Trump’s electoral victory has prompted many liberal women to move away from men, in politics and in life. Doing so is a gift to the right.
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The second election of Donald Trump has served as an opportunity for all sorts of people to reevaluate their priorities, and for some undetermined number of women, that appears to have resulted in the renunciation of men. The “4B” phenomenon, which derives its name from bi, the Korean word for “no” (affixed in this case to four domains: sex with men, dating, marriage, and childbirth), arose in South Korea over the past several years in response to the nation’s stifling patriarchy, in which marriage is de facto mandatory to achieve full adult status.
America’s budding 4B movement may be nothing more than a particularly noisy TikTok trend with a political edge—and real ambition. “If we can’t control what [men] do in terms of legislation and abortion rights, we have to do something for ourselves,” one 4B convert told the New York Times reporter Gina Cherelus, “starting with cutting out the male influence in our life, and making sure we’re taking the safety precautions as well, visiting OB-GYNs and making sure we are best prepared for when January comes and the years after that.” Another woman explained the impetus for her 4B journey thus on X: “Ladies, we need to start considering the 4B movement like the women in South Korea and give America a severely sharp birth rate decline: no marriage, no childbirth, no dating men, no sex with men. We can’t let these men have the last laugh … we need to bite back.”
These women are right enough on the merits. Trump ran a male-oriented campaign that was especially attractive to young men; some Trump fans have deliberately (and gleefully) harassed women in the aftermath of his victory, which suggests that causing women distress may have motivated some men’s votes and certainly struck some as a perk. But the sudden frenzy of 4B enthusiasm is nevertheless self-defeating, both politically unwise and personally costly; one might fairly characterize knee-jerk renunciations of many of life’s cardinal pleasures, such as love and sex, as a “self-own.”
Conceding valuable political territory where family and children are concerned, and doing so in this scorned and reactive way, is nothing more than a gift to the right, which delights in provoking emotional responses from liberals. Trump himself has always had a knack for this. Since the beginning of his political career, one of his premier offerings to conservatives has been the opportunity to “own the libs.” But opponents of the right should resist giving the Trump movement what it wants. First, overreactions help conservatives reinforce their claims that liberals are extremists and paranoiacs; second, acute alarm isn’t sustainable as a political posture—after a while, living in that state becomes exhausting and leads to burnout, indifference, or despair. A better approach is to focus on constructive responses to Trump’s victory. As one Philadelphia-based activist recently told The Guardian, “It’s crucial to remain focused on the long view: our collective history of resistance, our shared capacity for resilience and our ability to create change despite being systematically undermined.”
There are other foreseeable penalties for political mania. Sudden declarations of self-imposed asceticism are alienating, which threatens broad-based movement building. In the case of 4B, the wholesale rejection of men seems particularly inapt. One of the major lessons of the 2024 presidential election is that Democrats should have taken greater care to invite (especially young) men to join their cause all along; had Harris not lost that demographic so steeply to Trump, her chances of winning would’ve been much better. And liberals have quite a bit to offer men, should they wish to: “There is … a policy paradox here that Democrats could take advantage of,” Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, wrote recently in Politico. “Republicans are signaling a pro-male stance, but without any policy substance. The Democrats have existing initiatives that are a good starting point for a strong pro-male policy platform. But they have been reluctant to package them as such and could do much more.” Reeves pointed to programs such as paid parental leave, child tax credits, and expanded educational and vocational opportunities as areas where Democrats could enhance existing projects to aid American men who are by many measures floundering.
The potential personal costs are far more immediate. Though rash reactions to Trumpian provocations are perhaps temporarily cathartic, they can also compromise channels for genuine happiness. The 4B movement, for example, aims to exclude from personal and political consideration not just the interests of men, but also the desires of women: “For most women,” the journalist Phoebe Maltz Bovy wrote of popular ban-all-men feminism in The Globe and Mail, “wishing away men is not liberation, but erotic self-censorship. It’s taking the thing that’s the source of some of our greatest pleasure and announcing we should feel bad about it.” The same goes for the 4B stance on family. “Families have many faults,” the author and union leader Dustin Guastella wrote recently in Damage, “but they remain the best examples of an organic social relationship built on selflessness, uncalculated care-giving, and fraternity. And they even provide a few things that a deluxe, Nordic-style welfare state cannot: companionship, love, and babies.” All of those things are worthy pursuits, including the Nordic-style welfare state. And working to construct a truly equitable and enjoyable world is something born of considered solidaristic politics, not of counterproductive apoplexies.
