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From The Times and The Sunday Times, this is The Story. I'm Manvee Morano.
A few days after Donald Trump won the election, one of my colleagues was at home in North London, practicing what she describes as a now-nighly ritual, doom-scrolling through social media. There was lots of political content and analysis, and then she started to notice something else that kept popping up, too. So there was kind of like the normal stuff kicking around that you would imagine, like, you know, a bunch of fraternity boys dressed like Trump doing a dance in front of their fraternity house.
Kamala, you're fired. But then, probably naively, I hadn't felt that the gender divide was so extreme. But in the days following the election, it felt like this kind of underbelly of misogyny really
felt that they had a platform. So there was this influencer named Nick Fuentes, who's extremely right-wing, white nationalist, published a video where he's saying, since Donald Trump became the president, women's bodies are now under our control. And I mean that.
I said it's their body, but it is our choice. And politically, I'm obsessed with controlling women's bodies. And he's like, it's not a glass ceiling. It's a brick wall that you'll continually hit your face against.
There will never be a female president ever. It's over. Glass ceiling, dude, it's a ceiling made of fucking bricks. You will never break it. We will keep you down forever. And he posted just the sentence, your body, my choice forever, on X. And it got 93 million views and over 36,000 repos. So suddenly it just felt like this extremely fraught political environment that was getting much more extreme by the second.
Since the election, there's been a surge in misogynistic content flooding the internet. And it's leading to a backlash from growing numbers of American women. Some are even turning to an anti-men movement that first became popular six years ago and 7,000 miles away in South Korea. So what is this movement? How did it start? And how will it play out in both South Korea and the US?
The story today, no sex, no babies, no men. South Korea's 4B movement comes to America. My name is Kiara Brown. I'm a commissioning editor on the Times Luxury section.
Ankiara, your accent is always a joy in the newsroom. Just tell us where it's from. So I am from the States. I grew up in San Francisco. I started my life in the UK very insecure about my accent, so I'm very happy to hear that it's been a joy to hear. Ankiara, in the days after Donald Trump won the election, we all started seeing some posts on social media with American men saying things like, your body, my choice.
As an American in London, your social media must have been teeming with posts like that. How did it develop over the next few days?
So what was really interesting is it felt like there was more and more of that happening and the dialogue was getting more heated. And then all of a sudden, it felt like it hit a boiling point when women started posting videos with a proposed solution to it all, which was joining the 4B movement. What is the 4B movement? The South Korean trend gaining traction in the US after Donald Trump's win.
No sex with men, no dating men, no marriage with men, and no having children. There's no way I am letting any man near me for the next few years. Well, I have to say, good luck getting laid. Me and my brothers are participating before being movement. No more kitty cat for moderate men, bumpy and all the things that the patriarchy wants us to be. Clearly, I didn't get a shit about us. Why exactly are you going to keep becoming subservient to a nation that doesn't literally care about you? What is Christmas?
Was that the first you'd heard of it? I had come across it a couple of months earlier. And at the time, I was like, Oh, interesting. Sounds difficult to pull off, but I'm sort of intrigued by the logistics. So when I saw the people were posting about it again on social media after the election, I honestly wasn't that surprised because it did feel like sort of a natural next step to the extremism that we were seeing on the other side to have this sort of extreme solution.
We'll come back to Kiara in a bit to find out how it's all playing out in America. But as Kiara said, 4B began originally in South Korea. So to find out how and why and what the name means, I got in touch with a Korean academic who's researching the movement.
My name is Mira Choi. I'm a PhD candidate at Yale University in the Department of Sociology. So, B in Korean, not the alphabet B, but the pronunciation B is no. It means no. So, for B means saying no to four things and it's
P, sex, which is no sex with men. P, your name means no dating, men. P, hon means no marriage with men and pizza son, meaning no childbearing with men. So it is saying no to four things, four tenants, completely removing themselves from any heterosexual relationship or romantic sexual contact with men.
In mirror, you're doing this dissertation at Yale. You're talking to a lot of women in South Korea, and you're originally from Korea.
I mostly grew up in Korea. I was born in Korea, spent most of my childhood and adolescence and young adulthood in Korea. So I pretty much lived through all these moments where there was a surge of popular feminism among young adults. And I was part of all those waves of feminism as young adults as well.
And I just moved to the US in 2019 to pursue my PhD degree at Yale. So I currently live in Connecticut and I'm working on my dissertation, which is very timely because it's looking at what I call the rise of heterosexual refusal in South Korea.
I interviewed 130 women who are practicing either heterosexual refusal or 4B in a wide variety of variations, so either completely opting out or partially opting out or valuing heterosexual refusal as a positive way of living but still kind of open to maintaining relationship with men.
And just tell me about that, because they are a reaction against sexism and misogyny. Have you experienced those in both countries, in the USA and in Korea? Yeah, so I went to a women's college, the largest woman's university in South Korea called Yoha Women's University. And it has a reputation of smart women attending these colleges. And when I went on blind days or talked to other men,
And I told them, you know, I went to Yewao Women's University. Their first reaction is, oh, you're that scary type. You're that intimidating type. And of course, other than that, just in everyday lives, there were so many stickers in women's public restrooms in Korea that says, oh, this restroom was monitored by a female police at this time and checked that there is no hidden camera in it.
just sexual assault. It's just so prevalent. When you turn on the news, you just see it every single day. All these cases of women being killed or women being assaulted by their romantic partners or within family. So it was just something that I always had in mind growing up. And in the US, I would say, because I'm in a smaller bubble of this university setting, less so, but
For sure, there's much more of that sexism and misogynistic comments that are also intersecting with racism. So seeing Asian women in a certain subversive way and either it being explicitly racial and sexist slur in the street or just the novel and comments that
entails these ideas that, oh, you're an Asian woman, so you must be, you know, submissive, quiet, coming from a Confucianist, patriarchal culture, you must be, you know, XYZ. So I think there's a different layer of sexism that I experienced in the US that, you know, adds on to just regular sexism, I guess.
And Mira, recently we've seen a huge surge in America of women online, on social media, talking about 4B, which as a movement began in Korea, just take us back and talk us through its origins.
Yeah, so 4B movement began around 2018 in South Korea in the wake of MeToo movement, but prior to the MeToo, there was already a surge of popular feminism after this incident.
happened in Gangnam public restroom where this man waited outside of a restroom until the first woman to enter the space and killed this woman and he claimed that he wanted to kill a woman because women cheated him unfairly or not nicely. This was just the first woman who came along, a complete stranger.
A woman in her 20s was stabbed to death in a public restroom near Gangnam station by a schizophrenic man who called himself a woman hated. After the news broke, many condemned the act as a misogynistic crime. Yeah, so there was a CCTV that showed that he waited when other men entered and didn't do anything and then when the first woman entered just a stranger, he just killed this woman. It breaks my heart and it makes me angry. She died because she's a woman.
A minority of men caused women to feel unsafe and as a man myself, I feel horrible and sorry.
That's a very highly populated area as well where a lot of young adults go, you know, hang out in club and, you know, eat out and stuff like that. So in the wake of that incident, a lot of young women started to, you know, turn into feminist and say, Oh, it would have been me. Women are not safe. And women started mostly online anonymously talking about how women should boycott men as a way to fight against patriarchy.
And Mira, you've spoken to 130 women for your PhD. We can't go into the details of what they've been telling you because of confidentiality rules. But just tell us generally, what is the attitude to women in South Korea?
There's so much fantasy around men and women being equal, but in reality, just not being treated equally. In the labor market, gender pay gap in Korea is one of the worst among OECD countries. Women get paid 70% of what men make in Korea, despite the educational equality that women have achieved. And then there's also the motherhood penalty where there's just so few support for women who give birth.
to continue their career. Korea has one of the largest plastic surgery industry and you know with the K-pop culture there's such a high beauty standard and with the consumeristic like celebrity culture as well there's so much pressure among women to look beautiful
And then in addition to that, there has been a rise, not only happening in Korea, but happening worldwide, is the rise of conservative right-wing men, where there's so much of popular misogyny being shared, and just women seeing how there's this ideal of fairness and equality, but they're not treated equally in society.
Yeah, so you get this amazing moment you've had these horrific cases that have happened to South Korean women from murder to sexual assault. You've got a global movement of me too, and at the same time you've got women online in South Korea talking to each other about what they've experienced and being able to put it into context.
That's how you get the birth of the 4B movement. How big has it actually become? I mean, do you have any sense of how many women are involved? How many women are not participating in relationships because of this movement?
I would say because the 4B movement is more of a radical identity and radical movement. It could be considered a little more niche. There is not much data around how many women are participating in 4B and some people assume that there's about like a few hundreds to a few thousands.
What I find in my research is that regardless of whether they self claim to be for B or not, there's just this general sentiment that is shared being among women, especially heterosexual women, that dating, marriage, and childbearing is not necessary, and it's not beneficial for women, and there's just so much nationally representative data that shows that very few women want to date men or get married to men or have children with men
nor they think that it's necessary. So it's something that is happening naturally almost. Are there criticisms of the 4B movement? Because the movement is around heterosexuality, there could be some arguments around, so then what about queer women or other
queer individuals that do not identify as men and men or women, like, how does these different forms of relationship fit into this for being movement? I've seen other, you know, debates on social media, especially in the US too, around, oh, I'm already married or oh, I already have children. I empathize with this.
You know, sentiment around refusing men, but can I be a part of it? So along that line, I think there's room for, you know, debates and discussions. In a way, because it's such a private form of protest.
Is it effective? I mean, what do the women who take part in the 4B movement? What is it that they're hoping society will do? Because if you opt out of your own relationship in a way it affects the person you're in a relationship with, how does it have a broader societal impact?
Because Korea has the lowest fertility rate and South Korean government has been sensationalizing this low fertility as this national crisis, so much attention trying to solve this problem that I think a lot of women through not participating in marriage and childbearing or relationship with men, they see a value in dropping the numbers.
to show through these statistics that women are not going to participate in this national agenda unless you listen to where women are coming from. Coming up, how is 4B playing out in America? That's in just a moment.
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Kiara, we've just heard how 4B became a thing in South Korea. Recently, it seems to be re-emerging as an idea that's being proposed and flying around the internet in America. Just talk us through why that is. Why do so many women feel threatened by the Trump presidency?
Before he got into power, there was a lot of conversations about, oh, you know, he's going to take abortion off the table for women in the States. And I remember at the time being concerned about that. And then a lot of men in my life saying, oh, he's not going to do that. Like he's just talks a big game, but he's not going to do it. And then one of the biggest accomplishments of his presidency was overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, which was the key legislation that granted abortion rights.
For 54 years, they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated. And I did it. And I'm proud to have done it. So from there, I think there was a lot of trust eroded between women and Trump. And I mean, he hasn't had a great track record with women. At least 26 of them have accused him of sexual assault. And obviously, he denies the claims. But he lost a civil case and was told to pay 83.3 million, which is about 65 million pounds.
for defaming the columnist Eugene Carroll in 2019 while he was president, and was found to have sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. So he has a history of anti-woman sentiment, and then obviously there's the grab them by the pussy comments and the access Hollywood tapes that came out just after the election. You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful. I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. I don't hear the way. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the pussy.
do anything. I think all of those things stoke a sense of fear in women in the US when Trump's name comes up. Obviously not all women because there was a huge proportion of largely white women in this past election who cast their ballot for him again. But I think there was like a renewed sense of anxiety around a Trump's presidency among my female peers at least.
So, as you say, your peers, a whole lot of women who voted against him are quite depressed at the moment by his victory. Is that really translating into an renewed interest in 4B? I mean, I know that sort of it's been spiking on social media, but is it really a thing? Google searches for the movement one up by 450% with about 200,000 people looking into it just on Wednesday.
after the election. So there's definitely interest spiking.
But I think the logistics of actually making that happen, doing the 4B movement would be very challenging. And I also will say, I'm not totally convinced that it's the best way forward for us. I think women really need the help of men to be able to assert themselves and assert a more equal society. And I just think ruling them out of the conversation apart from just being logistically complicated feels like
not a great solution, particularly because I know that there's a lot of conversations going on about why men voted for Trump. And I think part of it is that men are feeling left behind. I think women felt left behind in this election, but I think men felt that there's no place for them in this new world. And the numbers are kind of showing that 58% of all college graduates in the US are women. And obviously that goes on to have long-term economic implications after you graduate.
There's an amazing professor from New York University named Scott Galloway, and he's pointed out that the young men just really don't feel seen by the Democratic Party. He has an amazing video where he kind of goes into all the different groups that are listed on the Democratic Party's website that they say that they're going to support, but a community that's not on that list is meant.
Women in urban areas under the age of 30 are now making more money than men, more single women own homes than men. And by the way, those are wonderful things. And most men don't resent that, but what they see is a huge apparatus and resources and rhetoric and very inspiring speeches about the importance of advocating for every single group but young men.
So you can see why they would feel angry and they would feel like they have to assert themselves right now, especially in this post MeToo world where I know a lot of them kind of feel they're being unfairly labeled as bad guys and they just are struggling to kind of find their place. And even in dating, I messaged a lot of my friends while I was doing research for this piece, asking whether they would be interested in joining the 4B movement themselves.
So it was funny because one of them was like, I'd be interested in doing everything but the sex women. What exactly would they be excluding in that case? So I think it's excluding marriage and pregnancy, but they were going to have a harder time giving up the sex with men element. So for that reason, I think it would be a hard thing to get off the ground all the way. And very seriously, America does actually have a problem with birth rates at the moment.
Birth rates are falling in the US below the levels that we need to maintain population levels. So the fertility rate is about 1.7 births per lifetime per woman. Meanwhile, the maintenance rate is about 2.1 births. Although it's interesting. I think the falling birth rate is definitely something to be aware of, but I also
feel that it's not really fair to talk about that without also talking about the potential fear of pregnancy that women are gonna have with these stricter laws in place on their healthcare. Like if there's a risk of you dying in a parking lot because of an ectopic pregnancy that you wanted, why would you put yourself in that position? There's like a lot of different elements that stand to play a role in the following birth rate, though I'm not totally convinced that 4B will be the reason that that goes down further.
Kira, in a way, the idea isn't new. We have come across examples in history of women withholding their services, if that's the way to put it.
Yeah, it was really interesting to read about all the different times that women have used, yeah, have used their bodies as a form of protest. There is an ancient Greek comedy play called Lyssa Strata, and it was originally performed in 411 BC, and it follows a group of Greek women who withheld sex from men to force them to end the Polypanesian War.
And then in the 1530s, Nicaraguan women did the same to protest the Spanish slave trade. And then just in 2003, Liberia had a similar campaign to protest the Civil War. And then in Iceland in 1975, 90% of the women in Iceland won on a strike for a day to improve equality. And it's actually turned it into one of the most equal societies in the world now. So there's been
evidence that it works. So if people really were willing to commit, I can see why they might think it would work. And I suppose there are sort of historical parallels within America. I mean, just looking at the last time that Donald Trump was elected, within days you had an enormous women's march, you had protests. I often think me too couldn't have happened as a movement if it wasn't for Donald Trump and that just the latent anger a lot of women felt coming out.
And yet it didn't change anything in terms of women's rights. If anything, they became more restrictive. You had Roe v. Wade being overturned. Is there a danger that it sort of feels like even if this does become a big movement and there's totally days yet, but is there a danger that this won't actually help women in terms of their legal rights?
Yes, I mean, I'm not sure that I think that this is going to really create the kind of lasting change just because I think men are a part of our society. And I think we will have to engage with them to really see lasting change. But I do think that women are angry. And I think they really want to feel heard right now. And I can't see a world where women will go down without a fight. And I wouldn't underestimate the lengths that they're willing to go to feel heard, particularly if
Their independence continues to get taken away from them. And Kyra, for you, how will you mark your protest? I mean, would you, would you swear off men? How do you do it?
For me, personally, I think I would find it difficult. But like I said, I'm not convinced it's the most productive thing. I really love the phrase, call in, not call out. And I think in the next couple of years, our best approach is to call people in to the conversation. And I'm hopeful. I have a lot of really great male friends in the States.
was just talking to my dad last day and I was like, I'm so lucky I was raised by all these amazing men. So I think it's just now kind of on them also to kind of explain to their peers why it's important to care about women's rights.
That was Kiara Brown from the Times luxury section and Mira Choi, sociology academic at Yale University. The producer today was Olivia Case, the executive producer was Kate Ford, sound design was by Tom Burchill and theme composition was by Mala Seto. If you've enjoyed this episode, you might want to have a listen to our previous one called, Our Dating Apps Running Out of Steam. Here's a little taster.
The researchers that I spoke to for this story all said the way that we love and how we feel love obviously has not changed from dating apps. But the way that we enter it and the way that we exit it has. And that's huge. There's a link to that episode in the description of this podcast. If you can, do leave us a review. It helps others to find us. And if you'd like to get in touch, do drop us a line to the story at thetimes.com. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
How often can you say a gift is truly unique? When you gift a loved one an Ancestry DNA test, you're giving them the keys to unlock their own personal journey of discovery. And with our festive sale now on, you can save on a truly meaningful gift. Help them discover their heritage, learn about their ancestors, and make new family connections this Christmas. Visit ancestry.co.uk to give them a gift that is truly unique. Terms apply.
