The Gender War Wants to Divide You
Anger and loneliness are part of what got us here. More of it won't get us out.
“Your body, my choice. Forever.”
It’s a line intended to infuriate, and it did. It’s a line that the men who said it — Nick Fuentes, anonymous troll accounts — want women to think is indicative of the broader culture that won the election. They want you to think that the 53 to 57 percent of men overall who voted for Trump did so because they at best have zero regard for your wellbeing and happiness, and at worst actively want to hurt you and infringe upon your rights. They want you to think this is all intentionally malicious, so that you respond with hostility in kind.
The post-election response has solidified that a strong, loud subset of men and women really do fundamentally hate each other, and have for a very long time. The anger and resentment on display is not purely a response to Trump winning: it is a release of emotions that have been settling in for years. The current moment is more of an opportunity for an outlet than anything else, a period of justifiable interpersonal revenge. Men are using this as a chance to gloat, while women are committing to fighting back by abstaining from relationships and sex with men entirely.
Still, I think we are overestimating just how much of the broader population these groups represent.
Most men are not Nick Fuentes celebrating the fearmongering belief that men will now own women’s bodies. Most women are not hardline SCUM Manifesto-reading radical feminists calling for universal male castration. Each of these represent small niches of the population, ones that barely move the political needle. But if you spent much time on various circles of X or TikTok, you might be led to believe otherwise — and some of these ways of thinking are indeed creeping further into the mainstream.
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In the days following the election, I saw posts calling for women to divest from men go viral in ways I’d never witnessed before. “ladies, I’m being so fr when I say this, it’s time to close off your wombs to males. this election proves now more than ever that they hate us & hate us proudly. do not reward them,” one woman wrote, amassing 276,000 likes. “women need to stop dating & having sex with men immediately and im not even joking or being dramatic in the slightest,” said another with 436,000 likes, encouraging women to “take a page from the feminists in South Korea.” Many American women have been encouraging each other to take up the South Korean feminist “4b movement,” which calls for women to reject marriage, children, sex and relationships with men.
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As I wrote previously in “Do Women Even Like Men Anymore,” this line of thinking has, in many ways, become a trend. This is not to say that all women who participate in it are doing so with poor motivations, but that it has become a popular form of in-group signalling. It is trendy to pledge your allegiance to 4b on TikTok — women with husbands and boyfriends are continually posting to ask if they can still participate despite their male partners, some saying they feel “suckered in” to the ideology. Meanwhile, dozens of videos of women responding to Nick Fuentes’ “your body, my choice” comment in tears or with threats of violent retaliation have received millions of views, further encouraging others to avoid men entirely.
I don’t think any of this is entirely unwarranted. These types of men who hate women want us to be mad. Some of these men (and even some women!) who have spouted off these types of vitriolic phrases do genuinely want women to have less authority over their own bodies for no reason other than misogyny. There will be some states who further clamp down on reproductive freedoms, and there will be women who suffer as a result. That much is real, and it is worth being angry about.
But even with all this, there is a gross overestimation of who these guys represent. These young women, too, leaning into an alleged female-only lifestyle, are a smaller fraction than they appear to be. Most people want things to be normal. They want to be able to pursue happiness and connection and sex and family and friendships. In an election, both sides obfuscate that reality to achieve their respective ends. The medium through which most of us digested the election and our cultural response to it — our phones — obfuscate that, too. Social media prioritizes the inflammatory; it makes conflicts that aren’t even our own immediate to our lives. It makes a line like “Your body, my choice” seem like it’s indicative of something it’s not.
This, too, is part of the issue with the Americanized 4b movement: its main accomplishment will be to further push women further online, seeking both digital community and an outlet for their frustrations. They’ll be further exposed to the hate of these misogynistic men, who will see all this as further justification for their hatred. The cycle will only continue.
As
wrote on Tuesday, “Within this cultural context, abstinence may be the best choice for many U.S. women. But I don’t think we should feel empowered by it—because the fact that so many women are resorting to celibacy isn’t a sign of our collective agency, but a symptom of the fact that we’re being progressively disincentivized from making other choices. And if the only way to preserve our autonomy is by giving something up, that is not evidence of our empowerment, but its opposite.”This online Gender War is itself one of the forces disincentivizing us from making other choices. Giving up on sex and dating when these are things we would otherwise want fuels this process. Disconnection, loneliness and antipathy are what got us here. How could anything that proposes more of it provide the solution?
Sex is political. Our bodies are political. But that is not all they are. This is something the Gender War wants you to forget — that your life and your desires are more than just a tool. They are something for you to determine and experience and enjoy. Most people, I think, want to do the same.
The fact is the majority of men voted for a rapist, racist, and wannabe-fascist, and no obfuscating arguments about the price of eggs and anxieties about the housing market is going to make that not a fact. The majority of men showed that they do not care all that much about the rights, dignity, and human flourishing of women--many of whom they live with. As Audrey Lorde said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." It's beyond odd to double down on how much men and women need each other and how women should be giving men access to our bodies and labor in a climate in which male entitlement is rampant, violence against women and girls is increasing, pregnancy could be deadly, and rapists can now choose the mother of their child.
I would love for us not to be divided. It's the dream. But the war on WOMEN (let's please stop staying "gender war" - this is "both sides" nonsense) is dividing us. Men are welcomed as allies...but where are they? They're apparently in your comment section arguing about how feminism is the devil and it's men that are oppressed, actually. When men step up en masse, supporting women and showing their true allyship, women will no doubt welcome them with open arms. Because that's the thing--this "both sides hate each other" is also not the whole picture. Women are making Tiktoks that say "I hate men." But do women really HATE men, or are they just angry? Women aren't the ones creating political coalitions to strip men of their bodily autonomy. Women aren't dumping all housework and childcare on men. Women aren't murdering their whole families because their husband wanted a divorce. What hate actually looks like, is what men do. When more men stop doing that, we'll be less divided. Simple!
Fuentes intended his words to be hurtful. Unless someone has given him a license to rape, his words are only words, and they can only hurt you if you let them.
Otherwise, 4B feminists seem to be in the midst of a collective tantrum. Last time, it was silly pink hats. This time, It's Serious. I suppose it's the same reason why, contra feminist mythology, women (not men) were traditionally most zealous in slut-shaming - because sluts were the equivalent of scabs undercutting the union price.