On the day Donald Trump won the American presidential election, a number of women contemplated a radical response. They just might swear off men. They might not date them, have sex with them, get married to them, or have their babies.
Maybe that would teach the men of the United States who have, like their president-elect and vice-president elect, made a habit of denigrating women. And put their leaders on notice; that they will not be stripped of their reproductive rights without a fight.
Today, senior columnist Jacqueline Maley, on the social trend that started in South Korea, and has now spread to the United States. And whether it just might come here next.
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Salinger Morris. It's Monday, November 25th. On the day Donald Trump won the American presidential election. A number of women contemplated a radical response. They just might swear off men. They might not date them, have sex with them, get married to them, or have their babies. Maybe that would teach the men of the United States who have, like their president elect and vice president elect, made a habit of denigrating women and put their leaders on notice that they will not be stripped of their reproductive rights without a fight. Today, senior columnist Jacqueline Maley on the social trend that started in South Korea and has now seemingly spread to the United States, and whether it just might come here next. Okay, so, Jack, I have to start off with what has to be the funniest line of your piece. Tell me what you wrote about Charlotte Bronte, the author of Jane Eyre and why you wrote about it now, because she's not often referenced in political columns about Donald Trump.
I know, and I'm here to change that because I'm a huge Bronte nerd. I'm obsessed with all the Bronte sisters. I've been on a pilgrimage to Haworth in Yorkshire, where, of course, they famously grew up in the parsonage. Anyway, she got married late, you know, famously having written books which, you know, really sort of revolve around a marriage plot, particularly Jane Eyre. And she wrote to her best friend in 1854 while on her honeymoon. And she said, it is a strange and solemn and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. Man's lot is far, far different. That line has always stuck with me because I thought what was happening on that honeymoon.
I know she's.
Kind of like. And in fact, I think although the marriage was short, I think it was actually quite happy, but it really actually did ram home to me in the Victorian era and and well before that, becoming a wife and marriage for a woman was a solemn undertaking. And it wasn't necessarily about romance or joy or lifelong happiness or any of those things. It was always, um, an economic arrangement and an arrangement that you knew could have, you know, serious consequences for you because it meant childbearing and childbearing historically has been a very, very dangerous business. So I just thought it was an interesting sort of lens to to put on marriage. Like, you know, we have all these modern notions of marriage and couplehood and dating and sex, but it hasn't always been something that is a is necessarily a heart filling, joyful thing for women.
And the anecdote does colorfully illustrate the reality that heterosexual marriage just isn't always so great for women, and that this isn't a new view or reality. But this does take us to your latest piece. So tell me about the somewhat radical trend that has sort of exploded among women in the United States.
Yeah. So this I found this really, really interesting after the election of Trump two weeks ago now, there was a surge in in Google searches in the United States for something called the Forbes movement. So for the digit and B, the letter, and it is something that's come out of South Korea. And South Korea, of course, is a really advanced society and a really wonderful, highly educated society. But they do have a big problem with gender disparity. And they have this sort of quite radical feminist movement called forb B in the Korean language means no. So it's four noes. So it's no sex, no dating, no marriage, and no childbirth. So it's basically a movement whereby heterosexual women swear off really any meaningful romantic or even social contact with men.
And then, of course, we get the election of Donald Trump and November 6th comes and then bam, there's a spike of interest in this movement in the United States. So tell me how that sort of has manifested. Yeah.
So it manifested, you know, with this Google search. And then there was a bit of an explosion on TikTok of young women influencers and just young women TikTokers saying, okay, ladies, it's time to get serious. You know, this is an election campaign that was defined by its misogyny and its machismo. Do not sleep with men.
Do not go on dates with men, do not have a baby with a man and do not get married. Four pillars not hard once.
Some of the post-election commentary online from the so-called manosphere was pretty brutal and pretty extreme. So men like the far right political pundit Nicholas Fuentes were sort of openly trolling women. And he tweeted out the slogan your body, my choice, which, of course is a play on the pro-choice motto, which is my body, my choice.
It's your body, my choice. And men, women again, men win again. There will never there will never be a female president. Ever. It's over. Glass ceiling. Dude, it's a ceiling made of fucking bricks. You will never break it. And yes, we control your bodies.
So you had women sort of talking about it online a lot. Now, you know, this man has been elected who has vowed to further strip back abortion rights, which, of course, are already under siege in the United States, in certain states. And it's time to get serious and let's join this movement.
So if you're a man, don't look at me. Don't touch me. Don't speak to me. Don't breathe near me. Okay. And now we are at our rock bottom.
And this is where we are at. I feel like I'm in a different world today.
This is so. All profiles don't just.
Delete the app, delete the profiles, and then delete the app. I personally have been celibate or abstinent for several years.
Hell, remove your uterus just to be extra safe. Like, I don't know.
It is, you know, this sort of full throated and quite extreme um, expression, I suppose, of how the fight over feminism, gender equality and the rights of women has really, really come down to the bodies of women. And we've seen that extremely explicitly and in a really visceral way. In the United States, since the abortion bans have been in place, I think there's 14 states now where there's sort of partial or total abortion bans. We've seen dreadful stories come out about the suffering and, um, and deaths of, of women due to those bans, because, of course, the abortion bans don't just ban abortion. They also sort of imperil all sorts of pregnancy and gynecological care for women who want to or don't want to keep their pregnancies. So it's about fighting on a bodily level. And this actually has, you know, as we've talked about offline, this has a long, long tradition of women sort of saying, okay, well, the only thing that I can do in the face of these structural and political inequalities is to withhold my body. You know, they're saying that they want to have autonomy over while I'm going to take back that autonomy.
Well, let's get into this, because your piece really took me down a rabbit hole. And I found it absolutely fascinating that this concept of withholding sex to achieve political or cultural gain for women is not a new strategy at all. It's actually been used in many different countries. So can you walk me through this a bit?
Yeah, there is a tradition of this. I was going to say a noble tradition. I don't know if it is a noble tradition. I don't know if it's been particularly effective, but it's been done so in places like Liberia, Kenya, Colombia, the Philippines, Belgium, you know, there have been political sort of movements or sex. Yeah. Sex strikes where women leaders have called upon other women, basically to withhold sex from your partners until we get a political solution here or until we get a government formed or whatever the political crisis is. And, um, of course, it was in this is a terrible word for anyone with a lisp to say, but it's a plot point in the in the ancient Greek play Lysistrata.
Thanks, parents, for funding my four year arts degree. That's the one thing I remember from Lysistrata.
Come on. We, you and I have always just wanted to casually drop Lysistrata into a podcast.
I mean.
Bucket list as a.
Reference. Yeah.
Um, so, yeah, I think the women in that play withhold sex because they want a resolution to the Peloponnese war.
For more than 20 years. In the play. For more than 20 years. And this is a comedy.
Yeah. I should note so I.
Can see how you could get some some.
Gags out of that. Yeah, exactly.
We'll be right back. Now, Jack, I want to turn to Australia and really ask you whether this concept of withholding sex as a bid to reclaim bodily autonomy or simply to protest misogyny, is there anything to suggest that it could catch on here?
As far as I'm aware, I'm the only person who's written about it in the Australian media. As far as I'm aware. But I'm sure it's kind of a thing on TikTok for Australian women and perhaps men as well. The reason I find it so fascinating is not because I think that this is going to take off or, you know, in Australia we thankfully have the right to abortion. And even though there have been some sort of attempts at incursions on that right politically in recent times, it's pretty solid. And even the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, sort of confirmed his pro-choice stance a few weeks ago in an interview. I do think it's interesting because South Korea, where this this movement came from, is a forerunner in what is a trend across the entire OECD, which is falling fertility rates. So in sort of highly educated, advanced societies, you know, basically the more that women are educated, the less they have children. And whether or not that's because they don't want to have children or it becomes structurally difficult for them is a matter that's for debate. But that is certainly a phenomenon in Australia. We follow the global trend in that in that sense. So we're at sort of I think below replacement rate, birth rate now, not as bad as South Korea, which has got the the lowest birth rate in the world. But we have a population replacement problem and that has flow on effects for women in the workforce. You know, the whole issue of gender equality generally and how we structure family life against working life, but it also has flow on effects for something like immigration, because if we can't replace our working age population and we do have an ageing society, then we're going to need to import workers and we're going to need to have a full migration program into the future. And at the moment, the political will and also the popular will is really to sort of cut back on immigration. So we're sort of being squeezed from both sides. People don't want more immigrants, but Australian women are not having enough babies. And this is a political and a social and an economic problem.
And it is so interesting. And you mentioned just before, you know, Peter Dutton confirming his pro-choice stance just a couple of weeks ago in an interview. But I have been fascinated, and I know you have definitely written about this, that abortion has recently become a matter of debate here. So do tell me about that, because I have been stunned by that.
Yeah, I think this is this is very much a sort of a direct import from some of the MAGA anti-abortion rhetoric. And it came up strangely as an issue in the Queensland state election campaign a few weeks ago for various reasons. But basically, you know, a minor party sort of brought up that they that they wanted to bring in a late term abortion ban or possibly a late term abortion ban. And so people within the LNP, you know, the coalition had to sort of say whether or not they were for or against this. And then it strangely came up in Adelaide.
A controversial bill to change South Australia's abortion laws has been narrowly defeated in the state parliament's upper house.
The bills would see women seeking abortions post 27 weeks required to deliver their babies alive.
This issue of late term abortion has also come up in the federal Senate, but it hasn't really been taken anywhere, certainly not by the major parties.
And it does.
Raise the question for me, though. I mean, does this indicate maybe seeds of a slight leaning towards a more conservative culture here, I guess, which would bring into play, you know, the possibilities that women might react if not in the four B movement, specifically in swearing off dating and romantic involvement with men. But perhaps another reaction. What do you think about that?
I think that, um, that women are having fewer babies. And the reasons. I mean, this is my opinion, but the reasons for that are quite evident, I think, in the sense that it's much harder to have children. It's much more expensive to have children. It's no longer possible in most cities or most places in Australia to have children and to have a home on one salary. And we go into the workforce and then we get to the crunch time when we have children, and we realize that instead of being asked to do one job at a time, we're being asked to do two, maybe three, maybe even four jobs at a time. And society and, you know, even workplaces as flexible as they're becoming, are not set up for two working parents. They're not set up for working mothers. I like to think we're at that inflection point. I don't know if we are. And sometimes it feels like it's two steps forward and one step back, or even the other way round. But I mean, the way that our society is structured, despite the rhetoric of a lot of politicians, is not particularly pro-family. And anyone who has tried to juggle a job with school hours, for example, just knows like it doesn't compute or has tried to balance their leave entitlements against school holidays. It doesn't compute.
And just to wrap up, as you've just written, you know, all of this, the four B movement, everything we've been talking about, it shows yet again, this is to quote you that gender equality is the only way to achieve a family centered society, at least for any civilization that doesn't wish to control its female population.
Yeah, I mean, I just don't. For me, it's not even an ideological point. It's just a kind of really logical one, because we can't we can't force women to have children that they don't want or, you know, if we do, it's really, really hard and difficult and expensive and full of suffering. So yeah, it just seems kind of like a no brainer to me that if you if you want women to have more children, you have to make it easier for them to have children. You have to make it easier for families to have children. And that means, yeah, sharing the burden more widely and perhaps giving them some financial or economic help.
Well, Jack Maley, all I can say is I'm so glad you're writing about this. I know your columns are among the most widely read in our newsroom, and and I'm so glad for it. So thank you so much for your time.
Thanks. I just really enjoyed being able to talk about Charlotte Bronte on her podcast. I've been wanting to do that for decades.
Thank you.
I am so delighted to.
Can we.
Have a separate podcast about.
Charlotte Bronte? I mean, can we please. I mean, I did my thesis on on Jane Austen, so maybe we can, like, double up. We can. We can do.
This. We can do this.
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by Julia Carcasole, with technical assistance by Kai Wong. Our head of audio is Tom McKendrick. The Morning Edition is a production of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. If you enjoy the show and want more of our journalism, subscribe to our newspapers today. It's the best way to support what we do. Search the age or Smh.com.au forward slash. Subscribe and sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a comprehensive summary of the day's most important news, analysis and insights in your inbox every day. Links are in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Salinger Morris. This is the morning edition. Thanks for listening.