4B Is Magnificently Reactionary

On the women shaving their heads to protest Trump

Context collapse discourse has been less fun since Elon bought Twitter, and the tribes began dispersing to different platforms. So I hope I’ll be forgiven a moment of nostalgia at the recent sex strike discourse, in which angry progressive women reacted to news of Donald Trump’s re-election by publicly sharing a “4B” pledge.

4B, from ‘bi’ in Korean, meaning ‘no’, refers to the four ‘nos’: no sex, no dating, no marriage, and no babies. Women have been signing up to 4B in Korea for some time, in protest at the misogynistic turn the Korean manosphere has taken in recent years. Now, they’ve started taking the pledge in America, too, in response to the perceived threat a Trump administration poses to their “rights”.

For a moment it felt like being back at peak context-collapse, pre-2022, as these women made videos shaving their heads only to be castigated by women with alopecia for suggesting that being bald makes a woman less sexually desirable. But rather than dwell on this kind of joyously 2018-coded public purity spiral, I want to make the reactionary case for 4B.

Firstly, it’s a coherent response if - as seems to be the case for many liberal women - you really believe abortion is about to be banned in totality across the entire USA. This isn’t actually true, as far as I can make out, but let’s say you believe this. In this context, for ordinarily fertile women who don’t want to be pregnant the most prudent response is to exit the normative post-Pill libidinal economy of low-cost, no-strings sex altogether.

It doesn’t really matter how you frame your decision; the bottom line is that in this hypothetical world the safest option of all is abstinence. The predominant reaction so far from the culture-war Right to 4B announcements has been variations on “lmao, look at the state of you, it’s not like they were queueing round the block as it was”. But this strikes me as mistaken, given that (once you look past the culture-war posturing) for conservatives encouraging sexual continence was the whole point. Why not just take the W?

More fundamentally: 4B is irreducibly anti-leftist, because it rests on deliberate disciplining of desire. And the whole raison d’être of the modern Left is the abolition of all constraint, the destruction of all form, and the unchaining of desire. It follows that there can be no willed imposition of order, and especially of sexuality - not even in service to nominally progressive goals - that is not structurally reactionary. Again: why not take the W?

And I’ll add further: for all that 4B includes no marriage or babies in the pledge, as well as no dating or sex, you can colour me less than 100% convinced that women will, in aggregate, follow through on this. On the contrary: in the context of sexuality, the outcome of deliberate self-restraint is less likely to be lifelong childless singledom (though this is, of course, still a possibility for some) than opening space for romance. A rocketing rate of lifelong childless singledom is, after all, increasingly obviously the aggregate outcome of re-ordering sexuality to individual amusement, in the context of tech-enabled sterility. But anyone who assumes abstinence would have the same effect across the board is underestimating physis or - to slightly misquote Khalil Gibran - “life’s longing for itself”.

Physis refers, classically, to things that arise spontaneously from their own nature. Think of the way a plant grows from a seed, blossoms into a plant according to a recognisable form, and follows a predictable life cycle. Humans aren’t plants, obviously, but we have our own physis. Sure, ever since the ancient Greeks we’ve been arguing about how and where this overlaps with nomos (the social stuff) and techne (our tools and inventions) but no one has seriously tried to pretend the physis simply wasn’t there, or could be wholly mastered.

Until recently. But it’s become received dogma today to act as though life does not long for itself; that human nature doesn’t exist. If it did exist, the dictum “you can be anything you want to be” would have to be heavily footnoted, and we can’t have that.

This isn’t just a Left-wing thing - look at all the life extension bros, for example - but so far, this template that supposedly doesn’t exist has nonetheless proved surprisingly stable. And in this particular context, I suspect that in practice “4B” might end up in practice not functioning as a war on physis but as opening space for it to return, in a space where techne had sought to dissolve any need either for physis or even nomos.

Consider: if you have renounced casual encounters and even dating, there’s no need to be on the (extremely psychoactive) contraceptive pill. You yourself have shut down any regular reinforcement of your general bad impression of men, by promising not to date or hook up with random guys - thus automatically foreclosing negative encounters. You have, in effect, placed yourself in the position of a woman in the Before Times, for whom the social default is sexual self-restraint. And it’s not as if passionate love affairs never happened back then, just because they were frowned-upon. A woman who has publicly taken a 4B pledge has even added in the pre-Pill layer of social accountability: she’d have to really fancy you to risk the disapproval of all her 4B friends.

Now, you might say “oh but all these women are ugly and middle aged, no one was dating them anyway”. Firstly, not true; but secondly, if you can manage to unplug from porn brain for even a moment you will instantly see that millions upon millions of perfectly ordinary-looking men and women fall passionately in love and lust all the time!! even in middle age!! and this is a good thing. That incel talking-point about “the top 10% of men” has so many confounders I could be here all day telling you how dumb it is. And in any case once you correct for hookup culture (if a Promise Ring isn’t your thing, have you considered a 4B pledge?) the picture could look quite different.

Perhaps I’m a hopeless romantic, but I really don’t expect those 4B pledges to outlast the pledgers themselves falling in love. Say you’ve taken the vow; you’ve renounced participation in a romantic ecology whose baseline is casual, loveless, no-strings sex. You’ve not had a miserable, disappointing hookup in ages and find yourself idly wondering what a non-disappointing one would be like. Then (oh gosh!!) you find yourself hanging out with someone who values your company, makes you laugh, has really nice eyes and when he stands a tiny bit close to you it gives you the shivers. You’re not chemically interrupted any more, because you don’t need to be, so midway through your cycle this involuntary reaction is off the charts. How long do you hold out, after you realise he feels the same? I dunno. But the rom-com practically writes itself.

So let’s not knock 4B. More continence is good, actually. Any practice that calls for disciplining the will to reclaim desire from the machine opens space for being able to re-order techne to human nature. This is also good. So is falling in love. So let’s cheer the 4B women on in their efforts - and cheer even more, when they “fail” by falling in love.