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.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/