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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35267 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.

Western Cultural Appropriation of 4B has induced ample low-hanging-fruit-but-amusing counter-memes. Such as those to the tune of “Trump hasn’t taken office yet and he’s already stopping women from being whores” or “You have nothing! Nothing to threaten me with [dark_knight_joker.png]”.

4B is just 2B, the 2B being sex and children. Actually, it’s just 1B. The 1B being sex. Thankfully so, to spare everyone the “2B or not 2B, that is the question…”-related references.

Without the prospect of sex, men generally would not care for dating women. Without the prospect of children and/or continued sex, men generally would not care for marriage (perhaps jokes on those men who get dead-bedroomed). Without sex, children will not result (aside from side cases like IVF or whatnot). Women striking by abstaining from 1) marriage, 2) dating, 3) birthing, and 4) sex would be just abstaining from 4) sex. Like how me hypothetically striking by abstaining from 1) dunking a basketball, 2) spiking a volleyball, 3) running 110m hurdles, and 4) jumping would be just me striking by abstaining from 4) jumping.

Given assortative mating, to the degree female Harris-supporters would be able to form a cartel to punish men by way of withholding sex, they’d with greater likelihood be punishing male Harris-supporters—not male Trump-supporters. It’d be mostly friendly fire. This is on top of the irony of attempting to punish your perceived political enemies—who you regularly and vociferously claim are incels—by withholding sex, and pwning the conservatives by refraining from casual/premarital sex.

It’s funny how online women, despite their insistence that women have value beyond sex and being Birthing Persons, immediately turn to the threat of withholding sex and bearing children when push comes to shove. Horseshoe theory strikes again: Feminists and manospherians agree, the primary worth of women is sex and child-bearing.

The revealed opinions of online women suggest they know that, if not for the bargaining chip of being gatekeepers of sex and children, their collective or individual negotiating power with men would plummet, perhaps to zero. Some part of them knows how their bread gets buttered.

It’s also funny how many women, despite supposedly being the empathetic sex, can’t fathom or are outright hostile to men having preferences, priorities, interests that don’t revolve around serving women.

Online women like to prattle about how men aren’t entitled to this or that, such as sex or female attraction (even, or especially, within marriage). However, they sure look like they feel entitled to men voting the way they want (in addition to other things like relationships/marriage if sex has already occurred, expensive engagement rings, lavish weddings, husband’s attraction regardless if she’s aged and/or gotten fat, to be wined and dined and taken on cUtE dates and vacations).

Women should look out for themselves and vote for their own perceived best interests. Men should be Decent Human Beings and vote for women’s perceived best interests.

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.

I don’t think so. As the possibly apocryphal quote from Kissinger goes, “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's too much fraternizing with the enemy.”

For example, apparently the percentage of US men who voted Trump was 55%, and it was 45% for US women. It was 57% and 13% (simulation scriptwriters are getting lazy…) for Whites and Blacks, respectively.

If women got Thanos-snapped away, I imagine a fair amount of young heterosexual men would be lost in life without the prospect of sex and later children. Life for the modal man would be more boring without the thought of the next chick you might bang, the children you might eventually have: It’d be grey, drab, and dreary. At least in Children of Men, one could still get laid.

If American Blacks and Latinos got Thanos-snapped away, it’d be a great increase to the quality of life for White and Asian Americans. Disproportionate sources of violent crime and net-lifetime-tax consumption gone. Living in a “good school district” would be less of a concern, as would be worrying if your grandmother will get randomly punched in the face. Entire neighborhoods would be available as open real estate. The outlook of White and Asian Americans would immediately become safer and richer.

The other thing is that the targets of this are very likely fellow democrats. The mating hasn’t been assorted in any real sense because most conservatives live in the Midwest/South/Western Plains where the women LARPing Bad Handmaiden don’t live or even visit. They’re not really going to stick it to Trump voters, they aren’t dating them anyway. They’re refusing sex with Dudes for Harris.

Have you seen the guys who are white dudes for Harris? I don’t blame women for not wanting to have sex with them.

Isn't this a bit, stated preference vs. revealed preference?

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