By Victor Morton - The Washington Times - Thursday, November 7, 2024
Making America Great Again may not work out so great for some American men in the bedroom.
A number of feminists are going on a sex strike in retaliation for Donald Trump’s presidential victory.
According to videos and social-media posts compiled and cited by the Daily Telegraph, liberal women are drawing inspiration from the South Korean “4B” movement, which commits women to four “no” behaviors toward men — dating, sex, marriage and children. (The Korean prefix for negative words is “bi.”)
Interest in the movement has spiked since Mr. Trump’s victory over Democrat Kamala Harris, who not only would have been the first female U.S. president but who also sought to make the election a referendum on abortion.
“For the next four years I am going to abstain from sex with men,” said a woman in one TikTok video cited by the Telegraph.
Abortion was specifically cited by one woman who said “if all these men are voting to take our rights away, they don’t deserve to touch a woman for the next four years. So, hope you thought that through you guys.”
Another woman referring to Florida’s rejection of a proposal to enshrine abortion rights in the state and said “good luck getting laid. Especially in Florida, because me and my girlies are participating in the 4B movement.”
In another TikTok video, the young woman not only vows to refuse sex but encourages others to delete dating apps.
“As a woman, my bodily autonomy matters and this is my way to exercise sovereignty over that,” she says. “I highly encourage any other women who are single and still care about progressing women’s rights and still fighting for our bodily autonomy to do the same. Delete your dating apps.”
She described the 4B movement as a “point of inspiration.”
Another video was captioned: “I think it’s time for American women to participate in our own 4B movement.”
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In the days after Donald Trump was elected president, the 4B feminist movement is capturing young women’s interest on social media.
Young women on Instagram and TikTok are the primary demographic behind the recent American surge in interest in the 4B movement.
Mariel Padilla
General Assignment Reporter
November 7, 2024
In the hours following former President Donald Trump’s election victory, Google searches related to 4B — a fringe South Korean feminist movement that made a name for itself in the mid to late 2010s — surged in the United States.
It’s called “4B” because “B” is a shorthand for the word “no” in Korean — and a series of “nos” is what the movement calls for.
No sex.
Young women on Instagram and TikTok are the primary demographic behind the recent American surge in interest. The idea behind the movement is individual resistance against what it defines as a conservative political environment and the corrosion of reproductive rights.
Michaela Thomas, a 21-year-old artist in Georgia, told The Washington Post that she first heard about the 4B movement about a year ago.
“Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not be able to have access to abortion,” Thomas told The Post. “They can’t have both. Young women don’t want to be intimate with men who don’t fight for women’s rights; it’s showing they don’t respect us.”
The concept of a “sex strike” is not new. The ancient Greek play “Lysistrata” highlights women swearing off sex to protest the Peloponnesian War. In South Korea, the 4B movement took root at a time when the country was undergoing its own reckoning with gender violence and equality issues. (It is a country with one of the widest wage gaps in the world.)
In the United States, there is a growing ideological divide between young men and women: Women aged 18 to 30 are 30 percent more liberal than men of the same age, according to The Financial Times. Some experts point to the 2018 #MeToo movement as the key trigger in the rise in feminist values among women and the subsequent backlash among young men.