Some single liberal women are so upset over President Donald Trump’s return to the White House that they are swearing off all men altogether.
“If we can’t control what they do in terms of legislation and abortion rights, we have to do something for ourselves,” 25-year-old Jada Mevs told the New York Times. “Starting with cutting out the male influence in our life and making sure we’re taking the safety precautions as well, visiting OB-GYNs and making sure we are best prepared for when January comes and the years after that.”
Mevs and other single women are joining the “4B movement,” an international sexual separatist movement that originated in South Korea after the brutal murder of a single woman at a Seoul subway station in 2016. The perpetrator was a frustrated young man who committed the crime because he felt ignored by women.
The “4Bs” stem from the Korean prefix “bi” which means “no,” and includes commitments to “bihon,” “bichulsan,” “biyeonae,” and “bisekseu,” which translate to “no marriage,” “no childbirth,” “no dating,” and “no sex with men.”
“We have pandered and begged for men’s safety and done all the things that we were supposed to, and they still hate us,” 36-year-old Ashli Pollard told CNN. “I think that women and their joy is going to be something that can’t really be overlooked anymore. Women are choosing themselves in droves.”
Pollard is right about one thing: women are choosing themselves in droves. Even before Trump was reelected, the percentage of households headed by a married couple was at an all-time low in the United States, the percentage of Americans living without a spouse or partner was at an all-time high, and half of all single people aren’t even trying to date.
Not that single liberal women are the only ones calling for sexual separatism. There is a similar movement on the right among some frustrated young men. Dubbed “Men Going Their Own Way” or “MGTOW.” This online community of Redditers, YouTubers, and X users believe that society has become so corrupted by feminism that any sexual contact with women has become a danger to men. The movement is virulently anti-marriage, believing that divorce laws across the country have made marriage a financial trap.
Like the 4B movement does for women, MGTOW encourages men to focus on self-improvement and self-fulfillment outside of the romantic sphere. All of history’s greatest achievements, MGTOWers believe, came from men pursuing greatness, and women have only been, at best, a parasite holding men back.
If both the 4B movement and MGTOW sound like recipes for loneliness, bitterness, and depression, that is because they are. As I detail at length in my new book, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy, the decline of marriage is one of the main drivers of the loneliness epidemic that has been recognized by the surgeon general. Married people are healthier, happier, and more involved in their communities than single people.
And although married people are, on average, more likely to be college graduates than single people, even after controlling for education, married people are still happier and healthier than their single counterparts.
The reality is that both men and women are hard-wired to need each other. Both men and women have physical and emotional intimacy needs that, while not as pressing as the need for food and water, are still every bit as essential to our happiness.
It is frustrating when your preferred political candidate doesn’t win. However, women in the United States have never had it better than they do today. Girls get better grades in high school than boys and are more likely to graduate. Women are more likely to go to college than men, get better grades while in college, and they are more likely to graduate college. There has never been a wider array of contraceptives available to women in the United States, and almost all of them are either free or subsidized.
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It is also frustrating when your romantic interest in a member of the opposite sex is rejected, but men need to remember that no one owes them anything, especially the love of a young woman. If you want to be loved, first, you must make yourself lovable. That could include some time alone for self-improvement, but it also must include spending time with women, getting to know them, and learning how to make them happy.
It can be emotionally satisfying to seemingly punish the opposite sex for their supposed transgressions against you by swearing off all future contact with them, but in the long term, that path only leads to unhappiness for both sexes. The better path is for both men and women to recommit to living together as best as possible.