B follows Kathi Weeks’s Marxist feminist ideology by refusing unpaid labour that exploits women in the name of responsibility. Audra Simpson, another feminist scholar, states, “refusal can be a powerful alternative to recognition” by ruling powers.

The ingrained misogyny and neoliberal labour-market values that rule society, prioritising productivity and usefulness over welfare and safety, create an interlocking system of direct, structural and cultural violence. This system denies women human security, where security is not just the absence of conflict, but also freedom from fear, economic precarity, deprivation, and barriers to basic well-being. Therefore, in politicising everyday aspects like dating and marriage, 4B not only highlights the harm that societal structures and abuse cause to women’s private sphere, but also allows women to recognise how political women’s private lives have always been.

The pronatalist state

This is especially true for South Korean women living in a pronatalist state. South Korea had the lowest fertility rate in the world in 2023, with Statistics Korea reporting it to be around 0.72. This decline has led to the state introducing various initiatives to encourage women to marry and not abandon their childbearing responsibilities, even amid such economic precarity. 4B’s refusal to solve the “fertility crisis” on the state’s terms “offers women one possible vision of a feminist future…that does not involve being part of the state’s reproductive future.” Many young women in South Korea feel that workplace incentives like the “baby bonus”, offered under the current presidency, are superficial measures that treat the symptoms of the crisis rather than its causes. Not only do they ignore the nuances of workplace harassment, sexism, and the societal burden and judgement placed on working mothers, but they also strip women of their agency and humanity by viewing them as nothing more than “birth machines”.

While the state is busy offering cash for babies, it has done far less to protect the women and children who already exist. Data from the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family revealed that between 2010 and 2015, only about half of recorded sex crimes against children aged 13 or younger resulted in a jail sentence at all, with the remainder receiving probation or a fine. Of the jail sentences, about 61% were between one and five years, and fewer than 10% were longer than ten years.[source needed] Perpetrators have also been able to use drunkenness as a defence, with the courts treating it as a state of diminished capacity. Cho Doo-soon, who raped and nearly killed an eight-year-old girl in 2008, received 12 years instead of the life sentence prosecutors sought, after the court accepted that he had been drunk. In 2019, a 26-year-old man who raped a college student also claimed he was drunk at the time. He was sentenced to three years in prison, but even that was suspended on appeal, leaving him with four years of probation and effectively making him a free man. It is no wonder, then, that many netizens argue that of course the birth rate is declining and women no longer want to marry, when they live in a country that protects perpetrators better than it protects its victims.

Similar demographic anxieties appear worldwide. With several states in the US making abortion illegal and putting women’s healthcare and autonomy in jeopardy, similar pronatalist campaigns in Japan likewise frame women’s reproductive labour as either a divine responsibility or a patriotic duty. Thus, when the state turns the conversation around fertility into a matter of economic productivity or religious duty rather than personal autonomy, it turns women’s bodies into objects that the state and, by extension, men feel entitled to.

Why 4B travelled

It is perhaps for this reason that 4B has resonated so widely beyond Korea. Refusal offers a way to resist where it is difficult, or even dangerous, to challenge authority directly, and it provides an avenue for facilitating women’s grief, rage, fear and guilt in societies that refuse to see them as fellow human beings rather than bodies meant to carry out patriotic, societal or cultural duties. As one Chinese feminist in London put it: “It is dangerous to openly challenge the government. I was impressed that Korean women found a way to do it on a personal level… to challenge the state’s instrumentalisation of women as reproductive machines.”

While not exactly 4B, women in Delhi have also been fighting back against restrictions imposed on them in the name of safety, in the face of an unsafe rape culture and multiple recent cases of women being brutalised. A recent post by Hauterfly argued that “keeping women doesn’t make them safe; it just makes their world smaller”. The post imagines the downfall of workspaces if women actually started adhering to the ridiculous curfew requirements of not staying out after 6 pm, ending with a strong question: “Why does a woman have to disappear from public life for a man to behave?”

In the USA, Donald Trump’s re-election in November 2024 led many women to connect with the 4B movement. Two years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and with a man found liable for sexual abuse by a civil jury returning to the presidency, American women began invoking 4B as a form of protest. One viral post urging American women to adopt the movement gathered over 450,000 likes. It became especially popular in U.S. feminist conversations on TikTok. This made 4B especially revolutionary since it was one of the first significant cases of feminist ideas moving from East to West, reversing the usual direction in which feminist concepts have been exported from the West to Asia.

Where 4B falls short

However, that does not mean 4B is a perfect movement. Like any organised struggle, it also has its shortcomings, especially the transphobia and queerphobia among sections of its Korean supporters, which is rarely covered in international conversations about 4B. These divisions go back to its roots. As Youngmi Kim documents, some Megalians “accepted lesbians as members but vigorously rejected and insulted gays or transgender women”, and it was this disagreement that led to WOMAD splitting off as a more radical group in 2016. Jinsook Kim notes that among Korean feminists today, 4B is strongly associated with self-proclaimed “radfems” who advocate essentialist and separatist politics for “biological women”, and Korean queer feminists have expressed concern that the global interest in 4B may “feed and revive the most regressive part” of the concept. For trans-exclusionary feminists, the conversation of who can be a woman, and who is a woman, only further serves to subjugate women within the same system that they wish to deny.

This is also where critics compare 4B to incel culture, arguing that both are online communities built on resentment of the opposite sex. The comparison deserves some thought, since any movement that lives mostly online risks becoming an echo chamber of anger and contempt. But as Youngmi Kim makes clear, there is “no moral equivalence between Korea’s digital feminism, even in its radical form, and the misogynistic groups that have proliferated online and offline.” Incel ideology is built on entitlement to women’s bodies, while 4B is built on refusing access to one’s own. Kim also points out that the anger of young men that fuelled forums like ILBE “was less about women themselves and more about the structural problems that followed the financial crisis.”

4B emerged alongside movements like “Escape the Corset”, which encouraged women to reject the capitalist patriarchal society and its demand for “self-fashioning labour”. The idea was that women could escape capitalism’s exploitation through arbitrary beauty standards and instead invest in their own economic independence. This was especially resonant in South Korea, the world’s third-largest cosmetics exporter and one of its most powerful economic hubs for beauty products and treatments. However, this culture of self-sustenance inevitably ends up following the logics of neoliberal individualism, centred on the very capitalist ideologies it seeks to reject.

Furthermore, radical movements like 4B, especially in Korea, are limiting in their definitions of womanhood and exclude anyone who does not fit them, echoing the anti-trans and anti-queer propaganda of right-wing politics. In doing so, they end up regurgitating the same definitions and discrimination tactics that patriarchal society imposes on women in the first place. What’s worse is that when Korean and other East Asian feminist conversations are adapted for an international audience, these shortcomings are often ignored or overlooked.

Therefore, when talking about global sisterhood, it is important to be sharp and aware. As Jinsook Kim warns, the global circulation of 4B risks a return to the old idea of a universal sisterhood rooted in shared female suffering, one that “narrows and homogenises the meaning of ‘women’… by prioritising biological women as the most oppressed class.” Western celebrations of 4B can also flatten Korean women’s history into a simple source of inspiration, skipping over the structural discrimination that m the first place. A sisterhood that can only be built by excluding trans women, queer women, or anyone we consider “the other” is not really a sisterhood at all. It simply reproduces the same hierarchies it claims to resist.

4B, then, is neither just a coping mechanism nor a complete solution. It is a refusal that tells us exactly what women have been asked to accept, and what they will no longer accept. The task for feminists everywhere is to take that refusal seriously, while forming movements that don’t leave anyone out.

References:

1. Jinsook Kim, “Sticky Activism: The Gangnam Station Murder Case and New Feminist Practices against Misogyny and Femicide,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 4 (2021): 37–60, https://doi.org
2. Jinsook Kim, “The Return of Global Sisterhood? The Transnational Journey of the 4B Movement on TikTok,” Flow 31, no. 4 (February 2025), https://www.flowjournal.org
3. Nicole Dular, “The 4B Movement Is a Labour Strike,” Blog of the American Philosophical Association, September 18, 2024, https://blog.apaonline.org
4. Jieun Lee and Euisol Jeong, “The 4B Movement: Envisioning a Feminist Future with/in a Non-Reproductive Future in Korea,” Journal of Gender Studies 30, no. 5 (2021): 633–44, https://doi.org
5. Ankita Singh Gujjar, “When Women Withdraw: The Global Politics of Refusal,” Yale Journal of International Affairs 21, no. 1 (December 2025), https://www.yalejournal.org
6. Youngmi Kim, “Mirroring Misogyny in Hell Chosŏn: Megalia, Womad, and Korea’s Feminism in the Age of Digital Populism,” European Journal of Korean Studies 20, no. 2 (2021): 101–33.
7. “South Korea’s 2025 Election: A Test for Gender Equality,” The Diplomat, May 2025, https://thediplomat.com
8. Human Rights Watch, “My Life Is Not Your Porn”: Digital Sex Crimes in South Korea (June 2021), https://www.hrw.org
9. “Korean Gaming Company Fires a Female Designer Due to Accusations of Being a Feminist,” Koreaboo, July 26, 2023, https://www.koreaboo.com
10. “Online Solidarity Against Anti-Feminist Backlash,” https://acr.comm.or.kr
11. Jean Mackenzie, “As South Korea Abolishes Its Gender Ministry, Women Fight Back,” BBC News, December 14, 2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk
12. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
13. Johan Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3 (1990): 291–305.
14. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
15. Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
16. Statistics Korea, Birth Statistics in 2023, https://kostat.go.kr
17. “Is Korea Soft on Crime?” Korea Herald, https://www.koreaherald.com
18. Jihye Jeong, “Boycotting Men? How the 4B Feminist Rebellion Is Taking on Patriarchy,” Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity Blog, March 19, 2025, https://afsee.atlanticfellows.lse.ac.uk
19. “‘Cover Up’ to Curfews for Boys — How India Is Responding to Women’s Safety in 2026,” The Better India, https://thebetterindia.com
20. Carroll v. Trump, No. 1:22-cv-10016 (S.D.N.Y.), jury verdict, May 9, 2023.
21. Rolling Stone Australia, report on 4B’s spread among U.S. women, November 2024, https://au.rollingstone.com
22. Mordor Intelligence, “South Korea Cosmetics Products Market,” https://www.mordorintelligence.com

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