Quitting Men Isn't a Political Strategy

In the days following the re-election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, mostly white and presumably middle class American women took to the internet to spread the word of a movement they just learned of and decided to join – despite obvious language and cultural barriers. The 4B movement, some TikTok users parroted, was a movement to boycott men and all the labor women do for them. 

Originally conceptualized in South Korea, 4B has four rules: biyeonae (no dating men), bihon (no marrying men), bisekseu (no sex with men), and bichulsan (no childbirth). After the revelation that more than half of men under 30 voted for Trump, women’s decision to quit men as a protest to men’s allegiance to a Trumpian status quo — the kind of status quo that subordinates  women — seems like an appropriate, if reactionary, response. Curiously, the social media posts disavowing men are mostly coming from white women, another demographic that has historically supported Republican candidates at the polls, an inclination that unfortunately continued in 2024.  

If it was announced on social media, it’s probably true: straight young women are done with men, and they’re quitting them cold turkey. Following these passionate announcements, the digital media machine rushed to explain the 4B movement to the public. Many of the reports had an orientalizing angle, framing gendered oppression in South Korea as something that happens uniquely elsewhere. The coverage has also framed the social media trend as a fringe movement that comes across as extremist to the median reader. How scandalous that women would do this in South Korea – women must really suffer under gender oppression there. The journalistic narrative is that, because of Trump, Americans will now get a taste of what it is like to be a woman in a global south country. To quote The Guardian, the 4B movement is “pushing against a deeply unequal society,” which seems to imply this isn't the case right now in the United States of Fascism.

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