podcast
CNN One Thing
You’ve been overwhelmed with headlines all week – what's worth a closer look? One Thing takes you into the story and helps you make sense of the news everyone's been talking about. Every Wednesday and Sunday, host David Rind interviews one of CNN’s world-class reporters to tell us what they've found – and why it matters. From the team behind CNN 5 Things.
After Trump’s Win, the 4B Movement Goes Viral In the US
CNN One Thing
Nov 13, 2024
As his opponents across the country come to grips with another Donald Trump presidency, some women are exploring a movement that basically swears off romantic relationships with men. In this episode, we explore its origins and the limits of its message.
Guest: Harmeet Kaur, CNN Culture Writer
Episode Transcript
David Rind
00:00:03
When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, the response was loud and it was visible.
Reporter
00:00:10
Many of them clad in pink. Women gathered in Washington in staggering numbers to march for civil rights.
Woman
00:00:16
This isn't a feminist movement. It's a humanist movement. It's not about women. It's not just about women. It's about all rights.
David Rind
00:00:23
Millions took to the streets around the country after the inauguration as part of the Women's March.
Reporter
00:00:29
The mass of people in Washington grew larger than the route they intended to march. The same thing happened in Boston, where the police chief noted that the intended path of marchers would be, quote, like a snake eating its tail.
David Rind
00:00:41
The response since last week's election has been a little more muted so far, at least in public. For many liberal women, though, Trump's win over Vice President Kamala Harris stings just as bad as it did in 2016. But the way forward is unclear, and now some are seriously thinking about taking drastic action.
Tik Tok
00:01:05
You guys know that my husband turned Republican this term. I don't know why threw his ass out of the house.
Tik Tok
00:01:11
Me and my girls are participating in the 4B movement.
Tik Tok
00:01:13
No more kitty cat for moderate men.
David Rind
00:01:16
In the days after Trump's election, there has been a surge of online interest about a little known movement known as 4B. My guest is CNN's Harmeet Kaur. She explains why this fringe feminist movement from South Korea is suddenly getting a lot of attention in the U.S. from CNN. This is One Thing. I'm David Rind.
David Rind
00:01:44
So, Harmeet, you cover culture for CNN and you've been looking into how liberal women have been reacting to Donald Trump's victory. What did you find?
Harmeet Kaur
00:01:52
Yeah. So for a lot of liberal women, this election was a referendum on abortion rights, but also more broadly, how women are treated in the country.
Vice President Kamala Harris
00:02:01
Like the fundamental freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own not have her government tell her what to do.
Harmeet Kaur
00:02:14
We had Kamala Harris, who would have been the country's first female president. She was running against Donald Trump, who was found liable for sexual abuse and whose appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices led to the overturning of Roe v Wade.
President Elect Trump
00:02:29
I said, well, I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not, I'm going to protect them from migrants coming in.
Harmeet Kaur
00:02:35
So Democrats had hoped that the contrast between Harris and Trump and the issue of abortion rights would energize voters and deliver a win for Harris.
David Rind
00:02:44
And specifically, like suburban women, voters like that group. They wanted them to show up in a big way.
Harmeet Kaur
00:02:50
Yes. And though we saw some abortion rights, ballot measures succeed on a state level, on a federal level, that didn't really pan out the way that Democrats had hoped. And at the same time, the dynamic between young men and young women online was really tense on election night, even before media outlets had officially called the race for Trump. Some young men were commenting on young women's posts, trolling them, saying, Your body, my choice or...
David Rind
00:03:23
Oh, your body my choice. Not like my body, my choice, which is what a lot of women have been saying about reproductive rights. Yes.
Harmeet Kaur
00:03:30
And so the culmination of all of this pushed a lot of young the liberal women to a boiling point. They were fed up with men who they see as at best apathetic to their rights and worse, hostile. So on election night, in the hours of the early morning leading to the couple of days after, we see a huge surge of interest online for a little known movement called for 4B.
David Rind
00:03:58
4B, what is that?
Harmeet Kaur
00:03:59
'4B is this fringe feminist movement that started in South Korea in the mid-to-late 20 tens. Essentially, it boils down to women refusing to do the things that have traditionally been expected of them. And so the word B means no in Korean. And so the 4 Bs correspond to no marriage, no childbirth, no dating and no sex with men.
Judy Han
00:04:20
It's like a refusal. It's it's the this this word B actually in Korean implies a kind of a rejection and a refusal.
Harmeet Kaur
00:04:29
I spoke to Judy Hahn, an assistant professor in gender studies at UCLA, and she says the 4B movement was started around 2015 or 2016 and it reached a peak around 2018.
Judy Han
00:04:40
'I think a lot of a lot of folks, probably because of K-Pop and various Netflix, Korean dramas and whatnot, maybe have glimpses of South Korean society as modern and empowering, perhaps for women. But that's certainly not the experience for a lot of women, if not most. Most women in South Korea.
Harmeet Kaur
00:05:00
The South Korea has one of the worst gender wage gap among industrialized nations. Things like revenge, porn and digital sex crimes have been serious issues there. And the Forbes movement there specifically arose out of this context of extreme gender inequality and a society that was really polarized along gender lines. In light of this really stark gender inequality in South Korea. There was one event that really took things to another level.
Reporter
00:05:28
Thousands of messages coded over the walls of exit number ten of Gangnam station. From words of condolences and sorrow to messages condemning hate crimes against women and calling for a safer society.
Woman
00:05:40
It breaks my heart and it makes me angry. She died because she's a woman.
Harmeet Kaur
00:05:45
In 2016, a woman was brutally killed near a Seoul subway station. The perpetrator reportedly said that he killed her because he felt ignored by women.
Reporter
00:05:55
The court decided he committed the crime because he was a schizophrenic. Regardless, the cause of the victim's death was simply being a woman.
Harmeet Kaur
00:06:03
And so this kicked off a national reckoning about systemic gender violence and discrimination in the country. And so in the context of all this, women responded to that in a lot of different ways. But one of them was this sort of extreme for B movement, which was swearing off marriage, childbirth, dating, sex.
David Rind
00:06:29
I mean, it does sound extreme, right? How would this actually work? And like, have any people actually done this?
Harmeet Kaur
00:06:36
'Yeah. So in South Korea, a small number of women did actually engage in this. But on the professor I talked to said it's not super widespread. In recent years, especially, the Forbes movement has kind of diminished and splintered off into different factions over disagreements about the role of queer and trans women. He said that some factions of the 40 movement in Korea have taken a pretty anti-trans turn. But this broader issue of disengaging with men. Is really resonating with some women in the US right now.
Tik Tok
00:07:12
Leave your husband, please leave your leave your husband.
Tik Tok
00:07:17
Hello and welcome to your 373rd post on the 4B movement on your FYP.
Tik Tok
00:07:24
At 36 years old, it is the best thing I've ever done for my mental health.
Harmeet Kaur
00:07:29
'On TikTok, we're seeing videos of women shaving their heads really defiantly saying that they're done with men. They no longer want to participate in this system. But other women that I spoke to said that they're not necessarily trying to stick it to men, but rather that they are doing this as an act of self-preservation.
Harmeet Kaur
00:07:47
Can you talk to me a little bit about how you learned about this movement? And what about it resonated with you?
Alexa Vargas
00:07:54
Yeah. So I kind of like unintentionally was participating in 2022.
Harmeet Kaur
00:08:00
Because I spoke with a woman named Alexa Vargas who said that she stopped engaging with men after a series of unhealthy relationships.
Alexa Vargas
00:08:07
There's a very crazy spectrum of men right now in the dating pool. And no matter which way you kind of go, most of them are just not really good enough to be dating women. Unfortunately.
Harmeet Kaur
00:08:24
That was before she even knew that for Abby was a thing. And then when she found this language and movement around it, she said that she found it empowering.
Alexa Vargas
00:08:34
I think it's healthy for women to just stop always putting relationships first. I think what we need to do is go with it.
Harmeet Kaur
00:08:44
And so she says that her choice was more about doing what was best for her and not so much getting men to change, but rather sort of preserving and protecting her own peace and safety.
Abby
00:08:58
So I'm trying to be open here. But I was on the phone with him and I said, I really don't want a sexual predator in office. And he said, So you're going to hit him over just a little bit of sexual assault.
Harmeet Kaur
00:09:11
I also spoke with a woman named Abby who did it more as a reaction to the moment. She said that she broke up with her boyfriend after, you know, the results were called and they were talking about Trump's win. And she said that her boyfriend made light of Trump's history of sexual abuse and was dismissive of her feelings around it.
Abby
00:09:32
And that was like my moment of the call is coming from inside the house. Like the horror movie moment of this is all the men in my life voting for Trump.
Harmeet Kaur
00:09:44
And that was it. She broke up with him and she posted a video about it online and said that she had decided to join the 4B movement.
Abby
00:09:51
I know I posted something on the Internet, so I should have been prepared for whatever came my way. But the amount of men in my DMS telling me like I deserve sexual assault like.
Harmeet Kaur
00:10:04
And in response, men started responding with a spate of really hateful comments about her appearance, calling her fat, calling her ugly. They said they hope that she killed herself. Just all kinds of really ugly things.
Abby
00:10:20
I wasn't expecting that. I didn't know. Me simply saying I'm removing myself from the dating pool could would elicit such hate. So that's been really eye opening for me. And it doesn't exactly entice you to reenter the dating pool for sure.
David Rind
00:10:50
I guess I'm wondering, are they hopeful that any of this conversation will bring about actual change that lawmakers would actually like, think about this in any way? Or does this amount to just some some viral research in the days after an election that a lot of women weren't happy about?
Harmeet Kaur
00:11:08
Yeah. So a lot of the women that I spoke to weren't under any illusions that this movement would necessarily make men change their ways or that it would, you know, topple a patriarchal system as they would describe.
David Rind
00:11:20
They've been trying that for thousands of years. Right?
Harmeet Kaur
00:11:22
Right.
David Rind
00:11:23
I could see a world where some men just don't even engage with like the broader message of what these women are trying to get at and where they just read it as, these women want nothing to do with men. They see us as irredeemable. So I guess, couldn't it make this gender divide that we see, especially in American politics, you know, get even worse?
Harmeet Kaur
00:11:45
I think one thing to note is that it is really early and in so much that there is a 4B movement in the U.S. it's mostly a conversation that is happening online. It's hard to tell how many people are actively participating in it, how many people are pushing back against it. And Han Actually, the professor that I spoke to said that she didn't think that the movement had the potential to really go mainstream in the US for a lot of reasons.
Judy Han
00:12:15
'So, for instance, it assumes that while their boyfriends and husbands voted for Trump, somehow women did not. But we already know from post-election data that's coming out that a lot of women did support Trump. A lot of a lot of women did support his election.
Harmeet Kaur
00:12:35
So she said it was pretty focused on the gender binary. Also, it ignores the fact that plenty of women voted for Trump election, you know, fewer than for Harris. But according to exit polls, Harris won the women vote less decisively than Biden did in 2020. So it seems in her view that American interest in the four B movement is going to subside pretty quickly.
Judy Han
00:12:57
But what I what I think A 4B movement really emphasize is that this is a collective reckoning, that this is a collective refusal and that this is about women seeing each other as being situated similarly.
Harmeet Kaur
00:13:11
I spoke to one woman, Hadia Kanani, who told me that even though she herself has not been dating men or engaging with men, and she's doing that to prioritize herself, she didn't think that adopting the 4B movement on a wider level was the solution. And that was because she said the problem goes much deeper. You know, she wants women to think more critically about the role that they all play in raising men to be respectful citizens.
David Rind
00:13:42
It feels like an extension to in some ways of the MeToo movement and where that did or didn't succeed. And then the first Trump presidency and all the conversations that were had there and now with the overturning of Ro and the idea of reproductive rights being so central in the political discussion, it seems like there's just this continuing grappling for women of like where they fit into the picture. Does that sound right to you?
Harmeet Kaur
00:14:10
Exactly. A lot of women that I spoke to that said they were participating in the 4B movement weren't necessarily doing it to prove a point to men or because they thought that it would necessarily change anything. They were doing it as a personal choice to protect themselves in a society that they feel is not looking out for them.
Alexa Vargas
00:14:31
I just think that men need like a wake up call. I don't know if men are going to change their ways. I don't know how this is really going to pan out. Honestly, I don't know. But I my goal in life and in this movement, I guess, is to protect young women and girls.
Harmeet Kaur
00:14:56
It's just one response, one way that people who are hurt by Trump's when are trying to cope with that.
Abby
00:15:04
I don't ever expect everyone in America to hold hands and agree not to date men. I, I don't see that happening. I can't see it sparking something. I definitely see it fueling change in some way.
David Rind
00:15:21
All right. Thank you.
Harmeet Kaur
00:15:22
Thanks, David.
David Rind
00:15:35
One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. If you're new here, first of all, welcome. And just a reminder to hit the follow button wherever you're listening so you don't miss an episode. We do this twice a week on Wednesday and Sunday, and we'll talk to you then.
