Natalia, who’s simply utilizing her first identify to guard her identification, tells GLAMOUR her dedication to celibacy is deeply private and political, formed by a longstanding concern of “undesirable pregnancies, sexual illnesses, and of getting used or harm by males” – a concern she feels each younger lady shares to some extent. Describing celibacy as one thing that “selected her”, she sees it as an act of self-preservation in a world the place intercourse is handled as a “meaningless commodity decreasing individuals to a different physique on an inventory”.
Experiences with males who “provided little however intercourse, with out real curiosity in her well-being or emotional wants” solely confirmed her selection. She provides, “With the election and the nauseating win of that man, Trump, I feel celibacy is the best way to go.”
Cait agrees that informal intercourse is now not protected in America as a consequence of each restrictive abortion insurance policies and a rising local weather of hostility towards ladies. With solely a short while left earlier than Trump takes workplace, many ladies would wrestle to seek out choices if newly pregnant, particularly given the looming risk of additional abortion bans. On the similar time, she notes, the surge in hate crimes and misogynistic chants like “your physique, my selection” add to the dangers, which she doesn’t see as “empty threats” however as actual risks.
Barely every week in, the West 4B motion has confronted mass criticism on-line. Distinguished liberal voices mentioned this motion is “steeped in rape tradition”, arguing that it promotes the concept ladies don’t need intercourse and that it is as an alternative one thing merely completed to them by males. Others have argued that the protest is counterproductive since Republicans, typically talking, are pro-celibacy – at the least if their historic investments in abstinence programmes are something to go by. “Method to give the dangerous guys precisely what they need; why don’t you protest one other approach?” mentioned one viral publish opposing the motion.
That concept of the 4B motion being by chance Republican is propped up by the plenty of Republicans responding to the West 4B motion with viral X posts and TikTok movies stating, “Good, go celibate – which means fewer abortions!”.
However Cait disagrees with this utterly, telling GLAMOUR that limiting abortion entry “was by no means about abortion and at all times about controlling ladies,” since Republicans notoriously block initiatives that will forestall undesirable pregnancies like intercourse schooling programmes and contraception entry. “They wish to shrink ladies’s choices to maintain them out of upper schooling and well-paying careers, and in the end depending on males,” she says.
She provides that whereas celibacy would possibly seem to be management, it really challenges males’s need for intercourse and dedication as a result of “ males do need intercourse, however on their phrases,” and 4B challenges that. Primarily, celibacy is the system used to unfold the message – not the message itself, which is what Natalia describes as “a brand new age of energy”.
The actual criticisms of the motion price tackling for Cait, Natalia and Aaliyah alike are the associations with transphobia. The unique 4B motion in Korea has come beneath fireplace for its leaders being transphobic prior to now, and plenty of have warned there are already indicators of comparable behaviour in its Western re-enactment. In reality, one distinguished collective within the motion, West 4B Motion, proudly states “#TERF” of their X bio. Many ladies collaborating have additionally mentioned it’s for “organic ladies solely” based mostly on the transphobic notion that trans ladies are, actually, males and, due to this fact, can’t participate in de-centring them.
“The transphobia (extra particularly transmisogyny) and white feminists that the motion welcomes, as a non-binary Black particular person, has made me fairly uncomfortable to say the least,” they share. “It’s exhausting to construct neighborhood and sisterhood (which is a core precept within the motion) with white, cisgender ladies that do not have any primary values or ideas.”
