BEFORE THERE WAS 4B

 

Before there was 4B

ByCarrie Gress            November 17, 2024

 

Female fertility is back in the news, with Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed presidential hopes. In protest to President-elect Donald Trump’s win, faithful Harris followers are swearing off four things: sex, dating, marriage, and children. The idea first cropped up in South Korea in the late 2010s and is now known as 4B, with the B referencing “no” in Korean.

But long before 4B, feminism targeted women’s fertility and the family. Feminists liked the sex and dating part — hoping that women could be as promiscuous as men, without consequences — while targeting the marriage and children part. Motherhood was quickly erased as a goal of fertile women.

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But what the feminists didn’t realize is that no matter how much they wished women could have consequence-free sex, consequences would arise in the form of unwanted pregnancies (not to mention emotional damage and STDs). Abortion on demand became necessary to take care of the consequences. Lesbianism, as second-wave feminists argued, was the pinnacle of female relationships because it is inherently sterile. Relationships with men were messy but consequential, while relationships with women were inconsequential.

Now that there is concern that abortion access might be at risk under Trump, 4B women are avoiding anything that could lead to the conception of children by cutting off relations with men altogether. Their message today echoes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 utopian vision in her book Herland, in which she dreamed of what women’s potential could achieve without men messing the world up. Herland made its imprint on the culture when it became the Wonder Woman series we know today.

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But what the 4B women, and feminists such as Perkins Gilman before them, don’t realize is that women aren’t made to go it alone. Certainly, they can do it. We have decades of evidence of women striving for the ideal of independence. But as happiness metrics show, feminist ideals aren’t making women happier, just more medicated.

Curiously, the long march through feminist history reveals a lengthy list of women with broken and tragic backgrounds — usually victims of one or more kinds of abuse. Rather than recognizing that the abuse they experienced was wrong, their reaction was to get rid of the culture and traditions that they believed led to the abuse: to eliminate marriage, to disparage men, to truncate fertility. The reaction of most victimized feminists was a cutting off of rich relationships and deep traditions, erasing faith and family.

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The desire to cut oneself off from others is an understandable response from those suffering the deep wounds of trauma. But the extreme response of those in pain has been promulgated over the last two centuries as the way in which all women ought to behave. The ideology of feminism we know today spread from the wounded to the healthy. It then became a self-fulling prophecy because it normalized abuse, particularly sexual abuse, that led to more and more women being traumatized and then believing they had to go it alone.

Ironically, the traditions carried by robust faith and healthy families that feminists have railed against are, in reality, the guardrails that generally protect women from a culture of abuse, such as the strong father who protects his naive daughter. The free love ideals ushered in by feminism and its sexual revolution targeted the family and led to today’s explosion of porn, sex trafficking, rampant abortion, and hook-up culture.

Meanwhile, today’s women lament not being able to find good men. Little do they recognize that their feminist ideals have undermined men’s incentive to become good. Why should they strive for self-control and self-sacrifice to care for a wife and children when marriage and families are of no value and sex is quick and easy? Feminism and being good are fundamentally incompatible, for men and for women.

So while the 4B women might think they are going to right a wrong, they are just swinging the feminist pendulum in yet another direction: swaying away from extreme promiscuity to the puritanical. But like their intellectual predecessors, they will miss the truth that women need men and men need women. Not to dominate or manipulate. Not to boycott or demean. But to serve, to love, and to build. Together.

Carrie Gress, Ph.D., is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a scholar at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. She is the author of numerous books, including Theology of Home and The End of Woman (Regnery, August 2023).

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3231149/before-there-was-4b/