by liberal japonicus
As tempting as it is to dwell on whatever outrage the Orange Turd has committed, I thought this Grauniad article, about the Korean 4b movement, might be interesting to discuss.
The 4B name stems from four Korean words beginning with “bi” (meaning “no”): bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating), and bisekseu (no sex). As with past “separatist” feminist movements, 4B represents a rejection of heterosexual relationships as a means of resisting patriarchal structures.
As the article notes, it is being picked up in the US after Trump's election and Nick Fuentes' making 'your body, my choice' a thing among MAGA. I read somewhere that Fuentes' defense was that he said this kind of stupid shit all the time, it wasn't until Biden lost that people noticed. Not the brightest bulb in the marquee it seems, and he was doxxed and, if rumors are true, is now staying with his mom.
Anyway, a bit of a dive into 4B. While most people here might be thinking of Lysistrata, that is a comedy, and 4B is dead serious. Here is a background research article on the 4B, written before the election, so hopefully offering a clearer view, because when an idea gets picked up in another culture, it can be changed in ways that make it unrecognizable.
It's interesting to think about the 4B movement in a pan-asian context. I feel like the US reporting is just in light of the election, similar to people saying they are going to emigrate, but in Japan, there has been little uptake on 4B. Admittedly, while the election also went badly for the ruling party here in Japan, it was a conservative LDP government that got its ass whupped. They lost their outright majority, but more related to the topic, the Korean elections have shown, similar to the US, a big gender gap, with the President elected in 2022, conservative Yoon Suk Yeol, getting 59% of the vote of the under 30 males while only 34% of young women under 30. I can't find similar data for the recent Japanese election, but this kind of gender gap wasn't reported anywere I could see.
On one hand, it's not surprising, the viciousness and velocity of misogyny in South Korea is really a level beyond. On the other hand, it's hard to understand why 4B hasn't made at least some inroads (at least that I'm aware of) into Japanese society. One possible reason for the rise of the 4B movement is a confluence of events, court cases and trends which haven't occurred in Japan. While the election and element of societal rebuke of choosing Trump over Harris provides a catalyst in the US, there hasn't been anything like that in Japan. For South Korea, a 2016 murder of a woman in a Seoul train station by a stalker because women in general 'ignored him' became a touchpoint, leading to the Gangnam station Post-it Note protest and there hasn't been a similar incident here in Japan. In addition, Korea suffers from spy cam issues (known as molka) and has become a center for deep-fake porn. This Guardian article describes some details. Japan also has issues with hidden cameras (tōsatsuki), but it doesn't seem to be anything like what is happening in South Korea.
The research article makes a brief mention, but the other articles don't (or I missed it), of the parallel Tal-Corset movement in South Korea, with Korean women rebelling against beauty standards. Again, while beauty standards can be problematic here in Japan, it seemed much more oppressive than in Japan. Plastic surgery is much more common in South Korea, with 1/4 of women under 30 getting it, while only 2% of the men do and that has to feed into what underlies 4B.
South Korea is also one of the few developed countries where pornography is illegal and subject to internet censorship. However, it can't be regulated on social media sites, so I imagine there is an incentive for sharing pornography that has been generated is increased because of the skew in availability. On the other hand, Japan has an astonishing large and varied pornography industry that not only embraces technology, which I imagine makes generating porn less attractive, but is rooted in historical and cultural ideas.
Trying to understand why Japan doesn't seem to have the same issues with deep-fake porn or spy cams, I think there may also be some cultural things that are not directly related to the treatment of women, but I think contribute. South Korean tech is not cutting edge, but they have more public tech availability (wi-fi almost everyone, internet banking to an extent hard to imagine here in Japan, linked information) and more people mucking about with stuff. South Korean internet connectivity is at 97% (US is 94% while Japan is only 84%), along with an online gaming culture that is both greater in public competitiveness through esports, but also in that people don't play at home, but in so called PC bangs.
There are also cyber defamation laws that are often used not to grant relief to victims, but as a way of silencing criticism. Truth is not a defense, so if I wrote that I got shitty service at a restaurant, the restaurant owner could ask the police to pursue a criminal case against me because I defamed him, regardless of the truth. This isn't a hypothetical either. From this article
In a case before Korea’s Supreme Court where a worker truthfully accused his employer of garnishing his wages, the worker failed to satisfy the elements of the public interest defense as he intended to pressure his employer to pay him properly and not to inform the public of his employer’s misdeeds.
These things seem to stack up to make things a lot more fraught in South Korea, which makes a 4B movement more understandable and why it might arise in South Korea but not in find purchase in Japan.
One can't have pan-asianism without mentioning China, but I don't have an good understanding of how societal issues play out in China. Apparently, the 4B movement has been taken up and renamed 6B4T, which is discussed in this article. It is fascinating for me that translation of terms has led to a divided view of exactly what the 4B movement represents, which underlines my thought about how, when movements go across cultural boundaries, often are changed in various ways. There doesn't seem to be anything similar in Taiwan, which seems much more accepting of LGBTQ (It was the first in the Asia-Pacific to legalize same-sex marriage)
According to some, the phrase 비돕비 (bidopbi) should be translated as “do not help married women,” while the opposing party argues that the translation should be rendered as “the unmarried help the unmarried.” The translation controversy points to the dissonance between different feminist paradigms within the online pan-feminist community in China.
It's been over 10 years since I've been back in the States, so I'm having trouble imagining a 4B movement actually catching on in the same way in the US as it seems to have in South Korea. I also realize the our demographics here aren't really going to get at where this is coming up. But I'd be interested in what everyone sees where they are.
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