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Friday, November 8, 2024

The 4B Movement Goes (Relatively) Mainstream

Looks like the famous 4B Movement is spreading beyond South Korea to the USA now in the wake of Trump winning the presidential election.  Basically, it is like a Lysistrata-style strike by Women, but broader, to essentially "boycott men" completely.  To quote the NPR article:
Following President-elect Trump’s victory — which was fueled by male voters and to many looked like a referendum on reproductive rights — some young American women are talking about boycotting men.
The idea comes from the South Korean movement known as 4B, or the 4 No’s (bi means “not” in Korean). It calls for the refusal of dating men (biyeonae), sexual relationships with men (bisekseu), heterosexual marriage (bihon) and childbirth (bichulsan).
It is apparently trending quite a bit in recent days on social media, and even in mainstream legacy media.  Whether the movement is limited to a sliver of the Female population, or ultimately ends up achieving critical mass, is not yet clear, but the message sure is clear as day.  Men really need to answer the "clue phone", as it is ringing louder than ever now.  

The fact that so many men were willing to throw Women under the bus during this election, because reasons, is more than justification enough for Women to go on strike.  To call such an act of betrayal "the straw that broke the camel's back" is truly the understatement of the century!

I have often half-joked that Women could take over the world in a matter of weeks if not sooner, if they all (or enough of them) did something like this at the same time.  After all, in economic terms, men's demand for sex in particular, let alone everything else, is very "inelastic", at least in the short run, while Women's demand for sex is far more "elastic".  Despite Women actually having a higher sex drive overall than men (a fact that was famously well-known by everyone long before the Victorians attempted to erase and invert it), for men it is still more urgent and linear.  Thus, men will hand over the "keys to the kingdom" in order to desperately end the strike.  

(Men's demand for marriage is similarly "inelastic" as well, but with the important caveat that that is true only if it is rigged in their favor.  It is at base a patriarchal institution, after all.  The moment it ceases to be rigged in their favor, their demand for marriage then becomes much more "elastic".)

Whether one sees it as a sprint or a marathon (and a case can be made for both, in fact), the more Women lean heavily into it at the beginning, the more effective it will be.  Men can thus be "broken like wild horses" fairly quickly (if temporarily), at least long enough for Women's demands to be met.

It's too soon to tell at this point, but this development may very well be a silver lining of the otherwise horrible national (and global) calamity of Trump winning, namely, that we become that much closer to Matriarchy if this movement gains enough traction, God willing.  Only time will tell.

P.S.  All the fellas (including myself) who are at least tempted to reflexively say some flavor of, "Don't blame me, I voted for Kamala!" (which I of course did) in response to this, are really missing the point, and that is just as tone-deaf and chutzpah as saying "Not ALL men!" as a typical canned response to Women's concerns about male violence against Women.  Expecting kudos for merely meeting the bare minimum standards of a decent human being truly reeks of privilege.

1 comment:

  1. To the reader: "elasticity" in economic means "the responsiveness of a quantity to a change in a variable", usually in terms of cost. "Price elasticity of demand" refers to the change in quantity of a good or service demanded in response to a change in price. "Inelastic" goods/services are relatively insensitive to changes in price, while "elastic" goods/services are more sensitive to changes in price. In this case, "price" refers to the "full cost", that is, any relative difficulty obtaining the thing in question.

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