(RNS) — As my church transitioned from postelection lament to anticipatory Advent a few weeks back, we women exchanged stories of resistance as we hung traditional plastic greenery, intertwined with sprigs of real. One woman, a friend who knows I teach “Sexual Ethics 101” at a divinity school, asked if I’d heard of the 4B movement, a feminist action that originated in South Korea some years ago that has inspired some anti-Trump women in the U.S.
The “4B” refers to the negative Korean prefix “bi” that starts the movement’s four tenets: no dating men, no marrying men, no having children with men and the trump card, so to speak, at the center of the other Bs: no sex with men.
My friend helpfully provided a link to a Cosmopolitan story headlined, “Everything to Know About the 4B Movement That’s Surging After Trump’s Reelection.” The subhead for the article reads: “After Tuesday’s election results, some women are taking to social media to join in on a South Korean feminist movement that says to hell with men.”
The article’s description of the U.S. 4Bs struck me as a newfangled version of evangelical Christian purity culture, mixed with old-fashioned talk about the battle of the sexes. While ostensibly feminist, the movement seems to concede hard-won gains. My friend’s assessment was particularly succinct. “I don’t want young women to think of sex as a present they give to men, as if only men want sex.”
Mainstream U.S. culture remains wary of female desire. Consider that in Philip Pullman’s series “His Dark Materials,” the heroine’s sexual awakening was excised from the North American edition. In “The Amber Spyglass,” Lyra experiences something described in both the U.K. and U.S. versions as “the key to a great house she hadn’t known was there, a house that was somehow inside her, and as she turned the key, deep in the darkness of the building she felt other doors opening too, and lights coming on.”
The expurgated U.S. version, however, skips Pullman’s original preamble. There’s no “stirring at the roots of her hair,” no “breathing faster,” no “sensations in her breast” that are “exciting and frightening at the same time.”
No wonder that young women raised on such stories, shorn of desire, may find it difficult to discover sex as a gift they want for themselves.
In a recent college-level seminar on masculinity, one coed asserted confidently that the double standard about sexual desire no longer exists. Hmmm. I asked in reply whether students had been taught it was normal for boys to masturbate. There were exclamations of “duh” and “of course.” And for girls? Crickets. Awkward crickets.
In the 1960s, Marlo Thomas noted the disparity between expectations for the two sexes in her musical album and children’s special, “Free to Be … You and Me.” As NPR reported on the album’s 50th Anniversary, Thomas fought for stories wherein men could cry, girls could refuse marriage, and she and her African American colleague Harry Belafonte could push baby strollers in tandem.
These freedoms were intended to counter purity culture at the root and encourage solidarity worthy of any Advent gathering. This was an era of saying not so much “To hell with it” but “Let’s do this in a new way!” It was a confluence of justice, from feminism to civil rights to labor rights to anti-war activism.
Instead of responding to Donald Trump’s election win by saying “To hell with men,” women need men to fight for a different system, in which we work and care for one another. A better model from South Korea is the thousands of women and men in that country who went on strike last February — together — to push against a government plan to abruptly expand admissions to medical schools, saying there are better ways to meet patients’ needs and their own. Risking the ire of the government, their bosses and elder colleagues, young doctors said “to hell with” a simplistic solution to a systemic problem.
Here in the U.S., hospital staffers have similarly joined to improve their lot and U.S. health care. The opening page of the Committee of Interns and Residents features men and women holding handwritten signs that say “Union.” This is a reality of men and women in a movement together.
If we women want to threaten to withhold sex, there is a potent, fictional precedent already in the fifth century B.C.E. play “Lysistrata,” by the Greek dramatist Aristophanes. As Margot Adler reported on NPR in 2003, women and men performed the play all over the world that year in their mutual opposition to the brewing Gulf War. “From Athens to Phnom Penh and Sydney to New York, people staged readings of ‘Lysistrata’ in 59 countries and every U.S. state,” Adler reported.
This movement in 2003 aimed their “to hell with” not at the boys and men caught in the machinery of a soul-depleting economy of war, but at the architects of that system.
This is the Christian feminism I avow. These are the inspiring, emboldening forms of holy mischief I want for my daughters and granddaughter. And for my nephews.
(Amy Laura Hall is associate professor of Christian ethics and of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University. She is the author, most recently, of “Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World With Julian of Norwich.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
