2spirit-1spoon
Additional context because I know the radfems are going to get their hands on this and love it:
- "Korea has the largest gender pay gap in the rich world, with women earning 31 percent less than men, and women still face widespread discrimination in the labor market, something the movement recognizes."
- "In 2016, a young man murdered a young woman in a Seoul public bathroom, telling police after that he killed her because women had always ignored him. Despite the perpetrator’s own statement, police refused to label the murder a hate crime. Furious, women flocked to online feminist message boards, communities, and chat forums. This wave of digital feminism attracted women from all backgrounds, including working-class women like Minji and Youngmi, making it different from traditional Korean feminism, which was largely confined to universities, NGOs that often received government support, and other elite spaces.
- In December of that year, as Korea’s fertility rate hovered at 1.2 births per woman (it has since slid to 0.78, the lowest in the world), the Korean government launched an online “National Birth Map” that showed the number of women of reproductive age in each municipality, illustrating just what it expected of its female citizens. (South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol won the election in March 2022 with a message that blamed feminism for Korea’s low birth rate, and a promise to abolish the country’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. ) Women were outraged by the map, observing that the government appeared to consider them “livestock”; one Twitter user reportedly created a mock map illustrating the concentration of Korean men with sexual dysfunction. Several of these digital feminists responded with a boycott to the reproductive labor expected by the state and decided that the surest way to avoid pregnancy was to avoid men altogether.
- It was through these online communities that 4B emerged as a slogan, and ultimately a movement.
It's not just about hating men.
It's a political statement and protest for equality that specifically seeks to eliminate the way the way Korean women are used, abused, discarded within the patriarchy by their own refusal to participate in any of it or associate with anyone who benefits from it.
It's very specifically about Demanding equality from men in power by refusing to take part in the patriarchy and challenging the way it perceives women.
It's becoming a topic in the west now and so I wanted to add all this context with the addendum that this is NOT an inherently transphobic movement. It's also completely autonomous meaning there is no "leader" of it.
Each person will have their own reasons and method of participating in this movement. Anyone can join or be part of it. Yes this includes radfems and TERFs so when they eventually try to co-opt this movement as their own let's remember that they don't speak for all feminists and theyre definitely NOT the voice of oppressed Korean women who started this, and as such have No reason to put themselves in the spotlight of this movement. And we have no reason to let them.
rui-cifer
The post above is incredible because it's actually just literally what allies of trans-exclusionary radical feminists say in South Korea when they're trying to show that they're not exterminationists about trans people while still saying that TERFs' behaviors towards trans women should be excused. For someone who is vehemently against TERFs, or so they say, the responder above has essentially ceded every ground that Korean "neutral" feminists have ceded in half a decade in one tumblr post.
For instance, Lee Nayoung's "Theorizing Sexuality and Feminist Sexual Politics: Development and Encounter of Feminism and Queer Theory" essentially also says that radical feminism is not about hating men, and that Queer Theorists (including transfeminists) should simply make up and hold hands with the same people who called for their extermination in the cademic space.
Lee hyomin's "Radical Reconstruction of Feminist Politics: Focusing on the Critical Analysis of 'TERF' in South Korea" essentially lists out every grievances that South Korean women have (and these are all, for the record, valid grievances), but come to the conclusion that even though TERFs are wrong, since South Korean women have it so hard, transgender people must excuse the fact that these women find comfort in radical feminism and really really need their female-only space that they enforce with violence against transgender women. But hey, Lee at least leaves open the possibility that when TERFs are ready, they should embrace intersectionality and join hands with trans women!
Yoon Jiyoung's "The Revolutionary Turning Point of Feminism Crisis: Is it Possible Radical Queer Feminism?" also essentially says that radical feminists aren't the face of Korean feminism and there should be a synthesis on queer, radical feminism.
Jeong Seunghwa's "Saving Radical Femnism from Queerphobia: Opinion on Alliance between Feminists and Queer Activists," straight up says that refusing to ally with queer activists is not the same as queer hate, and that "cisgender" as a construct is an oxymoronic concept within transfeminist theory, so wanting cisgender women to have a space for them only (once again, enforced with state violence, which necessarily invites cisgender men's violence upon transgender women) is not an inherently transphobic wish (her words; not mine; it's as nonsensical in Korean as it reads in English).
All the poster above has done, without knowing, is recycle these thinly-veiled trans exclusionary radical feminists' exact talking points. Somehow, this is supposed to be allyship for trans people and logic that this movement is not trans-exclusionary, but, like, South Korean feminist movement has had a huge issue with queerphobia, especially transmisogyny, for decades. Sure, 4B movement might not have a leader, but I (and other trans women in South Korea) have been very vocal about how trans women are actively, with violence, pushed out of activist spaces for women's liberation in Korea, including pamphlets handed out by organizers of rallies to report "men disguised as women" so that they can be "ejected" from rallies. These people might not be leaders of the movement, but they did organize the rallies where people gathered to protest under the same cause, and their resounding answer was that trans women, especially ones that haven't had bottom surgery, are not allowed!
If an organization whose in-person activism that includes this policy is "NOT an inherently transphobic movement," then Japan's far-right Liberal Democratic Party's policy on transgender people and their gender marker change (until a recent supreme court ruling) is not an inherently transphobic policy, despite the fact that an international community of trans healthcare providers have the policy akin to a genocidal policy.
There are transfeminists (such as Ruin) that exist in South Korea, and they do find allies with cis feminists, but these cis feminists, by virtue of working with transfeminists, are also pushed into a niche. This is all something that any LGBT+ South Korean person (let alone a trans South Korean person) that's tried to get involved in feminist activism can tell you, but apparently, for someone who wants to center the voices of the oppressed, the poster above couldn't even find a single South Korean LGBT+ person to ask about this.
This person has made up a version of South Korean bourgeoisie feminism that does not exist in real life because to yankees, South Korea is not a place to be seriously examined; it is an ideal of anti-whatever they want to project themselves onto, whether they're reactionary or otherwise, and this is by design! South Korea is a puppet state designed by the U.S. ruling class to be a symbol of whatever they want it to be, and they've propped up no less than 50 years of bloody far-right dictators that killed communists with little to no pushback and subsequent 20 (almost 30) more years of bourgeoisie "democratic" state that still crushes its most marginalized under its heels.
For this yankee who wants to "decolonize" the "left," they can't even decolonize the extreme reactionary ways in which they interact with the neocolony of a rotting corpse of an empire that they live in. This is what catchphrase-based, feel-good, "it sounds true" way of engaging with the world that doesn't study (or worse, actively shies away from) the material reality gets you.
