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Sex strikes are hot again Women-only societies rarely thrive

Prostitutes protest in South Korea. (Credit: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/ Getty)

Prostitutes protest in South Korea. (Credit: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/ Getty)


November 11, 2024   6 mins

There are four simple principles to South Korea’s 4B movement. These are all refusals, since the “B” stands for “bi”, meaning “no” in Korean. No heterosexual marriage (bihon). No childbirth (bichulsan). No dating men (biyeonae). No sexual relationships with men (bisekseu). Adherents are all conscientious objectors in the sex wars. At its most extreme, followers of the movement (which emerged sometime around 2015) even cut off ties to male friends and family members.

Korea is a difficult place to be female. Its president Yoon Suk-yeol ran on an explicitly anti-feminist platform, claiming feminism “blocks healthy relationships” between men and women. You’ll find similar language in the Korean equivalent of the manosphere, where popular influencers describe feminism as a “mental illness”.

As female participation in education and employment has increased, so has men’s resentment. Rates of domestic violence are alarmingly high, and the country’s standards of female grooming are so severe, “Korean beauty” has become an international export, characterised by exhausting (and expensive) multi-step routines. Women are desired but also despised: the insult kimchinyeo (“kimchi bitch”) suggests women are spoiled, materialistic parasites seeking to live off men. Small wonder a minority of women are drawn to a drastic repudiation of men.

But when the 4B women proclaim their independence, that too is received with hostility. Women who visibly signal their disinterest in men by cutting their hair and rejecting makeup are subject to open abuse and harassment. In 2016, a man stabbed a woman to death in a Seoul public toilet and told police that he did it “because women have always ignored me”. (Police declined to take the perpetrator at his word and treat it as a hate crime.) This, of course, only serves to vindicate the 4B women’s approach.

“Trump has positioned himself as a defender of traditional masculine values.”

In an onerously patriarchal culture, Korean women are increasingly opting out of marriage and motherhood: the country has the lowest birthrate in the world, with an average of less than one child per woman of reproductive age. And 65% of Korean women (48% of Korean men) say they want no children at all. So while it’s very likely that there are more women claiming to follow 4B than there are doing so in practice, there are even more women again whose lives reflect at least some of the movement’s core refusals.

In that context, it’s harder to see 4B as a perverse form of feminist extremism. Rather, it’s the utopian fringe of a situation where relations between men and women have broken down so calamitously that the future survival of the nation is in doubt: 4B represents an ideal of female-only existence, where male violence and sexual and domestic exploitation can be eliminated by simply ridding yourself of the males who do these things. Not just the eschewal of men, but the creation of a parallel world by and for women.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that one of the reactions to Trump’s re-election has been a flurry of young American women declaring their affiliation to 4B. Like South Korea’s Yoon, Trump has positioned himself as a defender of traditional masculine values (and unlike Yoon, Trump has been found liable in a civil court for sexual battery). Kamala Harris made considerably less play of her gender than Hilary Clinton did in her 2016 campaign, but nonetheless, this was an election where for many, sexual politics were on the ballot.

Trump’s first administration laid the groundwork for the appeal of Roe vs Wade, enabling individual states to remove legal access to abortion: much of America is now a dangerous place to have a miscarriage or termination. Embracing 4B is a way to “show people that actions have consequences”, a 21-year-old adherent from Georgia told the Washington Post. “Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not be able to have access to abortion. They can’t have both.” What she’s describing is essentially a sex strike, an idea with roots going back into antiquity and the Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata.

In that play, the womenfolk organise to withhold intercourse until men bring an end to their war. It’s a comedy because the scenario is presented as inherently ludicrous — for one thing, the women find it as much of a struggle to contain their libidos as the men do — but crucially, in the end the women win. Students of the history of female separatism might find Lysistrata’s ending the most absurd thing about it. Through the 20th century, the feminist movement in America and Europe gave birth to various forms of women-only societies, and all of them seemed to end in failure.

In 1975, Leeds Revolutionary Feminists published a pamphlet with the deliberately provocative title Love Your Enemy? “We… think that all feminists can and should be political lesbians,” declared the opening statement. “Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified-woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women.” Heterosexual sex itself was suspect: “every woman who engages in penetration bolsters the oppressor and reinforces the class power of men.”

Some women — including Julie Bindel — have written about how liberating they found the idea that they could choose their sexuality, but while this may be personally true for them, it is probably a “choice” that is easier to make when your underlying sexual orientation is pointing in the right direction. In a recent article about 4B, for example, the singer Janelle Monae is offered as an example of someone who has supported the idea of a sex strike against men. It is probably relevant that Monae is a self-described pansexual.

While bisexual women probably do have the option to round themselves up or down to lesbian or straight depending on circumstance, and lesbians have routinely been coerced into tolerating heterosexual relationships by social norms, female libido is not universally negotiable. The most generous interpretation of Love Your Enemy? is that its authors had mistaken their own experiences for generalities: the liberation they found in rejecting men would be far harder to come by for women whose sexualities were stubbornly straight.

That made political lesbianism contentious for heterosexual women, who took the victim-blaming implication that their inherent desires made them responsible for the abuse men inflicted on them. It was also unpopular with some lesbians, who were adamant that there was nothing voluntary about their orientation — and resented their sexuality being lumped together with celibate straights. A movement that claimed to elevate lesbianism could be seen to have reduced it to a lifestyle label. The proponents of lesbian feminism rejected those criticisms. But when the idea was put into practice, it didn’t necessarily look the way they had envisaged it.

The Van Dykes were a troop of leather-clad lesbians who cut a peripatetic sweep across America in the late Seventies. Under the charismatic leadership of Heather Van Dyke (the name was self-chosen, for self-explanatory reasons), they travelled between patches of “women’s land”, minimising contact with men as much as possible. The writer Ariel Levy describes Heather Van Dyke as “a kind of lesbian Joseph Smith, driving around the continent looking for the promised land with a band of wives and ex-wives and future wives in tow”.

Perhaps inevitably, this was a circumstance that fostered power-play and eventually sadomasochism: while the theorists of lesbian feminism had believed that removing the penis from the equation would remove the brutality from sex, the Van Dykes set about vigorously reinstating it via whips, chains and dog collars. Eventually, the Van Dykes dissolved. Few could sustain their commitment to separatism. Life got in the way of ideals: one of the Van Dykes resumed talking to men after finding a new female partner who already had two sons.

For straight women, a man-free life is even harder to maintain, though the prospect of doing so remains tantalisingly appealing. “I decentered men. Decentering my desire for men is harder,” lamented an article in the New York Times earlier this year. The author no longer believed marriage and motherhood were the twin pillars of a successful existence, but she remained, to her own disappointment, stubbornly attracted to men. You can try to subordinate your orientation to your politics, but in the end your orientation will likely win. It’s probably a mistake to make your principles the hostage of desires you’ll never be able to change.

On that count, the 4B movement is doomed to fail. You can find YouTube videos of 4B recidivists describing their enthusiastic return to heterosexual femininity: prodigal wives, safely back in the fold. And 4B itself can be seen as a reinvention of chastity culture under the colours of feminism. In one gloating response, Brandon Morse of the Right-wing media organisation Red State said of 4B: “They went so Left they started going Right, claiming they’re going to stop being hoes and won’t put out until men respect them. That’s what we’ve been saying you should do all along.”

But Morse and his brethren should pay attention to the demographics of South Korea, and check their complacency. The appeal of 4B may be nothing but a blip in the trending topics for American women, but the social currents it was born of — falling marriage and birth rates, and rising male resentment at women’s emancipation — are already embedded in the US. However hard it is for women to stop liking men, if men don’t like women, refusal becomes the only rational female choice.


Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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Arthur G
Arthur G
1 day ago

All of this nonsense (from 4B to Andrew Tate) derives from a failure to understand the nature of men and women. We are not competitors, we are not opposites, we are not enemies. Women and Men are naturally complementary. We each supply what the other lacks, and together (in a strong marriage) we create a whole much greater than the sum of the parts. Man and Woman are called to love each other more than we love our own selves, and to sacrifice for each other, and any children that may result from our union. Anyone who tries to undermine that bond is evil.

Last edited 1 day ago by Arthur G
Hugh Marcus
Hugh Marcus
1 day ago
Reply to  Arthur G

The problem with ‘cancelling’ people which seems to be the current trend, is that you’re trying to cancel something that can’t actually be cancelled.
Given the toxicity of figures like Andrew Tate & to a lesser extent Trump, there are plenty of times I’m frankly embarrassed to be a man, these days.

But the answer to toxic masculinity is not to try & defeat it with some kind of almost as toxic a form of feminism.

The answer lies with men & it’s compassionate masculinity.
We need male role models who will call out the crimes of their peers, who are prepared to cry with & cry over the hurts their fellow men have visited upon women for far too long.

Brett H
Brett H
1 day ago
Reply to  Hugh Marcus

Give me a break, I’ve never felt embarrassed to be a man, but I have been embarrassed to be associated with idiots.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 day ago
Reply to  Hugh Marcus

I think you are probably right to be embarrassed

William Shaw
William Shaw
1 day ago

I don’t think beta males feel embarrassment.

Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
1 day ago
Reply to  Hugh Marcus

Part of the problem is the default assumptions that most men are, in fact, criminals of one sort or another, indisputably guilty of harming women by their very existence.
And the corollary belief that women are essentially blameless, moral innocents who are at once both superior to, and powerless against, the snares and nets of evil men.
We never once hear phrases like “toxic femininity,” nor “deadbeat mom,” nor “matriarchy” discussed, in any serious way. It’s as if these things cannot exist.
But look what happened, as the author mentioned, with Heather and her sadomasochistic “dykes on bikes” – they replaced the purported cruelty of sadistic phallocentrism with a carbon copy of it, aping the cruelty they claimed to see and inflicting it on each other.
Women can be just as awful as men. The only difference is we’re forbidden to discuss it. Anyone who does will themselves be condemned as a misogynist. Though physically smaller, women are not such helpless creatures – they are, or at least would be, competent adults, capable of agency.
Nor will punishing innocent men help anything, or anyone. As we can clearly see with plummetting male university enrollment, and soaring male suicide rates, men are hardly living life on “easy mode.”
Perhaps less impressive men are invisible to Sarah Ditum – shorter, poorer, or unattractive men often are, to attractive women. But they clearly aren’t oppressing her – they simply don’t have that ability – and most likely don’t have the ability to oppress anyone.
But we lump them in together with the Weinsteins, the P Diddys, the Epsteins, the Hunter Bidens, and the other more despicable offenders, all the same. That was essentially what MeToo did, and it’s what progressive feminists do now.
Those men don’t deserve that at all, and of course will react with suspicion and resentment towards a society that’s every bit as unjust towards them.
Highly educated, comfortably compensated feminists could perhaps make allowance for the 80% of men who neither fit their personal dating standards, nor are able to inflict a “patriarchy” upon them. Our society would be far less fractured then, and perhaps, abortion and divorce and “political lesbianism” notwithstanding, our birth rates could head back towards replacement level.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 day ago

We have a serious problem in the US, because of the 60% female and 40% male makeup of college students. College educated people tend to want college educated partners. So women are competing for fewer college educated men, who can afford to be picky. It’s not likely that college educated women will choose a an working class man unless he has money. (A woman desires a man who can add support to raise a family. That is a biological imperative. Hundreds of thousands of years ago a women would seek out a physically strong male who could protect his family. Animals do the same thing.) Anyway, the 60% of men have a harder time finding a partner. This has serious implications for the US. There are more single men and women, and this can lead to more mental health issues and anger.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 day ago
Reply to  Hugh Marcus

So, turns out one of the first acts of toxic Trump will be to safeguard female spaces, sports, changing rooms (as a father of a young girl, hurrah!)

“need male role models who will call out the crimes of their peers”
Funny how you never ask muslim, native American or black men – far worse attitudes and crime rates against women than the average male – to call out the crimes of their “peers”.

And as for compassionate masculinity:
– Do all the difficult, stressful jobs which women won’t do
– Shoulder the responsibility of fighting wars, while women stay at home.
– Took on the burden of being breadwinners all through history so that mothers could be with their children.
– Entrusted with burden of policing and fire brigade to protect others, including women from the small number of violent criminal men.
– Random stuff like jumping into house fires to save some children you don’t even know.

When do women stop obsessing over themselves and work for men who are homeless, suffer work related accidents and commit suicides at far higher rates, I wonder?

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 day ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

It is quite humorous to contemplate the concept of “feminine” warriors. Perhaps professional Football should implement a program to feminize the sport and then see what happens.
The author fails to realize the irony of the quote, Embracing 4B is a way to “show people that actions have consequences”, a 21-year-old adherent from Georgia told the Washington Post.”
One consequence is certain….if women decide not to have children, that society will end soon and all these issues will go away. And then those that remain will be speaking Arabic.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
1 day ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

And we all know how feminist and empowered those Muslim women are.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 day ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

Of course if the right women like the 21-year-old adherent from Georgia stick with it they will be taking the right genes out of the pool

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 day ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

1. Women fight and die in combat.
2. There are quite a few female police officers.
3. There are very few female fire fighters, because women aren’t strong enough to pick up 200 pounds and carry that weight over their shoulders and out of a burning building.
4. From 1963 to 1966 my family lived on base in Okinawa. Starting in 1964, my father, who was the squadron commander, flew two tours in Vietnam. It was my mother’s job, accompanied by the chaplain, to go to homes and tell the wives that their husbands were dead or missing in action. This took a toll on my mother, and she had nightmares about telling herself that my father was dead. (Wives no longer do that.) She also had to worry about my father when he was in Korea and raise four children alone. My father worried that my toddler brother would not know who he was when he returned home. Men AND women are affected by war.

David Morley
David Morley
1 day ago
Reply to  Hugh Marcus

I wouldn’t worry too much. There are plenty of unpleasant women out there too. It’s not exclusive to men.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
1 day ago
Reply to  Hugh Marcus

The problem with male feminists is that they are almost always creeps.

Jake Prior
Jake Prior
1 day ago
Reply to  Arthur G

The trouble is technology today basically supplies what men and women lack – perhaps imperfectly, but considering even in the best heterosexual relationship there is a lot of compromise at best and more often than not conflict, it doesn’t take too many bad experiences to just accept the technological solution. The natural complementarity of men and women would have been much more meaningful when women really did need a man to chop wood so that she didn’t freeze to death, fight of lions so she and the children weren’t eaten alive, and the man had no time to keep the fire going or to prepare food, wash the clothes and dishes or tend the children. all these things are now taken care of technologically.
Whatever some men might like to think about natural complementarity of men and women, the fact is that when women get the chance not to really rely on men, they largely choose to do so. And even though I personally think what feminists refer to as the patriarchy is actually the genuine care men over centuries showed in protecting the women and children in their societies, often, and without thinking, to the extent of sacrificing their lives, and that insulting the struggle of your own ancestors that culminated in the ability of you to live a life of what would have been unimaginable security and luxury to any of them is about an evil mentality as I can think of, I can’t say I blame them. Men aren’t perfect. Many will, given the opportunity, ditch a middle aged woman for a younger more attractive model when she starts showing signs of declining fecundity. Relying on someone genetically programmed to be unreliable is a mugs game. I don’t know what the answer is, but the nuclear family is technological relic that will one day be looked at as we look at tribal societies today. It’s not right or wrong, it’s just a point on the long arc of history.

Brett H
Brett H
1 day ago
Reply to  Jake Prior

Many will, given the opportunity, ditch a middle aged woman for a younger more attractive model when she starts showing signs of declining fecundity
What do you mean by “many”?

Jake Prior
Jake Prior
1 day ago
Reply to  Brett H

I mean enough that it’s reasonable for women as a whole to ensure they have their own means of making a living. Once women are in the workforce competing, and needing to share the housework with men a lot of the complementary qualities of men and women are lost. Women know it’s hard to start a career at 45 or 50 when the nest is perhaps empty and the bond they thought they had with their partner proves to have been weaker than they hoped. They are of course perfectly capable of finding husbands less than desirable with the ravages of time as well.

Brett H
Brett H
19 hours ago
Reply to  Jake Prior

Your comment doesn’t seem to address my question.

Jake Prior
Jake Prior
11 hours ago
Reply to  Brett H

Yes it does. Unless you want to ask a more detailed question that actually expresses something I guess you didn’t manage in those 6 words. Obviously I can’t give a precise percentage, when I said “many” it was just to demonstrate why women need to look out for themselves. The consequences of being left abandoned with no way of supporting yourself at 50 years old are sufficient that it wouldn’t matter if it’s 2% or 50%, women would still be prudent to maintain their own means of making a livelihood. If you don’t know of any relationship that finished because something that was considered essential to one party or the other was found to be missing at some point along the way, you live in a peculiarly gilded cage, and I envy you.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
1 day ago
Reply to  Jake Prior

“patriarchy is actually the genuine care men over centuries showed in protecting the women and children in their societies”
I’ll add that “patriarchy” is a natural consequence of monogamy. Men are not predisposed to give up being promiscuous – which is in the best interests of their genes – unless in return they can insure they are in fact protecting and providing for their own children. Women are only willing to give up trying to mate with the highest status males in their social group in exchange for a greater certainty of consistent support and care for their children and themselves from less high-status males. The status hierarchy that evolves out of this is basically patriarchy. Up until very recently (and perhaps still), it has benefited both sides equally.
And many individuals – both male and female – cheat. Everyone knows of men with multiple children from multiple women. Fewer people though are familiar with the genetic fact that statistically, we all have roughly twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors, which is proof of the efficacy of female cheating. Robert Trivers, and others, have explored the genetic basis for this kind of cheating.
I forget who put it this way, but it is illustrative to look at who wins and who loses when comparing monogamy with polygamy. In polygamous societies the genetic winners are high-status males and low-status females. The former are obvious and the latter benefit from better resources and prospects for their children under the care of high status males. High-status females lose because they would have not have had to share resources and attention with other women in a monogamous relationship. Low status males lose in that they don’t get to reproduce at all.
Cheaters always arise. Higher status males often engage in secret or serial polygamy for obvious reasons of increasing the number of their offspring whatever their mental motivations might tell them they are. Lower status females are motivated towards cheating to mate with higher quality male genes then their status has been able to procure with security. This isn’t necessarily with the highest status males, but might be with those who qualify on the basis of health, vigor, aggression and other recognizable traits which suggest stronger offspring more likely to attract higher quality mates and produce grandchildren.
Should the Korean women and any others continue on indefinitely with their plan of not breeding, without offspring they will appear as a curious footnote in history (like the Anabaptists and some of those other completely celibate religious 19th century groups that now no longer exist). I suppose they might decide to forgo relationships with men and use sperm donors to have children. Good luck with that. Even in our civilized world where men are generally not needed to “protect” women; providing for oneself and offspring, having time to devote to both means of livelihood and child-rearing, and dealing with all the involved stresses without an intimate partner for help is a tough life in general. And, as is cropping up increasingly in the newspapers and the courts, cheaters still find a way to exploit novel niches. I’m thinking of all the people now discovering through Ancestry.com and 23andMe that they are related to the same doctor who worked at the fertility clinic their mother’s went to.

Last edited 1 day ago by Jeff Cunningham
Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
1 day ago
Reply to  Jake Prior

I’m curious what you believe will happen to child rearing. If there is no nuclear family, what will replace it. Single parenting is a possibility, but I’d wager few single parents are in that state by choice. They either got pregnant and decided to keep the baby, or one partner left them or died or got sent to prison or made any of a number of life choices that make one unfit to be a parent. I question how many men or women would go into a single parenting situation intentionally.

Failing that, what else is there. Do we have the state grow babies in test tubes (that technology is not far off) and funnel them into state run schools and institutions to maintain our population and pay for it collectively while kids are raised by bureaucrats. That sounds unbelievably dystopian to me and a surefire way to create a caste system where none existed as ‘natural’ babies will likely be preferred. Then again, maybe there’s a way to make that less horrible than it sounds.

Do we simply do nothing and let populations dwindle to whatever. The ‘long arc of history’ may not be very long at all if this is the case. The human population can only grow so fast, but it can decline at basically any rate given the right conditions. The road to a depopulated world is very much shorter than we imagine. I don’t believe that will happen mind you, but it’s theoretically possible.

Jake Prior
Jake Prior
11 hours ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

I think some kind of co-parenting where you each maintain your own home will increasingly appeal to people. To me having two or three days with the kids on my own, two or three days to myself and two or three as a family each week sounds much better than living in one house all the time with all the pressures and conflicts modern inter-sexual dynamics so often generate. This needs a lot more housing, but as populations decline there will be housing available. A lot of people are in nuclear families because that’s what they think society expects of them and there’s some shame in not maintaining your family cohesion – as well as a problem affording two family homes. But many of those people are in lives of quiet desperation in those conflict ridden households. It’s certainly good for children to get male and female influences, but most fathers want to have input into raising their children, I think a lot would take the split I suggested if they could afford it and if there weren’t old religious dogma’s against it.
Worrying about the road to depopulation while the world’s population is still in fact growing seems to me a good indicator that we live in an extremely benign world. There are still may babies being born, there won’t suddenly be no people, even at a fertility rate of 1 populations would decline over centuries, with plenty of time for new structures to emerge to allow some sort of balance to emerge in the future. The problem with saying “Do we simply do nothing and let populations dwindle to whatever” is that who is the “we” that is competent to compel people to have children? I’d rather a gently declining population than somehow being forced to live with a woman that hates me to have a family. That’s of course hyperbole, but it’s roughly the situation we face. In the scheme of difficulties our ancestors faced – such as keeping more than 50% of children alive past the age of 5 for the vast majority of history – a declining population is not something I’m personally very worried about.

William Shaw
William Shaw
1 day ago
Reply to  Arthur G

It’s rather sad I think that feminists believe their only value that is worth withholding is the provision of sex.
On a positive note it does help men identify females who use sex as a weapon. Very useful in knowing who to avoid.

General Store
General Store
19 hours ago
Reply to  Arthur G

And boring nonsense

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
1 day ago

“rising male resentment at women’s emancipation — are already embedded in the US.”
What nonsense. Rising male resentment in the United States comes from being told they are hopelessly vile endlessly in every possible manner.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 day ago

I wish people would stop saying that Trump has been found guilty of sexual assault. A Trump-hating billionaire paid a random woman millions of dollars to make the accusation, which was then upheld by a court without any evidence at all being presented. It was so blatantly political and so fundamentally implausible that no one should use it as evidence for anything.

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 day ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

All of those lawfare judgments are going to be vacated at some point.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 day ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

And it is very concerning that so many on the left are apoplectic about what has happened. They simply can’t comprehend how over half the country voted for a convicted rapist and felon who wants to be Hitl*r. I suppose these people also believe that OJ was innocent because he was found not guilty in a court.

Johann Strauss
Johann Strauss
1 day ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Well said. But I would go one step further. Every single case brought against Trump has effectively been vacated by the biggest Jury t5rial in history: the American people just gave their verdict on Trump, found him innocent and elected him President in one the biggest electoral college and popular vote landslides in history, not to mention the greatest political comeback in US history.

Jack Robertson
Jack Robertson
1 day ago

Oh no! There goes my chance to shag an uptight, angry and humorless moral curtain-twitcher whose inter-gender vocabulary consists only of inventing evermore narcissistic ways to explain to me why a) as a man, I’m a useless, violent, privileged piece of sh*t; and b) as a woman, her life is both miserable and oppressed and yet noble, courageous and empowered.
O no. O dear. O woe. How will life go on with such prospective delights so cruelly withheld…

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 day ago
Reply to  Jack Robertson

I suspect it might be time to invest in a brothel.

Jack Robertson
Jack Robertson
1 day ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

Thankfully there are still plenty of lovely women out there with a sense of humour and a healthy libido who are smart enough to ignore all the misandrist tosh now gunking up the sexual landscape.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
1 day ago

Trump’s first administration laid the groundwork for the appeal of Roe vs Wade, enabling individual states to remove legal access to abortion: much of America is now a dangerous place to have a miscarriage or termination.
To say that “much of America is now a dangerous place to have a miscarriage or termination” is a sentence of considerable hyperbole when the Atlantic article you’ve linked to focuses on Georgia only, with mentions of North Carolina, Texas and Florida. There are 46 other states: many of them will probably stick with the Roe regime.
It’s also quite inaccurate, as the abortions being dangerous is a different question to whether they are actually allowed and, if yes, subject to what requirements. An abortion being dangerous indicates a problem with the execution of the procedure and the skills of the person performing it. Abortions also go wrong in very permissive places.
For the forseeable future, the issue is with the states. Also, Roe was always open to attack, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg acknowledged this.
If American women want to change something and make their home state’s regime more liberal, then they need to organise and apply political pressure at that level.
Another issue with the Atlantic article which I’ve noticed quite a bit with the general discussion of the issue: it revolves exclusively around a woman’s right to choose. It’s not very often I read things/hear things from pro-choice people that acknowledges that abortion law is about balancing out the rights of an unborn child with those of its mother. And I don’t think that that helps the pro-choice case.

Last edited 1 day ago by Katharine Eyre
Dougie Undersub
Dougie Undersub
1 day ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

I’m not an absolutist on this issue by any means but my problem with the pro-choice lobby is that they seem to consider that abortion is an acceptable, even desireable, method of birth control.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
1 day ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

Left unsaid is how this happened. Someone challenged Mississippi’s law. It allowed for abortion up to 15 weeks into a pregnancy. That’s the longer that Roe and longer than most of Europe. But not long enough for the modern left. Stupid games beget stupid prizes.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 day ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

And I wonder what these same people would think about a Federal decision to enforce every American into going to church on Sunday?

J Dunne
J Dunne
1 day ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

A pregnancy involves three human beings, the father, the mother and the child.

A decision on whether to abort the pregnancy affects two of those people for the rest of their lives, whether that’s physically, emotionally, financially or practically. In the case of the foetus it affects whether it gets to live or die.

And yet, with typical feminist narcissism, the pro-choice fanatics make the entire issue about what they may or may not go through during the nine months of pregnancy. The father and the baby are made a complete irrelevance.

Jo Brad
Jo Brad
1 day ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

Abortion right up to birth is what it’s all about. The idea of this really disturbs a lot of people. Why wouldn’t it?

Steve Everitt
Steve Everitt
1 day ago

“Women-only societies rarely thrive”
They never thrive, because it is biologically impossible.
Try keeping bees for a few years…

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 day ago
Reply to  Steve Everitt

They also fail to thrive because they can’t open any jars. They starve to death.

David Morley
David Morley
1 day ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

This is the nice thing about the male side of this supposed sex war – it’s lighthearted and often witty. On the distaff side all we seem to get is spite. Ladies, give us all you’ve got – but for gods sake try to be entertaining.

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
1 day ago
Reply to  Paul Thompson

The jar is a tool of the Patriarchy.

J Dunne
J Dunne
1 day ago
Reply to  Steve Everitt

And the Van Dykes who travelled America being oh so independent did so using vehicles, roads and pretty much everything else that was designed and built by men.

Evan Heneghan
Evan Heneghan
1 day ago

Some days you get an achingly beautiful Carver-esque melancholic political essay on witnessing Trump’s victory in a late night bar somewhere in middle America, and sometimes you get this nonsense:

“For straight women, a man-free life is even harder to maintain, though the prospect of doing so remains tantalisingly appealing.”

The life of an Unherd subscriber. This is a mess of an article.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
1 day ago
Reply to  Evan Heneghan

From the sublime to the ridiculous, one might say

Kim Harrison
Kim Harrison
1 day ago

More men for the rest of us. 45 per cent of men voted for Harris, 4B seems like a collective punishment.

Last edited 1 day ago by Kim Harrison
Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
1 day ago
Reply to  Kim Harrison

Most of identity politics is precisely that – a collective punishment, in the way that Marx felt the bourgoise should be punished.
We saw that in Kamala Harris, or at least 55% of us did.
Either way, I suspect upper middle class females shall survive.

Brett H
Brett H
1 day ago

if men don’t like women, refusal becomes the only rational female choice.
Thats funny. If men don’t like women then it’s all over.

Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
1 day ago
Reply to  Brett H

Male sexual desire, ultimately, inspires us to do things like build skyscrapers, hospitals, farms, and factories. Many of us would otherwise be quite lazy.
If free sexbots are distributed to every man who requests one, humanity would soon enough cease, as the aftermath of worldwide fecundity ending would likely resemble a “Children of Men” type of scenario.
I don’t think women would much enjoy that, either.

Arouet
Arouet
1 day ago

The gender-based finger-pointing ignores the fact that men and women have almost identical attitudes to abortion. A Pew Research Center poll in May 2024 found that 64% of women say abortion should be legal in all/most cases, and 61% of men, a tiny difference of just 3%. The range of differences are far greater across religious affiliation, political party, age, race, and education. Another poll by Gallup found that the number of women who say that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances is in fact slightly higher for women (12%) than for men (11%).
The young woman in the Washington Post says that “Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not be able to have access to abortion. They can’t have both.” This is just ignorance. Well, apart from the first part…

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
1 day ago
Reply to  Arouet

“Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not be able to have access to abortion. They can’t have both.”
Perhaps if people weren’t confusing abortion for contraception, they’d still have unfettered access to it.

Last edited 1 day ago by Lindsay S
Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
1 day ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

I was going to say something like that but then chose another angle.
If a woman considers abortion as a species of contraception rather than a safety net if/when your normal contraception fails, she needs to be directed to the next adult sex ed class post haste.

Last edited 1 day ago by Katharine Eyre
Lindsay S
Lindsay S
1 day ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

What they should really be saying is “consequence free, unprotected sex – you can’t have both!”
Someone once told me I was lucky to only have two children, I pointed out that it had nothing to do with luck and everything to do with contraception.

Archibald Tennyson
Archibald Tennyson
1 day ago

How one could see 4B as anything other than a civilisational calamity is beyond me.
Lord help us all.

Lennon Ó Náraigh
Lennon Ó Náraigh
1 day ago

To paraphrase the great Titania McGrath, future generations will thank us if we can make every society into a women-only society.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 day ago

Extremist genderism of any sort is demeaning and anti-natural.

Jonathan Andrews
Jonathan Andrews
1 day ago

It seems an attempt at one aspect of the “femme fatale” expression of toxic feminity; women trying to manipulate men through sex.

Brett H
Brett H
1 day ago

In one gloating response, Brandon Morse of the Right-wing media organisation Red State said of 4B: “They went so Left they started going Right, claiming they’re going to stop being hoes and won’t put out until men respect them. That’s what we’ve been saying you should do all along.”
But it is funny. Are women becoming the new comedians?

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
1 day ago
Reply to  Brett H

They’re trying to follow the script of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata”, but out of a different motive.

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 day ago
Reply to  Brett H

Not feminazis. When they give up men and consort with cats, they also give up the sense of humor. Remember, when you laugh, the patriarchy is further entrenched.

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
1 day ago

Women’s ’emancipation’ is as nonsense a concept as ever the ‘Patriarchy’ was and is.
Feminism is brain rot, which owes its rise not to any deep philosophical insights but rather to the economic imperatives of the post-industrial West, which needed more non-physical labour to feed the burgeoning administrative office classes of the 20th Century.
For most women, it only ever made them miserable – forcing them to compete with men and deny their natural, fundamental roles as mothers. There was a class of woman whom feminism suited – they have always been with us, except in the olden days we used to call them witches. Now we call them childless cat ladies. They are mentally twisted, unhappy females whose fictional association with the dark arts provides some insight into the inner workings of the childless female mind.
For men, feminism has created resentment, it has made them weak and devoid of purpose. We are only a few generations into this experiment and the results are already pretty clear – it doesn’t work.

Last edited 1 day ago by Graham Stull
Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 day ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

I often ask feminists whether all the non-graduate women they’ve forced into servitude at supermarket tills might not be happier at home with their kids – and whether that might be a better model for society generally.

McLovin
McLovin
1 day ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

And the nannies and nursery workers.

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
1 day ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

I’ve come to understand that when these people say the word ‘intersectionality’, what they mean is a kind of fudge that allows them to rationalise how their $h1tty policies are, for the most part, a self-serving justification for their own intense privilege.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 day ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

I do hope future generations look back at these times and acknowledge the huge mistakes. Feminism, transgenderism and a few other “isms” will be skewered by historians.

AC Harper
AC Harper
1 day ago

The world is imperfect and various ‘groups’ are under great pressure (some self driven) to cement their special identities.
But there are said to be three types of love. Lust (the initial attraction to mate), Romantic Love (the first few months or years of togetherness) and eventually Loving Companionship.
During these three stages (if you are successful in navigating them) you may raise children. Arguably it is not Love that makes the world go around (media hype I’m afraid and not applicable to all cultures) but family.
So however high minded the 4B people are they are against something that makes the world go around. Their choice.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
1 day ago

Comparing Trump to Yoon, in any way, is next level obscene. His chief of staff is a woman. She managed his campaign.

And please stop with the “male resentment” over women having more opportunities. My first boss was a woman. In 1982.

Last edited 1 day ago by Alex Lekas
J Dunne
J Dunne
1 day ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

I do wonder when feminists will stop pretending that we live in a never ending 1957.

Kim Harrison
Kim Harrison
2 days ago

Didn’t around 44 per cent of men vote for Harris? This is supposed to be collective punishment, I guess, but that’s all the more men for the rest of us.

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
1 day ago
Reply to  Kim Harrison

Ironically, the only men who stand to be punished are the pick me male feminists who voted Harris anyway.
The rest of us want no part of crazy cat ladies. We’ll take the real women, thank you very much!

Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 day ago

Every picture of women in the 4B movement suggests an ulterior motive for this “principled” position – they all be ugly, and probably have no one trying to get into their pants. All we want to know, at this point, is “How many cats?”
Sex strikes only work if someone wants sex with the striker.

kate Dunlop
kate Dunlop
1 day ago

Some basic, boring, but important facts- most women are sexually attracted to and like men; most men are sexually attracted to and like women. Some people are attracted sexually to others of their sex and some people don’t like themselves at all and are not very attractive to anyone. I suspect that most 4B cultists fall into the last category.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 day ago
Reply to  kate Dunlop

The only evidence you have on your side of the argument is eons of human history.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
1 day ago

‘…and rising male resentment at women’s emancipation’
Maybe the resentment is more about being dismissed, denigrated and reduced to the role of a ‘problem’.

David Morley
David Morley
1 day ago

So in South Korea there are horrible men who say nasty things about the women who are saying nasty things about men. And nobody wants children. Guess we’ll be able to drop the “north” in North Korea pretty soon.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
1 day ago

“See the nice boys, dancin’ in pairs . . .”

Martin Goodfellow
Martin Goodfellow
1 day ago

Lysistrata’s project had a single, admirable goal: to end a war, not to leave their society in an endless war between men and women. That’s why it succeeded. 4B and its immitators are only offering a dead-ended road to failure and ruin. Male-female relationships are always going to be difficult, but still worthy of success, despite inevitable casualties. There is no general remedy for this, like it or not. Aristophanes understood this.

Last edited 1 day ago by Martin Goodfellow
Richard Craven
Richard Craven
1 day ago

(1) The repeal of Roe vs Wade hasn’t banned abortion. It’s returned the legislative jurisdiction over abortion rights to the individual States, where it belongs seeing as the U.S.A is a federation.
(2) Besides repealing Roe vs Wade, the Trump administration is also set to reinforce the rights of women and girls to female-only spaces.
(3) We men are very comfortable with the decision of the morbidly obese, blue-haired, bearded and bull-ringed laydees of the woke left to avoid copulating with us.

McLovin
McLovin
1 day ago

I read just the other day that the number of cross party relationships in the US is only 6%, and has been declining. That implies that the sex strike concept is going to punish men who agree with the woman about politics anyway – so what’s the point of that.
And here’s a thought – what if the men were only virtue signalling their politics to get laid. Sounds like a recipe for increasing republican support.

David Morley
David Morley
1 day ago

Am I the only one who feels genuine nostalgia for all those crackpot second wave feminists. Those dear dead days beyond recall!

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
1 day ago
Reply to  David Morley

The ones ripping their bras off and burning them?
Yeah – those were the days.

James Davis
James Davis
1 day ago

Actually there is a great benefit to the 4B movement. If women don’t have sex with men they won’t get pregnant. If they don’t get pregnant there will be less abortions.

Last edited 1 day ago by James Davis
Derek Smith
Derek Smith
21 hours ago
Reply to  James Davis

Shhh! Don’t give the game away…

David Morley
David Morley
1 day ago

the insult kimchinyeo (“kimchi b***h”) suggests women are spoiled, materialistic parasites seeking to live off men. 

Presumably this insult is used for those women to which it is felt to apply, rather than all women. A bit like basic b or Karen in the west.

A similar view is taken in the west to the one in South Korea – that the number of spoiled, materialistic women is increasing, and that this is a bad thing. But I don’t think anybody claims it is all women.

David Morley
David Morley
1 day ago

pansexual

Someone who has sax with kitchen equipment? I thought we were trying to get women out of the kitchen.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
1 day ago
Reply to  David Morley

Maybe it’s named after “Pan”, that priapetic god that’s half goat and wants to screw anything that moves.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
1 day ago

I just spent half an hour writing what I tried to make a thoughtful comment responding to another comment. I saw it appear, someone up-voted it. And then it was gone. It’s been removed. There was no profanity in it. There were no personal attacks in it. And nothing threatening towards anybody. I was relating the idea of patriarchy with modern discoveries in human genomics.
I’m not going to waste my time writing comments any more on Unherd if they’re going to be removed like this.
[edit] It just showed up again. What is going on here?

Last edited 1 day ago by Jeff Cunningham
Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
1 day ago

Sometimes updates take a bit of time. Before reacting, click the “refresh page” button. I haven’t seen my comments removed from Unherd.

Robert Gault
Robert Gault
1 day ago

I can’t help but think the women joining the strike likely have blue or green hair and a nose ring……so not highly desirable as sex partners in the first place.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 day ago

Brandon Morse calls women wh***s, and he wonders why women might not want to date, or even marry, men on the right (or on the left for that matter). Trump called Harris a bi*** and a c***, and the crowds chanted the words with glee. If I was a young woman, that would definitely turn me away from men the right. And men on the far left who are fanatics. When I was young, heterosexual woman, I wanted a man who respected me at the very least. I fell in love with my husband because he was hilarious, wicked smart, and would never call a woman a c***.

Last edited 1 day ago by UnHerd Reader
Pete Marsh
Pete Marsh
1 day ago

This sounds like groups of (mostly women) that are self deleting themselves from the future…

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 day ago

 “4B represents an ideal of female-only existence, where male violence and sexual and domestic exploitation can be eliminated by simply ridding yourself of the males who do these things.”
The author probably would find it hard to grasp the number of men in this country who eschew relationships with women because they are so toxic.
Also interestingly more than 25% of men in the UK will never father a child

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
1 day ago

Out of curiosity, I went back to look at a list of S.D.’s previous columns. One recent one was a real gem of political prognostication: “The Power of Taylor Swift Politics.”
In it she notes how badly Hillary was served for using the expression “basket of deplorables”, then chides Vance for “childless cat ladies”, predicting that this is the kind of thing that sinks elections. The trouble with her thinking is that Vance’s target is a relatively small group and a fairly benign label. A pity she didn’t spend anytime dwelling on the ill-advisedness of the “garbage” and “you must be at the wrong rally – try down the street” comments – targets of which were much, much larger.
Final paragraph: “Swift’s response is mindful and demure and resolute. It shows a grasp of political messaging that Vance and co. have failed to get anywhere close to: pop stars have learned the power of the big tent, while right-wing politicians flail around for the pleasure of their fandoms. …”
It’s such an embarrassment of riches for criticism, I’m going to throw up my hands and not even try.

J Dunne
J Dunne
1 day ago

Paul Joseph Watson released a rather amusing video on this subject earlier today if anybody wants to have a giggle.

Perry de Havilland
Perry de Havilland
1 day ago

Hard to see the downside if you are a rational reasonable male looking for a rational reasonable partner. If the psycho-nutters loudly self-identify & remove themselves from the dating pool (not to mention the gene pool), there are a lot less bullets to dodge & a much higher chance of hooking up with someone nice.

Vito Quattrocchi
Vito Quattrocchi
1 day ago

The trouble with strikes is that – to risk a distasteful terminology with respect to the subject matter – there are always scabs. Feminism is like any other utopian ideology in that it requires everybody to go along with it in order for it to work. You can go on sex strike but then other women who are happy to step in can always be brought in to do the work in your place. Not all women hate men and see them as oppressors no matter how many times they’re told to feel that way. The irony is, of course, that it’s precisely the kind of men that feminists resent most that women instinctually find most attractive. The men who agree with political feminism are amongst the least likely to be having sex regularly anyway. The incentives here run opposite to the stated goal.

Cantab Man
Cantab Man
1 day ago

Trump won because he took clear positions on issues that enough Americans (men and women) cared about, and agreed with him on that they handed him a mandate via a free and fair democratic election so that he can enact his/their vision.

The New York Times represented the loser’s reply quite nicely with their opening paragraphs the day after the election:

America, it appears to them, isn’t ready for a woman President.

The New York Times’ article didn’t dare to mention that her lack of vision (as was evident to all who listened to her incomprehensible word salads) and large-scale disagreement on the positions that could be deciphered from her unintelligible ramblings are what cost Kamala and Democrats the Presidency.

Americans are looking for competency in a presidential candidate on the issues that matter to them. A Commander-in-Chief.

Not a Man-in-Chief. Not a Woman-in-Chief. Not a DEI HR Representative-in-Chief. Not an Intersectionality Qualified-But-Incompetent-Person-in-Chief. Not a Therapist-in-Chief. Not a desperate Pick-Me-I’ll-Say-Anything-in-Chief. Not a You’re-all-Deplorables-I-Hate-Your-Guts-Vote-for-Me-in-Chief. And not any other faddish category currently favored within navel-gazing Social Science Departments on Ivy League campuses. Faddish categories that are implanted into the most privileged and lacking-in-real-world-experience children who already have immediate access to the most kingly/queenly resources that have ever existed as yet upon this aging planet. Which means that they will never understand the average voter.

If some privileged, rich, influential, and cloistered people want to call evidence of a candidate’s competency “The Patriarchy” (TM), they have every right. Their lamentations from Ivy Towers just don’t resonate with citizens who cast their vote.

Johann Strauss
Johann Strauss
1 day ago

Doies sarah Ditum know anything about what transpired in the US after Dobbs. Does she even know what Dobbs was about, and that even liberal Icon, justive Ginsberg stated ethat she was against Ro v Wave as it was bad law. Abortion has now been put back to the States. There will be variations, just as there are in Europe (12 weeks in France and Germany, 12 weeks in Spain and Italy, 24 weeks in the UK and the Netherlands), but any woman in America will be able to get an abortion. All she has to do is drive to a neighboring state.

Alan Gore
Alan Gore
10 hours ago

I really hope this movement catches on with the left. It would mean that conservative women would be the ones who date, marry and have families. They alone would influence children as they grow up. No more wokeness, forever.