In Act 3 Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character muses on two equally dark possibilities: committing suicide to escape despair or killing his uncle Claudius for murdering his own brother, Hamlet’s father:

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:/Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,/No more; and by a sleep to say we end/The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wish'd.”

 As a choice, it’s unthinkable and extreme. A conundrum, just like the times in which we now find ourselves living.

I was reminded of this play recently because on November 6 of last year, someone I called in a fit of despair told me, perhaps as a way to show that I was not alone in my upset, about a movement called the 4B’s. That movement had nothing whatsoever to do with Hamlet’s soliloquy. Yet as I thought about it later, the two seemed linked not just by homonymic chance but also in how both represented responses to wrongs committed in the name of power.

The 4B’s emerged in South Korean around the mid-2010s as part of a fourth wave feminist reaction gender injustice and crimes against women. Like the worldwide 2006 #metoo movement, it began on social media and sought to empower women caught in the cross-hairs of the most toxic elements of patriarchy: social inequality on the one hand and harassment/violence on the other. The name—4B’s—derives from four Korean words, each of which start with the negative prefix “bi.” (1) Biyeonae: No dating men. (2) Bihon: No marrying men. (3) Bichulsan: No having children with men. (4) Bisekseu: No having sex with men.

It gained its greatest visibility in the wake of anti-feminist movements that emerged after the 2019 election of Yun Sook Yeul (who, coincidentally, was recently impeached for wrongfully imposing martial law in South Korea on December 3, 2024). Young American women have expressed interest in it since its inception, but especially in the days after the 2024 U.S. election, which occurred almost exactly one month before Yeul’s attempt to undermine South Korean democracy. On social media platforms like TikTok and X, these women encouraged peers to look to the 4B movement for inspiration.

To liberal (read: white, middle class, accommodationist second wave) feminists, the movement no doubt smacks of radical feminism, especially the branch of it that supports separatism and has traditionally been identified with lesbians. To me, a third wave “cat lady” who thinks and writes at the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality, it sounds like an ordinary day in the world of an independent woman who has chosen—and has the luxury to choose—to live life on her own terms.

I see no radicalism here; then again, I observe as one who believes in tolerance. Two millennial/fourth wave friends, both well-educated and in their late thirties, live some version of the 4B “credo.” One has chosen 4B-style independence because she wanted an end to relationship demands on her time and emotional resources. Another has chosen what I call a 2B path that involves childlessness and no marriage. They are not actively resisting tradition just to resist; rather, they are acting in alignment with what they’ve deemed as the most fulfilling way to lead their lives.

By contrast, the South Korean women who identify as 4B see it as necessary resistance against a controlling, misogynist society. Intimate partner violence in their country is real. According to a 2018 study, of those affected, 824 women died by the hand of male partners while 602 lived with a heightened risk of death. In the economic arena, men early 31.2% more than women, who, if married, bear full responsibility for home, family and child-care. And the social pressure on young women to have children is high. So high, in fact, that the government has mapped out the country by the population of women able to bear children. As of 2022, the South Korean birthrate has fallen to below 1 child/woman.

It’s abundantly clear that something is more than rotten in the state of Denmark; and that this rottenness, especially as it affects women, has everything to do with the Claudius-like autocratic lust for power and control blighting the democratic world. Like all minoritized people, women are especially vulnerable to the assaults of this toxicity through harassment, violence and other forms of social and political disempowerment. If South Korean women feel under siege, American women, whose rights to bodily autonomy are under attack, feel they are under increasing threat. As I write this, all of us live in the shadow of laws that, if enacted, would end bodily autonomy while curtailing access to affordable healthcare and the civil rights currently protect them in the workplace. I can’t say with any certainty what will happen. All I know is that we will find ways to resist what tries to hold us down and back, just as every other generation of women before us has.

Some might say that 4B’s is yet another example of the global disunity that has come to be the hallmark of the 2020s. They wouldn’t be wrong, of course. Still I see the hope in division. Yes, Hamlet correctly understood that fraught times offer no guarantees: only difficult choices of ways to engage with dilemma. But his inability to move beyond grief to find the alliances that could have saved him from devastation was his real downfall. Whatever else women do, our ability to seek community among ourselves, both locally and globally, will be what help us weather— and ultimately move beyond—these perilous times.