If you've opened any social media app after the first week of November, you've probably scrolled past a clip of some frat bro reveling in Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris or referring to women as “property” for funsies. Far-right influencers like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate have been having a field day, posting slogans like “Your body, my choice” and celebrating having an accused rapist as a president.
Given all of that, it’s no surprise that interest in the 4B movement—a loose coalition of feminists in South Korea who reject the country’s oppressive patriarchal values by opting out of heterosexual relationships and childbirth—has not only spiked, but made it's way all the way to America.
American women have already spent the past few years talking about celibacy more. And the long-simmering discourse around decentering men has turned into a sudden influx of videos and Google searches about the 4B movement, as a direct response to the legions of outspoken misogynists in DT's corner. The aftermath, for many—including me—feels like fiction. A dark, cautionary tale or a movie. But perhaps that's because once upon a time, it was. A movie that feels as raucous and bewildering and wild as this country itself: Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq.
We Retain His Verse to Show Love for the Universe.
Released on this day December 4, 2015, and set in a few neighborhoods in Chicago, Chi-raq is a very American movie. It’s radically patriotic in its demand for American practice to live up to American principles, American realities to live up to American dreams, and American residents to take up the challenge of distinctively American virtues. And it’s radically angry about grievous and hypocritical, callous and cruel departures from the American promise, which felt eerily prescient on my rewatch. Trust.
The title of the movie is also the nickname of one of its main characters, played by Nick Cannon. Chi-Raq is the leader of the purple-clad Spartan gang, as well as a local hip-hop artist with big-time aspirations.
At home, his girlfriend, Lysistrata (played with such power by Teyonah Parris), who’s put off by his flaunting of firearms, gets inspired by an online video of Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee to approach other Spartan women—including the intellectual Miss Helen (played by Angela Bassett), a bereaved mother whose young daughter was killed by a stray bullet—and other gang-affiliated women as well to organize a sex strike against the young black men of Chicago until they agree to renounce their guns. But don't get it twisted, the movie isn’t about guns; it’s about masculinity and manhood, and the need to break the pathological cycle of self-identifying virility and violence.
The film’s political message is clear: it critiques the systemic issues of violence and the lack of effective leadership. It also focuses on the role of women in pushing for social change.
Chi-Raq is a loose adaptation of Aristophanes’ comedy “Lysistrata,” written in 411 B.C., about a group of women who withhold sex from men in order to get them to end the Peloponnesian War. Aristophanes’ play is gleefully erotic—or riotously obscene—and so is Chi-Raq; "Lysistrata" is hectic and veers toward the ridiculous, and so does Chi-Raq.
Spike Lee’s audacity is as unbridled as his vision.
In this adaptation, written by Spike Lee and Kevin Willmott, the antics of Lysistrata are thrust to the foreground. The text is written in witty and whimsical rhyming verse, which the cast performs with a vigor that doesn’t jingle but flows. Chi-Raq is hilarious but not exactly funny—not because the jokes fall flat, but because the point is to mock a deadly emergency that's almost too absurd to be believed.
With the burden of a distinct pain that fills the movie from start to finish—a burden that the movie helps its audience bear with its own flamboyant fury—Spike Lee has created a joyful yet haunting jazz requiem for not only a ravaged city, but a ravaged generation. But it's this generation, full of their own frustration and fury, that have (perhaps unknowingly) harnessed the energies of both the Athenian and beautiful Black Lysistratas and channeled them into a movement of their own.
No Peace, No Pussy.
Though it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the 4B movement started, it reportedly emerged—ironically or not—in the same year as the film, 2015, along with other movements that pushed back against what participants saw as a patriarchal culture in South Korea. The circumstances that gave birth to it included the rise of a misogynistic, anti-feminist community, called “Ilbe,” that painted women as gold diggers who were asking for more rights than they deserved, combined with a government fixated on encouraging women to have more babies. (Sound familiar?).
The 4B movement was also a response to ongoing violence against women in South Korea. A 2016 survey found that the incidence of intimate-partner violence there was over 10 percentage points higher than the global average.
Some women who identify with the 4B movement shave their heads, sometimes in videos that they then post online, as a rejection of Korean beauty ideals. Many of them lean into the ethos, distancing themselves from male friends and even female friends whose lives revolve around men. The goal, women who identify with it say, is not to change men. They hope to change society by demonstrating a different, more empowering way of life to women—and to “eliminate the risks that come from heterosexual marriage or dating.”
On TikTok, South Korean women have (post election) begun posting videos welcoming “U.S. sisters” and explaining the movement and its newer branches—5B, 6B, and 7B—which include helping other 4B women who’ve been financially affected by cutting men out of their lives, boycotting companies with “pink taxes,” and “not giving emotional labor to men.”
Even the Hoes is No-shows.
Many women are feeling fearful not only about the increasingly violent strains of sexism Trump’s win has already emboldened, but about diminishing access to reproductive rights in this country. The slate of proposals Trump is suspected to pursue includes prosecuting people who send abortion pills through the mail, tracking abortion seekers, and blocking federal funding for abortion care.
And the flamboyant fury of the women led by Lysistrata, chanting and dancing and gyrating, is energized by that same fear and grief and righteousness. The movie gets to some cold and exaggerated but familiar truths. There are characters like General King Kong of the Armory who keeps a Confederate flag in his office, and tries to have sex with Lysistrata using his Civil War cannon, Whistling Dick, and its ramrod as sex toys and fetish objects. Or the toxic combination of violence and sex that Chi-Raq himself, brings to his music, his gang, and his bed.
But unlike the current realities American women and women around the globe are finding themselves in, the film is idealistic. It dreams of a world in which those who choose violence can be persuaded to give it up—and to renounce the criminal life from which guns and violence are inseparable. Spike Lee brings this vision to life in a grand, imaginative triumph that proposes nothing less than a new social contract. The film at its core is about justice itself. And more than justice, it’s a modern American vision of the Athenian philosophical triumvirate of justice, beauty, and goodness. And in that, it’s a fantasy.
Even Though We Live in Terror Town, We Deserve Respect.
Back in the real world, Far-right influencer Andy Tater Tot, whose fans have proudly dubbed him the “king of toxic masculinity,” retweeted a definition of the 4B movement, writing, “24 hours and Trump has stopped hoes being hoes," completely ignoring the fact that the movement isn't about sex. It's about feeling safe. (Ironically, from people like him and his fans.) And that simply existing in our own bodies means safety is not guaranteed.
And like Spike Lee's comprehensive vision of justice—one that’s rich in spiritual, even metaphysical overtones—the 4B movement, too, risks becoming a source of misunderstanding. The backlash, even among other, let's say traditional women, has gotten to the point where the word “feminism” itself has virtually become a slur, equated with a "man-hater" or *gasp* a lesbian.
Naturally, men are feeling rejected by the movement; that's kind of the point. But to be clear the movement isn't about men. Its not about all men being no good, very bad monsters (though violence by those men that do believe women's bodies are owed to them has increased..but we're not allowed to talk about that without, again, being accused of radical lesbianism).
It's about us, first and foremost, everyday hardworking, not working, educated, uneducated, married, unmarried, child rearing, child free women who want a say over what we do with our own bodies and how we choose to live our own lives—preferably without government interference. It's not about wanting all men shipped to another planet. It's about respect.
Respect. Agency. Autonomy. And safety. It's as simple as that.
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