4B, Femme Freeze, Feminine Rage, and Foreign Flights

If you know any women, you've probably heard about the 4B movement in the last week. TL;DR: It means no dating, marrying, having babies with, or sleeping with men.

Being single and not having children is normal, actually! The whole "not sleeping with men" thing makes more sense when you consider the orgasm gap, how hot women are by comparison (seriously, have you met women? They're radiant), and how many guys take Andrew Tate seriously.

Let's rip the band-aid right off with some facts about the 4B movement in South Korea:

The 4B movement in South Korea began as a reaction to public policy
During the same time, Korean women's beauty trends were gaining popularity worldwide— and K Beauty was a really expensive trend. 4B? Totally free.

Third and perhaps most significantly: 5 years after the movement began in 2019, birth rates have dropped, schools around the country have closed, and the government has been forced to enact policies that support families. The process of societal change occurring as a reaction to changing factors within a society is an example of dialectical materialism. In South Korea, it began as a reaction to a man murdering a woman because he was angry that women had ignored him. The man was not charged with a hate crime, and a Twitter movement was born.

South Korea is different to the United States in terms of overall population size, impact to the global economy, and critically: its demographic makeup. But the fact that 4B began trending on election night suggests that American women from all walks of life are running a cost-benefit analysis on sex with men.

Femme Freeze: Diet 4B

4B is far from the only sex strike up for debate. This week the "Femme Freeze" also trended and I'm sorry, but this one will be gone faster than a "hawk tuah" in the wind. There's just no way this is real. Regardless, Femme Freeze is being billed as a monthlong exercise in the month of December wherein women should:

Not go out to bars or clubs - Midwest girls rejoice! You still get Blackout Wednesday!

Get off the dating apps - Anyone worth knowing left those a long time ago!

Cut back on excessive holiday spending - IT'S ALL EXCESSIVE

Disengage from male-centered social media - I deleted Instagram yesterday. Give me a frozen Thin Mint.

Raise your rates, if you own a business - You mean, like we do every year?

Sigh. I remember my first ill-conceived social media protest. RIP #Boobquake .

But for real. To understand what any serious attempt at American 4B could look like, it's important to understand the factors that got us here. Because as a woman who's In The Shit, I can tell you with confidence that this didn't come from nowhere.

Women Outperforming Men on Traditional Markers of Success

If you grew up Gen X or Millennial, you probably got a lot of messaging about how marriage and career are both key for stability. We took this message to heart and not only learned to cook, but sought advanced degrees, bought houses, and got promoted at work.

Over the past two decades, data indicates that single women in the United States have consistently owned more homes than single men. In 2022, unmarried women owned 58% of the 35.2 million homes owned by unmarried individuals, while unmarried men owned 42%.

Advanced degrees

In the 2020–21 academic year, women earned 65% of all master's degrees, while men earned 35%. During the same period, women received 56% of all doctoral degrees, compared to 44% for men.

Career advancement

A 2007 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 10.6% of men had received promotions compared to 7.6% of women, indicating a statistically significant gender gap favoring men— which surprises no one.

What is a shocker? Research from MIT Sloan in 2021 revealed that women received higher performance ratings than men but were rated 8.3% lower in potential, resulting in a 14% lower likelihood of promotion for women compared to their male colleagues.

So...women perform better at work, but are rated lower than the men that we're outperforming. Got it.

Our grandmothers needed husbands, but we don't. We date and mate for pleasure. Except...

Enshittification Came for Dating

I've dated online intermittently throughout my life. I entered a relationship in 2015 with a guy I met on Bumble. We broke up in 2020. And by the time I got back on the apps in 2022, algorithms had entered the chat, everyone had lost their social skills, and norms had changed significantly. Everything got measurably worse.

The dating app experience turned shitty for everyone thanks to culprits like these, in no particular order:

The invasion of the married guys

The "ethically" non-monogamous couples unicorn-hunting for threesome partners where single women were looking for protector/provider husbands

Paywalling the good matches - much has been said about why everyone on Hinge is so goddamn ugly

OnlyFans models , bots, and catfish

And honestly? Abstaining from sex with men is the natural consequence of enshittification of dating. The proliferation of "walking dates" isn't about going outside and getting to know each other while you enjoy your surroundings; it's about men not wanting to spend money. Single gents have been fearfully avoidant, yet weirdly entitled to, single women. Only I can't even say it's limited to single men anymore, because married dudes are dating in the open now, too.

See also: " drizzle drizzle ," " high value dating " content pitting the sexes against each other.

If you're a woman reading this and you've been single at any point in the last 5 years, you've probably danced the dating app tango. Best case scenario: You exchange a few pleasant lines of banter, you agree to go out, he looks like his pictures, and displays a reasonable standard of good behavior. Maybe he even smells good and makes you laugh!

Worst case scenario? Violent, lethal crime. Like that cardiologist in Denver who drugged all those ladies.

A critical lack of critical thinking skills.

Look, we know that abstinence-only sex education failed a generation or two. But abstinence from sex with men can be a tool, if used like one. A dildo for a society that just fucked itself, if you will. Haters say there are no clear, expected outcomes of an American 4B movement.

And to that I say: Read the fucking room.

American search interest in "4B" coincided with the looming threat of the same guy taking away divorce and abortion (which, LOL). Therefore, it stands to reason that just two of the policies we want to keep are the rights to

It is especially galling to hear women say that "4B lacks any clear objectives" when the well-read among us have been saying for years that paid maternity leave matters, dilation and curettage is not only used for elective abortion but also to remove fetal remains after an expectant mother miscarries a planned and wanted pregnancy before she dies of sepsis; and that expanding access to IVF would - I don't know - help willing parents grow the population you're oh-so concerned about dwindling. Mandatory military conscription frequently follows abortion bans, and California just voted to keep extremely low-wage labor in the prison system. Legalized abortion is correlated with drops in crime. Make of that what you will.

Be that as it may, concern trolling about declining birth rates in the USA started a long time ago. The concern about a declining birth rate— despite the United States still having a booming population— is nothing new. However, if fewer women are dating men, marrying men, and having babies with men, it stands to reason that fewer women are spending money on:

Going to bars or nightclubs (I personally haven't been to a bar since August, and that is a new record for me)

Botox, hair removal, other beauty treatments women in long-term relationships get to look more like the women in the porn their husband jerks off to every night

Holiday gift giving

inally, we're free from the insanity!

Baby showers, baby sprinkles, gender reveal parties

And other consumerist behaviors that I thought my fellow feminists wanted us to abandon, anyway. But now that we're doing it as a result of decentering men - which you also wanted us to do! - you're mad. The girl math ain't girl mathin'.

Men Written by Women: The Male Gaze versus the Feminine Regard

To be clear: Women who like men still yearn for good men. That's never going to change. We're just tired of our reasonable standards being dismissed as unreasonable expectations. And yes, dating coaches for straight men and for straight women share some of the blame for fabricating rivalry where there was once attraction. But also? There should never have been fodder for so many many "wash your ass," "weaponized incompetence," or "go to therapy" memes. There just shouldn't.

We have men written by women :

The Holy Trinity: Owen Grey, Small Hands , Girthmasterr

I'd argue that the "female gaze" isn't about sight at all, the way the male gaze is. The male gaze is shallow and all about instant gratification according to socially conditioned norms, conventional beauty standards, blah blah.

But when women write men? Often, you don't get to see them at all. Case in point: The audio app Quinn.

Weaponized Incompetence and Unequal 50/50 Relationships

I'm out of my depth on this one; I've always enjoyed a healthy symbiosis in my relationships. I like to cook, they don't mind cleaning up. It just fucking works. But based on Am I The Asshole posts on Reddit, a few "friend of a friend" stories about shitty husbands, most straight marriages between young people start off like this:

Congratulations. You've found a guy who pays his bills, texts you back, washes his ass, and maybe even has a good relationship with his parents. Let there be wedding bells!

Okay, now that you're back from the honeymoon in Destin , the real fun starts. Together, you get to co-create the culture of your home and establish what family life looks like. Aww.

But then you start to notice some irregularities. You could have sworn that Brandon used to put his dirty socks in the hamper when he was living at his apartment. The dishes never used to pile up like this when you were dating. Come to think of it, has he ever been to the grocery store by himself?

This is called weaponized incompetence. And if you expected me to explain that for you instead of Googling it for yourself, well, there's an example of it.

Not only does weaponized incompetence kill trust and breed resentment between partners. It's pretty fucking unsexy (I would imagine).

Just wait until children enter the chat, fam. Then you're splitting household bills evenly with someone who isn't splitting the household chores with you fairly . To make things even more fun, because you're the mother, you have the joy and privilege of scheduling every appointment, shopping for every classmate's birthday party, keeping track of the mental load behind all of that. If you haven't already, you'll be expected to remember his family's birthdays, favorite foods and such, too.

If you're a man who bathes, parents, and manages a household: This isn't about you. Here's the #NotAllMen you were looking for. Please start a podcast; grow the movement.

Eating the Young: Liberal Women Cannibalize Our Own Efforts at Organizing

Does anyone else remember motivational posters in the classroom? Positive quotes superimposed over pleasant, if totally fucking irrelevant, imagery?

Turns out that praise helps developing minds associate effort with reward and enjoy challenges. I don't think we needed an academic study to prove "if you tell people you have faith in them, they do better," but we have proof for all the haters. Of which there are many. Because unfortunately, you don't have to look very hard on social media to see liberal women tearing down even the notion of trying to use abstinence as a tool for policy change.

And just...the fucking audacity.

If your friend told you, "I want to start lifting weights" and you responded with something like, "How much? A Quarter Pounder?" you'd be a fucking asshole. Any reasonable friend, mother, sister, therapist would urge that friend to cut ties with you for this toxic behavior. And yet somehow, we're supposed to organize with other women who talk to each other like that?

With allies like these, who needs enemies?

Word of the Day: Anomie

No, that's not a French-inspired top-trending baby name of 2025. Although...

Anomie is a sociological term that refers to a state of normlessness or a breakdown of social norms and values within a society. This concept was developed by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe a condition where individuals feel disconnected from the collective norms, expectations, and goals that traditionally guide behavior. Anomie often arises during periods of rapid social change, economic upheaval, or crisis, leading to feelings of isolation, purposelessness, and despair among individuals.

In other words: When we don't have healthy communities, we have room for rotten shit to take root. Chaos reigns, and chaos creates opportunity.

If you think that movements like 4B aren't a vehicle for real social change, young American men just proved to the world that 3A (Algorithms, Anomie, and Assholes) can define public policy. The absence of any role models, or even clarity on what their role is, left a gap in young men's minds for the likes of Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate to fill. And frankly, our young men deserved better. But Silicon Valley didn't design its algorithms to recommend level-headed thinking and reasonable, well-researched perspectives. Cool heads don't generate clicks.

Remember that short-lived Jim Henson show Dinosaurs ? Prophetic.