My Take | US women’s sex strike at Trump more farcical than Aristophanes
As more angry female Democrats boycott men because of the election, their ‘4b movement’ will prove to be demographically self-defeating
A trend on YouTube and TikTok is to have young women and also a few men screaming like a crazy person into the camera or else staring at it for long periods without saying a word.
Many liberal young women and members of the LGBTQ community in America are understandably distraught at the return of Donald Trump.
But this post-election resistance – futile in its current form, at least in my opinion – should offer some insight into the disarray that has characterised the singularly ineffectual Democratic Party and its liberal and left-of-centre coalition that practically handed the election to the Donald.
You see, the sisters are angry and they have pledged to abstain from sex with men, from childbirth, from marriage, and from dating.
That’s their programmatic statement, the idea of which is to punish the men in their lives for voting for Trump, but more generally, to take on all men and the patriarchy. This so-called “4b movement” self-consciously takes after a similar radical feminist movement that has gained some traction in South Korea in recent years.
In Korean, bi means “not”, therefore the refusal to date men (biyeonae), have sexual encounters (bisekseu), marry (bihon) and give birth (bichulsan).
I can understand using sex, or rather the withholding of it, as a political weapon. But in this case, shouldn’t you have launched your sex strike – or declared a “womb shutdown”, as one critic puts it – before the presidential election, when your man would be under pressure not to vote for Trump or at least pretend not to at the voting booth? You exercise leverage before not after the fact.
