4B Or Not 4B?

Shaved Heads, Closed Legs, Zero Fucks Given

In the past couple weeks, we’ve all seen the high-pitched, post-election hysteria play out in lurid fashion across social media. Legions of leftist ideologues, shattered by the results and addicted to a particular kind of exhibitionistic emotional masturbation via iPhone, have taken to the internet in a great geschrei of trauma over the defeat of Kamala Harris by Donald Trump. Most of them are female (or should I say, female-identifying), howling their despair, weeping their “white girl tears,” raging against red-voting family members and vowing to boycott the holidays this year in the name of “self care.” To them, the election of Trump heralds a dark future, in which the evil patriarchy will oppress and subjugate American women in unprecedented ways. A real-life The Handmaid’s Tale. Certainly, reproductive rights were front and center in the Democratic campaign. Who can forget the protesters dressed as abortion pills, and the mobile medical units parked outside the DNC offering on-the-spot vasectomies? The message was certainly anti-pregnancy, which was interpreted by conservatives as anti-family, anti-motherhood and anti-men.

Back in 2017, after Trump, the “pussy grabber,” was first inaugurated, a Facebook event turned into a massive grass roots phenomenon, as women took to the streets with wit, defiance, and pink pussy hats for The Women’s March: at the time, the largest single-day protest in American history. The energy was defiant but upbeat—to many, this was an inevitable and appropriate repudiation of Trump’s misogynistic rhetoric and his party’s powerful opposition to reproductive rights. Seven years later, we face another Trump inauguration…but this time, the radical feminist screaming me-mes on social media, reactionary “AF,” have not, in my opinion, properly thought through their latest protest mania.

From the Suffragettes to the “Freedom Trash Can” protesters of the 1960s, American women have taken to the streets for more than a century, striving for equality and personal and bodily autonomy. Often their protests have included performative, public repudiation of restrictive symbols of feminine oppression: corsets, bras, high heels; women stopped shaving their armpits and legs or wearing makeup. These were strong, visible statements of defiance that went a long way to furthering the rights of women, and freeing them of their obligations to perform femininity in ways previously mandated by their male overlords.

The cutting of hair has been a powerful symbol of female liberation and protest against social injustice. During the French Revolution, women chopped off their locks in a style known as hair a la victime, a sign of respect to friends who had been executed by guillotine (shorn heads made for easier decapitation). In the 1920s, as modern women raised their hemlines, they also bobbed their hair—shocking and scandalizing the older generation. Hair seems to be a loaded, controversial thing for women. We’ve seen an entire movement arise around the acceptance of the traditional hairstyles of black women, with the state of California passing a law known as the C.R.O.W.N. (“Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair”) Act, which prohibits workplace discrimination based on hairstyle and texture. But it is the shaving of a woman’s head that appears to be, for some, the most potent and radical expression of female liberation and power.

Bald and Beautiful: Jada Pinkett Smith and Sinead O’Connor

Who can forget the cultural shockwaves created in 1987 when the late, great musician and activist Sinead O’Connor debuted her buzzed cranium as a protest against the hyper-sexualization of female artists in the music industry. Twenty years later, Britney Spears did the same. We think of buzzed heads and we think of the military—it’s a kind of symbolic declaration of war when women adopt the style. Just a couple years ago in Iran, following the death of 22 year-old Mahsa Amini, women took to the streets, tearing off their hijabs; some shaved their heads, filming the act and posting it online. Powerful stuff—and an unquestionably proportional response to patriarchal tyranny and female oppression.

The Woman Life Freedom Movement in Iran

It’s proportional response that’s at issue right now, in my opinion, as triggered, mainly white women, reeling from the Trump landslide, are engaged in an act of reactionary cultural appropriation. These spiraling, would-be radical feminists have taken up the “4B,” or “Four Nos” Movement from South Korea. The four no-nos are:

1. No sex with men

2. No giving birth

3. No dating men

4. No marriage with men

You get the idea: MEN BAD. This movement emerged several years ago on social media in South Korea, alongside, interestingly, something called “Escape the Corset,” when women began eschewing makeup, trendy clothing and other trappings of performative femininity (ironically, Korea is the third largest manufacturer and exporter of cosmetics and beauty products in the world). I won’t go into the nitty gritty of the Korean cultural situation, or their sexual politics, because frankly, I don’t know enough about it, and neither do the hysterical feminists who’ve taken up “4B” activism. That’s my point. This is typical woke hypocrisy: rail against things like cultural appropriation and racism…and then commit cultural appropriation and racism. Perhaps they think it’s kosher because Asians are “white adjacent?”

It’s the lack of self reflection (despite parading photos and videos of oneself twenty four-seven) that always hoists these TikTok activist types on their own petard. And look: I understand the anxiety since the Dobbs decision. I believe women should have bodily autonomy and it’s clear that the abortion issue has been central to the conservative political agenda for decades. I lived through the ‘80s, and the rise of the Moral Majority under Reagan. As a gay man who survived the AIDS crisis during that era, I have a question. All you gals swearing off sex with men, seeking to banish any and all possibility of pregnancy and motherhood: do you not know how to operate a condom? There are other consequences to unprotected sex; so I’m just asking, you know, as a guy with no—ahem—skin in your game, as ‘twere.

Here’s my message to these ladies—or should I say, people-who-menstruate: you really might want to rethink the need to go on social media and unload your post-election traumatic stress. I suggest backing away from TikTok and calling a professional—because a lot of you gals seem truly unhinged. I’m concerned. I understand that you’re upset and disappointed, and that the election of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has sent you over the edge. But you’re not in a thinking space right now, and I wonder if it’s occurred to you that the internet is forever, darlings.

Have you seen some of these “4B” videos on TikTok? Like the deadpan young woman who assures all those horny men out there that her vagina is dry, and that it will be dry for the next four years? Um….eew. Congratulations, luv, you get to be the “Dry Vagina Girl” for all eternity. But hey—maybe you could get the “Hawk Tuah” girl to help you with that…? Gack. And what of the chicks on X doing a G.I. Jane with clippers they don’t know how to operate, whilst taking the vow of celibacy as a punishment to all the MAGA toxic masculinity types who might potentially want to penetrate them? I got a news flash for ya: they don’t.

I know that the social justice warrior class love to adopt fashion choices that signal membership in the cult; things like technicolor hair and nose piercings. We’ve even seen promotional campaigns that feature women exposing their hairy armpits as a statement of empowerment. These people-who-identify-as-women may think that their freshly shorn craniums are a statement directed at men…but they’re not. They’re a statement directed toward other hysterical people-with-uteruses. I explored women and beauty standards in my piece about the Barbie movie when it came out, as someone who worked in the beauty and skincare industry for nearly two decades. Women don’t alter and enhance their appearance for men, or even because of men—they do it for, and because of, each other.

Do we really think heterosexual men are kicking back with a beer, and watching these Lysistrata-esque debacles of “4B” lunacy on TikTok? Do these ladies really think men see them shave their heads, and dutifully bow their own heads in shame for their evil misogyny, trembling at the prospect of having nowhere to dip their wicks during a second Trump presidency? Let me assure you gals: you’re preaching to your feminist echo chamber. You’re channeling your frustration more at yourselves than at the men you blame for the defeat of what might have been our first female President of color. You’re like a bunch of frustrated parrots in cages plucking out your own feathers.

What’s more, your lack of introspection and perspective coupled with your narcissistic compulsion to perform hair hara-kiri on social media are actually offending other women. How about those who’ve lost their hair due to cancer treatment? Are they going to be branded misandrists in the grocery store checkout line, because you’ve decided bald women equals no sex with men? What about women with alopecia? I’ve already seen some powerful pushback online against these “4B” idiots, from beautiful women with that condition who feel deeply offended by all this. What? A hairless woman is ugly and sexually untouchable? I mean, did we learn nothing from Jada Pinkett-Smith and the Oscar night slap-heard-round-the-world?

What are you really saying about women who choose to have hair—or wear makeup, dresses, and heels? Are you slut-shaming those who don’t go “4B” koo-koo with you? Are you saying that women who choose to adopt the trappings of feminine allure are asking for it?? Haven’t we seen that one already? Does anyone else remember Jodie Foster’s Oscar-winning performance in The Accused? I mean, what is the message here? That all straight men are disgusting, would-be rapist animals who, now that their Supreme Pussy Grabber Leader has been elected, will take to the streets, carrying off people-who-menstruate in some dystopian edition of the rape of the Sabine women? And what of the tens of millions of women who voted for Trump? Surely they can’t all be suffering from internalized misogyny.

It strikes me that you clipper-wielding, Lysistrata-esque feministas are suffering from externalized misogyny. Let me assure you: you needn’t go to such dramatic lengths to turn off men. Don’t you realize that the past several years you’ve spent vilifying, shaming, ridiculing, demonizing, and cancelling men have already rendered you completely unappealing in every way, sexual and otherwise? Trust me, dears, you needn’t overshare about your dry vaginas. There’s not a boner in sight.