Quitting Men Isn't a Political Strategy
White women’s individualistic calls to disavow men — while invoking the 4B movement in South Korea — do nothing to achieve collective liberation from patriarchy.
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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.