Essay: The 4Y Movement

Sex, love, and freedom in the time of fascism

When I first heard that women in the U.S. had made the 4B movement go viral after the re-election of Donald Trump, I initially thought fucking finally. Herein starts the torching of patriarchy that did not happen after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Here’s rage unleashed. Something will get burned down any minute now.

But instead, the more I read about the women who ostensibly were “boycotting men,” in the fashion of a movement that began in South Korea, the more it reminded me of pink pussy hats, and the ways performance passes for revolution for many white women in the U.S. It was that fucking Barbie film all over again, where merely repeatedly uttering the word “Patriarchy” passed for feminism. 

The 4B began as an online radical feminist response to growing misogyny in South Korea. Each B represents the first letter in the Korean word for the following: no dating men, no marriage to men, no sex with men, no babies. 

I am childfree by choice, bisexual, and nonmonogamous. While I seem to have signed onto two (and a half) of the B’s inadvertently before I knew of the movement, the majority of what I’ve learned about it dismays me in its claims to decentre men when its cornerstone principles encircle and dance around men. 

In the U.S. context, the 4B’s represent a retreat at a time when feminism should be on the offensive against fascism. Not just a retreat, but one that clarifies what it doesn’t want while rarely if ever articulating what it wants. 

And worse, judging from the (mostly white) women interviewed across the plethora of articles about the growing popularity of 4B in the U.S. it represents a naivete at best and wilful ignorance at worst of who brought Trump to power.

Let’s talk about sex. And pleasure, And desire. And community. Let’s talk about my 4Yeses, what I want and who I want it with.