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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35266 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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How about some man-bashing to start your weekend, fresh from Korea?

My take: I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race. Men of all races voted for Trump in larger shares than women did, with Hispanic men even preferring him on-net. Feminism used to be the huge culture war wedge back in the early years of the great awokening (2012-2017 or so). It kind of just deflated as people moved to talking about race instead, but none of the issues were ever really resolved, so there's a decent chance it could make a resurgence.

My best insight into Korean gender dynamics came from this AAQC a while back, which might be worth reading for background.

Here's the article:

No Sex, No Dating, No Babies, No Marriage: How the 4B Movement Could Change America

When I sit down at a bar in Brooklyn with my cousin — a recent college grad from Korea who is visiting America for the first time — I have one burning question: How’s your love life? She keeps her ballcap pushed down low and presses her lips into a tight line.

“I’m not interested,” she says. “I just don’t trust men. You don’t know what they’re thinking these days — whether they’re one of the guys with misogynistic thoughts. It’s so normalized. Why would I even risk it?” she says.

She does not want to date. She feels no need to get married. Her ideal life is to form a tight-knit community with other single women. “It’s not just me,” she says. “All my friends rarely date these days for that reason. These issues are all we talk about when we get together.”

My cousin and her friends are not alone. Across Korea, young women are swearing off men, influenced by the 4B movement, a radical feminist campaign that originated in Korea in the late 2010s. The four Bs stand for bi-hon (no marriage), bi-yeonae (no dating), bi-chulsan (no birthing) and bi-sex (no sex).

The movement formed in response to growing gender inequality and violence against women: Korea has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the world, and brutal murders of women — in subway stations, on rooftops and in their own homes, often at the hands of men they were dating — headline news shows daily. Amid so much political turmoil and bloodshed, 4B activists say the only way to make women safe — and convince society to take their safety seriously — is to swear off men altogether until something changes.

And now, in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, 4B is going viral on U.S. social media among women who are furious with the men who helped the former president clinch a win. On TikTok alone, top videos have gained millions of views, and one widely shared tweet about the 4B movement post-election now has 450,000 likes and 21 million views at time of writing.

It’s too soon to say if the 4B movement is here to stay in the United States. But even if it isn’t, the surge in interest says something about the social forces unleashed by the 2024 presidential election. An uptick in misogyny has already been evident — just look at the “your body, my choice” comments by men online — similar to what’s been seen in Korea, suggesting that this kind of feminist reaction could take hold. And even if women don’t explicitly take on the 4B label en masse, the movement’s message of bodily autonomy, and the anger that drove the conversation in the first place, could have a major impact not just on American politics, but on American life overall — just as it has in Korea.

Think of the movement as a labor strike, says Soha, a Korean feminist who provided only her online nickname for fear of being harassed for supporting feminism. She says it’s about rejecting the additional work women put in to appeal to men, maintain a household and follow patriarchal values — the kind of work that is more widespread in South Korea’s more socially conservative society. It’s the type of labor all women can identify with and push back against with one powerful voice. Many women eschew the 4B label, often in fear of harassment, but still live by its principles. My cousin describes it as an act of survival, a way to shield women from rapidly rising violence, avoid toxic conversations with misogynistic men and resist an anti-feminist government that is actively trying to roll back women’s rights.

Just as gender has become a political predictor in Korea, it’s shaping elections in the United States. The turnout demographics from the U.S. presidential election are still being sorted out, but a few things are crystal clear. The Republican ticket used male identity and gender grievances as a successful political tool, courting the “bro” vote and attributing Kamala Harris’ success to her identity. Young men helped Donald Trump win the election. Many young women are distraught. It’s an acceleration of the already widening gender gap in American politics, including an increasing number of young men rejecting feminism. An NBC News poll found that 57 percent of women backed Harris, compared to 40 percent of men — with women sprinting to the left while men flirt with the right.

Some U.S. women are seeking both revenge and relief from the consequences of a Republican trifecta, including a rollback of reproductive rights and a broader cultural acceptance of sexist rhetoric. For some online, the answer is right in front of them: the 4B movement from South Korea.

Like the U.S., South Korea’s gender divide played a striking role in South Korea’s most recent presidential election. Yoon Suk Yeol, then the conservative candidate, secured a victory in 2022 by catering to young men who felt left behind during a rapid push for gender equality, especially after the country’s #MeToo reckoning in 2018 tanked the careers of several actors and politicians. Young men cheered on Yoon’s declarations of being an “anti-feminist,” saying that “structural discrimination based on gender” does not exist, despite the fact that the country regularly ranks near the bottom in the World Economic Forum’s gender equality index. To this day, young men perceive that discrimination against men is more serious than against women, even though 50 percent of women between the ages of 19-29 say they’ve experienced sexual discrimination at work, compared to 30 percent of their male peers. From 2021 to 2023, female sexual assault victims saw a 15 percent rise. Many American women fear the same could happen here.

4B messaging is already echoing on U.S. social media. One X user advertises the 4B movement as a way to “take control of your life under him.” Another user writes, “We need to start considering the 4B movement … We can’t let these men have the last laugh … we need to bite back.” One TikToker has posted she’s joining the 4B movement after breaking up with her Republican boyfriend.

“When I saw the movement go viral in the U.S., I thought, even U.S. women must be at their limit,” says Yeonhwa Gong, a Korean 4B follower who has written on the topic. “But I don’t feel too bad that it has come to this point — if anything, I think of it as a necessary action that had been pushed back for a while and is now finally happening.”

For women who adopt the 4B mindset, not even men who claim to be on the same political spectrum can provide a safe space. With so many men opposing feminism, and even a video on how pro-Trump men could hide their political beliefs from the women they date going viral, how do you know if he’s telling the truth? “A lot of women are just tired of men, and worrying about ‘what if?’” my cousin told me. “I had thought at some point I’d want to find a good man, no matter how hard that would be. At this point now though, I don’t feel that need.”

The 4B movement might seem too radical to get far in the U.S., but the fact that it’s gained traction suggests that at least a number of young women feel more vulnerable since the reelection of Donald Trump than they did before it. The 4B discourse in the U.S. “prompts us to reflect on how much society has taken for granted or overlooked the rights and the freedoms that women rightly deserve,” says Hyejin Jeon, a University of Maryland doctorate student from Korea who is currently analyzing her country’s feminism movements.

If the movement takes hold, it could potentially lead to some of the same outcomes as have been seen in Korea, where women are reconsidering dates with men out of suspicion and lack or trust, young people are marrying and having children at lower rates, and both men and women are expressing deep loneliness. Politicians could take advantage of the divide for their own gains, leaning harder into gender-divide politics, and even outright sexist rhetoric. And even women may turn against one another; American women are already arguing about the inclusivity of the movement, with some saying that women with male partners have no part in 4B. Such discourse has long fractured feminist groups in Korea, according to Minyoung Moon, a Clemson University lecturer who published a report about the backlash against feminism in South Korea. Married women are seen as “serving the needs of men,” she says, alienating the group from what could be a more inclusive movement.

And then there’s the danger of backlash from the right. “The long-term effect I see is very negative, because they chose the radical strategy, giving men and anti-feminists reason to hate them even more,” Moon says. “And when I look at the 4B movement … on YouTube, I already see the conservative party people bashing against liberal women.”

Still, at least for now, the movement appears on the upswing in both countries as women say that the model of life they’d expected — dating, marriage, house, kids — looks, increasingly, like a trap set by men who don’t see them as equals. And women like my cousin want alternatives.

“To live with friends that are close to me, to have the ability to live on my own — living like that is my dream,” she says.

The descriptions of 4B make it sound a lot like MGTOW. I don’t know a ton about either, but I remember Men Going Their Own Way as a neighborhood of the broader manosphere, when the blogosphere was more of a going concern. It was generally made up of men who had been burned hard.

I also don’t know if the causes are similar – men mostly seem to come to MGTOW when they are looking to explain and contextualize bitter personal experiences. Is 4B an actual backlash in the West, or is it just that some journalists want to cultivate a backlash? When women join in South Korea, are they operating from painful personal experiences, or are they reacting to a consensus that tells them that any self-respecting woman in their situation should be bitter?

I was in Korea some 20 years ago, and the situation for women there really is pretty shit. It's still very patriarchal and traditional (maybe less so now than then, but still very much more so than the West). They aren't anywhere near Islamic levels of oppression, but I heard from a lot of women even before the 4B movement spread that marriage was widely seen as something that women just have to suffer if they ever want a life (and children). They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them, they do not expect sex to be enjoyable, and they are expected to be essentially maidservants for their husbands' families. (There is an entire genre of Korean horror movies about evil mother-in-laws.)

Of course there are exceptions, and they all look at fairy tale romances as an ideal, but it seems like very few of them actually expect this to be the reality.

They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them, they do not expect sex to be enjoyable, and they are expected to be essentially maidservants for their husbands' families. (There is an entire genre of Korean horror movies about evil mother-in-laws.)

This seems common with pagan cultures. Like we knock on Islam for its(tbh, pretty repressive) treatment of women, but Islamic religion does tell husbands to take their wives' wants and needs into account and care for them. Scott just reviewed a book all about how early Christianity spread by telling women that it would make their husbands love them. And a pretty good chunk of the republican fertility advantage in the US comes from telling young women that socially conservative values will make men love them and treat them better(there's an entire genre of country music about loving on women who are babycrazy and have strong family values and how they're worth holding off on sex for and cutting back on drinking to reasonable levels and all that).

You don't have to deny women opportunities on a societal level to make their lives suck. Women are not the same as men, you can totally set up society to make it so they get the short end of the stick in hundreds of little ways.

they do not expect sex to be enjoyable

I doubt that. Pagans have written books and created monuments to enjoyable sex.

essentially maidservants for their husbands' families

Nuclear families are the primary cause for this going away. England was admittedly the earliest nuclear society, and avoided this problem all together.

It's an underdiscussed aspect of single-core mega-urban countries like SK. More than half the country lives within commute distance of Seoul. So you can't build physical distance between you and the in-laws. Being a larger and distributed country helps mitigate this problem.

They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them

Can't compare across different historic economic settings. But, women must be given opportunities. Opportunities to work, to choose their spouse, to leave their spouse, to choose a profession.

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