Incels and Feminists Alike: Challenging the 4B movement and Our Culture of Sexual Politics

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This article was originally written in December of 2024.

In 2016, after the shocking and–for many– devastating, election of Donald Trump, millions of women, alongside their friends and neighbors, poured into the streets of America to protest. The protest was entitled the “Women’s March,” and it shattered records for its scale and success. This year, after the once-again shocking and devastating election of Donald Trump, American heterosexual women have a new idea for managing the grief and fear of the presidency: no more sex. 

More specifically, there is a surge in discourse about American participation in the “4B movement”—a more radical branch of protest created by South Korean feminists around 2015 (Kaur 2024). The movement has four pillars: withholding sex from men, withholding relationships from men, withholding marriage, and withholding children. These pillars were created as a reaction to gender-based violence, economic inequalities, and repressive familial norms in South Korea, with the aim to leverage sex and abstinence as a means to advance  equality and safety, and as a way to protect themselves from the dangers of romantic and sexual proximity to men (Kaur 2024”). The actual efficacy of the strike—as well as the efficacy of other sex strikes, such as the 2003 sex strike affected by women in Liberia, and a recent sex strike by Orthodox Jewish women in New York—varies (Day 2019). But the premise of all is quite similar: heterosexual women should abstain from sex with men if men don’t consider the exploitation and injustice that women face because of it.   

After the election, and the surges of gender discourse that came with it, social media buzzed with American women interested in joining the protest. Across the internet—and amongst female friends in my own life—I’ve heard the enthusiastic considerations of women who consider the protest to be a way to protect personal safety and punish the men around them for general misogyny. 

The protest originates from a fear of losing reproductive and interpersonal control, a desire to bring attention to gender based discrimination, and a pragmatic attempt to reconcile the role sex in contemporary American gender politics and oppression. 4B asks its participants to use sex as a means to reach for equality and safety. But it inadvertently reenforces the very framework of understanding sex which enables violence and misogyny. 4B seeks to manage a symptom of gender-based inequality, but in doing so, it furthers the original sickness. 

This idea was introduced to me in a piece by Emily Owens, in which she makes a very interesting feminist case against sexual consent advocacy. Her criticism is derived from our social understanding of consent as a contractual concept—in business and politics—where consent is part of a transactional relationship where something is exchanged between two parties (Owens 2019). In feminist and well-meaning contemporary literature, the prevention of unwanted sexual behavior is averted by emphasizing consent. But as Owens states, this reduction of consent into a feature of a contract implicitly relies on the understanding that sex can be owed, that rape is a mere breach of contract, and that sexual relations are are transactional exchanges, similar to business contracts (Owens 2019). She is concerned that such language removes room for larger social and institutional context in conversations about sex– for example, rape on college campus is classified as an individual breach of contract, rather than a product of much larger social norms, rape culture, university policies, and countless other considerations. Despite the feminist intentions of consent advocacy, consent language and activism reinforces an understanding of sex as part of a contract, something that can be owed and breached–isolated to individuals instead of part of larger social systems, and reduced to a simple exchange.  

Consider the similarity of this framework to the most drastic other end of the gender-politics spectrum: the incel movement. This online movement centers incel—involuntarily celibate—men who hate women and social progression because they blame their celibacy on women actively withholding attention and sex from them because they perceive them as unattractive (Griffin 2021). Incel culture is a product of insular internet communities, forums, and chatrooms where young men can find community in a shared feeling of injustice about their unluckiness in sex. The communities are accessible, rampant, and successful at engaging insecure young men. They are also deeply dangerous—several incel men have committed horrific acts of violence, behavior that is often encouraged by their online community (Rees 2024). 

Even for mainstream misogyny that isn't driven by the incel community, trends in contemporary misogyny contain feelings of male entitlement of women’s bodies and sexuality. A rise in Andrew Tate-esque podcasting has produced an accessible online culture of violence and misogyny. After Trump’s election, an X user posted the now-viral phrase “Your body, My choice”, mocking the reproductive right slogan “my body, my choice.” Explicitly sexist dialogue has been front and center during the campaign for President Trump, with an emphasis on crude and arrogant language about women and their bodies (Duffy 2024).

The language of incel and mainstream sexist ideology can be distilled to a framework of understanding sex and female physicality as contractually owed to men, and that advocacy for reproductive rights and gender equality violates this obligation. Sex is owed. Bodies are owed. The belief which so many of these hateful and often violent young men hold comes from a sense of transaction, obligation, and unfulfilled contract towards male sexual gratification. The problem with this language is that it creates an understanding of sexuality and gender as something reduced to a biological contract to be fulfilled for men. It isn’t just that the outcome of this framework or the extrapolation is hateful, it’s that the very framework is problematic. 

In all its irony, this approach to characterizing sex is quite similar to the consent advocacy that Owens criticizes and quite similar to the way the 4B movement understands sex. Consider this in two ways. Firstly, that sex is a tool for exchange, contract, leverage, punishment, and reward generally. Owen’s characterization of consent, the 4B movement, and the incel movement all presuppose that the role sex plays in our lives is reduced to an obligation to be fulfilled or withheld, a way to award someone something. But more perniciously, this framework of understanding sex also demands understanding of this contract entirely through a male perspective: for incels, men are owed sex. For consent, men should construct a sexual contract. And for the 4B movement, sex is withheld and leveraged against men based on their behavior. Women lose not only their agency in these equations, but also their independent relationship with sex and sexuality. Sex is framed as something women give and men receive, and the difference is only in how and when women choose to give it. But feminist movements and misogynistic movements all accept the premise that sex is a piece of candy dangling in front of a man, whether owed or leveraged. 

It might be worth it for the 4B movement, and many of us who seek to be conscious, thoughtful feminists, to engage with another possible framework for understanding sexuality. It’s possible that through validating a misogynistic understanding of sexuality, even though the aims are to help women, the movement continues to enshrine in our culture an expectation of sex as something owed, given, bargained. Maybe the more productive way of building a protest is to push ourselves even further. Not simply to protest sex, but to bring into conversation our assumptions about a culture of sexuality. Sex can and should be a place to examine politics and power in our lives, but it should be done with thoughtfulness, specificity, and care. 

In the first place, sex, in whatever situation we discuss it in, should not be measured entirely through the lens of men. It seems both disingenuous and condescending to frame protests or language about sex as if men are perpetual receivers of a shared human experience. Semantically and pragmatically, our protests should consider this. 

Extend this plea for honesty: for many, it would be a grave simplification to frame sex as simply an exchange. Sex is the location for connection, intimacy, trust, dignity, love, power, and fear. Building a protest movement that successfully advocates for sexual agency and freedom means recognizing the role of sex beyond a simple contract or exchange. 

If reproductive rights and gender advocacy can emerge from an understanding of sex that holds more nuance, equality, and honesty, maybe the protests we build can be more effective. This might look like making critical choices about whom we invite into our bedrooms, considering what we are comfortable participating in, and having conversations about what we need and expect from the men who we share these moments with. But the conversations and protests have the capacity for more focused, nuanced, and driven advocacy when we don’t simplify an understanding of sex or build a blanket policy. Instead, we can think critically about the people in our lives, the choices we make, and the worries we have in their full depth.  

The original 4B movement was born out of fear, frustration, and a desire for safety and equality. The current 4B movement responds to a terrifying culture of misogyny that permeates our screens and our White House. But perhaps the way feminists chose to protest should be not just by challenging a culture of control and repression, but instead the very assumptions that culture relies on. By asking the men in our lives to consider sexuality beyond a bargaining chip or reward, and to genuinely engage with the way sex impacts our freedom, communities, and culture, not only do we avoid reenforcing and perpetuating a framework that ultimately fuels violence and misogyny in the long term, but we are able to make more effective protests today and tomorrow. In many ways, it’s a harder ask. But if there’s one thing incels and radical feminists can agree on, it’s that our personal choices are critical in defining the cultural and political world around us. We could take this moment to try to work within the framework of sexual contracts and obligation and leverage that has been expected of us for so long, or we could ask for a better way of thinking about the power and politics of our bedrooms.  

Bibliography

Griffin, Jonathan. “Incels: Inside a Dark World of Online Hate.” BBC News, August 13, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-44053828. 

(Griffin, Incels)

Duffy, Clare. “‘your Body, My Choice’ and Other Attacks on Women Surge on Social Media Following Election | CNN Business.” CNN, November 13, 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/11/business/your-body-my-choice-movement-election/index.html. 

(Duffy, your Body, My Choice)

Lounela, Emilia. “Imagining the Past: Justifications of Ideology in Incel Communities.” GNET, April 25, 2024. https://gnet-research.org/2024/04/25/imagining-the-past-justifications-of-ideology-in-incel-communities/. 

(Lounela, Imagining the Past)

Rees, Gwyneth. “Men Who Hate Women: How ‘incel’ Culture Became Mainstream.” The Telegraph, April 21, 2024. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/21/incels-extremist-group-online/. 

(Rees, “Men Who Hate Women”)

Kaur, Harmeet. “After Trump’s Win, Some Women Are Considering the 4B Movement.” CNN, November 13, 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/09/us/4b-movement-trump-south-korea-wellness-cec/index.html. 

(Haur, “After Trumps Win”)

Day, Harvey. “The History of Sex Strikes.” BBC Three, May 16, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/bbcthree/article/1fc04f3e-3128-4be7-a78a-28ea31db4101. 

(Day, The History of Sex Strikes)

Owens, Emily. “Consent.” A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 30 (2019): 148–56. 

(Owens, Consent)