Culture, Digested: The New York Times is Very Frightened of the 4Bs

on the common concern about how women choose to live their lives

I have seen way more content criticizing the American version of the 4B movement than I have seen any content advocating the American version of the 4B movement. From Substack to Unherd to the New York Times (twice!), op-ed writers are calling them misguided, doomed to fail, transphobic, privileged, delusional, and misandrist. They must be stopped, they must be scolded, they must be educated on why what they are proposing is a bad idea.

And what are they proposing to do? Decenter men. The women of the movement are looking to disengage from men romantically, sexually, and financially, and to build lives outside of relationships with men. Building off a movement based in South Korea, the 4Bs are four nos: no dating, fucking, marrying, or having children with men. If they are going to have kids, arrange living spaces, socially and sexually connect, then they will do it outside of the heterosexual construct.

It's inevitable that this would attract the Sauron-like eye of the media, always looking for any movement on the horizon it can exploit and monetize. Women are great for that. In an ever-increasing need for content, “what are the goddamn women doing now” has always been a reliable hook. Are they angry? Are they watching something stupid? Are they voting for the right people? What are they putting on their faces? Are they being loud at a coffee shop? Are they doing silly little dances on social media? What are they wearing? Eating? Playing?

It isn’t enough to document, of course – judgment has to be made, declaring their salads of choice either good or bad politically, ethically, monetarily, and so on. People love to judge women – especially other women – so these clickbait articles are reliable revenue streams.

The content of their critique of the 4B movement is not important, it is just essential that people get on the record – immediately – that their little ideas will never work and will only lead to social chaos. I think people should probably leave them alone and let them figure things out for themselves. Of course, if the 4B movement does actually take over America and the women go door to door, castrating men and forcing women into matriarchal breeding camps, then I’ll admit that I was wrong and we should have intervened sooner.

***

Just a few years ago, declaring yourself independent of marriage and male influence was all the rage. Released within a year of each other, Kate Bolick’s Spinster and Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies were celebrations of the unmarried woman and all the cultural, political, and demographic power she held.

But there is an essential difference between the celebrated single woman of these books and the vilified 4B woman of today: the spinster has no ideology. She’s not staying single for any specific political reason, she’s doing it because she’s having too much fun!

Both were overcorrections from the cultural image of the single woman that predominated, that of the sad cat lady knitting baby clothing for other people’s children, crying softly to herself that she’ll never have any of her own. But in their rush to overcorrect, they saw spinsterdom as a fabulous lifestyle choice, without any consideration for how difficult and expensive it is to live a life on your own.

Both books were written by women with romantic partners, and the books feel like an indulgence in a fantasy. “Oh, how wonderful to be free!” (If you have been the longterm single friend to a lot of married women, you know the fantasy I am talking about.) Not noticing that that freedom often comes with financial precarity, social instability, loneliness, fears about dwindling fertility, and so on. Well, both books made halfhearted gestures toward the difficulty of living alone, with the usual tacked on so much worse for the poors language. It also should also be said that both books came out at the tail end of the Obama years, when the economy was good for the professional media class, so the idea of setting up an independent, urban life with all of its implied brunches, margarita towers, and creative endeavors for a college educated (white) woman was still aspirational within reason.

But it’s the lower classes and women without college degrees who are the most likely to stay unmarried and raise children alone in the long run. And it is very expensive to live independently, especially in urban areas where the cost of living has skyrocketed since 2020. With the scaling back of social welfare programs and “affordable housing,” when it is available, costing around $3,500 a month for a one-bedroom in New York City, being a fabulous, celebrated spinster is not in many people’s budgets.

This can coerce people into relationships – couples report being pressured into moving in together or getting married not by the social need to conform but by financial realities. But when the New York Times ran an essay titled “When the Cost of Being Unmarried Is Too High,” the writer was referring to the emotional price, not the economic. Meanwhile, financial stress is one of the number one triggers for domestic violence.

Basically, with health insurance being wildly expensive unless a worker is extremely lucky with their employer, with cutbacks on programs to feed children, with housing assistance mostly nonexistent, the only real alternative to the nuclear family is wealth. If you can personally compensate – with money – for the rights and privileges that come with marriage and romantic partnership, then a fabulous single life is attainable. If you can pay for, on your own, childcare, health care, and adequate housing, then you’re a Spinster (complimentary). And if you slip and can’t keep up you are either a spinster (derogatory) or a burden on the American taxpayer.

Someone here will inevitably suggest that women band together informally to live lives of cooperation and collaboration. But informal arrangements are unreliable. Traister includes an anecdote in Single Ladies about planning with her friend, back when they were both single, to live next door to one another and raise kids together. Who needs men? They can get some sperm and be partners in life and domesticity together. But that plan was immediately abandoned when Traister met a man. She reports she was so surprised by the appearance of love in her life, she makes a big deal about how torn she was before ultimately deciding on a life of suburban domesticity and the nuclear family. She doesn’t tell us what happened to her friend.

At any rate, one can guess that the “stay single” spinster manifestos were not altogether convincing. Eight years later, it was the “get divorced” books that were trending.

***

It’s also illustrative to look at the tone of coverage about polyamory versus coverage about any kind of feminist separatist movement. The trend of polyamory has mostly been written about with breathless enthusiasm in almost every media outlet in the country. Even when difficult, even when it goes against every feeling you have, even when it requires endless hours of “processing” and emotional grinding, even when it caused absolute misery, it is good. Freeing! Liberating!

Polyamory was also presented as the antidote to patriarchal forms of relationship and family. In one polyamorous group’s storyline on Showtime’s Couple’s Therapy, whenever one of the female participants expressed jealousy, fears of abandonment, or just general bad feelings about being in this arrangement, they would often chide themselves with “But I believe in this politically.”

Probably the first hint that polyamory was not as radical as people were saying was that New York published a how-to guide.

Personally, I think polyamory is less about an anti-patriarchal approach to love and more of a consumerist adaptation. Consumerism, after all, always suggests more as the solution to everything. If your phone, tablets, and other screens are giving you anxiety or hindering your sleep, the solution is not scaling back but adding more: subscribing to a meditation app, upgrading to gadgets with better night modes, glasses that block blue light, a white noise machine, a fancier mattress with better sheets, etc. The consumerist solution to the political and emotional problems of marriage – which for the media class will always be first and foremost the limitations put on the individual -- is to add more: more lovers, more partners, more sexual and emotional entanglements.

Denying oneself in a culture of indulgence and consumerist solutions to all problems, then, does sometimes require an ideology or some sort of structure to stay on track. It’s easier to stay meat-free if you are a participant in vegan social circles. It’s easier to live out voluntary poverty within the Catholic church. This is often derided as culty behavior, or “living in a bubble,” and of course sometimes it does veer in those directions. But one thing that reinforces those bubbles is the impulse to deride and chastise any activity or belief that does not meet the liberal seal of approval.

The last two decades of lifestyle feminism told women that feminism was not enough of a reason to deny oneself anything. Donning the label was enough, women should not feel pressured to forego marriage, misogynist popular culture, sweatshop clothing, or corporate careers to be in alignment with feminist principles – in fact, many of our feminist “thought leaders” worked hard to show how each of these things weren’t anti-feminist, in fact, they were empowering! That’s the opposite!

But many women found their new political awareness hard to square with these lifestyle choices. Looking for guidance on how to lead a more thoughtful life, they were sometimes bullied and ridiculed by the same feminists from whom they were looking for answers.

Mostly I think the overreaction and impulse to condemn women looking to live lives outside of romantic partnerships with men is just normal anxiety and fear that maybe you made the wrong choice. For women who compromised and conformed without thinking or consciously entering into the arrangement out of real desire and not simply because it satisfied family or social demands, the idea of a woman choosing something different – happily – is a provocation.

Which is why I’ve also seen a lot of anxiety about whether these women are going to turn transphobic, racist, etc. If they start thinking about the pressure to stay in relationships to men, if they start being curious about what else might be possible, will they start to develop hateful ideology? Curiosity is a threat because the monoculture of media can’t control where it might lead. Some people were actually radicalized into incel culture by online forums, and some of them did commit violent acts as a result, but there were probably more people writing think pieces, books, op-eds, and manifestos condemning incels than those who were committing violence because of indoctrination.

As Adam Phillips writes in Attention Seeking, curiosity about what else is possible is often experienced as a psychic threat. People kill off their curiosity and sense of possibility (outside of the consumerist experience of shopping for better products, of course) in order to survive without the underlying tow of regret and disappointment. He asks “what a person’s life might be like if they were unfrightened of their own complexity, or refused to determinedly narrow their minds, or were unintimidated by their unbidden curiosity.”

Instead of condemning these women, probably a better service would be to offer history lessons on how women have had to survive without men in the past, either due to a demographic imbalance following a war or because of religious commitments. It would be interesting for people to write about how socialist countries managed childcare and domesticity, how cities have created housing for unmarried women, how other cultures and eras have arranged families. It would be wonderful to have a well-researched book about separatist communities, like Kansas City’s Womantown or other utopian projects. It would be wonderful to have a not expensive printing of Dolores Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution available.

It doesn’t matter how the 4B movement turns out, if they all end up giving it up because it’s too hard, if they become hardline separatists, if they fuck up their kids’ lives or become hypocrites or ha ha they go crawling back to men like we all knew they would do. They are trying to figure out how to live. So let them.

Recommended:

• I watched the documentary Marx Can Wait this week, and while it was not amazing, one scene has stayed with me. Two brothers, one very successful and the other flailing, are talking. The successful brother has recently found socialism, and he has been radicalized. He keeps telling the flailing brother that what he needs is socialism. His brother snaps, “Marx can wait.” As in, he needs basic stability and a sense of purpose before he starts thinking about other people’s political and material needs. That was their last conversation, the flailing brother ended up killing himself. When I see people scolding the 4B movement for not being socialist enough, for being cultural appropriation, for not being inclusive enough, I think of this. “Marx can wait.” Let them figure out their stuff first.

• I wrote about Yellowstone: “When people say American culture is polarised, they say they are talking about politics and the so-called Red and Blue State divide. But I think what they really mean is that Americans watch two different types of TV shows. The college-educated, urban sophisticates who occupy Democratic strongholds watch prestige television like Succession. And the hicks watch Yellowstone.”

• This story about IVF clinic mixing up two embryos, and the families trying to figure out how much this is going to change their lives, is wonderful.

• If you’d like to write for The Culture We Deserve, get in touch.