Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Could the 4B movement ever happen in America?

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

Are women abstaining from sex to protest Donald Trump’s re-election? That’s the impression you’d get if you spent time reading the media over the past few weeks. Since the election, the “4B Movement” has been gaining traction online. But where did it come from, how does it work, and could something like this really take off in America? The Cut’s EJ Dickson joins Taylor to discuss.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Taylor Lorenz. Welcome to Power User. Are women abstaining from sex to protest Donald Trump's re-election? That's the impression you get if you spent time reading the media over the past few weeks. Now that my feet are firmly planted in the anger phase of grief, it's time for action. And my first form of action is actually inaction. It is actually to really embrace this 4B movement. Since the election, the 4B movement has been gaining traction online.

But where did the 4B movement? 4B movement come from. How does it work? And could something like this really take off in America? My friend E.J. Dixon has been covering all of this. She writes about internet culture for the cut. Hi, E.J. Welcome to Power User. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. So the 4B movement has gotten a lot of attention online. People have been talking about it a lot in the wake of the election and the context of Trump. Can you explain, first of all, what is the 4B movement? So the 4B movement is a feminist movement that got started in South Korea in 2016. And it basically entails no sex, no marriage, and no childbirth. I'm not going to embarrass myself by trying to pronounce

the Korean translation. And this is women intentionally abstaining from those things as a form of protest, correct? Yes, exactly. How did this whole movement get its start? This whole, the movement got its start in 2016, sort of prior to Me Too, when a woman was murdered by an in-cell at Gangnam Station, and it was reportedly... prompted by the fact that this guy had hit on her and she had ignored him. And it untapped a great deal of rage within South Korea. Gender inequality is a really big issue there. There is a pretty major income gap. The patriarchal structure is more firmly entrenched in a lot of ways than it is in the United States. This particular incident kind of untapped is like wellspring of anger among

feminists in South Korea. Why do you think people have been talking about it now in relation to Trump? People in the United States have been talking about it for a while. It comes up every few years. It came up after Trump's first election in 2016. And I saw it come up again on social media in 2022 after Roe v. Wade was overturned. There was talk on social media of doing like a Liz Estrada-esque sex strike from this ancient Greek play Liz Estrada by Aristophani is this comedy that's essentially a this group of women who go on sex strike as a way to sort of bring an end to the Peloponnesian War. So it's kind of something that just pops up in the discourse during a moment when women feel like their rights are really endangered. Has the Forby movement succeeded in expanding anywhere outside Korea?

Yes. Although it hasn't necessarily been called that. There have been sex strikes in other countries that have been successful. There was one in Columbia that resulted in like a bunch of rural roads being paved. There was one in the Philippines. There was one in Kenya. And what's really interesting is that they tend to succeed in cultures where women's rights really are not part of the conversation, where the patriarchal structure is like very, very deeply entrenched and women have very little bodily autonomy. But not so much in countries like South. Korea or here, like more industrialized countries where there are more of a blip in the radar.

Yeah. Well, you posted a Twitter thread, I think, actually talking about some of this, saying that a 4B movement really could never get traction here. Can you talk to me a little bit about what you posted and what you're arguing? Yeah, I think there are a few different reasons for why it can't get traction here. The first one is that it's very fragmented, right? And there's no way to really gauge like the effectiveness of it. If it's just a couple people on Twitter saying we're not going to have sex, we're not going to procreate, that's obvious. not really going to get a lot of movement. The other thing is I think that the premise of it is fundamentally based in a very 1950s view of female sexuality that we've outgrown in the

United States. It's sort of this idea that sex is something for men to be enjoyed and for women it's something to be like relinquished if they feel like it or withheld if men are pissing them off. And that's not really how most women grow up thinking about sex these days. I mean, obviously we live in a very misogynistic culture, but it's a much more sex-positive culture than that. Women know that sex can be enjoyable for them, and they have the tools and the resources available, such as birth control, so they can enjoy casual sex. The idea that women should refrain from something that is pleasurable to them is really anathema to a lot of feminists who hear about sex strikes.

And then I think the biggest reason, ultimately, why something like the Forremy movement wouldn't work in the United States is because women are already kind of doing it. The birth rate is declining. It's at a historic low. It declined three percent between 2022 and 2023. The marriage rate has declined like 60 percent over the past 50 years, also at a historic low. Famously, Gen Z is having less sex than they used to, although I think those studies are a little bit flawed in a lot of ways. I think overall what these numbers point to, though, is that women are waking up to the idea that having it all is a fallacy. The economy sucks. It's never been more difficult to raise a family in this climate. They've seen how their mothers and grandmothers have been able to handle, like, having careers and having families and how exhausted they were.

And they don't want any part of that. So they're already opting out. You know, and I say this as a woman who is married to a man and has children. I've spent a lot of my career reporting on this and talking to women in their 20s and 30s and 40s who have just been very clear to me about this. Like, I saw how my mom did this. I saw how my grandma did this. I don't want any part of it. You know, what is the benefit to me in getting married and having a family in such a restrictive economic climate?

in such a restrictive economic climate, like where there's no government mandated childcare, there's no paid leave, there is none. There really isn't. So I think the 4B movement is sort of redundant in that sense because women are already making these choices. How much do you think women making those choices played a role in sort of this male anger

that we see online in the rise of this super, like, sort of chauvinistic misogyny? Oh, a huge role. I think it's the primary driver for it. I don't think they, that a lot of the men's rights activists necessarily have like the language or the introspectiveness to kind of pinpoint that. But it's something that I've been noticing and I'm sure you've been noticing the past few years on the internet sort of this rage against single child free women really building to a fever pitch. Like there's every once in a while there are all these like TikToks that go around where some woman, you know, describes how much she enjoys her life being single and in her late 20s or early 30s. And she's just hit with like a wall of the most vile misogynistic harassment ever. And it's just like a woman living her life. I have really seen that reaching a fever pitch over the past few years. And I think as we're sort of unpacking the results of this election and the role that misogyny in the Manusphere played in it, I think we're going to be talking about that a lot more.

What do you think that rise of that misogyny is going to ultimately do to, I guess, like heterosexual gender relations in this country? I mean, nothing good, you know? Like, I think to a large degree of men and women already feel like they're at war with each other, I think that's only going to get worse with this administration. The Trump administration is insistent on encroaching on women's rights. And because a major contributing factor of his victory has been tapping into the influence of these Manosphere podcasters who regularly spout misogynistic garbage. I mean, I think if you're

like more than a little bit online, then you sort of don't see how this came from nowhere. Like, you sort of see how this was a slow build toward men, particularly white men, kind of standing up and taking a stance against what they feel has been them being deprived of their due. And, you know, women opting out of marriage and motherhood is a very big part of that. We'll be right back with more E.J. Dixon after the break. What do you think of all of the news articles that have cropped up in recent weeks on the Forby movement and it resonating with women in the U.S. in the wake of the election? I think that a lot of the coverage was pretty uncritical, but I think that can be said for

a lot of media coverage about things that sort of take root on the internet. I have started seeing, like, in the past few days, reporting. that's sort of been like, well, you know what? It didn't really catch on in South Korea, you know. And actually, I saw an article where they talked to South Korean and feminists. And they were like, why are people in the U.S. talking about that? Like, that was nothing. That was, that was over, like, years ago. So even if we don't see something like the 4B movement, do you think that there will be any sort of, like, concerted online resistance movement to the rise of some of this misogyny that's become so pervasive online? I suspect there will be, but I suspect it's going to be unfortunately a lot more potent, a lot less potent than Me Too was. And you can tell just in the week following the election, I mean, I do think that people on the left are really, to a large extent, still taking the time to process, like why this happened and sort of doing a post-mortem. But I haven't seen anything even close to the amount of outrage and protests and resistance that happened. happened after 2016. And I think that really bodes very poorly for us, especially since Trump has no guardrails this time around. And it could very well be a lot worse. So I don't know. I kind of think that people are too burnt out and too exhausted and too depleted to really

organize. And there's also like a lot of leftist infighting that is also sort of contributing to it and finger pointing. Well, also, it's a different platform landscape, right? I feel like Twitter generally, especially in the early days of the last Trump presidency, played such a key role for activists, even with the Black Lives Matter movement or all of these movements, right? Like, they really emerged on Twitter and I would say sort of solidified on Twitter in ways. And now Twitter has been completely co-opted, obviously by Elon Musk. I mean, he owns it and pro-Trump messaging in a way that I don't think it can be used as the same hub for activism. And it seems like there is no real space online, like no singular space online to replicate that sort of digital organizing.

Do you agree? 100%. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I would even go so far as to say that the entire social media ecosystem has been radicalized to a pretty significant degree by the right. Even if you look on ostensibly leftist or leftist skewing platforms like TikTok, it basically prioritizes the content that you are most likely to engage with and the content that you're most likely to find interesting. So it just sort of perpetuates this echo chamber that is happening on the left and on the right, regardless of what your political affiliation is. I guess to me, TikTok, I always kind of push back on that a little bit because I think the duet feature and the replies. There is a lot of dialogue that happens on TikTok that, for instance, you never get on somewhere like Instagram or YouTube.

And TikTok feels much more Twitter-like in that way where it's like, sure, do people go down, you know, follow all the people are engaged with all the people that they want, yes. But we all know what it's like to be on the wrong side of TikTok, right? Or like when your content leaves its little bubble. And it does happen a lot, especially with posts that have to do with politics because you immediately have people from the other side stitching or duetting them. I've actually noticed that it happens much less than it used to. Really? Much, much less. Yeah. I think there's actually less political discussion on TikTok generally. But also, both political parties have sort of worked together. to push these platforms to censor political speech. This is why Meta now downranks all speech from

journalists and activists and TikTok is very similar too, where it's, I think, suppressed a lot of political content. One thing that I think people in power, whether they're Democrats or Republicans, seem to be able to agree on, is that they want less online activism and less speech. And we've seen that throughout the Trump and Biden presidencies alike. And I do think it's concerning when we look at our social media landscape, these apps that were originally sort of ushered in with things like the Arab Spring or right, people talking about like their liberatory nature now, you know, you can't even say the word feminism, right, on threads without getting downranked. Yeah, I think you're right. I do think you're right. I think it's going to slow burn and is also another contributing factor

that we're going to sort of have to reckon with when we're doing like a post-mortem. Well, EJ, thank you so much for hopping on with me and chatting this week. Thank you so much for having me. That's all for this week's episode. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larchuk and Jelani Carter. Our video editor is Sam Essex. Our executive producer is Zach Mack.

Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like this show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And in the meantime, subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, UserMag.com on Substack. See you next week.