Could America’s women boycott men?

The 4B movement encourages women to swear off sex, dating, marriage, and childbearing with men—and after Trump’s election, it’s picking up steam

Illustration by me.

Like everyone else, I’m forced to come to terms with the fact that with Trump in office, we face another four years of having our reproductive rights systematically repealed. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. And following Trump’s reelection, my FYP is full of women sobbing into their pillows and talking passionately at their screens—and encouraging one another to join the 4B Movement: a niche, radical feminist movement set on “boycotting” men. The 4B Movement—which is rapidly picking up steam on TikTok, where users have uploaded thousands of videos on the subject—originated in 2019, and is intended to protest South Korea’s pro-natalist, patriarchal policies. It hinges on “Four Nos”: no dating men (biyeonae), no marrying men (bihon), no having sex with men (bisekseu), and no having children with men (bichulsan). Now, the movement is going viral on TikTok, with American women advocating for same policies as a form of protest and self-protection.

Women's sexual abstinence has long been called on in radical feminist movements challenging the hetero-patriarchy. But its modern resurgence begs the question: Does women denying themselves pleasure achieve political progress, or is it another emotional burden to bear? After all, women already take on a disproportionate amount of domestic labor at home and more emotional labor in relationships. In fact, heterosexual couplings are often accompanied by so many nebulous, hard-to-define inequities that studies show single women are far happier than women married to men—so the idea that we’d be better off without them isn’t entirely unfounded.

A chart that appeared in the Financial Times, indicating an increasing gender divide.

According to an article in The Cut, many South Korean women believe that adhering to the 4B movement, or “practicing bihon,” is the only path by which they can live autonomously in a society that is “hopelessly patriarchal” and views their bodies as tools of the state. “In their view, Korean men are essentially beyond redemption,” Anna Louie Sussman, writes, noting that while 4B’s adherents “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.” 

Emerging around 2015 or 2016, the movement grew out of 2016’s “Escape the Corset” movement, which called for South Korean women to liberate themselves from oppression—using the term “corset” metaphorically to reference the sexual, social, physical, and psychological restrictions born of a patriarchal system. It’s hard to pin down the exact number of adherents, with some articles putting the number at 5,000, others at 50,000.

The 4B movement seems extreme—but as some TikTok commenters are quick to point out, it isn’t so different from what many of us are already doing. In recent years, we’ve witnessed celibacy’s great rebrand—with a rising number of young, liberal U.S. women joining the #BoySober movement, which was described as “this year’s hottest mental health craze” in The New York Times. Sex positive feminism sold casual sex to women as a source of empowerment and pleasure—but between the malaise of dating apps, the low emotional accountability of hookup culture, and the alleged choking epidemic, it seems to have lost its luster.

Between a profusion of tradwife content, the rise of the stay-at-home-girlfriend, and Gen Z’s rightwing turn, I’m suspicious anything that rebrands the conservative values of yesteryear as liberating for the modern woman. But while reframing abstinence as empowering is an undeniably clever sleight-of-hand, there’s also no denying the fact that for women forced to contend with an increasingly hostile dating environment, swearing off sex might feel less like a sacrifice and more like a form of self-care. In principle, I don’t think women should have to sacrifice their own sexual pleasure on the alter of political progress. At the same time, their willingness to do so—and the fact that they might not be giving up much, given that up to 80 percent of women are faking orgasms to soothe male egos—speaks to the sorry state of sex and dating in America, even before Donald Trump’s win.

There’s a growing political divide between genders, particularly among Gen Z. According to preliminary exit polls in Pennsylvania, women aged eighteen to twenty-nine swung forty points for Kamala Harris, while their male counterparts swung twenty-four points for Donald Trump. And as Jia Tolentino observes in an article for The New Yorker, both candidates embraced the gender war in their election strategy. Trump turned his attention away from his female base and instead courted young men, demonstrating his commitment to “the institution of gender” with a proliferation of anti-trans campaign ads; Harris doubled down with young women, speaking to female audiences on the podcast “Call Her Daddy” and running campaign ads about how wives don’t have to disclose their liberal votes to their Trump-supporting husbands. (This is, by the way, a very real phenomenon: 30 percent of married couples hold different political views, and in the weeks leading up to the election, many women took to social media to post about “canceling out” their Trump-supporting partner’s vote—or even leveraging their own weaponized incompetence against them by, say, not reminding them to register.)

Thus far, the role of the 4B Movement in the U.S. is largely theoretical, not practical, with numerous viral tweets, threads, and TikToks serving as evidence of our collective angst. This gendered animosity is far from one-sided: When a young woman posted about 4B on the r/Gen Z subreddit, the thread became so hostile it had to be shut down, with countless men hurling vitriol at women for the very idea that they might want to abstain from having sex with them—which, of course, kind of proves the point.

A post on the Gen Z subreddit that was met with a wave of misogynistic harassment, causing it to be taken down within hours.

I’m not sure matching incel energy with femcel energy moves us any closer to healing the gender divide, nor do I think withholding sex is inherently progressive. In a sense, straight women holding their own desires hostage reaffirms the idea of sex as a relational bargaining chip—something women do for men, rather than wanting it on their own terms. But it’s also not hard to imagine that—in a dating environment that disproportionately benefits men, and a time when our reproductive rights are being systematically repealed—some women would view abstaining from sex as a way to reclaim control over their bodies.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for celibacy, nor do I think we should give up on men and lean into heteropessimism—I just think we should exercise common sense and engage sexually with the right (read: not right-leaning) men. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that women’s current dismay is real, and the choice to refuse sex is born from a complex matrix of sociopolitical factors—including male violence and the very real risk heterosexual sex can pose to our safety, especially in states without abortion protections. There’s truth to the old adage that while men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will kill them. And in a moment when our reproductive rights are increasingly under threat, it’s beginning to feel like death by a thousand cuts.