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3 days ago
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Since Trump’s election win in the US, the idea of a “sex strike”, linked to a form of women’s activism that began in South Korea, has taken hold on social media. Like many things that become a mainstream buzzword, it is in fact about much more than the literal meaning of those words.
This iteration of the “4B movement” is giving a voice and useful banner to women’s fear and rage across a nation that is increasingly refusing to provide basic reproductive rights and healthcare. Women are understandably scared about the consequences of unplanned pregnancy or pregnancy complications after the repeal of Roe v Wade. In addition, the so-called attitude gap between young adult women and men – that has seen young men move to the political right, while young women have remained largely more liberal – is no doubt also adding to what is being labelled by policy experts as a fertility crisis, but which is, in fact, a crisis in women’s lack of choice.
Faced with these conditions, the idea of intentionally withdrawing from sexual relationships with men, domestic partnerships and motherhood begins to look like a practical option.
The US 4B trend has been widely received as a feminist initiative, and has even been linked to the separatist movement and political lesbianism. Yet this is a misunderstanding of the intention and conditions giving rise to it. Such responses are also an indicator of the dearth of knowledge around feminist political theory and the history of feminism as a revolutionary social justice movement.
The main problem with the idea of a women’s sex strike is that rape exists. Much of the commentary in response to women’s videos and content openly makes this point, as young men reply that women don’t always have a choice. The slogan “your body, my choice”, which has circulated online since Trump’s victory, bleakly summarises this stance.
It is also debatable whether the idea of a sex strike is inherently a feminist act. A problem with seeing a sex ban alone as somehow revolutionary is that it plays into the very problems that arguably created the need for activism in the first place. In this framing, sex is labour – work that women do for men, and can then limit, manipulate or withhold alongside demands for improved conditions. That is not radical. Sex has long been defined under patriarchy as something men want and women should do. Such understandings of sex are why it took so long for rape in marriage to be recognised as a crime, for example – because how could a husband take from his wife what was rightfully his by the law of marriage? Framing sex as women’s labour for men results in sex being commodified and objectified, and the problem is that what can be bartered, exchanged or sold can also be taken. This is not an empowering position from which to call for revolution between the sexes.
It was also never what separatism or political lesbianism was actually calling for – and maybe there is something we could learn from a real understanding of the tactics of these movements.
Within the women’s liberation movement across the western world at least, separatism was a full-time women-living-with-women strategy. Examples included the women’s land movement – women-only communes, smallholdings and businesses that spread across the US and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. The point of separatism was to show that women could run things themselves, particularly with skills and knowledge traditionally denied to women, such as in construction, engineering and mechanics. Women-only communities empowered women by skilling up practically, but also by raising women’s confidence and providing a real-life example of their strength. Separatist living showed that women do not need men. That is not the same thing as saying that women did not want men. While there were lesbian communes and businesses, separatism was not an exclusively lesbian activity; it was women-only living and politics, often with no requirement or rules over individual women’s sexual orientation.
Political lesbianism in the UK, meanwhile, can be traced back to a document titled Love Your Enemy?, which started life as a conference paper for a revolutionary radical feminist conference, written by a collective of radical and revolutionary feminists based in Leeds, Yorkshire. It was distributed in 1979 in Wires, the national feminist newsletter of the Women’s Information and Referral Enquiry Service. The paper proved so contentious that it was later published, along with a selection of letters of complaint and comment, in 1981, for a wider audience by the women-only publishing house Onlywomen Press. The article attempted to open up debate on sexuality generally and to trouble heterosexuality within the women’s liberation movement. It argued that sexuality is subject to degrees of social conditioning, and that, to some extent at least, heterosexuality is expected and institutionalised, with little societal tolerance for any alternative.
At the height of the women’s liberation movement and intersecting social justice movements in gay liberation and Black Power, many felt that the revolution was just around the corner. Within feminism, radical activists believed that women should be spending all their energies on the women’s movement, not being distracted – least of all by caretaking for a male partner in the domestic sphere, where women are subjected to unequal care burdens and high levels of violence and control. The mirage of the idealised heterosexual nuclear family had already been blown apart by this time. Political lesbianism was not enforced sexual or romantic relationships between women, but the promotion of full-time focus on the women’s liberation movement.
The mainstream take on 4B frames it as a sex strike by young, marketable, heterosexual women. An alternative would be to reject such sexist constructs of sex and sexuality, and to imagine, and work towards, an egalitarian future where men and women are not divided up into predator and prey. Rather than a sex strike, there is another tried and tested form of activism, utilised by women and men the world over: a workers strike, the withdrawal of our wage labour that fuels the systems of capital that dare to govern us. Ban patriarchy, not sex.
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Finn Mackay is the author of Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars, and a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England in Bristol
