Essay: The 4Y Movement
Sex, love, and freedom in the time of fascism
First published November 24, 2024
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.
If the United States were Barbie’s Dreamhouse, more than half the white Barbies living happily within, ignoring (boycotting) the Kens, were Trump voters. Those same white women Trump voters would bar the trans Barbie from using the bathroom, as they have done to newly elected Rep. Sarah McBride in Congress.
If there’s a group of people I want to boycott altogether in the aftermath of the re-election of Donald Trump, it is hands down the white women who voted for him in their majority–as they always have with previous Republican presidential nominees, again, and again, for the past seven decades.
In the U.S., the Barbie Dreamhouse utopia is a lie akin to the right-wing’s nostalgia for the “good old days” of the 1950’s. It is a utopia for a very particular kind of woman. Her utopia is not mine and the reason why is the reason it’s important to actually define what patriarchy is, rather than just parrot the word over and over and think it makes you a feminist.
Patriarchy is a system of oppressions that privileges male dominance. Patriarchy is not men. Are the main beneficiaries of patriarchy men? Yes. Do some women benefit from patriarchy? Yes. Does feminism liberate us all from the oppressions of patriarchy? Fuck yes.
And in the case of the white supremacist patriarchy for which Trump is the fruition, not an aberration, it is clear that “voting against their interest” to explain why women or men of colour voted for a racist sexual predator reveals a poor understanding of the way patriarchy works.
Patriarchy is a system of oppressions that privileges male dominance. Patriarchy is not men. Are the main beneficiaries of patriarchy men? Yes. Do some women benefit from patriarchy? Yes. Does feminism liberate us all from the oppressions of patriarchy? Fuck yes.
The white women who in sheer numbers are the reason Trump won, chose their race over their gender. That is voting for the interest of their race. White women, at 37 percent of all voters, are the largest voting bloc in the U.S. The Latino men who in their majority voted for Trump, chose their gender over their race. They voted in the interest of their gender. Those Latino men represent 6 percent of the electorate in the U.S.
Go ahead and boycott men. What are you going to do about all those women who voted for Trump, who put him into power?
One of the most stubborn myths that I’ve always found astounding about the U.S. is that people here think they are free. It is a particularly dangerous myth for women. The U.S. is a deeply conservative country that is in denial over the power and influence that Christianity exerts. And that power and influence, along with racism and misogyny are at the core of the ascendancy of Trump et al.
In such a conservative country, the 4B’s are a conservative reaction that (perhaps inadvertently) reinforces that conservatism.
This is a country where in 29 states abstinence is taught as the preferred approach to sex education and in 19 states, the importance of engaging in sexual activity only within marriage is taught. This is a country where teenage girls sign “purity pledges” that promise their fathers they will be celibate until they marry (a man, of course). This is a country in which Christian zealots spent 50 years planning to destroy the federally protected right to an abortion, and succeeded.
This is a country in which the Democrats–who boast that they’re the “pro-choice” party–can only muster at their national convention the most cowardly and apologetic pleas for abortion rights by parading women who have suffered and therefore “deserve” an abortion instead of stating clearly that an abortion is the right of anyone who does not want to be pregnant. Abortion is a right, not an apology society makes to those it neglects.
This is a country where 30 years ago thousands of teenagers covered the lawn of the National Mall in the nation’s capital with an estimated 200,000 purity pledge cards, signed by teens across the country as part of the
Southern Baptist organization’s True Love Waits–a “breakout moment in the evangelical purity movement.” This is a country where that “purity movement” impacts sex education in the United States to this day.
In such a country, it is not enough to “boycott men.” What we need is a confident, unapologetic manifesto that claims ownership of our bodies, our sexuality, and breaks the chains of patriarchy rather than further wrapping ourselves in them — to loudly, unabashedly declare what exactly we are saying YES to.
So 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.
Unless you say what you want instead of what you reject, it’s a declaration that you don’t know what you want; it’s a retreat.
“No!” in the time of fascism can seem powerful, an unequivocal refusal of fascist diktats. “Yes!” as a full-throated feminist expression of what we demand, not just refuse;”Yes!” is the path to liberation.
Sure, “No” is a choice. “Yes to these things that I want instead,” is a choice with power.
Queerness
Non-monogamy
Reproductive Justice
Community
I was born in Egypt to a Muslim family. I was brought up and socialized in what is known in the U.S. as purity culture. I was taught and I obeyed that I should wait until I married (a man, of course) to have sex. And I waited and waited and got fed up of waiting and finally had sex with another person at the age of 29. I say “with another person” because I would’ve lost my fucking mind if I hadn’t started masturbating regularly at the age of 11.
In the numerous articles I read about women in the U.S. embracing the 4B’s, no one talked about masturbation, or sex toys, or sex with people other than cisgender men. There have been separatist lesbian movements in the past. The 4B’s are not that.
It is a joyless lack: lack of desire, lack of pleasure, lack of sexuality, lack of anything other than socking it to the boys. And it sounds utterly miserable. Fascism is miserable enough.
Queerness
Queerness is one of my Yes’s because I’m queer and cisgender men are not – to misquote Jeanette Winterson – the only fruit. Have sex with anyone you want! Break not just the gender binary but the idea that our sexuality belongs in a small, confining box. Unless you are asexual, swearing off sex altogether because you want to boycott men is akin to cutting off your nose to spite your own face.
Declare political lesbianism or political bi/pansexuality or even a sexual fluidity. At a minimum, refuse to declare a definition to your sexuality, to be put into the box of cisgender heterosexuality. Though I manifest: Declare your way of having sex and enjoying it too!
When all you offer cisgender heterosexual women is essentially a sex strike, you are enforcing the conservative idea–the bedrock of purity culture–that sex is something a woman gives and a man takes. You make it women’s responsibility to fix men through the withholding of the reward of sex. Abstention whether political or religious as mine was has at its heart that belief that women’s sexuality is a reward. Fuck that.
Where is a woman’s pleasure and desire? And not just with a cisgender man. With anyone.
It took me years to get over the guilt of having sex outside of marriage. I fucked that guilt out of my system. My revolution was to go from being that 29-year-old “virgin” to a woman who talked openly about sex and desire because I know that a woman from my background was not supposed to, and that I needed to, to be free.
Abstention whether political or religious as mine was has at its heart that belief that women’s sexuality is a reward. Fuck that. Where is a woman’s pleasure and desire? And not just with a cisgender man. With anyone.
The burden of “modesty” and “purity” that undergird “purity culture” are always much heavier on women and girls than on men and boys, but we must remember that patriarchy has defined in very narrow ways how to be a “man,” which often excludes anyone but a conservative, cisgender, heterosexual, married man. Depending on where you are, that man usually belongs to the most powerful group in a given culture.
Given patriarchy’s narrow and unforgiving gender binaries, subversion of those binaries and refusal to conform to the dictates of patriarchy’s “normativities”--heterosexuality as well as monogamy–are forms of rebellion. That is why queerness is powerful.
And so is nonmonogamy.
Non-monogamy
There is no higher principle or value for me than being free. I fought my way to nonmonogamy because I understand the way patriarchy weaponises monogamy against women especially.
Why date or marry only cisgender men and why date or marry only one person and why marry at all when the institution of marriage fails so many women, especially. Nonmonogamy liberates us to create relationships of our choosing.
My 4Y’s compel you to imagine. And then to imagine even more. And then to believe you can be free. Fascism is to control, what feminism is to liberation.
3, Reproductive Justice
Reproductive justice offers liberation in the ways we choose to have or not have families. I am childfree by choice–happily so. Reproductive justice is a term coined by a group of Black women who named themselves Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice in 1994. They intended it to mean “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”
SisterSong, which works to improve the reproductive lives of marginalized communities, explains: “They recognized that the women’s rights movement, led by and representing middle class and wealthy white women, could not defend the needs of women of color and other marginalized women and trans people.”
Community
My fourth Yes comes with the sustainable communities of reproductive justice. My ambition for such communities is to guarantee universal basic income, housing for all, and to ensure everyone has free education and healthcare.
Such communities liberate us to create exactly the kind of relationships we want free from patriarchy’s stranglehold or normativities, free from violent partners upon whose income or health insurance our survival depends, free to fashion lives outside of the narrow confines of what is possible or allowed.
My 4Y’s compel you to imagine. And then to imagine even more. And then to believe you can be free.
Fascism is to control, what feminism is to liberation.
“No!” in the time of fascism can seem powerful, an unequivocal refusal of fascist diktats. “Yes!” as a full-throated feminist expression of what we demand, not just refuse;”Yes!” is the path to liberation.
The goal of fascism is control: of our bodies and minds, and especially those of us it deems a threat to its determination to shrink our lives. The goal of feminism, the most potent weapon against fascism, is liberation: of our bodies and minds, and especially of a social and economic order that fascism uses to shrink our lives.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She has edited an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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It was that fucking Barbie film all over again, where merely repeatedly uttering the word “Patriarchy” passed for feminism. yup.