Donald Trump’s recent electoral victory may have been sweeping, but in one regard it fell short: the shock and outrage it elicited among the left didn’t quite reach 2016 levels. Despite this, a wave of radical feminists seeking an effective strategy for staging a long-term collective meltdown recently found it this week in the strangest of places: South Korea’s 4B movement.

The 4B movement, which might be more accurately translated as 4N (four “no’s”), involves refraining from dating, marrying, having sex, or having children — with men. Women are signing up by publicly shaving their heads, which also happens to correlate with social media attention.

The 4B movement emerged in Korean social media communities in the late 2010s as a response to what their even-more-disgruntled Western sisters on Wikipedia call the “heteronormative” nature of Korean society. The Korean feminists who ignited the trend may have failed to notice that the practice had already been widely, if inadvertently, adopted by the entire country, which has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates.

In the wake of Trump’s sweeping electoral victory, 4B has been co-opted — culturally appropriated? — by American feminists in search of their next performative outburst. While radical feminists view the 4B movement as a means of fighting back against the MAGA-emboldened “patriarchy,” their pledge to stop having sex with men didn’t exactly anger many of their political opponents. It delighted them.

One poster on the 4B movement subreddit (LARPer or not), described her father and older brother’s reactions to her participating in the movement, which consisted, respectively, of, “That’s great” and, “At least you won’t be a wh*re anymore.”

The post has since been removed by the subreddit’s moderators. Nevertheless, there are countless examples, including a woman who attempted to video herself shaving her head but was thwarted by her own inability to use her clippers, a group of 4Bers who are banding together to set up a forest commune (aka coven), and a lesbian couple who, presumably, weren’t having sex with men anyway (we saw a lot of this actually).

Oddly, the backlash has its roots in, of all places, American federalism. The issue of abortion was at the forefront of the 2024 race, particularly in leftist and feminist circles. The US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Trump’s vow to return abortion policy to the states, and speculation about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 all fed a narrative that a Trump victory would lead to the erosion of women’s reproductive rights and autonomy.

While positioned as a political protest, 4B is the latest piece of the performance art staged by the gender critical movement, which seeks to subvert gender roles, deconstruct biological sex, and generally wreak havoc on the patriarchy — by playing with their hair. The absolutist approach to sexual abstinence smacks of the puritanical, but even Puritans approved of (and, for purposes of reproduction, encouraged) sex among married couples.

In either case, the movement appears to be turning radical feminists into volcel (voluntarily celibate) women who view themselves as a vanguard of the resistance to their greatest cultural and political boogeyman: conservative “incel” men.

Most of the eye-rolling in response to the movement, however, has come from women, including one who has redefined 4B as “Brainwashed, Bitchy, Bitter, and now Bald.” But, some of the strongest criticism has come from cancer patients, who are pointing out that the decision to publicly shave your head because of a luxury belief is both weird and cruel.

One way to track the movement’s “success” is to analyze data from apps like Tinder. If the movement is anything more than mere posturing, men will see a drought of women (or, at least, leftist women) on the apps; whether that’s a bad thing is up for debate. Pro-natalists will rightfully point out that, at a time when both marriage and birth rates are on the decline, a large-scale and successful 4B movement would be disastrous. That said, the chances of the movement being large-scale or successful are slim.

As such, it’s probably worth letting the temper tantrum play itself out. Maybe some 4Bers will discover that refraining from casual sex can improve mental health and self-esteem. Others may find that their libido outweighs (or, at least, outlasts) their political rage. Regardless, the movement is not poised to accomplish what it claims it wants: a total rejection of men and their desires.

Indeed, radical feminists attempting to “retvrn” to tradition with a progressive twist is a cultural victory for the right — and for lesbians, which, sure, many straight girls will toy around with for attention, but at the end of the day? Come on, lol.

—Ethan Holmes