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Prostitutes protest in South Korea. (Credit: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/ Getty)
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.
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.
“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.
That, along with other iniquities, such as the new sexism as embedded in DEI.
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…
I suspect it might be time to invest in a brothel.
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.
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.
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.
Give me a break, I’ve never felt embarrassed to be a man, but I have been embarrassed to be associated with idiots.
I think you are probably right to be embarrassed
I don’t think beta males feel embarrassment.
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.
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.
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?
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.
And we all know how feminist and empowered those Muslim women are.
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
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.
I wouldn’t worry too much. There are plenty of unpleasant women out there too. It’s not exclusive to men.
The problem with male feminists is that they are almost always creeps.
That’s because they’re lying and you can feel it.
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.
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”?
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.
Your comment doesn’t seem to address my question.
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.
You said “Many will, given the opportunity, ditch a middle aged woman for a younger more attractive model when she starts showing signs of declining fecundity”.
I don’t know of any men who left their middle age wife for a younger women. You seem to know many. So what do you mean by “many” or is it just something you threw up in the air to bolster some idea you have?
Ok, well I do. There are plenty of examples of famous people that have done this, so pretending you kind of think it doesn’t exist is just ridiculous. It does exists – along with a myriad of other reasons relationships might fail at some point along the way – to say women should happily trust their husbands to provide for them because nobody changes over 20 or 30 years, and irresolvable conflicts never materialise, is patently against the reality of life.
Okay, I can see that you like to play games. I didn’t say it didn’t exist, I questioned your idea that “many” did it. But now I learn you weren’t talking about “many” at all but the few, the “famous people” who are hardly representative of anything. And you said you do know many men who have done this, but you meant “famous people”, so I guess I have to assume you’re famous.
No, I know a few people in my personal life that it’s happened, and I know of some famous people. The point still stands that women don’t know in 20 years whether their husbands will still be there supporting them for all manner of reasons. I’ve read early feminist literature where the threat of husbands leaving wives for younger women was important in their reasoning. I’ve said why I think it doesn’t need a large proportion of men to fall into this category for it to be prudent for women to behave as if it might happen to them. In any case, the specific category was just an example of many reasons marriages fail. I’m happy to change the statement to enough marriages and relationships fail, for whatever reason, possibly even including some men leaving their partners for younger, more sexually attractive women, that it’s prudent for women to ensure they maintain their own means of making a living in the eventuality that the marriage or relationship fails. I just don’t see this is even a contentious point.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
You seem to know a lot about what makes others tick. You think most couples would like the split and it’s religious dogma behind families living together? A lot of people are in nuclear families because that’s what they think society expects of them. You’re very good with words like “many” and “A lot”. What are all you’re ideas about others based on? Owning two homes? When do you think that’ll happen? And how will this happen on a three day income and what jobs would be there for all those, so called, couples.
I know lots of people that clearly enjoy living in a nuclear family. Full power to them, I’m genuinely happy for all my friends that have that situation. But I also know lots of people that aren’t, or weren’t, and the article, and comments are about an increasing tendency towards conflict between the sexes causing difficulties in relationships. My comments are about why this might increasingly be the case, and how people might naturally find solutions to these issues. I say “a lot” and “often” because it’s what the article is talking about. These phenomena do exist, whether you like to admit it or not.
Regarding the details of such an arrangement, why would someone looking after the kids 3 days a week have to work 3 days a week? There are plenty of single parents that work full time. Arranging a few hours childcare a couple of days a week is substantially less than any properly single parent. And regarding homes, as I said in the comment, if populations decline there will become a point where there are increasing numbers of homes available. If you’ve never heard of sharing housework to be an area of conflict between couples, you also live in a utopian world I also wished I inhabitted.
I’m unclear why my comments have drawn vitriol. Divorce is a common phenomenon, more people are single than ever, birth rates are declining. Even suggesting some reasons why that might be happening and how it might resolve itself in time, other than somehow forcing people to continue to do what they’ve indicated by their life choices they don’t want to, is seen as some sort of evil. I don’t get it.
I hope you aren’t including my comments as vitriol. I was legitimately curious and you’ve given me some things to think about. My principal concern is that we’re in uncharted territory in terms of a lack of underlying social structures and guidelines. Can human beings flourish, individually or collectively, absent an underlying common culture that favors certain social arrangements and gives a structure to social life? I don’t have the answer to that question and neither does anybody else. My experience leads me to be skeptical that any sort of harmonious, productive, society can exist this way for very long given the absence of historical examples. Maybe with technology we can make it work, but I have to imagine there will be consequences, some foreseeable and others not.
I’m imagining nations fracturing into mutually exclusive, hostile subcultures that make governance problematic if not impossible. Governments typically do not manage these internal conflicts well. More often than not, internal conflict leads to civil disorder, violent or nonviolent conflict, and widespread suffering. It almost always causes whatever civilization or nation to fall into decline, which continues until either the nation/civilization either establishes a new, binding social order, breaks up into smaller independent nations and cultures that remain hostile towards one another, or is conquered by a stronger outsider who imposes a new order. I question the viability of large nations and empires in such a disordered society with a lack of common social mores and cultural values. As a libertarian, I’m not at all opposed to replacing the US with somewhere between fifty and one hundred fifty more culturally homogeneous nations which can each have their own social structures, be they something traditional like the nuclear family, or some new social order that you have proposed.
I see. Co-parenting is certainly an option but I feel like we have a long way to go before that becomes the preferred social model. If people didn’t want to have families and be in that environment, why do they still do it? Religious belief is a factor certainly, and I’m sure you agree people should be free to practice whatever religion they adhere to and raise their children accordingly. I think you assume too much about what other people do or don’t want. Certainly many people would choose co-parenting, but others wouldn’t.
You seem to be assuming a great deal about human motivation that isn’t based on history or biology. For most of human history, the natural bonds of parent to offspring and genetic similarity formed the basis for clans, tribes, and eventually civilizations. There are few examples when familial connection was not of great importance. This strikes me as strong evidence that some aspects at least of family behavior are instinctive and biological. The examples we do have of alternative societies are largely cases of isolated tribes where some other social tradition replaced the natural family. There has never been any period to my knowledge where people functioned without any inherent social structure but rather made up their own as they went along, unless you have some example I didn’t know about.
You seem to place a great deal of importance on people’s emotions, which is a dangerous enough game. Things like ‘happiness’ are hard to define, let alone measure, in any objective way. I’ll concede your point anyway. I don’t doubt many people are in unhappy families, but correlation is not causation. Are people in nuclear families unhappy because they’re in families or for some other reason. You assume if they’re unhappy in a family they’d be happier without, but what evidence do you have to make such an assertion. Perhaps you personally are happier with this arrangement but why should you assume your preferences are typical of people everywhere. Take these people out of their nuclear families and they might be equally unhappy for different reasons. They might simply be people that are dissatisfied with the way the world is such that there’s basically no way to make them ‘happy and satisfied’. As someone with Asperger’s syndrome, I can tell you that I am horribly ill suited for our hyper-socialized world of atomized individuals and free associations with a lack of underlying social structure. Put more simply, I have very weak social skills and even weaker relationship building skills. I would be hard pressed to design a society that would be more difficult or unpleasant for me to navigate than the one we currently inhabit. There’s only so much that can be done to bridge the gap between my basic nature and the basic nature of the society I was born into.
As for depopulation, you’re mostly correct. Running out of people isn’t an immediate problem. That was a bit of hyperbole on my part. Declining population, however, can be a serious problem without any prospect of human extinction. The problem lies in the fact that the old and feeble come to outnumber the young and able bodied. Fewer people paying into social security also means less money going out, and distributed among a larger elderly population. Fortunately for us, the US’s decline will happen a lot slower than places like China, Japan, etc. I’ll be long dead before the US has exhausted the supply of its people and immigrants, but it’s something to think about in the long run.
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.
And boring nonsense
Someone who has sax with kitchen equipment? I thought we were trying to get women out of the kitchen.
Maybe it’s named after “Pan”, that priapetic god that’s half goat and wants to screw anything that moves.
If you have sax with kitchen equipment, do you jazz in the sink?
(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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
From the sublime to the ridiculous, one might say
“Women-only societies rarely thrive”
They never thrive, because it is biologically impossible.
Try keeping bees for a few years…
They also fail to thrive because they can’t open any jars. They starve to death.
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.
The jar is a tool of the Patriarchy.
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.
Extremist genderism of any sort is demeaning and anti-natural.
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…
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I wonder what these same people would think about a Federal decision to enforce every American into going to church on Sunday?
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.
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?
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.
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.
And the nannies and nursery workers.
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.
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.
It seems an attempt at one aspect of the “femme fatale” expression of toxic feminity; women trying to manipulate men through sex.
More men for the rest of us. 45 per cent of men voted for Harris, 4B seems like a collective punishment.
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.
How one could see 4B as anything other than a civilisational calamity is beyond me.
Lord help us all.
“See the nice boys, dancin’ in pairs . . .”
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.
All of those lawfare judgments are going to be vacated at some point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
They’re trying to follow the script of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata”, but out of a different motive.
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.
To paraphrase the great Titania McGrath, future generations will thank us if we can make every society into a women-only society.
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.
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.
The only evidence you have on your side of the argument is eons of human history.
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?
Sometimes updates take a bit of time. Before reacting, click the “refresh page” button. I haven’t seen my comments removed from Unherd.
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.
I do wonder when feminists will stop pretending that we live in a never ending 1957.
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.
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.
‘…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’.
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.
Shhh! Don’t give the game away…
This sounds like groups of (mostly women) that are self deleting themselves from the future…
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.
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.
Am I the only one who feels genuine nostalgia for all those crackpot second wave feminists. Those dear dead days beyond recall!
The ones ripping their bras off and burning them?
Yeah – those were the days.
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.
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.
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***.
“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
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.
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.
Paul Joseph Watson released a rather amusing video on this subject earlier today if anybody wants to have a giggle.
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.
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.
I used to work for US Customs. The visible contempt emanating from Korean, male travelers compelled to interact with female inspectors was startling. Perhaps information about places where females are respected, or minimally less demeaned, has fueled bi.
The most significant unexamined premise in this essay…? “when your underlying sexual orientation is pointing in the right direction”
Bindel treats sexual desire as arising from some dark and mysterious hidden well of souls, the deepest and most interior part of the ‘inner me.’ What long-repudiated hooey, some relic of Freudian theory and the psychotherapist’s couch – if we just look hard enough inside, we’ll find the real, true, authentic me.
This view is borne of our wish that what we want, what we feel, must be what is right. It’s a terrible, destructive idea, responsible for much of our modern malaise. But Bindel treats it as a given.