Natalia, who’s simply utilizing her first title to guard her identification, tells GLAMOUR her dedication to celibacy is deeply private and political, formed by a longstanding worry of “undesirable pregnancies, sexual illnesses, and of getting used or harm by males” – a worry she feels each younger lady shares to a point. 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 lowering folks to a different physique on an inventory”.
Experiences with males who “supplied 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 believe celibacy is the way in which to go.”
Cait agrees that informal intercourse is now not secure in America because of each restrictive abortion insurance policies and a rising local weather of hostility towards girls. With solely a short while left earlier than Trump takes workplace, many ladies would battle to search out choices if newly pregnant, particularly given the looming menace 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. Outstanding liberal voices stated this motion is “steeped in rape tradition”, arguing that it promotes the concept that girls don’t need intercourse and that it is as an alternative one thing merely achieved to them by males. Others have argued that the protest is counterproductive since Republicans, usually talking, are pro-celibacy – at the very least if their historic investments in abstinence programmes are something to go by. “Strategy to give the dangerous guys precisely what they need; why don’t you protest one other means?” stated one viral publish opposing the motion.
That concept of the 4B motion being by accident Republican is propped up by the plenty of Republicans responding to the West 4B motion with viral X posts and TikTok movies stating, “Excellent, go celibate – meaning fewer abortions!”.
However Cait disagrees with this fully, telling GLAMOUR that proscribing abortion entry “was by no means about abortion and at all times about controlling girls,” since Republicans notoriously block initiatives that will stop undesirable pregnancies like intercourse training programmes and contraception entry. “They wish to shrink girls’s choices to maintain them out of upper training and well-paying careers, and in the end depending on males,” she says.
She provides that whereas celibacy may seem to be management, it really challenges males’s want for intercourse and dedication as a result of “ males do need intercourse, however on their phrases,” and 4B challenges that. Basically, 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 true 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 hearth for its leaders being transphobic prior to now, and lots 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 stated it’s for “organic girls solely” primarily based on the transphobic notion that trans girls are, the truth is, males and, subsequently, can’t participate in de-centring them.
“The transphobia (extra particularly transmisogyny) and white feminists that the motion welcomes, as a non-binary Black individual, has made me fairly uncomfortable to say the least,” they share. “It’s laborious to construct neighborhood and sisterhood (which is a core precept within the motion) with white, cisgender girls that do not have any primary values or ideas.”