American women are swearing off sex with men after Donald Trump's election victory

7 November 2024, 18:53

American women are swearing off sex with men in the wake of Donald Trump’s election win by adopting a South Korean feminist movement.

A South Korean movement where women swear off marriage, dating, giving birth and having sex with men has gone viral in the US after Donald Trump’s election win.

Following the overturning of Row v Wade, the Supreme Court decision that enshrined abortion rights on a national level, in 2022, this week’s election became a referendum on women’s reproductive rights for many Americans.

So when Donald Trump stormed to victory against Kamala Harris, some women took to social media to announce they would adopt a radical South Korean feminist movement and swear off men for good.

The 4B movement has gone viral on TikTok and Instagram in the wake of Trump’s victory, with many young women pinning the blame for Kamala Harris’ defeat on men.

The radical movement calls for women to adopt the four “no’s”, no sex, no dating, no marriage and no giving birth.

Specifically the “Bs” refer to:

• Bihon: the refusal of heterosexual marriage
• Bichulsan: the refusal of childbirth
• Biyeonae: abstaining from dating men
• Bisekseu: the rejection of heterosexual sexual relationships as a whole

4B rose to prominence on social media in the mid-2010s amid a rise in conservative values and violence against women across South Korea.

The 2016 murder of a 23-year-old woman in a public bathroom in Seoul shot the movement into the mainstream and that, combined with the rise of #MeToo, placed women’s rights at the centre of public discourse.

“It comes from the everyday life experience of young women,” Sunyoung Park, an associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Southern California told the Washington Post.

“It has gone beyond the hashtag and [social media] and is making newspaper headlines because conservative men, male intellectuals, are reacting to it.”

She said the “the Instagram generation” or Gen Z is the driving force behind the 4B movement, with that seemingly the case in the United States also.

While these views may seem radical, the victory of Donald Trump’s anti-abortion platform has seen many women on social commit to adopting them.

Since Tuesday, posts mentioning 4B on X have been viewed by more than 45 million accounts. One post urged women to "start considering the 4B movement like the women in South Korea and give America a severely sharp birth rate decline.

The post added: "We can't let these men have the last laugh… we need to bite back."

One TikTok, with 4.5 million views, said: “Doing my part as an American woman by breaking up with my Republican boyfriend and adopting the 4B movement.”

While it remains to be seen if women will adopt the 4B en masse, this election has clearly highlighted the stark gender divide in American politics as men rallied around Trump and women backed Harris.