The 4B worldview

What you’re about to read started out as a very different column. I’d intended to decry, if not completely disparage, the post-election, social media temper tantrum that is the 4B movement and the women purporting to join it. But there is more to the story.

If you’ve not yet heard of the 4B movement, it originated in South Korea in 2018 among young, liberal women. After South Korean men voted for a candidate who was accused of sexual abuse and whose judicial appointments led to overturned abortion rights, South Korean women decided they were done—with men, that is.

The four B’s in Korean translate to no marriage to men, no childbirth, no dating men, and no sex with men. Adherents were effectively on strike against men, punishing them, in part, for failing to support abortion access.

In the United States, the 4B movement was back in the news after President-elect Donald Trump won the 2024 election. In the days that followed, women took to Instagram and TikTok for a collective meltdown, shaving their heads, vowing to become unattractive, and swearing off sex, marriage, procreation, and men in general. Ostensibly, they protested Trump’s relative pro-life policies.

That’s ironic, given Trump’s squishy stances on life in the womb and the overwhelmingly pro-abortion ballot measures in the states. But not quite as ironic as the insistence on protecting sexual license by shunning casual sex and modern conformity to low-commitment, no-strings-attached “situationships.”

It’s even more ironic considering the global accounts of female oppression, about which pro-abortion women are altogether silent. Like the 9-year-old girls who are now eligible to marry grown men in Iraq. Or the 1.4 million girls the Taliban has deprived of an education since retaking Afghanistan. Or the countless Sudanese women subjected to sexual violence in the most under-reported humanitarian crisis in modern-day history. You won’t see marches or hashtags among the American left for these women and girls. That outrage is reserved for abortion access.

This brings me to the greatest irony in the 4B movement. The very sexual license it aims to protect as a personal right and withhold as a social weapon is the predominant cause of their relational discontent.

Listen to recent 4B converts, and you will hear more than outrage. You hear pain.

In the words of one 20-something, whose past sexual relationships included abuse and assault, men need “a wake-up call,” one that changes how they treat young women and girls. Another girl described breaking up with her boyfriend over his comments about Trump’s sexual abuse allegations and the death threats she received from men after sharing it on social media. Add to this the young men who declared following Trump’s election: “Your body, my choice,” a distortion of female sexuality that only confirmed women’s fears.

Histrionic as elements of the 4B movement are, it’s more than a hissy fit.

The last 60 years have afforded women unprecedented freedoms, yet they still feel unvalued and unsafe. The sexual revolution of the 1960s rejected every social, moral, and sexual expectation as a power-consolidating cultural construct. Women were “liberated” to define and pursue fulfillment on their own terms. Yet, despite these opportunities, “the paradox of declining female happiness” remains unresolved.

In her book, Adam and Eve After the Pill, Mary Eberstadt observes that the sexual revolution has not only proven to be disastrous for many men and women but that its negative effects fall heaviest on the “smallest and weakest shoulders in society—even as it has given extra strength to those already strongest and most predatory.”

Hookup culture, rampant pornography, and delayed marriage have disproportionately harmed women in the name of freedom. “The paradox of declining female happiness” runs parallel to a paradox of declining female value. The society that defines human sexuality and female personhood apart from their created design dehumanizes both.

The 4B movement is but the latest expression of the failures and fallout of the sexual revolution. In a time of unprecedented isolation and loneliness, its devotees believe fewer marriages, fewer children, and fewer families will lead to greater happiness and satisfaction.

For decades, women have pursued social power and personal fulfillment as their highest good through freedom in sexual relationships. Now, women are pursuing social power and personal fulfillment as their highest good through forsaking sexual relationships. Like all misdiagnosed maladies, the prescribed cure will bring even more harm.