The 4B Movement Has Become a Refuge for Women Tired of Toxic Men

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“I broke up with my boyfriend on election night, before we knew who would win,” says Abby, a 27-year old artist who lives in Florida (whose last name is being withheld for safety reasons). She announced her breakup from her Republican boyfriend on TikTok in a video showing her petting her cat (a subtle dig at Vice President-elect JD Vance for his “childless cat ladies” remarks), declaring her plan to “officially join the 4B movement.”

Abby’s video quickly went viral, garnering 9.5 million views and joining the growing ranks of women committed to separating themselves from men in every way. Soon after Donald Trump won the election, calls and pledges for the 4B movement began to trend (previously trending in April when influencer Drew Afualo talked about in on her platform) online in America, largely as a reaction to the anti-choice and misogynistic views upheld by Trump and by many of his supporters. At about 1 a.m. on November 6, a tweet went viral on X encouraging women to join the 4B movement and “give America a severely sharp birth rate decline.” Soon, the topic was gaining steam across social platforms. Some women, like Abby, have broken up with their partners, while others swore off dating men in the name of staving off a wave of misogyny ushered in by the new Trump era. Others, though, see the growing interest as a knee-jerk reaction to the election, one that’s unlikely to make any real change.

The 4B movement started in South Korea during the mid-to-late 2010s (around the time the #MeToo movement kicked off in the U.S.) in feminist digital spaces and on Twitter. In Korean, the “B” is shorthand for the word bi, which means “no.” The four “Bs” are bisekseu (no sex with men), bichulsan (no giving birth), biyeonae (no dating men), and bihon (no marrying men), according to The Cut. Some participants are even expanding to include 5 and 6 B’s, including sentiments like avoiding items that are “pink taxed.”

As young men have swung right, joining 4B for some is a way to take back power after feeling wronged or abandoned by the men in their lives, those who voted for a sexual abuser.

“We were talking on the phone and he said ‘you can’t hate Trump for just a little sexual assault,’” Abby tells Teen Vogue about what precipitated her breakup. (Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1970s by at least 26 women publicly, and has been found liable in court for one instance of sexual abuse. He continues to deny the other allegations.)

Abby knew while she was in the relationship that she and her now ex-boyfriend had different political views, “but that statement completely shattered all respect I had for him,” she says. It wasn’t just her boyfriend: “I realized most every man I know and love was able to overlook sexual assault as long as gas is cheaper under a Trump presidency,” Abby says, explaining why her breakup extended into swearing off men entirely.

For Data analyst, Ritu Khan, 24, the 4B movement is appealing because it seems like a way to leverage political power. Khan encourages women to boycott spaces where women are essentially a product men get for free. “Bars and clubs depend on the attendance of women for revenue,” she says, instead proposing that women and those who are marginalized should retreat to spaces that harness safety and sisterhood.

“Women could make a huge impact on the economy and leverage it to get the government to meet our demands, such as reinstating Roe v. Wade. [Because] this industry depends heavily on women, it is an act of protest to not be in attendance and disrupt their revenue,” Khan says. Other spaces that have the potential of becoming a safe haven are community focused ones, such as book clubs, cocktail clubs, and crafting clubs.

Dr. Lisa Wade, PhD, a sociologist and associate professor at Tulane University whose research focuses on college hookup culture, sees the interest in the 4B movement as a new form of an age-old practice.

“Withholding sex is an ancient feminist technique, isn’t it?” Wade says. "The sexual culture [women] have access to doesn’t appeal to them. If you want to apply that to the wider phenomenon in the United States now, some women say if this is how America wants to treat women, then we are going to walk away.”

Wade cited the increasing economic independence of women, noting that as women gain power, men may perceive that they’re losing it. That creates an obvious mismatch in what people expect in relationships. “If what women want an egalitarian relationship, and they don’t have that, then they want nothing,” she says. “It’s not that women decided to do without sex. Women and men are becoming so structurally mismatched this is an obvious reaction.”

The 4B movement isn’t the only push away from men. Lately, there have been cultural shifts to swear off dating and men such as becoming “boysober,” where women opt out of dating, evaluate toxic romantic dynamics like “situationships,” and instead focus energy on self-improvement and non-religiously affiliated celibacy. It also has become popular to “decenter men from your life,” an act of taking care of your mental health and having a better quality of life by prioritizing yourself.

But this decentering of men didn’t come from nowhere. “Women taking care of themselves isn’t causing a gender divide, the men are,” says content creator Andra Berghoff, 26. “How about we stop framing women who are focusing on themselves and bettering their lives as the problem with the gender divide and start focusing on the real issue, the men behaving so poorly that women to have to cut them out of their lives in movements?” While the 4B movement has largely been discussed as an internet trend, Berghoff wonders, “Have you ever heard anyone refer to the things men do as trends?”.

But Jey, (whose last name is also being withheld for safety reasons), 23, a data analyst, thinks the 4B movement seems unrealistic in the long term, especially since women contributed to Trump’s ascent.

“A lot of us could not even break up with our Trump voting boyfriends before this past week, and now we're expecting ourselves to swear off men entirely,” she says, emphasizing that the majority of white women voted for Trump, placing them in line with patriarchal values (it’s also been noted that many of the calls to join the 4B movement seem to be coming from white women). “It's like trying to enter a PhD program without even graduating high school, we need to do step one before anything else.”

For Jey step one involves white women holding each other accountable, pushing one other to actually take steps toward change, rather than investing loudly in the movement of the moment, without examining structural issues beneath. She feels like the wave of interest in the 4B movement is just that, a wave. “Our society has a history of having knee-jerk reactions that suggest we actually want change, just to disregard the issue at hand a single news cycle later,” she says.

Berghoff doesn’t know whether the increased interest in 4B will have a lasting impact, but she stresses that some women have been doing this work for years. Whether or not more women materially join the movement, Berghoff says, “I do know that this election has entirely shifted the narrative and approach to men and relationships at the very least.”

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue