“You are characterless.”“There is little scope for girls in sports.”“Where is your scarf? There are male teachers here.”“Just two girls?”“Menstrual leave? Your salary will be deducted.”“Don’t wear jeans.”“You’ve grown up now. You shouldn’t roam around. It’s better for young girls to stay indoors.”“I feel like I’m barely considered a woman.”These lines are not taken from the script of some ultra-feminist film where the hero finally walks away from the patriarchy in the concluding scene.They are spoken to by real women in real classrooms, playgrounds, homes and workplaces in response to the question: ‘What is it that you hear about being a woman?’When asked whether they took any action against it, the answer was mostly negative.And yet, in some parts of the world, women have begun to do something radical: They’ve stopped trying to negotiate with the patriarchy altogether. In South Korea, a small but radical feminist movement emerged in the late 2010s that rejected not only misogyny, but also the social institutions built around it. 4B – short form of ‘number four’ – This movement is where women choose to opt out of four things altogether.
What is 4B movement?
No marriage. No delivery. no dating. No sex. These words sound radical, but at their core they are language of refusal to participate in patriarchal norms. Known as the 4B movement, its name is made up of four Korean words biWhich means “no”: Bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no delivery), bionae (no dating), and bisexeu (no sex). Together, they mark a clear break from heterosexual relationships as they are traditionally structured in South Korea.
Is breaking out of patriarchy the only way to deal with it?
“Patriarchy shatters every sense of one’s existence. As much as you want to protest, you somehow find yourself becoming a part of it. It’s a sad situation because then you don’t feel honest, but can’t help either,” said Varalika Aditya Singh, who studied law, and is currently “figuring out the new normal after marriage”.He said, “Freedom from total conditioning is important. I don’t believe we can resist and also be a part of it.”Like earlier “separatist” feminist movements, 4B is not about the branding of individual lifestyles, but about political resistance: the rejection of institutions that many women see as pipelines to unpaid labor, reduced autonomy, and systemic inequality.Former journalist Bhagya Lakshmi said, “The grip of patriarchy on women is so deep that from their birth till their death, the dark, unyielding shadow of men follows them everywhere.”
What caused the movement in South Korea?
There is no precise event that gave rise to the movement, no single spark that clearly explains why some South Korean women began to collectively refuse marriage, motherhood, dating, and sex. Instead, the 4B united through accumulation – years of online hostility, public violence and institutional indifference, which turned into something even heavier than outrage: resolve.The background was already unfavorable. In the early 2010s, the rise of Ilbe Storage, a notoriously misogynistic online platform, helped harden what became known as South Korea’s “gender war”, normalizing slurs, rape jokes, and open contempt for women in mainstream digital culture. Against this tide, the feminist counter-movement began to form. By 2015, the ideas that would later define the 4Bs – no marriage, no childbearing, no dating, no sex – were circulating within the Megalia community, which is known for its use of “mirroring” tactics: reflecting misogynistic language onto men to highlight their violence and absurdity.In mid-2016, resistance took physical form with the emergence of the “Escape the Corset” movement. Young women rejected South Korea’s rigid beauty standards by cutting their hair short and destroying makeup on camera, redefining appearance as a locus of control and reclaiming bodily autonomy – an ethos that would directly involve rejecting the gendered expectations of 4B.Later that year, the Gangnam Station femicide, in which a woman was murdered by a stranger who said women ignored him, shattered any illusions that misogyny was merely rhetorical. This was followed by massive protests. Around the same time, the release of the so-called “pink birth map”, which reduced women’s fertility by rendering women as demographic tools rather than citizens, further stoked feminist anger.By 2017, the term “4B” itself began appearing on Daum Cafe forums and Twitter, as South Korea’s #MeToo movement took hold and feminist networks tightened. During 2017 and 2018, these online circles strengthened the movement, fueled by the shock of the Gangnam murder and a rising wave of sex crime scandals, including illegal filming and image-based abuse. By 2019, 4B had achieved widespread recognition on social media, with its visibility peaking before declining domestically – even as its views continued to resonate beyond South Korea’s borders.In that sense, 4B was born not from a moment but from momentum: a slow, collective decision that participation itself had become an obligation.
Do we have any similarity in India?
The conditions giving rise to 4B in South Korea are not exceptional – and in India, the parallels are often obvious. Like South Korea’s “gender wars”, misogyny is increasingly normalized in India’s digital sphere. in 2020 bois locker room The incident exposed a private Instagram group of teenage boys that were sharing deviant images of underage girls, making rape threats and casually discussing sexual violence. What troubled many observers was not just the content but its ordinariness: the ease with which entitlement and cruelty flourished in supposedly liberal, urban spaces. Like South Korea’s Ilbe Storage, the episode revealed how the online ecosystem can breed misogyny long before it escalates into physical harm.However, India is already known for its social media scandals when it comes to gender violence. The Nirbhaya gang rape and murder in Delhi in 2012 remains a defining rift – a moment that can be compared to South Korea’s Gangnam Station femicide. The crime sparked massive protests, legal reform, and global attention. Yet the burden of change fell unevenly. Women were urged to remain alert and flexible; Institutions were reformed on paper, while everyday patriarchy remained structurally intact.The scale of violence that women face in India remains severe. According to NCRB crime in india 2023 According to the report, cases of crime against women are expected to rise by a marginal 0.7% in 2023 from 4.45 lakh to 4.48 lakh cases. As in previous years, the most common crime was cruelty by husband or relatives, which accounted for about 30% of all cases – about 1.33 lakh incidents, affecting 1.35 lakh women. Although this category saw a slight decline from 2022, it dominates the data, underscoring how the roots of violence often lie inside the home. The NCRB also recorded 29,670 rape cases in 2023, involving 29,909 victims, while over 10,700 cases from the previous year are still pending. Most of the victims were young: about 20,000 people were between 18 and 30 years old, and 852 were children, some under the age of six.Shravya Singh, a teenager studying in a co-educational school in Ranikhet, recalled the difference in the way boys and girls were treated in her school.“I remember once, when I was standing with a friend, a teacher came up to us and said that your body looked ‘heavy’ and the shirt looked ‘weird’ and asked to sit in the therapy room instead,” she recalls.Asked if he saw the possibility of “dropping the sweater” in protest at his school, he said that if we tried to do something like that, it would mean “straight up suspension.”
So is there a possibility of 4B in India?
Varalika Aditya Singh said, “It’s a step too far,” however, he also said that he “agrees with the concept of abstinence from every possible aspect where patriarchy plays a big role”.“But in India I still believe that we do things just to please, a lot of it is under pressure to be accepted, validated and seen in a certain way. Women can choose to live this way but in secret,” she said.“In India it’s mostly vocal, nothing action,” said Neerja Nath, who works as a news writer.Given the fact that marriage is so embedded in Indian culture, when asked if it is a patriarchal institution, Singh agreed “absolutely”.However, he added that “marriage may not be completely patriarchal but the conditioning has always been that way.”She said, “I cannot and do not want to disregard an entire institution because patriarchy is pervasive everywhere. Marriage is also more convenient because there is a lot of stigma attached to it if the relationship does not last long.”
