No, you won’t boycott men. Nor should you

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Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.

The 1990s British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances is rife with catchphrases. Not for everyone, but I find them charming. For Rose, a cartoonishly man-hungry woman in her 50s, it’s declaring, melodramatically, “No more men!” The other characters know to ignore these proclamations, because within moments, Rose is infatuated with a different Mr. So-and-So.

Jump to the present day, across the Atlantic, and to the world of real people, where a vocal subset of American women feels betrayed by the results of the presidential election. There was a gender divide in exit polls – not an immense one, but especially pronounced among the youngest voters. The election feels like a repeat of 2016′s theme of not just Donald Trump winning, but of men ensuring the result. No first woman president, again. Reproductive rights? Well, those were nice while they lasted. It was a quick hop from “Grab ‘em by the pussy” to “cat ladies.” While it’s hard to be as shocked as Hillary Clinton supporters such as yours truly (I’m a dual citizen) were eight years ago, it’s in some ways easier to be furious.

Anyway, some of these women have taken to social media to declare adherence to the South Korean “4B movement.” The 4B in question – not to be confused with 4-H – is a radical feminist group, of #MeToo vintage, that asks women to abstain from sex, dating, marriage and procreation with men, as leverage against misogyny. Per CBS, one of many major outlets covering 4B’s inroads stateside, “The movement specifically calls for the refusal of dating men (biyeonae), sexual relationships with men (bisekseu), heterosexual marriage (bihon), and childbirth (bichulsan).” They have decided, à la Rose, to give up men.

So, you might ask: is this just a bunch of news sites running versions of the same article, based on colourful but ultimately ephemeral social media posts? Are American women really going off men, at least for the length of one Trump administration? (And shouldn’t it put a damper in the political lesbianism that so many women voted for Mr. Trump? What if you switch to women only to find a MAGA hat on her bedside table?)

Few real-life women are as man-addicted as Rose. But there are reasons to be skeptical of “4B” declarations. Historically, giving up men has only worked out for the subset of the female population that wouldn’t find this a sacrifice. If there are indeed 4,000 Korean women taking part in 4B, this … does not suggest that all the women of Korea have given up men. And it’s not as if anyone’s fact-checking the bedroom activities of even those 4,000.

Media coverage of women “decentering men” or “going boysober” has been a constant since 2016. The year is no coincidence; this is about Mr. Trump, even when it’s not explicitly about Mr. Trump. But the on-the-ground evidence for women going off men upon his election is scant. The rise in bisexual identity among America’s young women roughly coincides but does not – contrary to commentators’ hopes or fears – amount to an abandonment of opposite-sex relationships. (Bi women generally partner with men.) Marriage rates – and marriages are, to state the obvious, mainly opposite-sex – are declining, but trending upward again since the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of what feels like young people embracing chastity is just a cohort that spent its formative years locked inside.

So no, I don’t think many women are giving up men. What concerns me are the proclamations themselves, which come from an understandable place emotionally, but go nowhere. They go nowhere because women aren’t about to do the thing, and because they shouldn’t be trying in the first place.

Asking women to give up sex – and that’s what chucking men means for most women – is fundamentally conservative, and winds up, in a roundabout way, in the same place as right-wing efforts to control women’s bodies. It harkens back to outdated notions of sex as something women give men, but more to the point, makes no sense if the reason one is mad at Republicans to begin with is their cavalier approach to women’s sexual autonomy.

I’m your boring normie liberal, and I think American women are right to be angry. But the answer is in better political organizing, not in torching interpersonal relationships. Someone worked up about the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the ensuing threats to contraception and assisted reproduction can volunteer with or donate to advocacy groups, or figure out how to get Democrats elected moving forward. None of these things require celibacy, something the realist in me knows women will not embrace, even in the states with the worst track records on reproductive rights. Sex drives are real – and not unique to men.