Four Words, One Refusal

The 4B movement takes its name from four Korean words that all start with the syllable “bi,” a prefix working roughly like “un-” or “non-” in English. Because “bi” sounds like the letter B, the name doubles as both a number and an acronym. The four words are bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating), and bisekseu (no sex with men) — a lifestyle stance built on rejecting marriage, childbirth, romantic relationships, and sex, specifically with men.

It’s not a formal organisation with leaders or membership cards. It’s closer to a personal commitment thousands of women have adopted individually, often anonymously, as a way of stepping outside a set of expectations they see as harmful. Supporters describe it less as rejecting men out of spite and more as rebalancing power in relationships where the odds have always felt stacked against them.

Where It Actually Came From

The roots go back to 2015, and the origin story is uglier than most people realise. When MERS reached South Korea that year, a popular online forum called DC Inside erupted with posts blaming a Korean woman for supposedly bringing the virus into the country. Men on the forum piled on with openly misogynistic comments. It later turned out a man had actually brought MERS into the country, but by then women had already started pushing back.

Out of that pushback came Megalia, an online community where women used “mirroring” — taking the same hateful language men had used against them and turning it back around. Megalia didn’t last long, but the ideas stuck. Women there began floating the idea of refusing marriage and childbirth as resistance, and by around 2017, those ideas had formed into the fuller “four nos” that make up 4B today.

The movement gained real momentum after a brutal event: in May 2016, a young woman was murdered in a public restroom near Gangnam station by a man who later said he killed her because women had always ignored him. The killing sparked nationwide outrage and became a rallying point for exactly the kind of feminist organising 4B represents.

Tangled Up With a Falling Birth Rate

It’s impossible to talk about 4B without mentioning South Korea’s birth rate, since the two are constantly linked in public conversation, though that link is more complicated than it looks. South Korea already has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and commentators often point to movements like 4B as part of the explanation. But that framing flattens a bigger picture. Researchers draw a clear line between women who can’t afford children because of economic pressure and women deliberately opting out of marriage and motherhood as protest against a system they see as patriarchal by design — different things, even if they produce a similar-looking outcome on a national statistics chart.

When an American Tweet Set It Off Again

For years, 4B stayed mostly contained within South Korea. That changed in November 2024. Right after Donald Trump won re-election as U.S. president, a tweet urging American women to adopt the 4B lifestyle went viral, and TikTok picked it up almost overnight. Within days, tens of thousands of tagged videos were circulating, and Google search interest in “4B movement” spiked by hundreds of thousands of queries in 48 hours. Some American women posted videos of themselves breaking up with partners on camera; others filmed themselves shaving their heads as a symbolic rejection of conventional femininity, drawing its own backlash from people pointing out the insensitivity toward cancer patients and others who lose their hair involuntarily.

The driving fear was reproductive rights. With Trump’s return to office raising concerns about further abortion restrictions, many American women framed adopting 4B as a way to reclaim control over their own bodies. Critics were quick to point out an awkward tension: a meaningful share of American women had actually voted for Trump themselves, making the idea of a unified “boycott” of men feel a lot less coherent than the viral posts suggested.

Quietly Spreading to China, Under Very Different Conditions

Around the same period, a related version took hold in China, though under conditions that make open organising far riskier. Chinese feminists have engaged with what’s sometimes called the 6B4T framework — an expanded version of the original four principles — using platforms like Weibo and Douban while working around strict state censorship. Chinese authorities have already cracked down on feminist groups discussing these principles online, at one point shutting down large 6B4T discussion communities entirely. Rather than disappearing, the movement adapted into something closer to coded resistance, framed less as visible activism and more as quiet, personal disengagement from a system activists can’t openly criticise.

The Argument Inside the Movement Itself

Even among people sympathetic to 4B, there’s real disagreement about what it stands for. The most persistent internal debate is whether it’s trans-exclusionary. Critics, including some Korean queer feminists, argue that 4B’s framing — built entirely around women rejecting men — risks sidelining trans women and erasing decades of intersectional feminist organising in Korea that specifically tried to include them. Some 4B supporters have pushed back hard, explicitly rejecting any version of the movement that excludes trans women or leans into rigid gender essentialism.

There’s a second, broader question that follows the movement wherever it spreads: is walking away from relationships with men a form of structural protest, or just personal retreat dressed up as activism? Supporters argue mass, visible withdrawal is itself a form of pressure — a falling birth rate is something governments eventually have to reckon with. Sceptics counter that individual lifestyle choices don’t necessarily add up to organised political change.

A Movement That Won’t Stay Still

What’s clear is that 4B keeps resurfacing in new contexts, picking up a slightly different meaning each time depending on where it lands. It began as a response to misogyny and violence in South Korea, got pulled into America’s post-election anxiety over reproductive rights, and is now being quietly reshaped by Chinese feminists working under active censorship. Right now, it’s being described again as gaining fresh momentum globally — proof that a set of ideas born from a 2015 controversy in South Korea has had far more staying power, and reach, than anyone likely expected at the time.

Reference:

1. Britannica. “4B movement | History, Context, Critiques, & Impact.”
2. Wikipedia. “4B movement.”
3. Wikipedia. “6B4T movement.”
4. The Week. “4B movement: what is it and how has it evolved?” October 23, 2025.
5. Feminist Current. “The South Korean women’s movement: ‘We are not flowers, we are a fire’,” June 16, 2020.
6. FeministWiki. “4 B movement.”
7. NBC News. “Trump re-election sparks interest in South Korea’s ‘4B’ movement among American women,” November 7, 2024.
8. HuffPost. “The ‘4B Movement’ Is Surging On TikTok After Donald Trump’s Win. What Is It?,” November 8, 2024.
9. The Diplomat. “Between Sisterhood and Surveillance: How the 4B Movement Came to China,” June 26, 2025.
10. What’s on Weibo. “Censorship of Chinese 6B4T & Feminist Groups Prompts Wave of Support for ‘Douban Sisters’.”
11. That’s What She Said Magazine. “The 4B Movement and what it means for Feminism,” March 14, 2025.
12. Flow Journal (Emory University). “The Return of Global Sisterhood? The Transnational Journey of the 4B Movement on TikTok,” February 19, 2025.4 B

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