The South Korean “4B” movement exploded in popularity on U.S. social media after Donald Trump won the presidential election on Wednesday.
“4B” is shorthand for a South Korean movement in which women refuse to engage in heterosexual marriage, childbirth, dating, or sex with men. It comes from the words bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, and bisekseu, all of which start with a Korean prefix for “no.” It originated in 2019 in response to a culture that women felt was patriarchal beyond repair, and has since gained some traction in other countries.
But after Donald Trump won Tuesday’s election, 4B has gone viral among women in the United States. Posters are encouraging women to join the movement as a way to protect themselves as states restrict abortion and healthcare in many states and as Republicans muse about the potential of national abortion restrictions.
“American women it’s time to learn from the Koreans and adopt the 4b movement,” one user posted on X. “I’m so serious.”
Various videos about 4B have gone massively viral on TikTok, with one woman, stating that going 4b was the “best decision” she had ever made.
“As somebody who’s been 4b for two years now, I haven’t exactly talked about it because I don’t like people’s opinions about my decisions in my life,” she said. “But I’ve decided to be a little louder about it…We are not alone in this. We’re not crazy, and we have to do this together.”
Google searches for “4b” have also dramatically increased. While the search term had zero interest for the past six months, its interest spiked to 100 on Wednesday evening.
Jessica Valenti, the author of Abortion, shared a screenshot of search interest in the term skyrocketing. “If you want to know where young American women are at, the Google search term interest for the 4b movement says it all,” Valenti wrote.
On the subreddit r/TwoXChromosomes, many posters have started discussing the movement.
“Anyone else starting to feel like 4B is the only way?” one person wrote.
“The vow of celibacy starts now,” another person posted. “They no longer get access to us until they can prove they’re capable of caring about our basic rights, health, and safety. The ‘good men’ failed us by letting the bad men proliferate. They all have to be punished in a way they can understand. American men need to fix their fellow men. Let them suck the poison out of each other. We have the power to shun them.”
In another TikTok captioned “Trump presidency = 4B,” a user said that she would start supporting the movement.
“It doesn’t matter if you take away abortion,” she said. “We’ll want to have your babies even less. Even if you take away contraception—women are really good at celibacy, because you guys are actually a threat to us. We have a lot less to gain from you. 4B all the way. Let’s make some money, I guess. That’s all we can do now.”
Another woman posted on TikTok that she was “doing my part as an American woman by breaking up with my republican boyfriend last night & officially joining the 4b movement this morning.”
In South Korea, the 4B movement has become part of the story in a country that now has an incredibly low birth rate. Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, and Elon Musk have become obsessed with increasing the birth rate in the United States while simultaneously actively supporting or aligning themselves with a political party that is taking away women’s access to healthcare and bodily autonomy.
“Ladies, we need to start considering the 4B movement like the women in South Korea and give America a severely sharp birth rate decline,” one poster wrote on X in a tweet that has been viewed more than 19 million times. “We can’t let these men have the last laugh…we need to bite back.”
The spike in popularity comes right after abortion rights ballot initiatives passed in seven states and failed in three others.
