On the misuse of 4B feminism to explain Korea

Courtesy of Insung Yoon

I recently gave a group of 11 young women the opportunity to speak at the Royal Asiatic Society. For months they prepared their topics, posters, and digital content, filled with nervous excitement that they would be talking to professors, diplomats, and members of society about the real issues that affected their lives. They spoke of outrageous beauty standards; they said that parents did not always understand their hobbies and the career paths they chose; they revealed what it was like dating foreign guys. And they did all this with passion and enthusiasm. Taking the freedom afforded them and demonstrating true courage to show the world who they really were and what they actually thought. The talk that night received a great ovation. People whooped with excitement. They clasped their hands, offering gratitude and praise. Thanks to technology, the talk given in downtown Seoul was examined in Polish lecture halls and Italian media offices. A great success.

It was only afterward, while reading the analyses and reports that followed, that I felt the dull recognition of something that had been bothering me for some time. One European analysis offered an excellent summary of the issues the young women had raised. And then, almost casually, it appended a section explaining how all of this should be understood as evidence of the 4B feminist movement in Korea, how a refusal to engage was only a thin red line away, and how 4B feminism was therefore the next logical step. I stopped reading. Paused. The women had spoken openly about their lives, their confusions, their hopes, their frustrations, and while many people had listened, others seemed to have been waiting patiently for the moment they could translate it all into something more familiar, more legible, and more convenient.

At no point had the women mentioned a 4B movement. They spoke of love and dating, of heartbreak and social pressure, of the creeping anxiety of late-stage capitalism and the quiet tragedy of existential uncertainty. They spoke as people. And yet, in the retelling, their words became something else entirely, evidence for a framework they had never invoked, pressed into the service of an explanation they had not offered. What was said, and what was heard, turned out to be two very different things.

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail

This was not the first time I had seen this interpretive move performed. A few days earlier, after an hour-long lecture on compressed modernity, a student from Singapore began her analysis with impressive confidence. “The result of such compressed national behavior,” she explained, “is that women adopt the 4B feminist movement and turn away from dating and marriage.” Now, not everyone is obliged to admire Professor Chang Kyung-sup’s work, and some may even find his theories opaque or irritating in the way that serious sociology often is. But to encounter a structural account of Korean modernity and then immediately collapse it into a single, pre-packaged conclusion, “this equals 4B feminism,” revealed something else entirely. People do not always fail to understand because the material is difficult. More often, they fail to understand because they are not really listening.

They come equipped with a hammer, and once you are holding a hammer, everything obligingly begins to look like a nail. Tap it. Strike it. Smash it flat. There. And there again. Hammer in the morning. Hammer in the evening. And, inevitably, hammer online, where repetition hardens into truth through sheer volume.

Korea’s low birthrate? 4B feminism. The gender divide? 4B feminism. Male conservatism, the rise and fall of Yoon Seok-yeol, pink parking spaces, people owning more dogs than children: everything, for some commentators, seems to point back to the same answer. To be clear, this is not an argument against the existence of the 4B feminist movement itself. There are undoubtedly people in Korea who identify with it, and their views deserve to be heard and taken seriously. But the reality is messier, and therefore less useful to those searching for clean explanations. Many feminists in Korea are married. They have children. They date. They worry about maternity leave, impossible housing prices, glass ceilings at work, and the asymmetry of the military system.

This complexity often comes as a shock to exchange students and international visitors. They arrive armed with warnings about demographic collapse, depression, radical individualism, and all-out gender war. And then they do something unforgivable to a good narrative: they go for a walk. They spend an afternoon in Sangsu or by the Han River. They visit COEX, the library, or one of the city’s indefensibly large number of coffee shops. And suddenly they are surrounded by couples with their matching outfits, shared selfies, and interlaced fingers. All so conspicuously affectionate that it feels almost impolite to stare. The problem, at that point, is not reality. It is that the language they brought with them no longer seems to describe what is right in front of their eyes.

And this is the point worth slowing down for. This is not an argument against the existence of 4B, nor a denial that some people in Korea genuinely identify with it. It is an argument against what happens when the term is repurposed as a kind of all-purpose interpretive key. Outside the country, 4B is often clung to like a mantra, invoked reflexively, repeated confidently, and circulated almost entirely online, where fluency in the vocabulary of a place is mistaken for familiarity with the place itself. In this form, it functions less as an analytical concept than as a shibboleth: a word whose primary purpose is not to explain reality but to signal belonging, to reassure the speaker that they are saying the correct thing in the correct register. At the same time, it becomes a fetishized idea, one that promises understanding without the inconvenience of inquiry, certainty without contact, and moral clarity without the messy obligation of listening. And, of course, 4B is only the most recent example.

Korean dramas, with all their gripping emotional weight and the oppression they reveal is said by many analysts to be evidence of the han of the Korean people. Han is the hammer. "Squid Game," "Parasite," "DP" and "The Glory" are the digital nails. And if only this were a Korean phenomenon. But it’s not. We use the same behavior to explain China, Democrats, Conservatists, religious groups, K-pop fans, and, basically everything else. “You see,” people proudly assert. “It’s communism. That’s the reason.” And you can only but wonder if those with the loudest voices know that China has Starbucks everywhere, iPhones in every pocket, and a middle class that values consumerism and individualism just as much as a citizen of western Europe.

The cruel irony of modern shibboleths

Social media has been extraordinary at connecting people, opening doors, sharing art, revealing injustice, and, of course, making memes. But if we are honest, that is not what it mostly does anymore. Platforms that once existed to keep us in touch with friends now function as endless delivery systems for short-form certainty, engineered to reward whatever can be understood, reacted to, and shared in under a minute. We are far more likely to encounter something funny, or enraging, or neatly explanatory than we are to see our friends’ holiday photos or hear them hesitate mid-thought.

By the same token, social media has elevated the permanently online into authoritative narrators of places they do not live in and lives they do not share. They become fluent in the vocabulary of a country without ever learning its language, confident in their explanations without ever submitting them to reality. Their imported words compress experience into something manageable, legible, and…wrong. And somewhere beneath all of this, buried under the hashtags, the frameworks, the hammers and the nails, are the voices of the young women who stood up, spoke honestly about their lives, and were then translated into something more convenient. The damage is not merely misunderstanding. It is that real speech, once flattened into slogan, stops being heard at all. And once language is used to explain people instead of listen to them, it stops being language and starts being a kind of soft violence.

But the cruel irony of all this is that the louder these explanations become, the easier it is to miss the fact that no one is actually listening anymore.