A World Without Men

Anna Louie Sussman Mar. 8, 2023

The women of South Korea’s 4B

movement aren’t fighting the
patriarchy — they’re leaving it behind
entirely.
By

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty

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Youngmi’s childhood was a difficult one. The 25-year-old

nurse was born to a poor family in Daegu, South Korea,
known for being one of the most conservative cities in the
country. Youngmi’s mom left the home when Youngmi was
young to escape her husband’s physical abuse, leaving
her and her sister behind with him and their paternal
grandmother. When she was 5, her 8-year-old sister
started losing her hair from stress.

As she grew older, Youngmi found herself depressed,

unsure of what her future held, and financially unstable. In
Korea’s patriarchal society — in which women are
generally expected to defer to their fathers and to adhere
to rigid beauty standards — she felt like a perpetual
victim, obsessed by the wrongs done to her by her father
and pressured into maintaining her appearance in order to
please men. Despite her meager budget as a nursing
student, she purchased new clothes each season,
spending a lot of money on cheap, poor-quality clothes
from H&M. She wore makeup religiously. “I could not go
outside without any makeup. I felt ashamed of my face,”
she said. “I had this pressure of wanting to look beautiful
and wanting to be desirable, physically or sexually.”

While scrolling through Twitter in 2018, Youngmi came

across footage of protests taking place in the streets of
Seoul. In South Korea, where cases of femicide, revenge
porn, and dating violence are widespread, a surge in spy-
cam sex crimes, overwhelmingly committed by men, had
mostly resulted in fines and suspended jail sentences, if
they were prosecuted at all. That was not the case,
however, for one 25-year-old woman who had taken a
nonconsensual photo of a nude male model at art school
and posted it online; she was sentenced to ten months in
prison and court-ordered sexual-violence counseling. The
demonstrations were a reaction to the blatant hypocrisy.
Youngmi was moved by the solidarity she saw, but there
was one thing she found perplexing: Many of the women
at the protests shaved their heads on-camera. As she
began to follow more feminist Twitter accounts, Youngmi
understood this was a public act of rejection of those
same aesthetic expectations imposed on Korean women
that have made the country a leader in grooming products
and plastic surgery. She began to realize that “you know,
men do not do that — men do not feel the pressure to buy
clothes every season or wear makeup.”

Soon, Youngmi shaved her head, too, and stopped

wearing makeup, joining the so-called “escape the corset”
movement happening among young women in South
Korea. The movement, which first gained popularity in
2018, saw Korean women publicly turn away from
societally imposed beauty standards by cutting their hair
short and going barefaced. (Youngmi was not alone — in
2019, a survey found that 24 percent of women in their
20s reported cutting back their spending on beauty
products in the previous year, with many saying they no
longer felt they needed to put in the effort.) This
eventually led Youngmi to “4B,” a smaller but growing
movement among Korean women. 4B is shorthand for
four Korean words that all start with bi-, or “no”: The first
no, bihon, is the refusal of heterosexual marriage.
Bichulsan is the refusal of childbirth, biyeonae is saying no
to dating, and bisekseu is the rejection of heterosexual
sexual relationships. It is both an ideological stance and a
lifestyle, and many women I spoke to extend their boycott
to nearly all the men in their lives, including distancing
themselves from male friends.

Through open chat groups on KakaoTalk, Youngmi

connected with other feminists in Daegu, where she lived
with her mother while attending nursing school, soon
meeting each other offline. (“It’s so easy to recognize
each other with short hair,” she said.) She stopped seeing
her friends from high school and middle school whose
conversations still revolved around makeup, clothes, and
boys. When we met last November at a café in Seoul,
where she’s been living for the last two years, she was
barefaced and dressed comfortably in loose jeans and a
white fleece jacket. Her hair was long enough to be pulled
back in a ponytail, as she’d grown tired of people asking
about her short hair at her nursing job, but it was tucked
into a white baseball cap. Feminism, she said, had helped
her recognize that it was patriarchy that was the problem,
not her — that “the bad things that happened in your life
are not your fault,” she said.

For Youngmi and many others who subscribe to its basic

premises, 4B, or “practicing bihon,” is the only path by
which a Korean woman today can live autonomously. In
their view, Korean men are essentially beyond redemption,
and Korean culture, on the whole, is hopelessly patriarchal
— often downright misogynistic. A 2016 survey by the
Ministry of Gender Equality and Family found the
incidence of intimate-partner violence at 41.5 percent,
significantly higher than the global average of 30 percent.
While 4B’s adherents may hope to change society —
through demonstrations and online activism, and by
modeling an alternative lifestyle to other women — they
are not trying to change the men whom they view as their
oppressors. It is too soon to tell whether this movement
can survive and thrive over the long haul. But its ideas and
actions have already affected the country’s online
discourse, its politics, and most of all, individual women’s
lives.

“Practicing bihon means you’re eliminating the risks that

come from heterosexual marriage or dating,” Yeowon, a
26-year-old office worker, told me on a café terrace in the
seaside southern city of Busan. We talked over coffee and
pastries, along with Yeowon’s girlfriend and another of
their friends, all of them wearing wide black pants and
black sweaters and sporting cropped short haircuts.
Those risks Yeowon alluded to might seem familiar —
trading career for child-rearing and housework, as well as
the threat of physical violence — but in Korea, Yeowon
said, marriage presents an existential threat.

There was a time when Minji, a 4B adherent in Daegu, had

wanted to get married, “because, you know, everyone
wants to get married.” Knowing what she knows now,
however — like that domestic violence, as she puts it, is so
common — “I don’t want to get married anymore.” Minji,
27, is probably heterosexual, she said, and has liked a few
guys in the past, but they wanted her to “treat them like a
king.” So she has no problem boycotting the men of her
generation, who are little better than her selfish and
abusive father.

Even young women who are not members of the

movement echo that they could not imagine dating or
marrying a Korean man. Sooyeon, a teacher in her early
30s, told me that talking to her male friends “made me
always feel like, ‘Oh, maybe I can never find a Korean man’
… Even in my generation, some guys expect a really
traditional role from their spouse.” As if to prove her point,
a recent survey by a matchmaking company found that
women were reluctant to marry because of the division of
housework, while men hesitated because of “feminism.”

It is unclear how widespread or popular the 4B movement

is given its fluid online and offline nature and its evolution
over the years, beginning sometime around 2015 or 2016
when a simple “no-marriage” lifestyle grew to include a
boycott of men and reproductive labor more broadly. One
article estimated 50,000 adherents; others have put the
movement’s numbers at under 5,000. Its origin story is
similarly complex, though its contours can be traced.

Following years of financial crises in which young people

faced growing housing costs and intense competition for
university spots and jobs, the way women and men
related to each other openly soured. Beginning in 2013,
the rate of college enrollment among Korean women
surpassed those of men; today, nearly three-fourths of
women are enrolled in higher education, compared with
less than two-thirds of men. Previously, women were
expected to drop out of the labor force after marriage or
parenthood. Now, young men see their female peers as
competitors for increasingly scarce jobs. (Several
academics I spoke with noted to me that Korea is largely
ethnically and racially homogenous, making gender the
default and central societal fault line.) In online forums and
on social media, disgruntled men began labeling college-
educated women kimchinyeo, or “kimchee women,” giving
a name to “the stereotype of Korean women as selfish,
vain, and obsessed with themselves while exploiting their
partners,” wrote feminist scholar Euisol Jeong in her
doctoral thesis on “troll feminism.”

Around 2014 and 2015, a virulently misogynistic and anti-

feminist community called “Ilbe” grew in size and
prominence. In its interpretation, women were demanding
additional rights and privileges when they already
benefited from avoiding the country’s compulsory military
service. To the Ilbe community, the entire female populace
is gold-digging and shallow. Female Korean internet users
responded by latching onto misogynistic strategies like
trolling, mockery, and abusive language. Members of
Megalia, one of the more prominent feminist sites in this
period, coined the term hannamchung, or “Korean male-
bug,” which stereotyped Korean men as “ugly, sexist, and
obsessed with buying sex,” wrote Jeong.

In 2016, a young man murdered a young woman in a Seoul

public bathroom, telling police after that he killed her
because women had always ignored him. Despite the
perpetrator’s own statement, police refused to label the
murder a hate crime. Furious, women flocked to online
feminist message boards, communities, and chat forums.
This wave of digital feminism attracted women from all
backgrounds, including working-class women like Minji
and Youngmi, making it different from traditional Korean
feminism, which was largely confined to universities,
NGOs that often received government support, and other
elite spaces.

In December of that year, as Korea’s fertility rate hovered

at 1.2 births per woman (it has since slid to 0.78, the
lowest in the world), the Korean government launched an
online “National Birth Map” that showed the number of
women of reproductive age in each municipality,
illustrating just what it expected of its female citizens.
(South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol won the election
in March 2022 with a message that blamed feminism for
Korea’s low birth rate, and a promise to abolish the
country’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. ) Women
were outraged by the map, observing that the government
appeared to consider them “livestock”; one Twitter user
reportedly created a mock map illustrating the
concentration of Korean men with sexual dysfunction.
Several of these digital feminists responded with a
boycott to the reproductive labor expected by the state
and decided that the surest way to avoid pregnancy was
to avoid men altogether. It was through these online
communities that 4B emerged as a slogan, and ultimately
a movement.

The blowback and fear that 4B practitioners experience

underscores their conviction that Korea is still a
frightening place for women. Yeowon’s photo was posted
on an Ilbe site after participating in a feminist protest, and
she was harassed and sexually threatened online for
weeks. Youngmi said men have tried to physically attack
her on the street three or four times. She recalled an
episode when she and some friends, who all had cropped
haircuts, were dining at a Japanese restaurant in Daegu.
Throughout the night, the restaurant owner and his
friends made gagging and puking noises and gestures at
them. When Minji and I met at a coffee shop near the
city’s central train station, she told me she was worried
that someone in the café might post a photo of her online
because she had short hair and was speaking openly
about feminism. Others I spoke with insisted on using
pseudonyms for safety reasons.

There are other consequences to forgoing long-term

partnerships with men. Korea has the largest gender pay
gap in the rich world, with women earning 31 percent less
than men, and women still face widespread discrimination
in the labor market, something the movement recognizes.
A widely circulated 2018 tweet encouraged 4B women to
save the money they would have otherwise spent on “self-
fashioning labor” to sustain an independent life instead of
winding up “a penniless granny with a wardrobe full of
clothes.”

Women who commit to 4B “just work hard, because they

know they will not have a breadwinner man or husband,”
said Jeong, the scholar who wrote her doctoral thesis on
troll feminism, adding that some take two or three jobs.
Youngmi and her girlfriend live together about an hour by
subway outside of downtown Seoul where rent is more
affordable. Yeowon said her small studio apartment, the
best option she can afford right now, is in an unsafe
neighborhood near a market where drunken men often
congregate after the local bars close. Her partner, who
works in IT, recently moved apartments because her last
one had cockroaches.

Several 4B women I met in Seoul still lived with their

parents. Yeowon’s partner lives by herself but still eats at
her parents’ house several times a week, even though
they are no longer emotionally close. Her mother’s
cooking is excellent, she said, and it saves her time and
money. “I treat it like a restaurant,” she added. Youngmi
and her friends created a map of women-owned
businesses in Daegu so they could ensure their dollars
went to supporting other women. “The economy is a very
important issue for us,” she told me. Other 4B groups host
events with personal-finance experts to help women learn
how to save and invest. A subgroup of an online
community called “WITH” (which stands for “Women in
the Hell,” Hell being a nickname for Korea) is specifically
focused on economics; members post job listings, advice
on which banks are offering the best interest rates, and
other financial tips. Han, a math tutor who runs her own
tutoring company in Daegu, said she believes as women’s
collective economic power grows, so will their political
power, something she sees playing out over the next 20
years. Their interest in finance is both about the pressing
matter of living an economically viable life today and the
longer-term possibility that women practicing 4B at scale
will eventually weaken the patriarchy. “When women are
more economically influential, then it’s possible that the
political parties will listen to women as important voters,”
Han added. “But until then, I feel like women will still be
utilized — their bodies will be utilized to reproduce.”

But it’s not just political backlash and straightened

economic circumstances that pose a threat to the long-
term sustainability of 4B and its influence. Like any social
movement, 4B has its own internal rifts and divisions: Can
4B women be friends with men? With women who still
want to date men? Does lesbianism privatize
relationships, destroy feminist solidarity, and resexualize
women, or is it a necessary foundation for a world without
men? Some 4B practitioners also were turned off by the
movement’s focus on cisgender women to the exclusion
of trans women; many of the online communities require
verification with a photo ID attesting to the applicant’s sex,
and Minji said that one of the feminist communities she
joined asked her to submit a video of her Adam’s apple,
ostensibly to ensure she wasn’t assigned male at birth.
But regardless of where they stand on these questions,
for the more than a dozen 4B practitioners I met in Korea,
these were academic disagreements that had little impact
on their own personal commitment to living apart from
men.

For a movement born of rage, what happens when the

rage mellows or when other concerns take priority?
Yeowon said some of her friends are “selective feminists”
who forgo makeup when they meet up with her, but are
ultimately not ready to give up the advantages that come
with being conventionally attractive. “They cannot let go
of this power as women, of using femininity,” she said.
“There are these feminists who say, ‘Oh, I’m a feminist, I
hate men, but I also want to be, you know, consumable.’”
She and her friends described videos on YouTube of ex-
bihon women who told viewers that they’d seen the light
and returned to heterosexuality, narratives that recall the
profusion of #TradWife content online.

At least for now, it is clear that the message of 4B,

regardless of how it is practiced, or however closely its
followers identify with the label, has provided a refuge for
Korean women. Taekyung, 24, is getting her master’s
degree in German literature at Ewha University, an all-
women’s university with a robust campus feminism
movement and a respected gender-studies department.
On a beautiful fall day, she proudly walked me around the
campus, which dates from the 1880s, showing me the
campus gift shop and the area where students socialize
and sometimes take naps.

She has tried to avoid men since high school, after doing a
research project on Ilbe that brought her to web pages
where men had posted nude photos of their female family
members and discussed how to get away with rape. She
went to Sungshin Women’s University, another all-
women’s university, for undergrad. She doesn’t believe in
labels for her own sexual orientation and has little interest
in dating other women, but she does believe in political
lesbianism as a way for women to establish lives separate
from men — with an emphasis on the “political” rather
than the “lesbian.” “I don’t need to try being a lesbian,
because in political lesbianism, I can just be a person, like
a normal person — a human being. I can be in a safe
place,” she told me as we drank sweet-potato lattes at a
campus café. The most important thing, in her view, is the
absence of men. “Always, when I use the word ‘safe
place,’ it means the place for women.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer

Center.

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