Boycotting Men Won't Fix Us
The 4B movement ain't it, and that's OK!
Boycott men! Sex strike!
If you’re interested in learning more about the origins, politics and practice of the 4B feminist movement in South Korea, check out The Cut’s 2023 deep dive. As I realized halfway through writing, this is less about 4B and more about me working out some post-election rage via “media criticism.”
Late Friday night, a friend texted me the New York Times article, “After the Election, a Call for Women to Swear Off Men.” No, Alyssa Milano wasn’t at it again, calling for a sex strike that nobody asked for. It was the inevitable trend piece about how some (i.e., not many) liberal women were reacting to the election, looking elsewhere for models of bucking the patriarchy. And in this case, it was the familiar instinct to take page from Lysistrata and quite literally stop riding its dick.
“Interest in South Korea’s 4B feminist movement, which rejects dating, marriage, sex and childbirth, has risen in the United States,” the subhead announced, based on a post-election uptick in Google search traffic for “4B movement” and “dozens” of TikTok videos discussing it, both favorably and not.
Granted I’m looking through rage-colored glasses, but judging by the flood of piggyback trend pieces and 4B explainers, you’d think we were mass mobilizing for man-o-cide. (Weren’t the election results supposed to teach us our lesson about the disconnect between online discourse and offline behavior, or something like that?)
My massive eyeroll isn’t directed toward South Korean 4B feminists or the American women talking about it on TikTok. It’s toward the story’s predictable virality and swift mangling into far-right headlines like “Wild-Eyed Leftist Women Fantasize About Killing Men After Trump’s Dominant Election.”
It’s also a too-soon reminder of the narrative a lot folks love to believe about feminists: That we’re hysterical extremists who hate men and are so fucking stupid, we can’t even do the girl math to see that we’re actually making up the existence of gender-based violence and misogyny. That we’re so incapable of getting through our delicate skulls that this is how the world is and has always been so deal with it, all we can do is take out our own inadequacies on MEN. That we are the crazy ones, obviously.
There’s also the fact that South Korea’s 4B feminist movement can’t exactly be copy-pasted over to America. Wellesley political scientist Katharine Moon explained to NYT how, in South Korea, “until very recently, being a social adult—not coming of age at 18 or so but being a socially recognized adult—marriage was mandated.” So the 4B movement, Moon says, is less a reactive boycott on men than it is a rejection of culture where being a single-by-choice woman is a radical lifestyle choice to choose. And you bet they’re getting backlash for it; South Korea’s anti-feminist manosphere is apparently thriving, too.
Over on US TikTok, the thing that grabbed my attention in the 4B conversations was guns. Gun ownership is highly restricted in South Korea (lucky them). Self-defense is paramount to 4B living. Take a boxing class. Watch your back. Make sure you have cameras at all entrances to your home. And in America, get a gun (or 🌹 in the tiktok below), learn how to use it and stay packing.
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In the wake of an election win by a party that actively courted the manosphere, I don’t blame them. I can also see the benefits of fed-up women finding community and catharsis all the 4B discourse happening. Going all in on American-style 4B could also be personally transformative. Politically though? Not so much.
We can’t not-fuck our way out of this. But you already knew that. And hasn’t it kinda sorta been happening organically for a while anyway? Yet here were are. Angry, fucked over and the butt of the joke that was the 2024 election. Oh, and that ancient Greek play, Lysistrata? THE Western cultural touchstone of women sex striking to end a war? It was a comedy, too.
Not that sex strikes can’t work…
Earlier this year, The Cut profiled the ultra-Orthodox community of women whose sex strike helped secure a gett, aka a divorce.
In 2016, rural Colombian women’s “Crossed Legs Strike” got a much-needed road paved.
Filipino women in a sewing coop masterminded a sex strike in 2011 that quelled intra-village conflict.
recommended post-election reads
The Way Harris Lost Will Be Her Legacy (Tressie McMillan Cottom, NYT)
Why Democrats won’t build their own Joe Rogan (
, User mag)How America Embraced Gender War (Jia Tolentino, New Yorker)
Beyond the spectacle of elections (Jasmine Butler, Prism)
til next time…
