In May 2015, DC Inside, South Korea’s largest anonymous message board, opened a page called MERS Gallery to share updates on the country’s outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. Shortly after, a claim circulated on the board that two South Korean women, who had been potentially exposed to the virus, had travelled from Seoul to Hong Kong for a holiday and evaded the mandatory quarantine measures to go shopping. The board was flooded with messages from male users calling them selfish and accusing them of damaging the nation’s reputation abroad. This sparked retaliation from women who mirrored the abuse, replacing “women” with “men” in the same insults, and within weeks, split off to build their own site. Megalia emerged through the fusion of “MERS Gallery” with “Egalia’s Daughters”, a satirical novel about a world where gender power is reversed.
However, Megalia did not remain confined to a battle on a message board. By 2016, teenage girls in South Korea were filming themselves destroying makeup compacts, cutting their hair short, and posting the footage under the hashtag “Tal-Corset” (escape the corset). In South Korea, a country known for immaculate and elaborate beauty routines and standards, this was symbolic of something far greater than a seasonal shift in fashion trend. For one of the world’s largest beauty markets and epicentres, the hashtag resembled a civic movement rejecting a deeply ingrained idea and feature of a culture rather than a style choice. The same year, a twenty-three-year old woman was stabbed to death in a public restroom near Gangnam station by a man who told the police that he did it because women had always looked down on him. In the weeks preceding this incident, South Korean writer and author Cho Nam-ju published her book ‘Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982’. The novel chronicled the gradual erosion of the protagonist under everyday sexism. It became the first Korean novel to sell over one million copies since 2009.
By 2018-2019, momentum from Escape the Corset’s rejection of beauty labour, South Korea’s #MeToo movement and the lasting memory of the Gangnam murder led to the formation of what is now recognised as the 4B movement, centred on four Korean words, each beginning with “bi” (negation). Bihon meant no marriage, bichulsan meant no childbirth, biyeonae meant no dating, and bisekseu meant no sex with men. While Escape the Corset rejected the performance of femininity, 4B went beyond it by refusing to participate in structures and institutions underlining it.
On the Economist’s Glass Ceiling Index, which measures women’s obstacles in pay and childcare, South Korea ranked last for twelve consecutive years. Its birth rate at 0.92 children per woman is among the lowest recorded across the world. In 2016, the government released a ‘Pink Map’, charting the number of reproductive-age women by district. It was meant to visualise a solution for the country’s falling birth rate. However, the map received immediate backlash because it reduced women to reproductive statistics, comparing women to livestock and treating the solution to the low birth rate as belonging exclusively to women, ignoring the broader socioeconomic factors such as job insecurity, housing costs, and childcare access. No equivalent map for men existed.
Sociology professor Lee Na-Young of Chung-Ang University stated that “Movements like 4B are a message of warning that women would boycott romantic relationships unless society and men change.” 4B’s refusals and rejections were leverage for demanding bigger change in society’s expectations and perspective towards women. It also drew boundaries on its authority over women and their bodies.
The movement stayed domestic until 6th November 2024 when a tweet urging American women to adopt 4B went viral within hours of Donald Trump’s re-election, drawing nearly seventeen million views before being deleted. On TikTok, videos tagged to the movement garnered nineteen thousand views within days and Google searches for “4B movement” crossed half a million in 48 hours. Women posted themselves shaving their heads and swearing off dating apps.
The movement also found its way into China and survives under a different name. Chinese feminists adapted it into the 6B4T, adding boycotts of pornography and disowning surnames to the original four refusals. Even while the state dismissed a landmark #MeToo lawsuit against a state broadcaster and shut down foreign NGO funding, 6B4T circulated on platforms like Douban. Under a government urging women to be good daughters in an ageing population, the movement may not be a declared protest, but it is functioning as a private defiance.
In 1970, economist Albert Hirschman noted that there are two available responses to anyone dissatisfied with a failing institution (a firm, organisation or the state). Voice, which seeks reforms from within and exit, which withdraws participation altogether. 4B falls into the category of exit, with women withdrawing from participation in the institutions of marriage, motherhood, romantic and sexual relationships. The movement does not include lobbying, contesting elections or negotiating policy. The end goal is reform. However, this goal is pursued by leveraging their withdrawal or exit from these institutions and structures. In his examination of voice and exit, Hirschman also pointed out that the removal of people most capable of demanding change can also leave the institution as it was, punishing no one but those who left.
Hirschman’s disclaimer is echoed in the movement’s fracture. 4B, as well as its predecessor Escape the Corset, have drawn criticism from trans and intersectional feminists on the grounds of the movement’s insistence on defending “biological women”. In South Korea, this has shaded into open hostility towards trans women. During Escape the Corset, some participants compiled ranked lists distinguishing “real” makeup-free looks from merely “corseted” ones. Resisting patriarchy also required a metric according to these lists, and whether an act or a body was considered as resisting patriarchy was based on its adherence to this metric. It policed who was part of the movement, who was allowed to exit and thus escape.
What the movement amounts to depends on the direction it takes. Exit is also a mechanism through which reform is sought, fought for, ht and the same holds for 4B, too. For the movement to impact societal and policy change, the leverage of exit must affect change within the institutions and structures it has named. Second, a movement based on the rejection of patriarchy cannot survive and create sustainable positive impact while practising the very patriarchal norms of exclusion and restriction. The corset may have come off, and women may have rejected the performance of femininity, but it is equally important to observe the norms that have replaced them.
References:
- Britannica – 4B Movement
- ABC News – What are the South Korean origins of the feminist 4B movement rising in the United States?
- Atlantic Fellows – Boycotting Men? How the 4B Feminist Rebellion is Taking on Patriarchy
- The New Republic – How White Women Doomed Kamala Harris and the Democrats – Again
- The Diplomat – Between Sisterhood and Surveillance: How the 4B Movement Came to China
- Hirschman, Albert O. – Exit, Voice & Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations and States