Since the election of Donald Trump in the United States, women have been calling to join the “4B movement”: no marriage, no sex, no pregnancy, no heterosexual romantic relationships (1). Millions of tweets and videos were then surged on social networks, bringing joy to the masculinists who won this electoral round, going as far as Nicolas Fuentes (2) to proclaim: “Your body, my choice” while bursting out with sardonic laughter.
These four items come from the radical feminist and misandrist 4B movement born in South Korea in 2016 – each of the words, in Korean, begins with a B.
American far-right masculinist activist, white supremacist, and political commentator.
To say that masculinism and fascism confiscate our libido and our desire to procreate is obvious, but is it an adequate political weapon? I asked myself? The sex strike is a old affairalready told in 411 BC by Aristophanes in his play Lysistrata, where he stages in a very agile comedy the refusal of the women of Sparta and Athens, then at war, of any gadriole as well as the men will not have surrendered their arms.
On the same subject: “Male sexuality is an imperialist logic”
In 2015, Spike Lee will make an extraordinary film adaptation, entirely in verse and rap, in the Chicago neighborhoods devastated by gang wars: After. We see the women’s strike spreading throughout the world, as is happening today. With a difference of size: today, it is not the war “in itself” that women denounce, but the war against them, their gender, their sex, their body.
The revolution will rather be to put an end to heteronormativity, through violence and the absence of consent.
Journalist Mona Eltahawy, however, takes issue with the “4B movement” with, in particular, this argument: the sex strike amounts to making this activity “retribution” to men, which is exactly the patriarchal expectation. The 4B movement also has the effect of divert the view of white women who largely contributed to Trump’s victory, by proposing exactly what conservatives advocate: abstinence!
In February 1974, amid general indifference, the pioneer of ecofeminism Françoise d’Eaubonne also launched Charlie Hebdo a call to the belly strikewhich was rather a procreation strike, while the Veil law on access to abortion had barely been adopted, to put an end to what it called “phallocratic rabbitism”. She was also going to write a saga, recently republished, depicting a world without men, after a real war of the sexes: A virile happiness (ed. Women-Antoinette Fouque).
Denying sex, monogamy, romance and offspring to cis men is a reaction that could be described as normal in these times. But the revolution will rather be to put an end to heteronormativity, through violence and the absence of consent. Instead, let us learn to say yes to our multiple and diverse desires, while holding the picket lines against all racist, sexual and sexist, homophobic, ecological and economic violence!
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