Donald Trump’s return to the White House inspired plenty of familiar forms of political protest. Marches, angry TikToks and vows to fight his agenda were hardly unexpected.
Then the hair clippers came out.
After Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the November 2024 presidential election, videos began circulating of liberal women cutting or shaving their hair while talking about reproductive rights, feminism and rejecting traditional expectations placed on women. Some of those clips collected millions of views and quickly became part of a much bigger online conversation about the South Korean feminist movement known as 4B.
The clips came out after Trump’s victory
One of the women at the center of the viral moment was TikTok creator Maria Barbieri, who posted under the name @girl_dumphim.
Wired reported that Barbieri filmed herself attempting to shave her head shortly after Trump’s victory. When the clippers were not doing the job quickly enough, she switched to scissors and began chopping away at her hair.
“Giving up on America? [I] have,” Barbieri said in the video.
Her message soon became much broader than a bad morning with a pair of clippers. She declared that she was done trying to conform to beauty standards she associated with the patriarchy, saying, in part, “Fuck being all the things that the patriarchy wants us to be.”
The video reportedly drew millions of views.
Another TikTok creator known as Sidney told Newsweek that her decision went beyond simply being angry about an election.
“I took the clippers to my head and shaved it all off,” she said, describing the move as an attempt to “take back the narrative.”
Those videos became highly visible symbols of the post-election anger among some young women. But visibility and participation are two different things. Millions of people could watch one woman shave her head without millions, thousands, or even hundreds doing the same thing.
That distinction matters.
The bigger story was the sudden fascination with 4B
The haircut videos were tied to a much larger conversation about 4B, a fringe feminist movement that emerged in South Korea during the 2010s.
Its name refers to four refusals involving heterosexual relationships: no dating men, no sex with men, no marriage to men and no having children with men. The movement developed alongside wider debates in South Korea over misogyny, violence against women, workplace inequality and traditional gender expectations.
Shaving one’s head is not technically one of the four rules.
The hairstyle element has stronger connections to South Korea’s “Escape the Corset” movement, in which some women cut their hair short, stopped wearing makeup or destroyed cosmetics as a rejection of conventional beauty standards. The ideas have overlapped online, particularly as American users discovered 4B.
Trump’s election supercharged that interest.
CNN reported that hundreds of thousands of people searched for information about 4B immediately after the 2024 election. Social media filled with women discussing whether they should stop dating, marrying or sleeping with men whose politics they believed threatened their rights.
Ashli Pollard, a St. Louis woman interviewed by CNN, summed up the frustration behind the sudden interest.
“We have pandered and begged for men’s safety and done all the things that we were supposed to, and they still hate us,” Pollard said. “So if you’re going to hate us, then we’re going to do what we want.”
USC professor Sunyoung Park described 4B differently from a traditional protest organization. Rather than having leaders recruiting members and organizing chapters, she described it as a form of “individualized resistance” driven heavily by younger women online.
For many American women discussing it, abortion rights were central to the anger.
Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who joined the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. During his 2024 campaign, however, Trump opposed a nationwide abortion ban and argued that abortion policy should largely be decided by individual states.
The backlash arrived almost as fast as the buzz
The head-shaving clips did not receive universal applause from women.
Some cancer survivors and women living with alopecia objected to the suggestion that becoming bald was a way to deliberately make oneself less attractive to men.
TikTok creator Noell Babb, who identified herself as a cancer survivor, pushed back sharply.
“Shaving your head to try and correlate baldness to being unattractive is a slap in the face to those who lost their hair not by choice,” she said.
Trump supporters also seized on the videos, reposting them with mocking commentary. The result was exactly the kind of social-media storm modern politics regularly produces: a handful of dramatic videos, millions of views, angry reactions, counter-reactions and increasingly sweeping claims about how many people were actually participating.
Meanwhile, the broader women’s resistance to Trump continued in more conventional ways. Reuters reported before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration that organizers expected roughly 25,000 people at Washington’s People’s March, while activists increasingly focused on local organizing rather than trying to recreate the enormous Women’s March of 2017.
And that helps put the haircut controversy into perspective.
Women really did shave their heads after Trump’s election. The videos were real. The political anger behind them was real. Interest in 4B exploded, and debates about reproductive rights and gender politics clearly helped fuel it.
