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Alongside these conversations, the idea of “decentering men” has gained traction as another strategy for navigating misogyny. Decentering men means refusing to treat male perspectives, needs, and authority as the automatic center of social life. By shifting attention toward women’s experiences and marginalized voices, people can more clearly recognize harms that male-centered systems tend to ignore or minimize. This approach connects to broader calls to dismantle patriarchy, understood as the long-standing system in which men disproportionately hold social, political, and economic power. Some feminist thought experiments go further by imagining matriarchal or matricentric systems that prioritize care, cooperation, and collective well-being. Whether symbolic or practical, these visions reflect a shared goal which is creating social structures where survival strategies are no longer necessary because gender no longer determines who must endure harm.

 

Two ways that women have decentered men that I want to focus on are the 4B Movement and Lesbian Separatism. When people ask me what the 4B movement is and why I’ve decided to join it, I usually start by explaining where it came from. The 4B movement started in South Korea and the name refers to four refusals: no heterosexual marriage, no childbirth, no dating men, and no sexual relationships with men. In Korean those are bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, and bisekseu. What’s interesting about it is that it didn’t start as a formal organization with leaders or a membership list. It mostly grew out of online feminist communities where young women were talking openly about the realities of their lives. Women were comparing experiences, talking about the pressures they were under, and asking why the system seemed to expect so much from them while giving very little back. Over time those conversations turned into something bigger. What began as discussions online turned into a broader critique of Korean society and a way for women to imagine futures that didn’t revolve around heterosexual family life.

 

Part of the reason the movement gained traction has to do with the social and political context in South Korea. The country has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, and that has become a huge concern for the government. Because of that, there has been a strong push through policy and public messaging encouraging women to marry and have children. These policies are framed as solutions to a demographic problem, but they also send a very clear message about what women are expected to do with their lives. Reproduction gets treated almost like a civic duty. Women’s bodies and life choices start to look less like personal decisions and more like resources that the state needs in order to sustain the population and the economy.

 

The women involved in the 4B movement are pushing back on that idea. They are basically asking why the responsibility for solving a national demographic issue should fall primarily on women, especially when the social conditions they are living under remain unequal. Many women in Korea still face workplace discrimination, rigid beauty standards, and the expectation that once they marry they will take on the majority of domestic and caregiving labor. When you put those things together, the system ends up asking women to sacrifice a lot without necessarily improving their lives.

 

The movement also challenges the way women are taught to imagine their futures. In many places, including South Korea, single women are often treated as though they are just in a temporary phase before the “real” part of life begins. Even when women are working, living independently, and supporting themselves, society still tends to frame their lives as incomplete until they marry and start a family. At the same time, consumer culture pushes women to invest heavily in beauty standards, dating culture, and romantic expectations. Women are encouraged to build lifestyles centered around relationships, while their long-term economic stability can still remain uncertain. The result is a strange contradiction where women are told they are independent individuals but are still expected to eventually organize their lives around marriage.

 

For many women in the 4B movement, refusing marriage and childbirth is a way of stepping outside that contradiction. Instead of treating singlehood as a temporary stage, they are reframing it as a complete and intentional life path. That shift is important because unmarried women in Korea often face structural disadvantages. Hiring discrimination, promotion barriers, and social policies that prioritize married families can leave single women economically vulnerable. The movement encourages women to build lives that do not rely on those institutions.

 

Online feminist spaces have been central to the development of these ideas. Platforms like Twitter and other digital communities became places where women could share experiences, compare strategies, and build a shared language for describing what they were seeing. A lot of those conversations also became practical. Women talk about financial independence, career planning, housing, and ways to support themselves without relying on marriage as a safety net. In that sense the movement is both political and practical. It critiques the system while also helping women figure out how to live differently within it.

 

The 4B movement is also connected to other feminist campaigns that have appeared in Korea in recent years, like the “escape the corset” movement. In that context the word corset became a metaphor for the social rules that dictate how women should look and behave. Rejecting strict beauty standards became one way women began questioning the expectations placed on them. The refusal of marriage, romantic relationships, and reproduction grows out of that same critique. All of these conversations are connected by the idea that women should not have to mold their lives around social expectations that primarily benefit patriarchal systems.

 

What I find interesting about the 4B movement is that it doesn’t really function like a traditional political organization. There is no central leadership and the women involved come from many different backgrounds. Many remain anonymous online. What connects them is a shared realization that the system they are living in was not designed with their well-being in mind. A lot of them belong to what has been called the “3-po generation,” a generation that feels it has already had to give up certain life milestones like dating, marriage, or home ownership because of economic pressures.

 

The 4B movement is similar to earlier feminist ideas that came out of the second-wave feminist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly lesbian separatism and what was sometimes called political lesbianism. Lesbian separatism was a strategy within radical lesbian feminism that argued women should reject participation in heterosexual institutions altogether. The idea was that heterosexuality itself was not just a personal orientation but a social structure that helped organize patriarchy. If women continued building their emotional, economic, and social lives around men, then they would remain tied to the systems that limited them.

 

The concept started gaining visibility in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One well-known moment happened in 1970 during the Second Congress to Unite Women organized by the National Organization for Women. A group calling themselves the Lavender Menace protested the way lesbian issues were being ignored within the feminist movement. Their intervention helped push lesbian feminism into the center of feminist debates and argued that feminism needed to take lesbian lives seriously rather than treating them as an embarrassment or distraction.

 

Out of that moment came groups like the Radicalesbians and later collectives such as The Furies. These groups experimented with women-centered communities and sometimes communal living arrangements where women created spaces that functioned as homes, meeting places, and workspaces all at once. Their goal wasn’t simply to encourage women to come out as lesbians in the sense of sexual orientation. They were also trying to challenge the deeper assumption that women’s emotional and social lives should revolve around men. Some theorists described this idea as “women-identified women,” meaning women placing other women at the center of their lives and political commitments.

 

For some feminists at the time, this developed into the idea of political lesbianism. The argument was that lesbianism could be understood not only as a sexual identity but also as a political strategy that resisted patriarchal structures. Writers like Charlotte Bunch, Jill Johnston, Adrienne Rich, and others explored these ideas in different ways. Adrienne Rich famously wrote about “compulsory heterosexuality,” pointing out how social systems encourage women to orient their lives toward men whether they want to or not.

 

Lesbian separatism was controversial then and it remains controversial now. Even many feminists were uncomfortable with the idea because it pushed feminist politics to a very radical place. Some thinkers argued that separating from male-dominated structures could allow women to develop their own social and political power outside patriarchal control. Others felt the approach was too extreme or exclusionary. Either way, it was part of a larger conversation about how deeply patriarchy shapes the structure of everyday life.

 

For me personally, learning about both the 4B movement and earlier feminist separatist ideas has shifted the way I think about my own future. Without even knowing it I had already been implementing the 4B movement in my life. When I first heard about it I thought to myself “I’m already doing that!” I’ve never been a person who has wanted children and after my last relationship I was done with men. After further educating myself, seeing the way men acted after the orange was elected, and especially after the release of (a portion) of the Epstein Files, I fully decided to decenter men and do my part in dismantling the patriarchy.

 

Further, I have decided that lesbian separatism might end up being my retirement plan. The idea of building communities of women who support each other, live independently, and are not structured around male approval is appealing. It represents a very different vision of what aging, friendship, and community could look like. Instead of assuming that a husband or traditional family will be the center of life, the focus shifts toward autonomy, chosen family, and mutual support among women. I must share a couple of anecdotes surrounding this idea. One is from a friend who wants to buy an Island only for women and call it Taco Island.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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