For me, Nashville carries with it a distant familiarity. Similar to Los Angeles - Burbank specifically - landing at the airport it is easy for me to spot other crews traveling with other shows. On the major roads and outside the usual suspect hotels, I spy other tour buses out the window and if I look closely I see another roadie lounging in the jumpseat.
My bus isn’t the only bus parked in this hotel lot on election night and I look around sitting in the diner next door to see if other music nomads have also decided to take their last supper here. Up until 48 hours prior, I was confident that Trump would win. But that small part of me that likes to hope took over and I found myself unable to say who would win despite always being out in the country working alongside all kinds of people. Unlike my parents back home in the city, I often saw other versions of normal. I saw all the perfectly competent people for whom voting for Trump was the obvious answer.
Dragging my bags back onto the tour bus a little after midnight, I am met with the artists on my show barreling through different stages of grief, not being able to comprehend what has happened, zooming in on voting maps to see how people voted in the dozens of towns we’d been performing in over the past two months. The normalcy of the people there went against the red the artists were seeing on their screens. In real time, I saw them becoming fearful of shadows.
But not me.
“Of course,” I thought to myself hours ago, “there was no other way this was ever going to go.”
For most of my life, ever since Obama’s first inauguration was projected on a screen in the hallway right outside my school’s cafeteria, somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered what the retaliation would look like. Would it be swift at the inauguration itself? I refused to look at the screen for that reason passing by with my books and snacks. I thought the same with same-sex marriage. I thought the same with the glorification of hookup culture. With young women achieving more than many thought they should. With “Me Too.” With BLM. With all things trans. With DEI. With the Hollywood mockery of Christianity and academic thought pieces on the death of the nuclear family, falling birthrates, and neverending perplexion about male loneliness and the violence it apparently justifies. Poking and prodding at the hive could only ever end one way. And after sixteen years, it had by every statistical measure. A flimsy revamping of the status quo had thoroughly backfired.
What of the next sixteen years? Who’s to say?
Waking up the next morning in Alabama, I greet cheerful local stagehands who are all still high with delight coming from their respective late night election parties. There is work to be done though. Everyone no matter their mood must soon focus. Settling into my production office for the day, however, I open my social media to see “4B” in my top trends. And over the next few days, not just in my personal trends. National trends. And soon after, national headlines.
“4B” or “the four no’s” is a term coined by South Korean radical feminists. It refers to no dating men, no marrying men, no having sex with men, and no having kids. The disparity between the sexes in South Korea is more immediately pronounced in the usual traditional ways than in the United States from both a legal and social standpoint. Yet just like everywhere else, radical feminism is considered both fringe and extremist and is derided by most people you stop to ask about it on the street regardless of their political leanings. But because it unabashedly aims at the root of male rule, unlike other forms of feminist or otherwise progressive thought that simply dress it up to appear more friendly, the movement has garnered both national and global attention and on the ground has resulted in targeted violence against women who appear to go against any aspect of Korea’s very singular beauty standard. No makeup? Short hair? Must be one of those evil feminists trying to bring about the downfall of society.
The inaction of 4B is more popularly known as celibacy but given the way of the world, I tend to refer to it as common sense. The bare minimum of ground level self-respect a woman could have from the outset. But historically, any time simply choosing not to engage with men even if just limited to the arena of physical intimacy is proposed, it is immediately shot down as extremist and ineffective, snuffed out before talk of it can ever materialize into something concrete. So even though women the world over have privately been participating in this inaction over the span of human history, 4B is unique in its volume in the online sphere, loud enough to go viral all the way on the other side of the planet among women who not too long ago would equate a lack of sex life with a lack of empowerment, and label anyone encouraging women to not intimately involve themselves with men as anti-feminists plagued with internalized misogyny. I would know. Such accusations were made toward me quite a few times.
Similar to the overall political atmosphere of the United States, I sit back in wonder when I realize I’ve been alive long enough to see shifting tides in mainstream American feminism and related topics. I’d caught wind of the “childfree” contingent of women, some celebrities and other public personalities drawing absolute hysteria from men over short clips of them lounging in some scenic location using time and money they wouldn’t have had if they’d chosen to have children or (in a distinct minority of cases) marry.
Parallel to that, I have seen the backlash against the formerly embraced hookup culture by women that was pitched as this tool to level the playing field of sexual politics by emulating the sexual behaviors and attitudes of males and equating that with liberation. This has mostly taken the form of anti-feminism, course correction leading the way of the “trad wife” for some women, and the way of obsessive navel-gazing about one’s sexuality and gender identity for other women who - despite their long think pieces on the topic - typically have close to or no experience in any actual intimate relationships.
In this equation, the latter has made a habit of calling the former and many other women “TERFS” (trans exclusionary radical feminists) for years at this point, over the simple fact that they acknowledge that women are female and men are male. Just as “4B” dragged even the term “radical feminism” into the spotlight in South Korea, “TERF” dragged the term into the spotlight in the United States. This all added to my confusion that such a wide contingent of ultra-liberal genderists would even loosely associate with anything related to radical feminism. But it became quickly apparent that the pop feminists of my country had every intention to water down any and all things sensible about 4B just like they had at every other juncture at which they could have risen to the occasion but just allowed themselves to be fucked over in increasingly creative ways. The questions I have seen come from this common sense resolution include but are not limited to:
Is 4B anti-trans?
Is 4B anti-sex worker?
Should we distance ourselves from South Korean TERFs?
Does 4B unjustly punish the “good men”?
Should men be excluded from 4B?
Can I participate in 4B with my boyfriend/husband?
Will 4B actually do anything to change men?
I find it both painful and infuriating yet unsurprising how quickly and easily my fellow countrywomen completely lose the plot every single time. It is why I reacted to CNN headlines with deep skepticism and have been reluctant to engage online with anything carrying the 4B banner. But I don’t wish to throw the baby out with the bathwater either. Every woman must first have her own rebellion before even getting a toe out of the fog of her conditioning. So while I am tempted to mock the tone of 4B in the West, I must acknowledge that somewhere out there surely it is a first step in the right direction for women who yesterday were directionless. And it is to those women that my tiny Substack read by maybe ten people in a good month stumble upon or take the time to read. Or maybe this is just more for me, an automated message for all the instances I have neither the time nor the patience to even attempt to spell all of this out, particularly to women who are a breath away from calling me a Nazi for agreeing with Hitler that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Just like for the female artists on my tour bus attempting to hold back tears as they struggle with understanding the difference between today and yesterday, there is no hope for them until they understand that the only difference between today and yesterday is that they - however temporarily - have gained some level of clarity about the longstanding reality of their own situation.
THE SITUATION: We are the product of thousands of generations of rape and subjugation under male rule. In the system of male rule - within which we all find ourselves - women are not people. They are resources just like children, animals, minerals, or plants. All part of nature yet nonetheless not man. Men are people, for whom rights default, brotherhood extends, and more complicated internal hierarchies develop, hierarchies that are chiefly concerned about the control of all resources. Above them are the gods or God, fictional characters that regurgitate and naturalize man’s own ideas generation after generation after generation.
Everything from their kindness, their sadness, their passion, their love, their anger, or their benevolence is underlined by this reality. And through that clarity, the swinging ship of politics makes much more sense and remains enduringly unsurprising. In times of peace and abundance, this reality can be more muted than it would otherwise, particularly when compared to harsher environments. But the danger for women is always present. This is not a scare tactic. This is simply reality. The entire world knows it. We were all taught it one way or another as children. It only becomes blasphemous to say when adult, legally fuckable women, regurgitate it or (god forbid) take it upon themselves to do something about it.
LIBERATION: In conjunction with the overarching situation, most women have no desire for liberation from men. Of those women, many are not even of the view that they have anything to be liberated from. They find comfort in their cages, have accepted this as the natural order, and are perfectly content on a personal level with their status as a secondary sex class even if it requires no small amount of mental gymnastics in which they frame themselves as unique either due to their own “greatness” or the “greatness” of the men they surround themselves with. They invest their lives into the system, feast on its questionable rewards, and pity those who just couldn’t manage it the way they could.
For most, the caged life is comfortable or even desirable. They will likely never turn away from it, performing all the usual steps to chase this feeling of safety from unspecified external threats and stability. For some, like me, this fate is a horror I dreaded with all my being from a young age. As a result, my cage was never comfortable at all. But I am happier seeing the bars for what they are resulting in a lifetime of singularly deepening my relationships with other women and girls. It has not been a life free from male violence, but it has been a life of stubborn dignity.
NEGOTIATION: Whether it be the simple proposition about basic human rights, legislation over legal matters of education, property ownership, financial independence, divorce, pregnancy, birth control, abortion, workplace harassment, street harassment, violence of all kinds, full constitutional equality with men (still not achieved in the United States), or the rollback of any of the aforementioned, at some point in some room somewhere, the concept of a “sex strike” was proposed. But while the inaction of a “sex strike” is one I support, the reasoning behind it is often flawed.
The popular rebuttal of a sex strike by feminists usually centers on them not wanting to so readily admit their baseline value as resources under male rule. To view yourself as men view you is anti-feminist. But it is only through acknowledging the existence of the male view that the inaction of non-participation becomes not about men at all, but your own self-respect as a human being, something inherently refuted under a male regime. The answer is not to dress up the overarching situation with cultural notions of romance, to reframe pornography as empowering, or any other number of “feel good” copes. None of that is possible while we are still in cages. None of this would exist in the first place if the cage itself did not exist either.
That aside, the stated goal of a “sex strike” if any does catch any ounce of consideration, is to change male behavior. But it must be understood that male behavior is not contingent upon lack of education or lack of preferred ejaculation. Male behavior simply is, and after thousands of generations of rape and exploitation of resources, I find it unproductive to have a nature vs. nurture debate around the issue. I simply determined that I will not be negotiating with terrorists and through that determination, I have arrived at the common sense conclusion that willingly going as far as dating terrorists, marrying terrorists, having sex with terrorists, or birthing their children would be the definition of insanity under the given, longstanding, and (in our lifetime) unchanging circumstances. I instead maintain the thin veneer of civility expected in everyday interactions between adults that keeps everything out of an active state of chaos.
RETALIATION: Whether it be plain old celibacy, a sex strike proposition, childfree, 4B, or any other term that takes men out of the equation in any form but particularly when it comes to intercourse that can result in pregnancy, the fear of male violence suddenly blossoms from women who just moments prior were talking about how most men are good, actually. But you must understand, male violence will happen either way. Even if you become the exception (for however long) to a man who will puff his chest out in pride knowing you trust him to protect you from that other extreme minority of men who are bad, actually, you might have moments of clarity - like a presidential election, however silly - that make you acknowledge our overarching situation. And you might feel, no matter how much your instincts have been dulled, that the man who poses the most threat is the one in your house. The one with the most unregulated access to you. Not the nameless, faceless bad man in an alleyway that your benevolent overseer is supposedly protecting you from.
CHOICE: All that being said, within the United States it still stands that you have a choice. No one is making you swear off men. In fact, everything running as it always has demands that an appropriate amount of us don’t swear off men. The conveyor belt must keep moving. And just like always, the vast majority of public and private programs that have resulted from feminist efforts will continue to focus on getting women away from their terrorists once negotiations inevitably fail. Meanwhile, just as many others will continue to fulfill their role in the resource pyramid, feeling secure behind silk-covered bars, dying of old age none the wiser.
I, a singular individual, simply ask that if you ever again have a moment of clarity, know that you have real power. Everyone knows it. And that is why it is instrumental that your head stays in the sand. That is why panic so quickly sets in the moment any woman anywhere in the world says “no.”
Excellent writing, queen!