From Seoul to Washington, Why Radicality Arises Where Feminism Dissent Is Policed

Source: Unsplash (Translation - "Welcome to Feminist Utopia")

In South Korea, young male voters backed presidential candidates who promise to abolish the country’s gender ministry, while teenage boys run Telegram channels distributing deepfake pornography of female celebrities. In the United States, President Donald Trump has banned diversity programmes, and girls and women have reported hearing the phrase “your body, my choice” in schools and campuses. What differs is not the backlash itself, but how much room exists for resistance, and how that space shapes the form dissent takes.

In South Korea, nearly sixty-two per cent of suspects in deepfake-related sexual crimes are teenagers. One fifteen-year-old produced 590 deepfakes on Telegram channels with 800+ users. Official figures recorded over 3,500 cybersexual crimes between November 2024 and October 2025, around half involving deepfakes.

“The number of male juveniles consuming deepfake porn for fun has increased because authorities have overlooked the voices of women,” said ReSET, a South Korean monitoring group tracking digital sexual violence.

This digital violence mirrors a broader institutional retreat. South Korea’s national gender equality index fell to 65.4 in 2023, its lowest level since tracking began in 2010. Hostility toward women has also reshaped electoral outcomes. In the June 2025 presidential election, over a third of male conservative voters under thirty backed Lee Jun-seok, who has called for dismantling the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. As abuse against women escalates online, political support for protecting them has thinned offline.

Women, however, have not been absent from public life. In 2024, young women made up roughly thirty per cent of protesters calling for the impeachment of President Yoon Suk-yeol, challenging South Korea’s traditionally male-dominated protest culture. Many were mobilised by Yoon’s openly anti-feminist rhetoric, including his claim that feminism was responsible for the country’s low birth rate. Participation, however, did not translate into representation. In the snap election that followed, there were no female presidential candidates for the first time in eighteen years, and leading contenders largely avoided women’s rights altogether.

The United States follows a parallel, though not identical, trajectory. In the 2024 election, men aged eighteen to twenty-nine leaned toward Trump by fourteen points, while women in the same age group favoured Kamala Harris, mirroring South Korea’s widening generational gender divide.

Trump’s campaign aligned itself with Project 2025, an initiative advocating the revival of the nineteenth-century Comstock Act to restrict access to abortion medication. After the election, federal agencies began removing references to “gender ideology” from official websites, echoing South Korea’s removal of “gender equality” from school curricula. In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order banning diversity programmes across federal agencies, contractors, and publicly funded universities.

These shifts emboldened online misogynistic networks. Within the so-called manosphere, men repurposed the language of bodily autonomy to mock women’s loss of rights. Following Trump’s victory, “your body, my choice” spread rapidly on X (formerly Twitter), alongside calls for women to “get back to the kitchen”. Girls and women have since reported hearing the same phrases in middle schools and on college campuses.

Some American women responded by adopting a movement that originated in South Korea, known as 4B. The term refers to four refusals: no dating men, no sex with men, no marriage, and no childbirth. The movement promotes withdrawal from heterosexual relationships as a means of reclaiming autonomy.

In both countries, 4B has been labelled radical or extreme. Western media frequently described it as “fringe”, while young South Korean men dismissed it “mental illness.” The difference lies less in the ideas themselves than in how political systems absorb, deflect, or suppress them.

In the United States, radical feminist ideas are often mocked or marginalised, but they remain publicly permissible, and women can advocate for gender equality without being widely branded antisocial. Search interest in 4B in the United States surged by 450 per cent in the days following Trump’s election victory. Still, within months, the movement was depoliticised into a TikTok trend known as “Boy Sober” and reframed as a dating detox.

In South Korea, the backlash extends beyond the movement itself. Feminism is frequently treated as a slur and equated with hostility toward men. “The Republic of Korea is now going crazy, scrapping the principle of the benefit of the doubt by letting men be branded as sex criminals without any evidence just because women say so, due to the feminist establishment,” wrote Bae In-gyu, a member of the anti-feminist group New Men’s Solidarity.

Oh Jae-ho, a researcher at the Gyeonggi Research Institute in South Korea, in an interview with The New York Times, observed that young Korean men “are deeply unhappy, considering themselves victims of reverse discrimination, angry that they had to pay the price for gender discriminations created under the earlier generations.” Under this logic, even minimal expressions of gender equality are punished. Olympic archer An San faced sustained online abuse for her short haircut, accused of engaging in “feminist acts” despite making no political statements.

Where avenues for dissent narrow, resentment accumulates, leaving women with a stark choice: comply with a hostile system or withdraw from it entirely.

From Seoul to Washington, 4B may appear at first glance as an unsustainable refusal of intimacy. In practice, it reflects an effort to survive and reclaim agency in societies that have withdrawn institutional protection. When women are left without security, voice, or representation, opting out becomes a response to exclusion. Until those conditions change, radical movements will continue to emerge as symptoms of structural abandonment.

Written by Godiva Kwan

Edited by Sherkan Sultan