Facing the camera, Maria Barbieri had the clippers out. Donald Trump had just been elected US president and the creator, who posts under the handle @girl_dumphim, woke up “feeling spicy.” She tried to shave her head, eventually grabbing scissors and cutting off chunks at a time. “Giving up on America? [I] have,” she says in a TikTok posted Wednesday morning. “Also given up on coloring this hair, because, right? Fuck coloring my hair. Fuck having my hair be long and luxurious … Fuck being all the things that the patriarchy wants us to be because, clearly, they don’t give a shit about us.”
A floating bit of text on the video reads “Opting out. 4B”—a reference to the feminist movement, started in South Korea, encouraging women to not marry, date, sleep with, or have children with men until all genders have equal rights. As of this writing, it’s gotten more than 3 million views.
Barbieri was just one of several people who posted videos about 4B on Wednesday. Another says, “Doing my part as an American woman by breaking up with my Republican boyfriend last night & officially joining the 4b movement this morning.” It has nearly 9 million views and the poster, @rabbitsandtea, did several follow-up videos to respond to comments about her decision and appearance.
A video from creator @smith.woods with more than 50,000 views joined the movement with this message: “Trans girls, lock it up.”
“There’s no sleeping with men that is worth risking your life and your safety,” says TikTokker Regan, who goes by @ftheniceguy on TikTok, also encouraged women to swear off men (though she herself is gay). “When they have showcased time and time again that they don’t value who you are and they don’t vote for you, they don’t stand up for you. It’s important that you protect yourself when they’re not willing to protect you.”
Talk of adapting the 4B movement to American politics isn’t just taking off on TikTok. Since Tuesday, there has also been chatter on X, Threads, and r/Feminism. Google search interest in the movement shot up in the hours after it became clear Trump would win the US presidency, an election in which Trump saw big gains in his appeal to young male voters.
The 4B movement originated in South Korea, and encourages women to opt out of marriage (bihon), childbirth (bichulsan), romance (biyeonae), and sexual relationships (bisekseu). Born out of protests against South Korea’s culture—instances of dating violence, revenge porn, and gender wage gaps are widespread—the movement has grown in recent years. South Korea has the lowest birth rate of any country, and despite government incentives, many women still feel the country’s patriarchal structure makes the cost of motherhood too high, and refuse to be “baby-making machines,” according to reporting from the New York Times.
Although it started in the late 2010s, the movement didn’t really gain attention in the US until earlier this year. New York magazine published a long feature on it in March in which writer Anna Louie Sussman laid out the ways in which 4B adherents were, as Barbieri demonstrated on TikTok, cutting their hair and eschewing beauty products. “The blowback and fear that 4B practitioners experience underscores their conviction that Korea is still a frightening place for women,” Sussman wrote, noting the threats and attacks women, and specifically 4B protesters, receive.
Some creators who spoke to WIRED were already participating in the movement before the election. Dalina, who uses they/them pronouns and asked to withhold their last name for privacy reasons, was casually seeing a man when, they say, “he made a joke along the lines of like, ‘I considered coming inside of you.’” Dalina says at that moment their blood ran cold. “I thought, ‘Why does that sound like a threat?’ It’s like, because it is a threat … He also knew that it was a threat.”
Since then, Dalina, who goes by @senoracabrona on TikTok, says they have sworn off romantic and sexual entanglements with men. Their video, including text telling women to look up the 4B movement, has garnered more than 130,000 views on TikTok.
With the election of Trump, and all the threats to reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights and misogyny that entails, women online seemed to be channeling the fear they felt into action in similar ways.
Barbieri says when she posted her original 4B video it was the result of something she’d been investigating for several months via her involvement in feminist spaces on Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram. After her post went up, she got several negative comments from men, but was surprised to find a lot of support, particularly from women interested in the movement.
“I’m getting private messages from people all over the world who are supporting the, quote, ‘losing’ side,” Barbieri says.
TikTok creator Ashli Pollard tells WIRED that she has been practicing 4B for two years and says the experience has been freeing. “It’s just I didn’t realize how much of my upbringing and my thought process was centered around men until I decided to step away from it for a little bit,” she says. She had not shared her story publicly, however, until after the election, when she saw other women on TikTok posting about starting a 4B movement.
“I think part of it was I was furious. But I also don’t want people to think it’s just some 21-year-old on this app who is upset about the results of the election,” Pollard says. “I’m a 36-year-old and I made a very considerate decision about how I want to live my life.”
Pollard says she, like many of the women posting about 4B, has received a lot of attention—and also pushback. In the comments of some 4B videos and others discussing reproductive rights, (presumably) male users have responded with “your body, my choice,” quoting white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who jubilantly cried, “We control your bodies!” on a livestream during election night.
TikTok declined to comment on the record about whether or not the phrase violates its Community Standards, but four videos using the phrase flagged by WIRED were removed after this article published.
“[The maternal death rates] are out of this fucking world, and they keep climbing. Why on earth should anyone be subjected to that?” says Dalina. “Was the sex even that good? Was it even that great? What value are these men bringing to you if they’re not even protecting you?”
Updated 11-7-24, 5:30 pm EST: This story was updated with response from TikTok.
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