Trump’s victory boosts 4B feminist movement in the US: ‘Divorce your husbands, leave your boyfriends!’

Maria woke up the morning after Donald Trump won the presidency feeling “spicy.” She grabbed a razor and began shaving her head while recording the process for TikTok. “I’m giving up on America,” she said as she tried to shave off her hair until she gave up, grabbed a pair of scissors, and began cutting it off in chunks. “Fuck being everything the patriarchy wants us to be, because they clearly don’t give a shit about us,” she continued in the three-and-a-half-minute video, which has already racked up more than four million views. “If you’re a man, I will not be talking to you. I’m going to be promoting the 4B movement from here on out.”

But what did she mean by the “4B movement”? Trump’s election as the next U.S. president has sparked a wave of social media posts discussing the South Korean-born 4B feminist movement, which advocates for women to swear off men altogether. Maria — @girl_dumphim on TikTok — explained in her video: “Women, stop dating men. Stop having sex with men. Stop talking to men. Divorce your husbands, leave your fucking boyfriends, leave them! They don’t give a shit about you.”

Since election night on Tuesday, searches for the “4B movement” on Google in the United States have skyrocketed by 4,000%, making it one of the top trending topics over the past 72 hours. The five states showing the highest interest — Washington, D.C., Colorado, Vermont, Minnesota, and Maine — are all Democratic strongholds, indicating that progressive women, disillusioned by Kamala Harris’ loss, are driving the surge. TikToker Maria, for example, lives in New York, according to her video.

For Harris and many of her supporters, women’s rights were at the heart of this election. The vice president’s campaign focused on the fight for reproductive rights, hoping it would galvanize the female vote in her favor and against Trump. However, women ended up gravitating towards him, despite his misogynistic rhetoric and the fact that he was responsible for the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision to overturn the federal right to abortion. Women shifted to the right, with Harris winning the female vote by only eight points, compared to Biden’s 15-point margin in 2020, according to exit polls.

For many progressive women, Trump’s victory, along with the failure of abortion rights referendums in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, is a threat to their reproductive freedoms. While Trump has expressed support for states legislating abortion rights, they fear a federal ban on abortion or at least a nationwide law restricting it to 15 weeks, as he has previously proposed. Their alarm is compounded by the fact that the new president is a man convicted of sexual assault and accused of rape.

In response, many are turning to the 4B movement. TikToker @rabbitsandtea posted on Wednesday: “Doing my part as an American woman by breaking up with my Republican boyfriend last night and officially joining the 4B movement this morning.” Her post quickly went viral, accumulating over 9.4 million views, with more than 10 additional videos explaining her decision in the face of widespread backlash.

To counter this, they are turning to the 4B movement. Another TikToker (@rabbitsandtea) posted on Wednesday: “Doing my part as an American woman by breaking up with my Republican boyfriend last night and officially joining the 4B movement this morning.” Her post quickly went viral, accumulating over 9.4 million views, and she has since posted more than 10 additional videos explaining her decision in the face of the backlash.

The 4B movement, inspired by global feminist movements like #MeToo, began in South Korea in 2019 amid protests against the country’s deeply entrenched gender inequalities and misogynistic culture. The movement gained momentum during the 2021 presidential election, when conservative candidate Yoon Suk-Yeol campaigned on abolishing the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, claiming that structural sexism didn’t exist in the country. South Korea also has one of the largest gender pay gaps among OECD countries and the world’s lowest birth rate, with women of reproductive age averaging less than one child, according to 2023 data.

The “4B” refers to four key rejections: heterosexual marriage (bihon in Korean), having children (bichulsan), dating men (biyeonae) and having sexual relations with them (bisekseu).

In the United States, discussions about the 4B movement have not been confined to TikTok, with users advocating for it on other platforms such as X, Instagram, Reddit or Facebook. “Ladies, we need to start considering the 4B movement like the women in South Korea and give America a severely sharp birth rate decline: no marriage, no childbirth, no dating men, no sex with men. We can’t let these men have the last laugh, we need to bite back,” reads a post on X with more than 20.4 million views.

In addition to swearing off men, some social media users are also encouraging women to sign up for self-defense classes, support female-run businesses, and cultivate the female relationships and friendships in their lives. “Reminder that the 4B movement, and the separatist movement in general, isn’t just about avoiding men—it’s also about supporting and investing in women,” one posted on X.

While the 4B movement has gained international traction and popularity in recent years, particularly as young women around the world have discovered it through social media, it remains relatively small outside of South Korea. Experts suggest that, in the United States, the movement is largely a reaction to Trump’s election.

“It’s a temporary means to bring attention to the precarious situation of women, with Trump and his ascending to power,” Katharine Moon, a professor at Wellesley College and an expert on women’s movements in East Asia, told The New York Times. “So it’s not really about a total commitment to a way of life without men. Whereas in South Korea, it is a way of life.”

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