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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33883 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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How about some man-bashing to start your weekend, fresh from Korea?

My take: I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race. Men of all races voted for Trump in larger shares than women did, with Hispanic men even preferring him on-net. Feminism used to be the huge culture war wedge back in the early years of the great awokening (2012-2017 or so). It kind of just deflated as people moved to talking about race instead, but none of the issues were ever really resolved, so there's a decent chance it could make a resurgence.

My best insight into Korean gender dynamics came from this AAQC a while back, which might be worth reading for background.

Here's the article:

No Sex, No Dating, No Babies, No Marriage: How the 4B Movement Could Change America

When I sit down at a bar in Brooklyn with my cousin — a recent college grad from Korea who is visiting America for the first time — I have one burning question: How’s your love life? She keeps her ballcap pushed down low and presses her lips into a tight line.

“I’m not interested,” she says. “I just don’t trust men. You don’t know what they’re thinking these days — whether they’re one of the guys with misogynistic thoughts. It’s so normalized. Why would I even risk it?” she says.

She does not want to date. She feels no need to get married. Her ideal life is to form a tight-knit community with other single women. “It’s not just me,” she says. “All my friends rarely date these days for that reason. These issues are all we talk about when we get together.”

My cousin and her friends are not alone. Across Korea, young women are swearing off men, influenced by the 4B movement, a radical feminist campaign that originated in Korea in the late 2010s. The four Bs stand for bi-hon (no marriage), bi-yeonae (no dating), bi-chulsan (no birthing) and bi-sex (no sex).

The movement formed in response to growing gender inequality and violence against women: Korea has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the world, and brutal murders of women — in subway stations, on rooftops and in their own homes, often at the hands of men they were dating — headline news shows daily. Amid so much political turmoil and bloodshed, 4B activists say the only way to make women safe — and convince society to take their safety seriously — is to swear off men altogether until something changes.

And now, in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, 4B is going viral on U.S. social media among women who are furious with the men who helped the former president clinch a win. On TikTok alone, top videos have gained millions of views, and one widely shared tweet about the 4B movement post-election now has 450,000 likes and 21 million views at time of writing.

It’s too soon to say if the 4B movement is here to stay in the United States. But even if it isn’t, the surge in interest says something about the social forces unleashed by the 2024 presidential election. An uptick in misogyny has already been evident — just look at the “your body, my choice” comments by men online — similar to what’s been seen in Korea, suggesting that this kind of feminist reaction could take hold. And even if women don’t explicitly take on the 4B label en masse, the movement’s message of bodily autonomy, and the anger that drove the conversation in the first place, could have a major impact not just on American politics, but on American life overall — just as it has in Korea.

Think of the movement as a labor strike, says Soha, a Korean feminist who provided only her online nickname for fear of being harassed for supporting feminism. She says it’s about rejecting the additional work women put in to appeal to men, maintain a household and follow patriarchal values — the kind of work that is more widespread in South Korea’s more socially conservative society. It’s the type of labor all women can identify with and push back against with one powerful voice. Many women eschew the 4B label, often in fear of harassment, but still live by its principles. My cousin describes it as an act of survival, a way to shield women from rapidly rising violence, avoid toxic conversations with misogynistic men and resist an anti-feminist government that is actively trying to roll back women’s rights.

Just as gender has become a political predictor in Korea, it’s shaping elections in the United States. The turnout demographics from the U.S. presidential election are still being sorted out, but a few things are crystal clear. The Republican ticket used male identity and gender grievances as a successful political tool, courting the “bro” vote and attributing Kamala Harris’ success to her identity. Young men helped Donald Trump win the election. Many young women are distraught. It’s an acceleration of the already widening gender gap in American politics, including an increasing number of young men rejecting feminism. An NBC News poll found that 57 percent of women backed Harris, compared to 40 percent of men — with women sprinting to the left while men flirt with the right.

Some U.S. women are seeking both revenge and relief from the consequences of a Republican trifecta, including a rollback of reproductive rights and a broader cultural acceptance of sexist rhetoric. For some online, the answer is right in front of them: the 4B movement from South Korea.

Like the U.S., South Korea’s gender divide played a striking role in South Korea’s most recent presidential election. Yoon Suk Yeol, then the conservative candidate, secured a victory in 2022 by catering to young men who felt left behind during a rapid push for gender equality, especially after the country’s #MeToo reckoning in 2018 tanked the careers of several actors and politicians. Young men cheered on Yoon’s declarations of being an “anti-feminist,” saying that “structural discrimination based on gender” does not exist, despite the fact that the country regularly ranks near the bottom in the World Economic Forum’s gender equality index. To this day, young men perceive that discrimination against men is more serious than against women, even though 50 percent of women between the ages of 19-29 say they’ve experienced sexual discrimination at work, compared to 30 percent of their male peers. From 2021 to 2023, female sexual assault victims saw a 15 percent rise. Many American women fear the same could happen here.

4B messaging is already echoing on U.S. social media. One X user advertises the 4B movement as a way to “take control of your life under him.” Another user writes, “We need to start considering the 4B movement … We can’t let these men have the last laugh … we need to bite back.” One TikToker has posted she’s joining the 4B movement after breaking up with her Republican boyfriend.

“When I saw the movement go viral in the U.S., I thought, even U.S. women must be at their limit,” says Yeonhwa Gong, a Korean 4B follower who has written on the topic. “But I don’t feel too bad that it has come to this point — if anything, I think of it as a necessary action that had been pushed back for a while and is now finally happening.”

For women who adopt the 4B mindset, not even men who claim to be on the same political spectrum can provide a safe space. With so many men opposing feminism, and even a video on how pro-Trump men could hide their political beliefs from the women they date going viral, how do you know if he’s telling the truth? “A lot of women are just tired of men, and worrying about ‘what if?’” my cousin told me. “I had thought at some point I’d want to find a good man, no matter how hard that would be. At this point now though, I don’t feel that need.”

The 4B movement might seem too radical to get far in the U.S., but the fact that it’s gained traction suggests that at least a number of young women feel more vulnerable since the reelection of Donald Trump than they did before it. The 4B discourse in the U.S. “prompts us to reflect on how much society has taken for granted or overlooked the rights and the freedoms that women rightly deserve,” says Hyejin Jeon, a University of Maryland doctorate student from Korea who is currently analyzing her country’s feminism movements.

If the movement takes hold, it could potentially lead to some of the same outcomes as have been seen in Korea, where women are reconsidering dates with men out of suspicion and lack or trust, young people are marrying and having children at lower rates, and both men and women are expressing deep loneliness. Politicians could take advantage of the divide for their own gains, leaning harder into gender-divide politics, and even outright sexist rhetoric. And even women may turn against one another; American women are already arguing about the inclusivity of the movement, with some saying that women with male partners have no part in 4B. Such discourse has long fractured feminist groups in Korea, according to Minyoung Moon, a Clemson University lecturer who published a report about the backlash against feminism in South Korea. Married women are seen as “serving the needs of men,” she says, alienating the group from what could be a more inclusive movement.

And then there’s the danger of backlash from the right. “The long-term effect I see is very negative, because they chose the radical strategy, giving men and anti-feminists reason to hate them even more,” Moon says. “And when I look at the 4B movement … on YouTube, I already see the conservative party people bashing against liberal women.”

Still, at least for now, the movement appears on the upswing in both countries as women say that the model of life they’d expected — dating, marriage, house, kids — looks, increasingly, like a trap set by men who don’t see them as equals. And women like my cousin want alternatives.

“To live with friends that are close to me, to have the ability to live on my own — living like that is my dream,” she says.

The 4B movement has already been disavowed by the American Left for not being inclusive of trans ideology (i.e., transwomen who may still have their initial bits and parts are not getting laid by a 4B chick; transmen are also encouraged not to do the same; it inherently focuses on reproductive functions; it started on a message board that includes anti-trans sentiment), which makes all of this somewhat odd to me - the gender divide isn't going to swing back to the Democrats by Democrats telling biological women that they can't have feminists movements without biological men being lifted up within those movements.

My immediate reaction to this 'movement' is the same as when I see the 'we're not having kids because it's too expensive' or even 'we're not having kids because of global warming'. A rationalisation for what's going on, not a true reason. After all, Korea's birth rate been low for decades, and only now are the women supposedly swearing off men?

There are clearly a lot of things that contribute to Korea's low birth rate; the punishing work culture, the educational arms race, the pathological status obsession, hyper-urbanism, the lack of in-person socialising (and the comparative amount of spending time online), the sleep deprivation. I see the breakdown in gender relations as a symptom of all this, rather than the cause.

If you focus on Korea particularly those might seem like likely causes, but every capitalist country is suffering low birth rates and it's always concentrated in those urban centers that are the centers of economic growth. Capitalism is what suppresses birth rates by optimizing for short-term wealth accretion over other values. Women are incentivized to work rather than reproduce, and both sexes are incentivized to engage in hedonist consumerism, while meanwhile social factors conducive to fecundity, like having grandparents who expected grandchildren, gradually fade away like a strange dream.

I don't think 'capitalism' is a particularly useful label here. We've had 'capitalism' since either the 1500s (the breakdown of manorialism) or the 1700s (the industrial revolution) but global birth rates only really started to decline in the 1900s, and even that was reversed temporarily by the baby boom in the 1950s and 60s.

The Amish are extremely 'capitalist' (in the sense of being extremely engaged with the market, owning businesses etc) and yet they manage to maintain high birth rates. You can see Russian birth rates collapse after the communist revolution. 'Capitalist' America has long had higher birth rates than comparatively less 'capitalist' Europe.

Now I'd certainly agree that global culture is antinatal, but referring to that culture as 'capitalist' obscures more than it hides.

As the capitalist system develops it alters in character. Some of the current capitalist institutions suppressing birthrates I mean to refer to include: office labor being the norm, extremely high levels of consumerism and luxury being available, various cultural diminishments in the role of community and family in peoples' lives owing in part to automobiles, suburbanization, etc., obesity caused by processed foods and cheap low-nutrient foods, environmental contaminants, etc., government and corporate propaganda systems increasing the prestige of educational and economic attainment while denigrating 'traditional' lifestyle choices. All of these flow in some way from the role of capital both as a general incentive and as a recursive shaper of policy.

All of the things you mentioned (except high levels of consumption, lol) existed under communism in the USSR.

various cultural diminishments in the role of community and family in peoples' lives owing in part to automobiles, suburbanization, etc.,

What does this have to do with property rights and free enterprise?

obesity caused by processed foods and cheap low-nutrient foods, environmental contaminants, etc.

Given that obesity and number of kids both correlate negatively with income, I'd be surprised if the obese weren't having more kids than the skinny.

government and corporate propaganda systems increasing the prestige of educational and economic attainment

Even government propaganda is capitalism now?

What does this have to do with property rights and free enterprise?

It’s caused by market forces and corporate influences rather than planning.

Even government propaganda is capitalism now?

Yes, as the governments in question are ideologically capitalist and are operating under a capitalist paradigm, some of which even entails the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres with revolving door politics, regulatory capture, and the importance of plutocratic funds in running modern political campaigns, among other things.

It’s caused by market forces and corporate influences rather than planning.

It's caused by (some) people's revealed preferences for suburban living rather than apartment living and the increasing unusability of public spaces thanks to laws against nuisances not being enforced, for which we can thank leftists.

If this was actually true, we'd have expected higher birthrates in Communist countries during the Cold War. That was not, in fact, the case.

No we wouldn't expect that to necessarily be the case, since it's possible for more than one economic system to suppress birthrates, and also Western capitalism was suppressed historically through greater levels of unionization and government regulation. But in any case, fertility rates in the Soviet period were in fact higher than the post-Soviet period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#Historical_fertility_rates

since it's possible for more than one economic system to suppress birthrates

What is the basis of comparison?

Areas of the world that are more enmeshed in capitalism versus less. Examples would be New York versus Oklahoma, Singapore versus Malaysia, or your local upper-middle class neighbourhood versus lower class.

Comparing city state against full sized country is crazy

Why is Oklahoma less enmeshed in capitalism than New York?

I mean it’s entirely possible that a slightly larger trivially small fraction of the population in Oklahoma supports themselves non capitalistically; realistically all of his geographical examples are better explained as urban vs rural though, and the class neighborhood difference is probably false.

There's some battle of the sexes going on, but 44% of women still voted for Trump, and an actual majority of white women. The very active pro-life organizations that are out running crisis pregnancy centers, right to life dinners, and petitions for heartbeat lives are largely supported by women.

(unedited, meandering thoughts)

Something seems to be going on, not just between men and women, but just as importantly, women and their mothers. There seem to be a lot of women, of the making histrionic remarks on Facebook variety, who are into looking at the faults of their mothers, and "re-parenting" themselves at 35. I've heard from acquaintances about their mothers gently nudging them about how if they want a family, now is the time to do it, they're in their 30s, there won't be another chance -- and the women getting frustrated and offended about that. Why are Korean mothers in law so demanding? It sounds like they've had hard lives, but also they're not stupid, and should have noticed their bad reputation, and that they're scaring the younger women. From the thread below, LLL has been important partly because mothers stay out of their daughters' business when it comes to childbirth and feeding of infants, though sometimes they step in to babysit every now and again.

I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, where they were talking about the female archetype with Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and how the Mother and Crone archetypes are currently rather broken. There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose. Perhaps this is related to the trivializing of women's work and running the household. I was reading the other day about Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint because she was well loved, a good midwife, and was always making warm clothing to give to people. They talk about people in the other villages wearing socks and mittens she made for them, and how happy they were about it. George MacDonald is a lovely writer, who's books are full of very old but still lively grandmothers and great grandmothers at their spinning wheel. Sometimes they spin wool, or magical thread that will let the adventurers always find their way home. He said he remembered going to his grandmother's little cottage, where she was always spinning, back when that was important and necessary work, and loved the sound of the spinning wheel, and the stories of his grandmother. My godmother knitted me a huge wool scarf that I would wrap up to my nose when the cold winter winds blew, for years. I moved a few times with only a suitcase since then, but it was the coziest scarf I've ever warn, with both wool and effort.

It's nice that I can just order a totally adequate coat online for less than four hours of labor and have it delivered to my house, where my dishwasher and laundry machine are running in the background. But despite quite a lot of training in home economics sorts of tasks, I don't make much of anything, because it feels redundant. Many of the women in my community make art, and sometimes I go to the local gallery, or the studio tour. It's nice to paint the hills, or "work with printed textures" or whatever, but it seems disconnected and trivial, like it's a visual expression of a crisis of meaning. The whole lifestyle of sending a six week old baby to daycare so you can go file papers in an office to pay the mortgage in the neighborhood with the adequate schools so that your daughter can get a college degree so that she can send her newborn infant to daycare while she sends emails thing is... not ideal. And then you retire and go to workshops where you paint the hills or make abstract acrylic collages or something, and babysit the grandkids a couple of times a year, if you're fortunate enough to have any grandkids. It sounds a lot worse in S Korea. You work in some dull office all day to send your kid to cram school at night so that she can go to college to get a job that lets her send her kid to cram school. Nobody receives love and recognition for vacuuming her mother in law's house every day.

Maybe I'll take my kids to church tomorrow. Apparently they had a tamale making event today, and a potluck tomorrow. They built a new building, with a metal dome that's still under construction, and it looks rather nice. Someone is hand carving an iconostasis.

I think you're right that there's some important impact from the decline of embodied competence (material, social, physical) as a personal quality that people aspire to. In a society where people need to do more to survive on a daily basis, there's more value from the kind of deep, optimized knowledge you accrue through pure repeated experience; and that feels like a natural factor in making people respect their parents enough to want to become them, in a household/family setting that's similar to the one where they excelled. I definitely consult my mother regularly on workplace relations, etiquette, domestic stuff, child/husband/friend psychology, and various adulting skills, in addition to her professional areas of expertise, and I similarly pay attention to other women and men of her generation as models for social technologies and ways of being that I feel like we're in danger of losing. I expect it will be unpleasant to become a crone when it's my turn, but I don't think I'd trade the abilities and understanding I will have gained along the way.

If that kind of respect for experience is on the wane, I wonder how much of it is (a) the devaluation/ demystification of knowledge in general with the rise of the Internet; and (b) the massive Dunning-Krugerization and loss of intellectual humility that the culture has undergone as a result. But also, the high-status life narratives these days seem much more consumption-oriented than production-oriented, so maybe people don't particularly know or care whether they're good at anything.

Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint

As of last year, this includes the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America. I'm not sure if all the proper preparations and rite have taken place yet, but soon (if not already) she'll be considered a saint by the Orthodox Church more generally.

They exhumed her body this weekend, that’s why I was reading about her, but I’m not quite sure how it works.

One issue is grandmas getting older. At the more extreme end but probably not incredibly uncommon in the past a grandma could be in her low 30's certainly 40's. My mom, who is now a grandmother to my toddler is in her early 70's.

That does seem like an issue. In my own family, it seems like grandparents are getting too old to safely lift babies and toddlers right when I have them. We've had kids in late 20s/early 30s.

There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose.

To be fair i think this goes for men too. I don't think this has to do with denigration of women's work or anything but with the very extended retirement and generally privileged existence of a good portion of the current generation of "elderly". The retirement, where people are protected from a lot of current hardships through various policies such as Medicare, inflation protected pensions or the abolishment of property tax (while simultaneously massively benefiting from their inflated value) leads to a sort of reversed and very prolonged adolescence where slightly diminished but perfectly capable people mentally, socially and spiritually degenerate through disassociation from the economy and purpose in general. Being a reality divorced leech isn't very admirable, regardless of age.

Men aren't protected from this much more than women, even if they often retire a bit later and aren't stay at home moms with kids in school.

People who keep working usually are worthy of respect though and I do respect most of my seniors at work, men and women. There are a few retired people I respect, they are almost always very active with helping out caring for their grandchildren, but can also be active in some kind of local charitable organisation.

Maybe there is something to that.

I liked my grandmother better, because she stayed and raised my mom and siblings while my grandfather moved to another state and didn't communicate with or visit them. My grandmother had everyone over for all the holidays, and it was nice. But she never babysat us, even for an hour, and that was probably stressful for my parents. I think she inherited money and didn't work, other than raising children. My other grandfather died when I was a baby, and we visited my other grandmother and stayed at her house, which was at least nice. I don't think she ever worked while I knew her, and she was fine, but I got the impression she mostly watched game shows and walked around the neighborhood once a day. The TV was never off at her house. I suppose my family made me feel neutral toward having children.

A couple of people in the thread brought up Korean mothers in law specifically, as being demanding and expecting their daughters in law to serve them, which seems interesting in a context where marriage and childbirth are very low. I would guess that they had to work for their husband's family when they were younger, and expect it to be paid back, but were less likely to work an 8 - 5 kind of job outside the home? I don't know what the actual facts are, not being very familiar with Korean culture.

I bonded with my own grandfather hunting, and fishing, and when school was out by helping him with various tool-related tasks he wasn't too old for. I legitimately don't know what non-redneck grandfathers do with their grandsons.

My grandfather taught me to solve chess puzzles with him from old magazines, kicked a soccer ball and threw a baseball with me, took me to the local small community college's football games and tried to explain what was going on (in retrospect he failed mostly because the gameplay was so sloppy it defied normal football analysis). Took me to local small-town orchestra concerts, went on small hikes in the hills, etc., talked with me about my favorite books, dinosaurs, etc.

Plenty of people do much the same even if they're urban white collar people, like my father for instance.

My father in-law doesn't like that kind of stuff though and does things like taking them to soccer games, museums and going swimming.

Something seems to be going on, not just between men and women, but just as importantly, women and their mothers.

A phenomenon I didn’t even know existed. Where can we learn more?

For the extreme example, /r/raisedbyborderlines. It's actually kind of a fascinating place in that the median poster there is from an oddly niche demographic: They're usually the daughter (in an otherwise male-dominated website), almost always consider themselves the scapegoat child (and their brother the golden child who usually remained enmeshed with the mother and is thus some variety of emotionally stunted), and have a spineless father who remained married to their mother (when BPD isn't usually correlated with long-lasting marriages).

Anecdotal, but in my experience material concerning mothers with borderline personality disorder seems strongly oriented toward women, while the material oriented toward men is far more concerned with getting over a borderline ex-GF/wife than dealing with a borderline mother.

How much of this is two neurotic people being neurotic and bouncing off of each other? I don't always trust neurotics perception of reality.

Anecdotal, but in my experience material concerning mothers with borderline personality disorder seems strongly oriented toward women, while the material oriented toward men is far more concerned with getting over a borderline ex-GF/wife than dealing with a borderline mother.

Do you know where I can read up on this?

Check out Out of the FOG, it's got a lot of good info on personality disorders, associated behaviors, and best ways to preserve oneself. If you're interested specifically in Borderline mothers, I'd highly recommend reading Understanding the Borderline Mother which is, of course, out of print and relatively expensive. AFAIK it's pretty much the reference material on how BPD presents to children and spouses, regardless of sex.

Source: my mother is BPD as are many women on her side of the family.

I may be falling prey to Google being a fairly lousy search engine these days, but that was my experience when researching it as a teenager/younger adult. In fact, the first time I read about BPD was when reading about high-conflict divorces (because I was still a teenager stuck in the middle of one). Search for "son of borderline mother" versus "daughter of borderline mother" and you'll get more results for the latter. Search for "borderline ex-wife" and you'll get more material than either of the first two. That may just reflect there being more stuff out there about abusive/crazy spouses than parents.

It kind of makes sense. BPD is more common in women (to roughly the same extent that Narcissistic Personality Disorder is more common in men), so it's unlikely that women are going to wind up in a closer relationship with someone suffering from that condition than that with their mother, while adult men are more likely to encounter BPD in the setting of a romantic relationship (which at that point will be a far more acute crisis than past mommy issues).

As for the disorder itself, This and in particular this are about the two best blog-length posts I've seen on the subject.

Scott also has a good essay about BPD https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/16/borderline/

Has no one ever told Scott about color contrast best practices? That's not even close to a pleasant reading experience.

An interesting article. Comparing this to Astral Codex, I can’t help wondering if Lorien is where Scott has been investing the majority of his time and intellect.

I think he’s mostly played out on normal essays. I could pretty much boil his late output down to EA is good, AI is not so good, and Everything is Fine. I don’t demand constant contrarianism for the sake of it but there’s a self-satisfaction bordering on incuriosity in his recent stuff that I don’t like much. Moving to California seems like it was good for his life but bad for his brain.

I don't know where you can read more on it, but I can provide more evidence in that direction.

From my experiences, the Cluster B disorders tend to fall out (roughly) in this fashion.

Antisocial - male dominated (used to be called sociopathy). Tends towards anger as it's primary emotion. Borderline - female dominated (I've heard it called, derogatorily, "crazy bitch disease"). Tends towards fear of abandonment. Histrionic - slightly female biased. Doesn't get a lot of media attention (think of like, the mothers of child stars). Tends towards performative actions (my mother, who fell into this bucket, would run away from home every Christmas and make the whole family persuade her to return). Narcissistic - male biased. Extreme selfishness which is expressed as unending need.

Edit: I just realized all of the above sound extremely similar, so let me provide an example.

If you were, for example, trying to go out for an evening:

  1. Someone with Antisocial personality disorder would say it's fine, but would break something (or someone) to force you to stay.
  2. Someone with Borderline personality disorder would hurt themselves, or send increasingly scary messages indicating that they are going to until you stay.
  3. Someone with Histronic personality disorder would make a huge fuss about you leaving, and how much they do for you (and may pack up everything and leave, or sell all your stuff, or whatever).
  4. Someone with Narcissistic personality disorder would tell you that you cannot, and tell you how much you are hurting them until you return.

All of the above fall into cluster B behaviors, so it's not like they're exclusive to one or another; it just tends to be the predominant form of expression.

For reading purposes I'd recommend just looking at DSM criteria or searching pubmed and finding what seems to be a reasonable review article.

Correctly making these diagnosis can be hard, and many cases seem obvious but aren't. While Borderline (BPD) is more common in women we find that Antisocial (ASPD) is over-diagnosed in men (not all criminals have it but...) and under-diagnosed in women. Borderline is the opposite (just because this dude murdered someone doesn't mean he isn't borderline). People with disordered personality who hurt people almost always get an ASPD diagnosis but people with severe BPD often hurt others. Impulsivity is a cardinal symptom in both (contra organized serial killer stereotypes). Often the dx just gets thrown out on gender lines, which is sometimes accurate but not always.

ASPD can be thought of us being a fucking asshole in mild to moderate cases and evil in moderate to severe cases (as demonstrated by disregard for the rights of others).

People with BPD in contrast care too much about others to some extent. There's been an attempt to rebrand it as "Emotional Dysregulation Disorder" which is instructive. Impulsive, passionate, lots of relationships that end abruptly, things like "I LOVE YOU, I HATE YOU" (splitting). For most they'll pattern match to a moody teenager, but in an adult body.

This is also a core part of what Cluster-B disorders often are, over expression of immature coping mechanisms aka acting like a kid. Also one of the reasons why they often burn off with age.

Severe borderline looks like psychosis (inability to determine what's real) and that's what the border in borderline is named for. There's an attendant identity instability which sometimes leads to being trans. Severe antisocial is lizard people types.

Histrionic is less interesting, you can call it stereotypical energetic Italian disorder if you like and wouldn't be too far off.

Narcissistic is simple at a basic level - Trump often gets accused of this (although I'm not sure I buy that). It gets pretty complicated if you look deeper though, most mass shooters are a subtype of this and not ASPD.

People often overweight anger in antisocials, it is often present but the lack of emotion is frequently more startling - lack of remorse, lack of respect for others, lack of love for partners). Often violence, anger, and intimidation happen because they are cheat codes towards getting whatever utility they are seeking, not because of investment leading to anger.

Most mental health conditions have heritable elements and we suspect that ASPD and BPD are two-hit situations (lived experience and genetic predisposition). Raisedby types may have it themselves, and failing that some shit happens with mothers and daughters - boys will just leave or pushback physically and be able to protect themselves, would be my guess.

In contrast crazy bitch exes are of interest to men because a lot of borderline traits are desirable (most stereotypical: abundant, quality sexual activity) and unlike mothers, exes can be more easily a legal or financial threat.

Uhhh that rambling went on longer than I thought it would, sorry. Everything I said is shortcuts/oversimplification.

In discussions of South Korea, I never see any of the proudly childless express any concern about what will happen to them in retirement. They seem to be implicitly assuming that someone else's kids will be paying their pensions.

While women are largely the gatekeepers of sex, I don't understand how a sort of threat of withholding it would work on a macro level. My understanding is that by and large the sex that happens is mutually desired by both parties, so trying to go on strike will hurt the women as much as it does the men.

My understanding of the labor perspective is that strikes work through government capture or extralegal action such as assaulting strikebreakers. Though maybe an industry wide or general strike can work without those elements, they still require some representative to go to the bargaining table.

Human social lives are vicious. Watch your back. Alice has a dishy boyfriend Bob. Carol is jealous. Carol goes 4B and tells Alice how wonderful 4B is. Alice gets persuaded to break up with Bob. Bob is back on the dating market. Carol hooks Bob while maintaining the 4B charade around Alice.

Yikes! I've swallowed too many black pills. Any-one know the antidote?

Yikes! I've swallowed too many black pills. Any-one know the antidote?

Observation of events not consonant with pessimistic views.

Married women are seen as “serving the needs of men,” she says, alienating the group from what could be a more inclusive movement.

Someone should inform my wife

As an aside, it’s ironic that women fear men the most in a place like Korea, statistically one of the safest, close to being THE safest place to be a woman on earth. I wonder what this fact says about women and gender relations . 4B makes a lot more sense in a place like South Africa or perhaps Sudan or Chad. But Korea? Lol

The only reason 4B ‘works’ in Korea (or at least doesn’t instantly collapse as farcical) is precisely because Korean society is actually great for women. In Africa if you try to withhold sex from men in general, or especially your husband, you’ll just get raped, and everyone will call you an idiot because OBVIOUSLY that’s what would happen.

Say what you will about sexual violence’s moral deficiencies, but it does keep women in line, as the fertility rates in Africa demonstrate.

In Africa if you try to withhold sex from men in general, or especially your husband, you’ll just get raped

And yet looking online, Africa seems to be the only place where sex strikes have ever actually worked. I realise of course that their effects are probably overhyped by activists, but it seems to me like a sex strike is more likely to work in a sexually conservative culture without high speed internet.

Most men actually like their wives, and don't enjoy using violence against them. And it's not as if activists invented 'not having sex with your husband if you're upset with him'. I'm pretty sure women (and to a lesser extent, men) have been doing that since forever. The silent treatment or storming off in a huff are variations of this too.

Of course, 4B is obviously a cope, and I predict that approximately 0 women will actually act in a different way than they would have acted anyway.

I'm not sure that 'sexually conservative culture' is the key ingredient. AFAICT Africa generally has no taboo on male adultery and lots of prostitution; you'd expect a sex strike to work worse in a sexually conservative culture with those conditions vs a more liberated society, because presumably prostitutes aren't participating in it.

Allegedly women paid prostitutes to make them participating in sex strike too, or maybe the problem was serious enough so prostitues considered supporting it too themselves

This feels like the uncanny valley of civil rights & protesting. A truly authoritarian country doesn't have protests, because everyone knows they will be squashed. Presumably South African women have it so bad, protesting would just anger the men.

Is it actually an uncanny valley? Do we know for sure that utopias don't have any complainers? Given that utopia is impossible*, is the question even meaningful? Yudkowsky's recent post on future humans being impoverished by lack of oxygen makes a lot of sense to me. As an average progress-critical reactionary, I think its human nature to want more, so my rule is simply the more protests and 4B movements, the better everything is.

Why do people protest? At the most fundamental level, it is because a large group of people on some level have done a cost benefit analysis and decided that protesting is more in their interest than not protesting. Their underlying motivations might be different (social status for some, entertainment for others, etc). But everyone needs a reason to be there, and that reason needs to be sufficiently positive so as to overcomes any negatives.

Let's look at a very safe, very "developed" society like SK. What are the positives of partaking or supporting such a movement.

  1. You get potential concessions from society if the movement is successful (laws guaranteeing more rights for women, more pay, more legal weapons at your disposal, etc).
  2. You get social status. Protesting for a "good cause" is generally seen as positive by your peer group.
  3. Personal fulfillment. You feel like you are making a difference/doing the right thing. You feel more in control of your life.

What are the negatives? Almost nothing.
1)Men might be mad at you. But there's not much risk there. Especially for younger women, since said men will still likely make concessions in order to have a chance to sleep with them.
2)The older generation might be mad. But in modern society, many young people are financially independent. So the older generation has much more limited leverage.

Contrast this to a less developed society. What are your benefits? Possible concessions (with a lower probability) and personal fulfillment. That's probably it. Your peer group will probably distance themselves from you out of fear of sharing the negatives, which are:

  1. Potential violence - both sexual and non sexual. This is the largest negative you can possibly have for most people.
  2. Ostracization - others don't want to share in your misfortune if something goes wrong.
  3. Anxiety - Even if nothing happens, the threat of these things always looms.

There are probably many more negatives, but I think those three are probably sufficient to deter most people. So looking at a cost benefit analysis, the choice to protest in SK vs in SA looks pretty clear.

I've heard this phenomenon called "Tocqueville effect/paradox". @MaiqTheTrue

From Democracy in America:

The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on.

See also: the psychoanalytical concept of the "narcissism of small differences".

I don’t think it’s a valley, I think it’s a sort of truism of political life. Complaints and protests tend to happen in places where said problem is least apparent. Environmental protests happen where the environment is well cared for, marital protests happen where women are safe, screams of authoritarian regimes happen where arbitrary arrests don’t.

Same reason why (sane) people don't start expressing rage at someone pointing a gun at them. Anger is used as a tool when you think it'll work in favor of your interests rather than against them.

You forgot to expand your asterisk.

Meta: your post is 700 characters of your own words, followed by a verbatim quotation more than ten times that length. The source you linked does not seem to be paywalled. Assume that the average reader is tech-savvy enough to click on a link if they want to read the article. Quoting two paragraphs should be plenty if you are not interrupting it with commentary. Besides I gather that the motte is likely run over a jurisdiction in which copyright is a thing, and thus relies on fair use exceptions for quotations.

The article you quoted is clearly partisan. For example, uncritically referring to the gender pay gap is a red flag for me. From my understanding, the pay gap is a typical example of an equality of outcomes, not an equality of opportunity. Women are free to pick high-paying careers like engineering instead of low-paying careers like gender studies.

To this day, young men perceive that discrimination against men is more serious than against women, even though 50 percent of women between the ages of 19-29 say they’ve experienced sexual discrimination at work, compared to 30 percent of their male peers.

The article makes it sound like that statistic clearly refutes the perception of the men, when in reality, it does nothing of that sort. Perhaps men are less likely to see themselves as victims of sex discrimination. Or perhaps the cases of discrimination men experience are more severe.

From 2021 to 2023, female sexual assault victims saw a 15 percent rise.

This sounds like the author was searching for an impressive statistic to support their claim that women are more in danger than ever. Of course, 2021 was still partly COVID. And it could be that it is simply the rate of reporting which increased, which would be great news instead. Of course, it could also be a real increase, and perhaps even part of a worrisome trend instead of a random fluctuation, but so far the author has not shown the non-partisanship that I would just assume that.

It’s an acceleration of the already widening gender gap in American politics, including an increasing number of young men rejecting feminism.

Feminism can mean a lot of different things. The message of woke feminism to white cis-het males seems to be: "You are the oppressor group. By default, you are in the wrong unless conclusively proven otherwise. Your concerns do not matter because they are not the result of structural oppression." Clearly it is a total mystery why that message fails to resonate with young men.

It’s too soon to say if the 4B movement is here to stay in the United States. But even if it isn’t, the surge in interest says something about the social forces unleashed by the 2024 presidential election.

I will make the prediction that it will indeed not stay in the US.

Lots of single people do not participate in the dating market for a variety of reasons, and I doubt that the politics of their preferred gender is the main reason. Many more people will filter dating partners by their politics.

Finally, I think that if you want to avoid having sex with Trump supporters, a better strategy might be to select on geographic location. Fucking people from Hawaii (37.5% Trump) and avoiding people from Alabama (64.8% Trump) would be more effective. Wikipedia has a convenient list of criteria. The urban (38% Trump) vs rural (64% Trump) divide is in any case much stronger than the male (55%) vs female (45%) split.

The article makes it sound like that statistic clearly refutes the perception of the men, when in reality, it does nothing of that sort. Perhaps men are less likely to see themselves as victims of sex discrimination. Or perhaps the cases of discrimination men experience are more severe.

My understanding of Korean youth politics is that these men are probably referring mostly to the draft, which, let's remember, involves them being legally enslaved by the state for a couple of years. I can see why it might chafe for them to see young Korean women complaining about discrimination while the young men have to deal with a form of sex discrimination which is universal, legal and long-lasting.

Plus Korea places heavy emphasis on seniority, so when the men get a real job all the women are on top of them.

Finally, I think that if you want to avoid having sex with Trump supporters, a better strategy might be to select on geographic location.

Does someone even need to do that? Your statistics give the impression that filtering mates by Trumpism is a fool's errand, and the best she can do is move to Hawaii and hope for the best, doubling her odds.

In Scott's cannon post Outgroup, he writes about his strong filter bubbles. Surely an extreme liberal woman has a filter bubble pretty strong, no matter their location? But, I could see if the American-4B import is here to stay, then it wouldn't just be radical women who partake. More normie liberal women probably don't have filter bubbles that strong.

Western Cultural Appropriation of 4B has induced ample low-hanging-fruit-but-amusing counter-memes. Such as those to the tune of “Trump hasn’t taken office yet and he’s already stopping women from being whores” or “You have nothing! Nothing to threaten me with [dark_knight_joker.png]”.

4B is just 2B, the 2B being sex and children. Actually, it’s just 1B. The 1B being sex. Thankfully so, to spare everyone the “2B or not 2B, that is the question…”-related references.

Without the prospect of sex, men generally would not care for dating women. Without the prospect of children and/or continued sex, men generally would not care for marriage (perhaps jokes on those men who get dead-bedroomed). Without sex, children will not result (aside from side cases like IVF or whatnot). Women striking by abstaining from 1) marriage, 2) dating, 3) birthing, and 4) sex would be just abstaining from 4) sex. Like how me hypothetically striking by abstaining from 1) dunking a basketball, 2) spiking a volleyball, 3) running 110m hurdles, and 4) jumping would be just me striking by abstaining from 4) jumping.

Given assortative mating, to the degree female Harris-supporters would be able to form a cartel to punish men by way of withholding sex, they’d with greater likelihood be punishing male Harris-supporters—not male Trump-supporters. It’d be mostly friendly fire. This is on top of the irony of attempting to punish your perceived political enemies—who you regularly and vociferously claim are incels—by withholding sex, and pwning the conservatives by refraining from casual/premarital sex.

It’s funny how online women, despite their insistence that women have value beyond sex and being Birthing Persons, immediately turn to the threat of withholding sex and bearing children when push comes to shove. Horseshoe theory strikes again: Feminists and manospherians agree, the primary worth of women is sex and child-bearing.

The revealed opinions of online women suggest they know that, if not for the bargaining chip of being gatekeepers of sex and children, their collective or individual negotiating power with men would plummet, perhaps to zero. Some part of them knows how their bread gets buttered.

It’s also funny how many women, despite supposedly being the empathetic sex, can’t fathom or are outright hostile to men having preferences, priorities, interests that don’t revolve around serving women.

Online women like to prattle about how men aren’t entitled to this or that, such as sex or female attraction (even, or especially, within marriage). However, they sure look like they feel entitled to men voting the way they want (in addition to other things like relationships/marriage if sex has already occurred, expensive engagement rings, lavish weddings, husband’s attraction regardless if she’s aged and/or gotten fat, to be wined and dined and taken on cUtE dates and vacations).

Women should look out for themselves and vote for their own perceived best interests. Men should be Decent Human Beings and vote for women’s perceived best interests.

My take: I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race. Men of all races voted for Trump in larger shares than women did, with Hispanic men even preferring him on-net.

I don’t think so. As the possibly apocryphal quote from Kissinger goes, “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's too much fraternizing with the enemy.”

For example, apparently the percentage of US men who voted Trump was 55%, and it was 45% for US women. It was 57% and 13% (simulation scriptwriters are getting lazy…) for Whites and Blacks, respectively.

If women got Thanos-snapped away, I imagine a fair amount of young heterosexual men would be lost in life without the prospect of sex and later children. Life for the modal man would be more boring without the thought of the next chick you might bang, the children you might eventually have: It’d be grey, drab, and dreary. At least in Children of Men, one could still get laid.

If American Blacks and Latinos got Thanos-snapped away, it’d be a great increase to the quality of life for White and Asian Americans. Disproportionate sources of violent crime and net-lifetime-tax consumption gone. Living in a “good school district” would be less of a concern, as would be worrying if your grandmother will get randomly punched in the face. Entire neighborhoods would be available as open real estate. The outlook of White and Asian Americans would immediately become safer and richer.

The other thing is that the targets of this are very likely fellow democrats. The mating hasn’t been assorted in any real sense because most conservatives live in the Midwest/South/Western Plains where the women LARPing Bad Handmaiden don’t live or even visit. They’re not really going to stick it to Trump voters, they aren’t dating them anyway. They’re refusing sex with Dudes for Harris.

Well, they weren't forharrising hard enough, so they get no prize. Yet again, meritocracy raises its ugly (at least as far as the left's theory is concerned) head.

Have you seen the guys who are white dudes for Harris? I don’t blame women for not wanting to have sex with them.

Isn't this a bit, stated preference vs. revealed preference?

I cannot disagree with you.

That said, kinda low effort booing. You know we frown on posts that are just dunking on your outgroup like this.

Fair enough

The mating hasn’t been assorted in any real sense because most conservatives live in the Midwest/South/Western Plains where the women LARPing Bad Handmaiden don’t live or even visit.

With mass media and the internet, there are people like anything in every place, just in different proportions. I come from a red area of a red state, and yet there are many progressives here -- I was one, when I was a high schooler. And I've known a great many feminists terrified of Trump who were born and raised here. I've even known women who somehow fit in their brains both evangelicalism and feminism: my favorite was the woman who was obsessed with feminism and railed against the patriarchy, but wouldn't date me (despite straightforwardly saying she wanted to) because, at the time, I was an atheist. Modernity is a funhouse mirror.

Yep. I live in an SEC college town and we had to import our Trump supporting female bartender from California. There are few species of liberal more obnoxious than the first-gen college educated late Xer/Millennial liberal with high-school educated Trump supporting late boomer/Gen X parents, especially if they come from a place where the Moral Majority actually mattered. The middle-aged Yankee liberal English professor might be easy to offend, but was more tolerant in the long run. It's a shame I never got to meet her daughter, who is reportedly very high on the "hot, but crazy" scale (The professor is also this, according to the boomer regular who dated her.). My Gen X mom from George Wallace Democratic stock has been waging a Clintonian holy war on Facebook for far longer than my Gen X father's acquired Trumptardism and addiction to the dumb parts of right-wing Twitter.

Interestingly, the Southern liberals I know from more upper-class backgrounds have been vastly more relaxed about it. One of favorite drinking buddies (He is a hilariously obnoxious womanizer with a country lawyer's drawl and Yellow Fever when drunk.) is a lawyer's son turned Democratic campaign operative. Another is a 40-something professor who never got a steady gig, a hilarious, hopeless dandy who even his liberal female counterparts write off as gay (This does, in fact, cripple his dating life.).

My favorites to drunkenly talk history/politics with are female law students, by a mile. They're well informed and while tough in an argument, they won't take disagreement personally.

This is common enough that right wing twitter/substack has already "invented" a term for it. They call them hicklibs.

This is commonly treated as a slam-dunk argument that Western 4B is counterproductive, but is it really so? What if the intended effect is not that progressive men continue whatever they were doing and get arbitrarily punished with sex withdrawal, nor that some random conservative men also get caught up and punished, but that the men of the tribe go and figure out some way of making sure Trump doesn't win again, be it by running a better campaign, falsifying votes, principles-be-damned lawfare or one million assassination attempt suicide runs on him? What is the actual ratio of blue-tribe men who see the 4B threat and defect to the red tribe to ones who will redouble their efforts whether because they think of tribal duty or imagine that maybe they can personally get ahead enough on the newly established "fight against Trump tooth and nail" ladder that an exemption from 4B is quietly granted to them after all?

Throughout history, propaganda of the form "women will spurn you if you don't do this self-sacrificial thing" has been leveraged too often to be dismissed out of hand. In fact, per what some other posters in these threads say, in general the Korean message that women will not put out unless men work 60-hour weeks to buy a house seems to be achieving its goal just fine, and most Korean men do go on to climb the standard career ladder and work 60-hour weeks and support the lifestyle of their women through the system, rather than "defecting" and going to fraternize with and dedicate their labour to some group of enemy women from the 4Bers' outgroup. Tribal loyalty is strong, and if you write from the perspective of the outgroup it is all too easy to be biased in a way like "Why would blue men not just go red then? As far as my red eyes see, life on the red side is perfectly fine!".

Except there is a large group of women who don’t share the values of the strikers. So effectively you have probably at least 40% of the population already going to defect and they will heavily benefit which would encourage the not true true believers to defect.

The White Feather Movement did not get large numbers of British men to elope with the droves of eligible German bachelorettes. Are you sure nothing like the many factors that led to this are present in the modern US scenario? The cutting of ties that would have been necessary to move and socially establish yourself in an enemy country will surely be necessary to a lesser degree for a blue->red defection, as will the circumstance that red women might not necessarily like blue men over red men (as German women may not have chosen British men over German ones).

imagine that maybe they can personally get ahead enough on the newly established "fight against Trump tooth and nail" ladder that an exemption from 4B is quietly granted to them after all?

"Imagine" is right. The exemptions from 4B will be granted to Chad, like they always are. Chad voted Trump, and he might wear a MAGA hat while collecting 4Bs.

What if the intended effect is not that progressive men continue whatever they were doing and get arbitrarily punished with sex withdrawal, nor that some random conservative men also get caught up and punished

I’m pretty sure that the intended effect is to inspire conservative women that they have safety in numbers and can leave their abusive husbands to become happy progressives.

That this belief is delusional and the husbands are probably not more abusive than the general population is of no matter; this is a small group of radicals.

I don't know why the election has triggered a renewed gender war. The gender gap remained the same, or even decreased : https://www.nbcwashington.com/decision-2024/2024-voter-turnout-election-demographics-trump-harris/3762138/

Even if you think there's new evidence that says it makes sense to use sex as a carrot to convince men to vote Democratic, isn't going full Lysistrata a bad idea? If Democratic women go on an absolute intimacy strike while Republican women are still happy to form relationships etc., for men who would be swayed by such things, it just creates an incentive to become Republican.

Lastly, it seems self limiting: as women drop out of the relationship market, the women who choose to remain in it move up in terms of the quality of the men they can get.

All of this is probably overthinking things, though, as it seems mostly like a temper tantrum of the overly online set.

This is all getting silly. Women vote differently from men because they're more emotional, social and subjective. So they're camp "It's fine if everything gets worse, as long as we're not mean" while men tend towards "It's fine if we're mean, as long as our society improves".

There's like half a standard deviation of difference in the distribution of personality traits, which causes these differences in voting outcomes. There's no need to fabricate any wars, and act like natural tendencies are a way of punishing eachother and securing ones power. "Why are men keeping women out of engineering?" They just like engineering at a higher frequency.

Trying to pressure other people into having the same values as yourself is, and always was, bad taste. And both genders are biologically hardwired to enjoy sex. None of this is necessary, I know because I still hang out in communities with zero politics, and in which men and women enjoy eachother and in which people would be confused if you talked about power dynamics or even a gender divide.

Now, I don't disagree with your takes on the issue, I reject the issue itself and suggest that you do the same. I ended up replying to you because your comment is short and approachable

Lastly, it seems self limiting: as women drop out of the relationship market, the women who choose to remain in it move up in terms of the quality of the men they can get.

Seems that the discerning liberal woman can use the Trump victory as a plausibly deniable way to get the competition out of the market. I won't say all the American 4B'ers are "in on the joke" but maybe the most rabid are? See also: "wokefishing," and a post in this space a couple years back suggesting that a lot of progressive-coded dating dynamics are because the gender ratios of woke spaces skew heavily female.

If 4B was a cup size, how big would it be?

If 4B was a cup size, how big would it be?

Grotesquely oversized.

Maybe it's a 4' band, although I'm not sure which one's worse.

I don't know why the election has triggered a renewed gender war

It's the abortion issue, which is more Christianity v. secularism than men v. women, but is often conceived of as men v. women.

I don't know why the election has triggered a renewed gender war.

DNC shills and the usual suspects thought painting alt-right/maga as incels and pickup artists would be a great tactic to win some of that white woman vote. Relentles spam and inauthentic posts have been spewed down websites like 4chan and normie tier places like youtube and facebook, always focused on fomenting inter-gender animosity.

My suspicion is that the race thing got a bit too real once journalists and academics started losing jobs to dei, the transsexual thing is an oozing wound they don't want to touch with a 10' dilator right now, and so the only culture war left to push is warmed-over '12-'18 feminism.
And the idea of not pushing on any culture war front just doesn't occur to people who consider journalism and activism to be synonymous (and who are out-bidding each other for #resistance jobs that seem to be in shorter supply this time)

Agreed, this is wishcasting. Almost no one in the real world is doing this. The whole premise is bunk anyway. Most women don't want weak men who bend to society. They want strong men who mold reality.

Probably the bigger problem in South Korea isn't misogyny but rather effeminate men.

South Koreans really aren't very effeminate compared to other East Asians. They all go through military service which seems to change a substantial portion of them physically and mentally, at least IME. The problem (as explained in the linked AAQC) really does seem to be mostly caused by (unrealistically) high female standards.

The 4B movement will not change America because it will be embraced by an extremely small number of people who all come from subcultures with South Korea-tier fertility already.

It's also, as far as anyone can tell, not the cause of Korea's uniquely low fertility, because Korea's fertility is not uniquely low. It's on the low end of average for the region; Japan is actually an outlier up for developed East Asian fertility. Taiwan, the PRC, Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore all have extremely low fertility and South Korea is on the lower end of average among that group. Not an outlier. The real question is 'what is Japan doing so right to have nearly double South Korea's fertility rate?' not 'why is South Korea's fertility so low?'.

And why developed East Asian countries have such low fertility rates is mostly known- they're highly urban places which generally have non-abrahamic religions which they barely practice in an ultra-competitive society in which childhood sucks. People don't like putting kids through hell, and South Korean and Chinese childhoods are hellacious. Strivers the world over generally have lower fertility rates, and everyone in these countries is a striver. Add incredibly dense urbanism and the lack of religious influence to raise fertility, it's not that hard to explain.

PRC is closer to Japan than it is to Korea, unless you think the numbers are fake. And I don't think it's fair to compare city-states with full sized countries.

Saying "developed East Asian countries" is kind of a loaded term, because you really only have Korea, Japan, and arguably China/quasi-china areas.

You have South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the PRC, and some city states. Taiwan is arguably the best comparison for South Korea and it also has a TFR below 1, while the PRC will dip there very soon. The city states are South Korea tier but they’re also city states, I’ll give you that.

East Asian fertility. Taiwan, the PRC, Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore

Why is Monaco, a European state, in the middle of this list of East Asian locales?

Have to wonder if OP meant Macau

Stupid autocorrect. I meant Macao.

Funnily enough, both are the Casino-world tax haven of a bigger polity.

Strivers the world over generally have lower fertility rates, and everyone in these countries is a striver. Add incredibly dense urbanism and the lack of religious influence to raise fertility, it's not that hard to explain.

Also, remember the last time the [urban] US had South Korean-level birthrates: it was 1910-1920, and people were packing hard into cities to work sweatshop jobs in an economy that was hollow as fuck (and would collapse in 1929). [A TFR of 2.3 in a country that was 50% rural suggest the urban areas were serious fertility shredders.]

Remember also that China in particular is trying to make sure this doesn't happen by limiting the number of people from rural areas that will ever be allowed to take the sweatshop jobs- one could argue the Depression happened in the US because this process happened too quickly.

As @Amadan says, Korea’s demographic decline seems more likely to mirror those of every other advanced nation (including countries like Saudi Arabia that are much more socially conservative, even if they’re slowly liberalizing) than be something unique because of this “4B” phenomenon. In fact polling shows that many South Koreans, male and female alike, still want more children than they have, just like Americans.

That international correspondents saddled with the Seoul beat (Samsung, Kpop, Squid Game, DPRK, plastic surgery get boring to write about after a while) would write about this is one thing, that anyone else takes it seriously is quite another.

The fact that anyone takes "For Bee" seriously is completely wild to me.

The best analogy I can think of is that it's like if a dad is going through his tween daughter's text messages, and he comes across one that says "Sally isn't allowed in our secret club because we don't like her". And instead of brushing it off with a "bleh, kids can be so mean", he instead becomes deeply concerned with what will become of Sally if she is denied the prestigious honors of being part of the secret club. Like, obviously being in the secret club is the most important predictor of life success, right? What can we do to rectify this injustice? Can we get the school involved? He forgets that he's supposed to be an adult on the outside looking in, and instead he becomes completely absorbed in the (obviously childish and ultimately unimportant) narrative.

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.

Also:

I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race.

This is undoubtedly the sort of comforting thing that one might like to believe, because it is tantamount to saying that there are no real conflicts to deal with, only pseudo-conflicts. But it is of course false. Racial/ethnic conflicts are real; they are based in material reality, and they have real effects on people. The alleged "conflict" between men and women is a purely symbolic construct, a postmodern creation of cyberspace. Women have neither the ability nor the desire to sustain an actual, physical conflict against men for any length of time. And to the extent that this "conflict" does have a basis in reality and isn't purely virtual, it's largely a good thing anyway, as its primary effect is to prevent evolutionarily unfit individuals (largely male) from reproducing, while more fecund and vigorous strains are unharmed.

I encourage you to travel to Palestine and tell people that the real divide is not between Muslims and Jews, but between men and women, and see what kinds of responses you get.

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help!

I'm not worried about 'evolution' doing okay. I'm worried about myself, my friends and family, and human civilisation. I know that humans as a species will survive, but I'd rather that every country in the world not turn into South Africa in the meantime. I think industrial civilisation is good and I want to maintain it.

Like sure, I guess I can admire your extremely long view from a certain perspective. But what can I say, I'm just a parochial worry-wort who doesn't want humanity living in mud huts and bashing eachother with rocks again.

I have a much nearer and deeper fear. You are correct, evolution will out, women are liars and biological determinism will make sure that pandas that refuse to fuck all die out.

However, governments around the world, especially in what we think of as the liberal western/developed first world, are addicted to the expanding growth of their sclerotic, overweight bureaucracy, while running a state full of economic dependents.

I an deeply, deeply concerned with what they will inflict on me in the name of keeping things going once tax revenues dry up and the economic expenditures of supporting their old and infirm grow stupendous. Singles tax will be the first of many, it won't be the last.

Oh, and privately I don't relish having to compete with increasingly older and more wealthy men for an ever-shrinking pool of young women.

IMO the problem with low fertility isn’t that humanity goes extinct, it’s that the more centralized and authoritarian countries figure out how to retain a high population before the West, and then they dominate us through greater manpower and industrial capability. China’s TFR is low right now, but China is authoritarian, centralized, and vaguely Han-supremacist. They will eventually realize that they can enhance fertility through cultural and economic change, and the day after that realization they can instantly implement laws to transform Chinese cultural and educational norms. America has no such capability because we aren’t centralized and authoritarian and we have the feminist fifth column which will make a big deal about schools switching to teaching/propagating women how to be mothers and excluding them from high stress professions entirely.

There are other issues at play:

  • 4B disrupts the fertility of somewhat intelligent and conformist women, the kind of genes we want in a civilization;

  • Our consumer capitalist system demands a steady supply of immigrants, meaning the domestic fertility rate can steadily decrease without affecting business, so the government has little incentive in solving the problem unless there is an essentially racist pressure applied to it;

I also disagree that evolution will figure out the solution on its own. The evolutionary drive to form families is the sexual drive. There is no other drive. Humans may have a vague drive to care for a little cute creature, but that interest can be cheaply satisfied with pets, neopets, squishes and genshin impact. If you have an outlet for the sexual drive, which modern culture has, then an entire human population can gradually go extinct and evolution may not have the time to fix this.

The evolutionary drive to form families is the sexual drive. There is no other drive.

Yes there is. Adoption is common enough. Some people- not all- really enjoy raising children and want to do so desperately.

Adoption is mostly an American phenomenon though, so that may be more cultural than evolutionary. For instance, only 4k adoptions for all of India’s 1.4 billion. If humans somehow evolved an evolutionary drive to care for kids who weren’t their own, then that evolutionary drive would have disappeared somewhere in our distant past, due to decreased gene proliferation

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.

This moral argument here is just-world fallacy. I also doubt that evolution would just trivially solve this issue. In this framework, why would cities and urbanization, which have always decreased fertility quite severely, still be a thing? If evolution could impact human behavior like this, people who refuse to live in cities would presumably gradually rise as a proportion of the population until cities were effectively irrelevant. But instead the opposite has happened.

I highly doubt humans will go extinct due to fertility issues alone, but even a roughly 30% decrease in population could cause a lot of problems. A decrease of ~90% (which I personally find unlikely, but is still in the realm of possibility) starts to make industrialized society itself look dicey, which means a huge loss in standards-of-living for humanity.

I don't get your strike-through, a decrease in 30% absolutely could bring a lot of problems.

It's not just the fact that there's less people, the world has chugged along fine with far fewer, but also the population pyramid inversion. A lot of old people depending on few of the young is an issue that might get sorted out eventually, but it won't be pretty. (Assuming no AI saviour/doom)

As the other people correctly guessed, my strikethrough was just a typo born of using two ~ symbols. I've fixed it now.

It's not an intentional strikethrough; it's ~ (tilde) symbols (meaning "approximately") before "30%" and "90%" being misinterpreted as a strikethrough by the software.

I ran into the same problem with a post last week. Still have no idea how to manually type tildes without triggering strikethrough.

& Tilde;test& Tilde; (without the spaces, case-sensitive) → ∼test∼

Also, & approx; → ≈

HTML named character references are supported by Markdown.

Nicely done

Testing.

30% vs. 90%. EDIT: backslashes don't work.

30% vs. 90%. EDIT: <plain> tags don't work. Okay, I'm stumped.

30% vs 90% (tilde number percent space tilde number percent) is showing non-strikethrough in my preview box, so it clearly can work and the real problem lies elsewhere. Now I'll post and it'll strikethrough and I'll look like an idiot.

I can get behind some wall spaghetti testing

Double tilde: 30% vs. 90%

Triple tilde:30% vs. 90%

High-spatial efficiency double tilde: ≈30% vs. ≈90%

EDIT: this is a known issue, see https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/issues/736

And to the extent that this "conflict" does have a basis in reality and isn't purely virtual, it's largely a good thing anyway, as its primary effect is to prevent evolutionarily unfit individuals (largely male) from reproducing, while more fecund and vigorous strains are unharmed.

Max Anders the glasses-wearing nerd makes six-figures at his software infrastructure job keeping the city running. But because he has a nerdy and uncharismatic personality and poor facial structure he will never reproduce.

But Slaggern Thundercock has eight children with three different women because he has strong cheekbones and a violent alpha personality? Vigorous by the definition of the 10,000 BC tribal warrior is not really what we need.

Stacy Smartbook is clever and hardworking - she lives alone, her demanding job, lengthy education and high expectations for a partner leave little room or time for a partner or children.

Salmonella Sarvesian is stupid and abusive, raising her brood of children badly. Many will go on to be crooks. She's on welfare and doesn't care, or maybe she works a few hours at a low-income job.

On a global level this is exactly what's happening. The most talented and proficient are not reproducing. We have the statistics on fertility by region, by demographic, by city. We can read a chart. We can see what's happening in front of our eyes. This is a bad thing, at least for those of us who value a high-quality human civilization. In some places it's worse still, the Korean race will vanish from the South if it keeps on this path of TFR going straight down - no genocidal foe is needed.

It is perfectly natural for nations and civilizations to die out. It has happened many times in history. While natural, it is not very pleasant for those who live in a dying nation. We should take steps to avoid this. It is natural for cars driving towards a cliff to sail off, the driver should swerve rather than burn.

On a global level this is exactly what's happening. The most talented and proficient are not reproducing.

At least in the US, this actually isn’t true- I made a top level comment about it a few months back. Blacks are the only group for whom the unsuccessful have generally higher fertility than the successful. For everyone else, higher income=higher fertility.

I guess @RandomRanger meant this

https://x.com/theHauer/status/1222514313723875332

I saw a chart that showed the people with huge incomes had high (by first world country standards, so around 2.0 or 3.0) fertility, but they're quite rare. It was a U-curve chart, not a diagonal chart.

And it's certainly not commensurate with Niger's 6.4 TFR.

So the answer to the low TFR is enough money to escape the rat race? South Park already did it.

This is true, but Niger’s TFR is not driven by low IQ, it’s driven by being full of subsistence farmers. The highest TFR group in the world is the Amish, who are high-IQ subsistence farmers(ish, it’s complicated).

Within country IQ/fertility correlations mostly don’t point towards idiocracy.

There is no evidence that Niger's fertility isn't dysgenic. For countries for which there's data, ones with greater share of population in agriculture like Moldavia have more dysgenic pattern than more developed ones. Higher IQ Nigeriens probably are more likely to use condoms, get higher education and emigrate to 1st world countries. Even if the country had zero dysgenics, it's still loss for the world at large.

Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology.

Agreed. Just take a look at Elon Musk's progeny. The expected value of grandchildren he's going to get from one of his normal children is much higher than the expected value of grandchildren he'll get from his trans daughter. Iterate for a few generations and the deleterious memetic mutations will weed themselves out.

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.

I'm not worried about humanity going extinct. I am worried about losing the ability to maintain an industrial society. Like there will be Amish in 200 years, but an all-subsistence-farmer society sucks. And yes, I am aware that the Amish are not pure subsistence farmers, but they depend on being able to trade with industrial society for inputs like solar panels to maintain the not-subsistence-agriculture parts of their society.

Let's say the TFR stabilizes at 1 so that population halves every 30 years or so. Then it takes 90 years to return the world population to 1 billion, which is about what it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution was very localized; it certainly didn't depend on millions of rice farmers in China existing. It started with 10 million people in Britain and spread to 100 million people in Europe.

So it takes like 300 years to get the world population back down to 10 million. Unlike the 10 million who lived in Britain in 1800, who were mostly illiterate farmers, people in the future will still have computers with the internet and Wikipedia, so they are much more capable of maintaining industrial society.

Of course if the population keeps shrinking the situation does become problematic at some point. But 300 years is a long time. Lots of things will change during that time. I would worry much more about the near future, for which we can make better predictions and over which we have much more control.

I am worried about losing the ability to maintain an industrial society.

The problem with highly-automated industrial societies is that you need relatively few people to maintain them. They need to be intelligent, of course- that's why hay gets made about "only the stupid breeding"- but the first indication that there were way too many people for a society to house without serious efforts towards UBI/make-work/bureaucratic expansion came to the US in the 1930s and it's weird nobody seems to realize this.

South Korea has a surplus of people relative to the economic opportunity that can be found there; that's why their education system is a hellscape, that's why women don't feel the need to marry men for resources nor are men in a position to accumulate an attractive surplus (since the average man and average women are roughly equal in industrial and post-industrial productivity, and the men lose some of that through the draft, and the women complain that the post-military men just show up and compete successfully for the same level of jobs).

Their TFR of 0.7, and the fact men can't attract women/women can't be attracted to men in equal conditions like that, is thus natural and probably good for the country long-term, but certainly not beneficial in the short-term (you'll see this effect in Russia after the war even if they lose; perhaps the best thing for South Korea to do at this point is to invade the North, since they've got a lot of resources they aren't using there).

South Korea has a surplus of people relative to the economic opportunity that can be found there;

This doesn't seem right to me, as South Korea's fertility problems, and indeed those of most of East Asia's, are far more severe than in the West.

I'm partial to the explanation by Hanania that East Asians are hyper-conformists. This explains why their education system is a hellscape by those who experience it. Education is a zero-sum status competition, and practically everyone in their societies are competing. This also helps to explain why they stopped having kids, as cutthroat educational competition explains part, and then once a lot of people aren't having kids, the entire society decides it's OK to forgo doing so since none of their neighbors are doing it.

are far more severe than in the West.

The economic opportunity per capita in the West is higher than it is in the East, and if you assume the Easterners are better workers that only serves to compound the problem (i.e. they need an even greater level of opportunity to function correctly than even the average American does simply because they're more efficient at exploiting it, so a lack of that opportunity is going to be harder on them).

That's part of why the US leads Western TFR (despite the generous terms European countries give to their citizens to have children it doesn't seem to be helping, but remember that the average European is significantly worse off compared to the average American even before the US sabotaged their gas supply). Twice the population for the same regional GDP paints an awfully grim picture and that's been true even before the MENA human wave.

And the Indians aren't a refutation of this, because their urban areas (40% urbanization) are just as bad for TFR, but perhaps it's a different story when your standards are that low? (I'd argue the same for China, but maybe that falls apart considering I also made this point about 100-year-ago US, which kind of had the same thing going on.)

The economic opportunity per capita in the West is higher than it is in the East,

What do you mean by this? South Korea is above average in terms of GDP per capita (PPP) compared to Europe, or even just Western Europe according to IMF estimates.

If by "economic opportunity", you instead mean something like "competition for jobs is much more fierce", then that mostly just goes back to zero-sum status competitions being particularly bad in conformist countries in East Asia.

South Korea has a surplus of people relative to the economic opportunity that can be found there;

This doesn't seem right to me, as South Korea's fertility problems, and indeed those of most of East Asia's, are far more severe than in the West.

I think one explanation is that East Asian laborers are much better than Western ones.

One Japanese laborer at a convenience store is worth at least 2 and probably more like 3-5 American workers. In such conditions, it does create a race to the bottom for labor.

No doubt someone will chime in that the US has higher total factor productivity than Japan. That's true on a societal level. But the low wage workers in Asia are simply spectacular compared to their US equivalents.

We can see this in academics as well. Add a typical Asian kid to a typical American classroom and the Asian kid will excel due to a much higher level of effort. But when all the kids are Asian, it's a wasteful arms race. The smart kids still get the best grades, but everyone's working 3x as hard.

Asian societies are optimizing for worker drones, not for human flourishing. Without irony, they would be better off if they weren't such try hards.

(you'll see this effect in Russia after the war even if they lose; perhaps the best thing for South Korea to do at this point is to invade the North, since they've got a lot of resources they aren't using there).

Given the likely effects of a war on Seoul (half the population is in the Seoul metropolitan area), that will depopulate the country faster than their birthrate will. Maybe the survivors would be willing to breed, I suppose.

If it's like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then it will result in mostly men dying, which affects birth rates much less.

More like the reduction of Mariupol.

Okay but that was like 10,000 civilian deaths, a rounding error for a country of 40 million.

Mariupol had half a million people to start. Seoul (metropolitan area) has roughly 25 million. And shells don't care what gender you are.

Also, it's much harder to see a civilian evacuation, since Seoul is so much bigger. Of course, if the South does well at first, the destruction will be much less (because they'll stop the artillery), at least until the North starts nuking.

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will.

Total violation of Hume's guillotine. Yes, obviously, whichever human organisms manage to reproduce in the modern environment, will, and their traits will proliferate, and afterwards it may be said that evolution "worked". Evolution also works when underground mammals lose their sight, or male anglerfish lose their brains. Whether these adaptations to selection pressures are desirable is another question.

The bulk of people reproducing now are (a) extremely high time-preference poor people, or (b) highly religious people. There is also a tiny number of rich people breeding well. If you do not want humanity to consist of this type of population in the future, low birth rates should bother you.

I agreed with you yesterday on needing to have more compassion towards anti-vaxxers (despite disagreeing with them). And I'm going to disagree with you today about needing more compassion for people who are lonely or anxious about politics.

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so.

I'm not worried about people who don't want kids not having them. More power to them.

I am exceptionally worried about people who are lacklove and lonely becoming depressed, atomized, and suicidal, because I care about human flourishing and I couldn't give one iota of a damn about what what "evolution thinks" should happen to them.

There's an intense sneering involved in what you're saying there that I find, well, inhuman. Maybe even evil. I'm going to be honest with you: what you've said strikes me as the sort of thing I'd expect a rogue AI or alien or demonic creature trying to maximize suffering would say.

Because it just so happens that some who walk the earth with us are one of these organisms that are "unable to reproduce... and rightly so." I'm not just talking about the young men who will remain lonely if this movement takes off, but about the young women themselves, people who are clearly neurotic and anxious and scared and desperately need someone to tell them that it's going to be ok, and hatred and resentment will just drive them deeper into loneliness and sorrow. There is nothing "right" about people being lonely, depressed, and terrified because their social environment has distorted their view of reality.

It's rather odd that you'd write:

Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright.

just as we're discussing people who desperately need to hear that exact message. If you can make a difference in people's minds by saying this with regards to one worry, it stands to reason you can make a difference in the minds of the people under discussion -- and therefore perhaps there is something "you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way."

I'm reminded a little about that famous quote from Alexander Pope: "Whatever is, is right," that Leibnitzian saying that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And I'm going to counter you with the view that not only the 4B people but the Christian people and the Muslim people and the new Atheist people and the progressive people and the conservative people disagree with you, and they disagree with you profoundly, at the core of their being. This world is fallen, less than it could be. And I take hope in the fact that, despite our disagreements, many people believe that we are not beholden to the origin of our nature or the vicissitudes of evolution as to the outcome of our existence.

I agreed with you yesterday on needing to have more compassion towards anti-vaxxers

I didn't use the word "compassion" in the posts I wrote about vaccines, and that's not what I was asking for anyway. I was asking for understanding - an understanding of the conditions and values that cause people to do what they do and think what they think - but that's different from compassion.

There's an intense sneering involved in what you're saying there

No there isn't.

It's just a fact that some people are more fit for biological reproduction than others. But I don't think that evolutionary fitness is tied in any direct sense to your ultimate moral worth. Some of the greatest men to ever live (Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, etc) had no children.

Nature is dumb; it is opinionated, certainly, but you can decide for yourself how seriously you want to take its opinions. The appropriate response, upon learning that you are defective according to nature, isn't "ah, I am defective, all hope is lost". The appropriate response is "very well, I am defective. I accept this designation. But now what? What can this defective organism accomplish? You might be surprised at the answer."

I'm not sure Nature has an opinion on who reproduces. That's what the phrase "fitness landscape" is for. The fitness landscape can change. It seems like you're trying to abdicate value judgements. It's fine if you don't care who reproduces, but this kind of appeal to nature shouldn't persuade anyone.

If two demons are fighting over to change the fitness landscape, you wouldn't care?

(After re-reading my post, I see I am making essentially a "postmodern"/subjectivist argument, kinda)

I didn't use the word "compassion" in the posts I wrote about vaccines, and that's not what I was asking for anyway. I was asking for understanding - an understanding of the conditions and values that cause people to do what they do and think what they think - but that's different from compassion.

Fair enough. Yet compassion is the more excellent way.

But I don't think that evolutionary fitness is tied in any direct sense to your ultimate moral worth.

Let us review what you wrote:

Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to

And to the extent that this "conflict" does have a basis in reality and isn't purely virtual, it's largely a good thing anyway, as its primary effect is to prevent evolutionarily unfit individuals (largely male) from reproducing

Those are judgments based upon moral worth.

I’d also add that you were quite literally saying “it’s not happening, and it’s a good thing.”

You’ve attempted to retreat to the Bailey, by saying you were only descriptively stating “nature’s judgment” as “an objective fact”, but the motte is right there for all to see. You were clearly describing these things in terms of what is good and deserved. “It deserves to” is a moral claim of moral desert.

As it so happens, saying “you are defective, and it is good and desirable that fewer people like you exist in the future” is sneering, and is a moral judgment. If you think it is not so, I find your perspective quite perplexing indeed.

All my friends rarely date these days for that reason. These issues are all we talk about when we get together.

So their conversations don't even pass the Bechdel Test.

I get that this is a different country with its own rat-race social problems, but I roll my eyes at the fear of men who hate women. Most men who hate women hate them because women won't get anywhere near them, so they never have an opportunity to hurt a woman apart from mean comments on the internet. Sexually successful men dont hate women, they just don't treasure them, and treat them how [sexually successful] women treat men; as disposable. Abusive men don't hate women, they hate the world and women just can't resist being around them for some mysterious reason.

Or by "men who hate women" does she mean that don't soyfully agree with generic feminist talking points? I once ended a relationship over watching The Imitation Game, of all things. "Ah, here's Kiera Knightly reprising her role as a modern woman trapped in the past" was apparently such a hateful comment that it got me a continuous diatribe about women's suffrage until I flat-out got up and left. I wonder if that was proof that I hated women.

Sexually successful men dont hate women, they just don't treasure them, and treat them how [sexually successful] women treat men; as disposable.

I guess it depends on what you mean by hate. "I hate you personally and want to hurt you" is pretty rare, but "I consider you to be a disposable object to be used, and your feelings on the matter are irrelevant because you're not really even a person" is a kind of contempt near enough to hate as to make little difference.

Abusive men don't hate women, they hate the world and women just can't resist being around them for some mysterious reason.

I think some abusive men are just misanthropists who hate the world and take it out on those they can (which are most often their partners and children), but some abusive men definitely do hate women and take out their lack of success (sexual and otherwise) on them.

Or by "men who hate women" does she mean that don't soyfully agree with generic feminist talking points? I once ended a relationship over watching The Imitation Game, of all things. "Ah, here's Kiera Knightly reprising her role as a modern woman trapped in the past" was apparently such a hateful comment that it got me a continuous diatribe about women's suffrage until I flat-out got up and left. I wonder if that was proof that I hated women.

I dunno man, but you have so many of these anecdotes, the punchline always being that a woman rejected you for inexplicable and irrational feminine reasons (usually relating to you talking about how much you resent all things female). Do you actually like women? I mean as people, not as things you want to fuck? Pardon the blunt phrasing, but that is kind of what the "men who hate women" construct is getting at. I sometimes hear men who clearly despise women deny it and say that of course they love women, when what they really love is sex with women, and the fact that there is a woman involved in the process seems to be an annoyance to them.

Only thing I can say is I've had two real loves in my life, and most of the reason I loved them was because they had qualities and virtues that I was in awe of. And plenty of those qualities were feminine.

And by now I frankly want companionship, validation and physical comfort more than I want to get off. I find myself disappointed that so few people will let me in, or show me anything that's really theirs and not a regurgitated soundbite.

I consider you to be a disposable object to be used, and your feelings on the matter are irrelevant because you're not really even a person

This is how I treat my toilet paper. However I would not say I hate my toilet paper at all, in fact I am usually very grateful that it is present (assuming no bidet etc.) and would be very upset if it were missing.

Hate requires having a certain intensity of feeling and even if we were talking about particularly poor toilet paper I've got better things to do than give the requisite number epicycles to thinking so hard about the toilet paper than I can reasonably say I hate it (perhaps if it were the toilet paper used in all the toilets at my workplace so I used it on a daily basis then yes I might dedicate enough cycles, but if it's like a toilet in a shopping mall I rarely ever visit then sorry, I don't have the brain cycles to waste on hating the toilet paper).

For someone who's very sexually successful they may well have better things to do than waste their limited number of brain cycles on what exactly their next sex partner thinks, no different to how I have zero desire to waste brain cycles on what the guy sitting next to me on the train thinks, purely because of how abundance makes humans value things less, no hate involved (were the guy next to me on the train the only person I'd met in the last month I'd probably care about what he thought, but under current conditions, he's just an "eh").

This is how I treat my toilet paper. However I would not say I hate my toilet paper at all, in fact I am usually very grateful that it is present (assuming no bidet etc.) and would be very upset if it were missing.

Well, as I just explained, "hate" in the sense of harboring personal animosity isn't the same as "hate" in the sense of considering someone to be less than human, but I don't think women who claim men hate them are wrong when pointing to men who think it's appropriate to regard them as equivalent to toilet paper.

I don't think that the toilet paper sense qualifies as "hate", personally. Much like love is wishing for someone's good, hate is wishing for someone's bad. I agree that it is contemptuous and unpleasant to disregard someone completely and use them as one would an object, but I don't think it qualifies as hate.

I don’t think hate is necessarily the word, either. Maybe contempt or disregard. But probably not better than nothing in terms of romantic interest, even if he’s rich and hot.

Oh, I absolutely agree with that. Being treated with such casual disregard would almost certainly feel just as bad for the recipient as actual hatred.

It all depends on how much one has of one thing vs the other because we value things based on marginal and not absolute utility. If someone easily has access to say 50 women for sex but no toilet paper (or substitutes like a bidet) then they are completely justified in valuing a deluxe 9 roll pack of toilet paper more than a 51st female sex partner. They are certainly justified in spending money they would never do on the 50th woman to ensure the toilet paper is kept in a warm, dry place because it's no great loss to them if this woman disappears for whatever reason like it would be if their toilet paper got all wet and unusable.

You're just belaboring the equivalence. Obviously, if women are just commodities to put your dick in and produce babies (and I'm well aware there are people here who unironically believe this, though in your case it's hard to be sure whether you're serious or trolling) then yeschad. However, I would suggest it does not serve your purpose to act out the caricature of the dude who spawned the smarmy feminist "Women are human" meme.

Yes, I agree women are human. I just do not agree that being human gets you special exemption from the internal valuation process we all use to decide how much we care about a thing. If the devil came to me and gave me the choice that either Michelangelo's David gets crushed or a random human being named David gets killed I'd choose to save the work of art in a heartbeat. Inanimate objects can have higher value than average humans and recognising this doesn't mean you are demeaning these other humans, you are merely putting them in their rightful place in your personal hierarchy.

I'm actually in agreement with you that for most people they should value a sex partner higher than toilet paper (because toilet paper is easier to access than sex partners), all I'm saying is that we can think of edge cases where this is not true and it's not because the edge case is a woman hater, they are merely a personal utility maximiser and in their situation getting access to toilet paper brings them more value than access to yet another woman.

Well, I just disagree with you. I am not talking about utilitarian calculations about the value of a Michelangelo vs. the value of some random person, I'm talking about the equivalence you keep insisting on making between women and toilet paper, which you're doing just to be provocative. If that is your mindset, that you literally regard them to be in the same category (disposable commodities that are of value depending on abundance and your need), you can argue all you like that you don't "hate" women, but I don't think women would be wrong to see it otherwise.

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If the movement takes hold, it could potentially lead to some of the same outcomes as have been seen in Korea, where women are reconsidering dates with men out of suspicion and lack or trust, young people are marrying and having children at lower rates, and both men and women are expressing deep loneliness

This is just thrown out there in the article, but this is massively important, the most significant consequence of what's being discussed.

"Women have decided to swear off men, which will lead to expressions of deep loneliness for both men and women" is a terrible outcome. It's people choosing to take actions that steer them and others into profound unhappiness.

In Korea, you can understand why people might make that choice: better unhappy alone than unhappy being a servant of the mother-in-law. But in the US, I hold that this is people choosing to avoid something that would be profoundly meaningful to them out of intense, neurotic fear that their partner might not be an angel. This is making the perfect the enemy of the good, and thus destroying all the good.

Amadan said this:

[Korean women] all look at fairy tale romances as an ideal, but it seems like very few of them actually expect this to be the reality.

This is the key difference between Korea and the US: in Korea women wish they could have fairy-tale romances but expect marriage to be hellish. In the US, however, women wish they could have fairy-tale romances and damn well expect this is what they're going to get. Korean women know what they're in for. American women, like American men, have swallowed all sorts of messaging about fairy-tales and then subsequently find their dating life to be disappointing, because it's not perfect. American perfectionism and hedonistic optimizationalism destroys everything it touches, like a metastatic cancer or a radiation burn.

But I disagree with him on this: something like the 4B movement is already going on among young women in the US already, albeit not explicitly politically. A huge chunk of women are simply uninterested in sex, dating, relationships, marriage, the whole sheboodle (or rather she-not-boodle). I've dated women like this. Didn't go well. I've certainly met many more; rates of explicit asexual identification have skyrocketed among US women. I don't know about political lesbianism, but practical asexualism seems predominant.

I'm agnostic on the cause, I don't know if men just aren't striking them as interesting any more, or if mass-media is just too satiating with its parasocial relationships (see Tumblr shipping and fandom), or if there's some kind of endocrine dysfunction (I genuinely worry there might be one affecting both men and women -- we're turning the frogs gay), or if incentives towards focusing on careers are just so great... but it's alarming. We have a whole generation of lonely men who can't get a date, and lonely women who don't seem to have any inclination towards resolving their loneliness.

There was one of the tiktoks about 4B going around, that featured a young women who said something like "I haven't dated for 4 years, I'm happy, and I'm fine swearing off men for the future." I don't know why this woman who was already off the market seems to think a permanent pledge is worthy of a video, but ok, sure! But really, this is just women politicizing something they were already doing. If it weren't Trump, it would be something else.

Women are asexual unless Chad is around. The upturn in their identification rates is just an upturn in hypergamy. I'm not sure if Korea's situation is the same.

Also, 50 Shades isn't porn for women; Tinder is porn for women. That's probably part of the situation, too.

I'm agnostic on the cause

What do you make of the idea that the government now fulfills most of the roles that a husband and the extended family used to fill, though in an inferior capacity? It seems similar to the way free streaming porn and thirst-trap simp-magnets have supplanted chasing girls in the lives of many young men, though also in an inferior capacity. In both cases, the choice used to be between a risky venture (dating/marriage) and simply having nothing at all (no sex/economic security/companionship). Now, there's a inferior choice on offer that requires way less risk/effort, so a lot of people "choose" that out of inertia.

Radical feminism/inceldom seem downstream from these massive changes in the sexual and romantic landscape. I can't imagine them arising in a state that did not have a massive welfare machine and lax sexual mores.

I think it might just be depression, housing unavailability and financial insecurity. When you’re clinging by the fingernails to the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy, you aren’t going to be too concerned about self-actualization and fulfillment.

I kinda doubt that. People have lived in much worse conditions than the Gen Z PMC people deciding not to have kids. Go look at video of any third world slum — people have kids when things like electricity and running water aren’t available. They have babies in war zones. I can’t see that and then look at Gen Z refusing to have kids and see financial issues being the real reason.

I have a few hypotheses.

First, I think American children are much slower to mature emotionally and mentally. 25 year olds in the USA still act like teenagers and are still into drunken partying, staying out late to go clubbing. They aren’t really ready to settle into parenthood even if they had the means because they aren’t ready for the responsibility of a baby.

Second, Americans are pretty hedonistic. A baby isn’t about you, and worse requires sacrificing your lifestyle in major ways. You need to get serious about a career and making money because the baby needs food and diapers. You might hate what you are doing, but you don’t have the same choices that you have as a child-free couple. Likewise every other choice you make now has to include planning for the baby. You want to go out to dinner, you either find a sitter or the baby comes along. And I think the lifestyle most young adults like living just doesn’t have the room for a baby.

Pairing up is a SOLUTION to housing unavailability and financial insecurity.

Yes, that's absolutely correct.

But the association persists in people's minds. There was a youtube comment (bottom of the barrel, I know) that I saw which absolutely flabbergasted me. Who knows who the person who said it was, whether male or female, whether Western not, or whether they just weren't another 13 year old let loose on the internet posting silly takes. But they said:

Getting married is so expensive, there's no way young people can do it!

And then a thousand comments in response going, "what the hell are you talking about, marriage reduces your costs because you're sharing expenses!"

In subsequent comments, the person made it clear they weren't talking about wedding costs or honeymoons or anything dumb like that, they honestly believed it was more expensive for two people to live together than to live separately.

From "Marriage Makes You Rich and Stupid" by Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle:

Marriage allows you to pool nonrival goods, such as Netflix accounts, but also what economist Bryan Caplan calls “semi-rival goods,” such as kitchens and cars:

Two childless singles, each earning $50,000 a year, marry. Both keep working, living by the old-school principle of "share and share alike." What happens to their material standard of living? If all depends on how rivalrous their consumption bundle is.

If all their goods are rival (like food), the answer is "Their standard of living stays the same." $50,000 times two divided by two equals $50,000.

If all their goods are non-rival (like Internet access), the answer is "Their standard of living doubles." They pool their money and buy a $100,000 lifestyle for both of them.

In the real world, of course, couples are rarely at either pole. Most goods are in fact semi-rival. Consider housing. If you share your home with a spouse, you don't have as much space for yourself as a solitary occupant of the same property. But both of you probably enjoy the benefits of more than half a house. If a couple owns one car, similarly, both have more than half a car. Even food is semi-rival, as the classic "You gonna eat that?" question proves.

But this is not the only benefit of marriage. Marriage also enables specialization. Which can be illustrated by a piece of wisdom I have developed in my brief three and a half years of marital bliss and now pass onto my friends who are getting married: “Marriage makes you stupid.”

I mean, I used to know where I kept my batteries and old documents. But when we got married, my husband, who is much tidier than I am, took over organizing the house. Now, unless it’s a piece of my clothing or kitchen equipment, I have no idea where we keep anything. And while I’m pretty sure I used to be able to put up shelves, now all I know how to do is ask my husband to do it.

On the other hand, he has no idea how much money we have, or in what accounts. And he can’t do the grocery shopping, because he doesn’t know what we consume. Individually, we are less competent to survive on our own. But collectively, we eat better, and we have a tidier house and better-managed finances. And our shelves don’t fall down so often.

Obviously, child-rearing is a major area of specialization. One interesting thing I’ve heard from gay parents is that they find themselves falling into roles that you might describe as “Mom” and “Dad,” even though this is obviously not some pre-programmed gender destiny. It just doesn’t make sense to try to jointly manage a kid 50-50; one parent keeps the social calendar and decides what kids Junior can play with, because two parents trying to do it actually makes the task take a lot more time, as both people have to learn about all the friends and the birthdays and the parents, and then negotiate what Junior does with her time. I’m not saying this happens with every gay parent. I’m just saying that gay parents I know report considerable benefits to specialization.

Specialization also allows for external income gains -- perhaps one reason that married men make a lot more than single ones do and married households are richer than single ones. Some of that is selection effect, of course -- stable, responsible men are probably more likely to get married, especially in this day and age.

So while pooling nonrival and semi-rival goods is an excellent benefit of marriage, it is far from the only one. And it doesn’t stop with economics: There’s also better health, less depression, and happier and healthier children to consider. At the end of his piece, Caplan calls being single a “luxury” good. But it’s not exactly an aspirational one.

I really doubt that this is specific movement is terribly relevant, but I'm willing to buy that there's some small-scale vibe related to it. One thing that's interesting to me about it is that it is the interplay with marriage dynamics - the electoral marriage gap is also quite wide, and married men and women are both more likely to vote Republican. So, who would be conducting an American 4B and whom would be getting punished by it? It doesn't seem like there will be a great deal of success in punishing right-wing men, who tend to already be married to right-wing women. You can see some of that in the dynamic here:

Still, at least for now, the movement appears on the upswing in both countries as women say that the model of life they’d expected — dating, marriage, house, kids — looks, increasingly, like a trap set by men who don’t see them as equals. And women like my cousin want alternatives.

“To live with friends that are close to me, to have the ability to live on my own — living like that is my dream,” she says.

As a now-aging, happily married, somewhat right-wing man, this all sounds absolutely insane to me. The dream is having a cozy home with your partner. This isn't a trap, it really is just the best, easiest, happiest way to live life. To the extent that single women are vulnerable, it's not because of right-wing men, but because of their own failure to arrange their life in a coherent, ordered fashion. In rebelling and insisting on remaining alone, they continue to push further into insecurity and loneliness.

I have been hearing about the 4B movement from Korea for years, but it's not clear how pervasive it really is. Korea is facing some steep demographic decline, but I'm not sure how much is because of women intentionally signing up to a radical feminist no-men movement. Japan has the same problem and there is no real 4B movement there.

I have been seeing a lot of women posting 4B rage-videos, and they fit right in with all the post-election meltdowns. Women talking about how they're going to "burn shit down," how they're going to harm men, how they're going to go "feral" on any man that looks at them funny... And to be honest, all I can think is, "Honey, try it."

Because it's all performative. Sigma some very small number of genuinely mentally ill crazies, no woman is actually going to lay hands on a man in a situation where she'd face consequences. They know, deep down, that they are not dangerous or scary and they get to engage in these performative Internet Tough-Girl acts because if they scream at a man in public he's probably going to back away and avoid getting physical with a woman. They can get away with it because most men don't like to hit women and also know the burden will be on them to prove self-defense against a crazy woman.

It's also performative because most of these ladies are not actually going to swear off men, because they like sex, attention, and validation. Political lesbianism and lesbian separatism largely failed as a movement because women found out that they can't just decide to be not attracted to men, any more than men can just stop wanting women.

This is exactly the same as the MGTOW movement, who are just as much a gang of performative blowhards who'd crawl over broken glass to actually score, but talk a big game online about how they don't need no woman. They don't care. They so don't care. Can you see how loudly and obnoxiously and convincingly they are not caring?

Women doing the same thing now.

It's also performative because most of these ladies are not actually going to swear off men, because they like sex, attention, and validation. Political lesbianism and lesbian separatism largely failed as a movement because women found out that they can't just decide to be not attracted to men, any more than men can just stop wanting women.

This is exactly the same as the MGTOW movement, who are just as much a gang of performative blowhards who'd crawl over broken glass to actually score, but talk a big game online about how they don't need no woman. They don't care. They so don't care. Can you see how loudly and obnoxiously and convincingly they are not caring?

"No one will ever win the battle of the sexes, because there's too much fraternising with the enemy."

It's also performative because most of these ladies are not actually going to swear off men, because they like sex, attention, and validation.

One of the snarkiest and meanest comments under a "I am going 4B" post was - "If you were capable of keeping your legs closed, abortion would not be your top 1 issue", so it doesn't seem that people are bullish on 4B taking traction in the US. I guess you need a whole generation to pass for a culture that values promiscuity less to emerge.

It only works because the counterargument is less catchy than the quip and therefore loses according to Twitter debate rules. I don't think the women who are threatening 4B want, or claim to want, to "keep their legs closed", everything else being equal; their argument is instead that because of lack of abortion access, they can't open their legs safely, and therefore they will abstain from it, to their own detriment and the detriment of other beneficiaries of them opening their legs (men who want to have sex).

Compare something like "if you ban airbags, I will refuse to ride cars". Is it not obvious that "if you were capable of leaving your car keys in the drawer, airbags would not be your top 1 issue" would be a nonsensical retort?

No, but "if you were able to drive sober airbags wouldn't be a top issue" still works as a non nonsensical retort.

If you remove the reckless drivers from the road the value of car safety features goes down substantially

"If you were capable of keeping your legs closed, abortion would not be your top 1 issue"

This is a good line, but it fails the ideological turing test.

An interesting dynamic is that some of the strongest advocates for abortion access are women who have never and would never get an abortion. The view, which I do find at least somewhat sympathetic, is that it's necessary to maintain access as a bodily autonomy measure. This becomes particularly significant in the case of conceptions due to rape, which are indeed rare, and most everyone agrees are deeply tragic and awful.

It's precisely the fact that many of these people believe abortion is rare that they believe it's necessary to preserve access to it. "Abortion is so rare, and only used in tragic cases: why are you insistent on banning something to save 30 lives, even if we assume you're right about fetal personhood? Are you just trying to control women?" Actual knowledge on the frequency, stated reasons, and racial statistics of abortion is often rare among young white women like the people who are leaning into 4B.

some of the strongest advocates for gun rights are men who have never and would never [intentionally put themselves in a position to need to] fire shots in anger

The abortion rights debate is literally just a mirror of the gun rights one (especially if you accept the progressive framing that "nobody deserves to die by someone defending themselves over property, because all fetuses criminals are conceived? born innocent and literally couldn't help but being a burden on society"- complete with 'future lawyer or doctor' applying word for word).

Are you just trying to control women?

Are the motives for gun control initiatives primarily conducted with the end goal of controlling men?
They're certainly couched in "protecting innocent children from evil men is worth the violence risk", and so the abortion initiatives have learned to take the same tack (protecting innocent children from evil women is worth the rape risk).

It’s mostly that low time preference and intelligence are both correlated with each other and almost certainly linked to neuroticism. Affluent PMC women may rarely get abortions, but they probably worry about possibly needing one more than those who actually get them at higher rates.

Japan has the same problem and there is no real 4B movement there.

Korea is uniquely bad and in the running for worst in the world along with various city-states and crowded island nations. Korea is in a whole different league from any actual country with an actual landmass.

Japan's current TFR is on the low side but in line with the rate of other developed nations with stagnant economies, such as Spain, Italy, Canada, etc. They are just noted for being the first to experience serious population decline, since their TFR has been in the dumps before other countries caught up.

My actual real IRL girlfriend did in fact break up with me over the election. No idea if she swore off men as a whole (probably not tbh). Social media is real. Online meltdowns are real.

I'm reminded of all those species of animal that for whatever reason don't breed in captivity. Some natural impulse or function is being blocked.

How did she find out? Did you tell her outright? I'm sorry either way.

Sigma some very small number of genuinely mentally ill crazies

Pun not intended?

I might as well reply to your other comment here: I think part of why the 4B Movement has any legs at all in Korea is precisely because the expected "life script" of modern Koreans has become a crushing, zombified shit-show of a rat race for everyone, not just the women (as the men are similarly polarized). The culture war aspect is an unintended veil over the actual rebellion against the establishment, in my eyes.

I’m utterly baffled; what could “sigma” possibly mean in this context? Usually “epsilon” is the mathematician’s Greek letter of choice to denote very small quantities.

"Notwithstanding", but I've never seen "sigma" used to mean that. Sometimes "modulo" is.

"The sum of"?

Conspicuously missing from the article is how many korean women do participate in that movement.

The descriptions of 4B make it sound a lot like MGTOW. I don’t know a ton about either, but I remember Men Going Their Own Way as a neighborhood of the broader manosphere, when the blogosphere was more of a going concern. It was generally made up of men who had been burned hard.

I also don’t know if the causes are similar – men mostly seem to come to MGTOW when they are looking to explain and contextualize bitter personal experiences. Is 4B an actual backlash in the West, or is it just that some journalists want to cultivate a backlash? When women join in South Korea, are they operating from painful personal experiences, or are they reacting to a consensus that tells them that any self-respecting woman in their situation should be bitter?

MGTOW had two categories. Men who had genuinely been burned hard by women (eg divorce rape, abuse etc) and younger incel types that were being more performative. The first group were genuinely happy(er) being alone, in the same way I've seen middle aged women be happier being alone after getting out of a bad marriage. The second group is a bit like this US based 4B crowd.

I'm betting the US 4B movement has a big overlap with things like: being physically unattractive, being overweight, claiming 'Feminist' as an identity, watching Korean Dramas, listening to K-Pop, being young, being college educated, being a Harris supporter (duh) and being 'very online'. I suspect that this is just post-election histrionics and will quickly be forgotten as bad orange man doesn't start goose-stepping his way to push a federal anti-abortion law.

I was in Korea some 20 years ago, and the situation for women there really is pretty shit. It's still very patriarchal and traditional (maybe less so now than then, but still very much more so than the West). They aren't anywhere near Islamic levels of oppression, but I heard from a lot of women even before the 4B movement spread that marriage was widely seen as something that women just have to suffer if they ever want a life (and children). They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them, they do not expect sex to be enjoyable, and they are expected to be essentially maidservants for their husbands' families. (There is an entire genre of Korean horror movies about evil mother-in-laws.)

Of course there are exceptions, and they all look at fairy tale romances as an ideal, but it seems like very few of them actually expect this to be the reality.

Related: I went to a college with a high Asian student population, also around 20 years ago, and there was a long-simmering argument over the issue of Asian women dating white men (at a much higher rate than Asian men dated white women). The Asian women were most likely to defend this choice with some variant of "you don't own us", but if pressed or in a spicy mood they would also point out that white men almost never expect a 10/10 submissive housewife, or have a mother who expects a servile daughter-in-law, whereas a non-trivial percentage of Asian men do.

They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them, they do not expect sex to be enjoyable, and they are expected to be essentially maidservants for their husbands' families. (There is an entire genre of Korean horror movies about evil mother-in-laws.)

This seems common with pagan cultures. Like we knock on Islam for its(tbh, pretty repressive) treatment of women, but Islamic religion does tell husbands to take their wives' wants and needs into account and care for them. Scott just reviewed a book all about how early Christianity spread by telling women that it would make their husbands love them. And a pretty good chunk of the republican fertility advantage in the US comes from telling young women that socially conservative values will make men love them and treat them better(there's an entire genre of country music about loving on women who are babycrazy and have strong family values and how they're worth holding off on sex for and cutting back on drinking to reasonable levels and all that).

You don't have to deny women opportunities on a societal level to make their lives suck. Women are not the same as men, you can totally set up society to make it so they get the short end of the stick in hundreds of little ways.

they do not expect sex to be enjoyable

I doubt that. Pagans have written books and created monuments to enjoyable sex.

essentially maidservants for their husbands' families

Nuclear families are the primary cause for this going away. England was admittedly the earliest nuclear society, and avoided this problem all together.

It's an underdiscussed aspect of single-core mega-urban countries like SK. More than half the country lives within commute distance of Seoul. So you can't build physical distance between you and the in-laws. Being a larger and distributed country helps mitigate this problem.

They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them

Can't compare across different historic economic settings. But, women must be given opportunities. Opportunities to work, to choose their spouse, to leave their spouse, to choose a profession.

The descriptions of 4B make it sound a lot like MGTOW.

This is a very good point.

When women join in South Korea, are they operating from painful personal experiences, or are they reacting to a consensus that tells them that any self-respecting woman in their situation should be bitter?

It's probably a little of the former mixed with a lot of the latter. The best insight I've had into Korean gender norms came from this AAQC, which I've added to the OP. Almost anyone who dates will encounter heartbreak at some point. That, mixed with a media environment that aggressively highlights every instance of male misbehavior like men murdering their partners, could easily lead to the belief that men as a group are terrible overall.

Korean journalists - especially ones who know enough English to write for foreign journals like CNN and the NYT - are largely drawn from those upper-class women who went through college in the humanities and were radicalized on third-wave feminism.

Korean friend points out, Korean journalists frequently cite foreign (CNN, NYT, etc) articles about Korean gender wars to assert that these things are real, without thinking about the filter effect and the fact that the foreign journalists' friends are all upper-class English-speaking Koreans (i.e. filtered for feminists).

The resemblance to urban Indians is uncanny. Almost beat for beat.

  • Dads worked insanely hard to give kids a good life. Absent from home.
  • Moms over worked at home and ignored. Kids perceive dad as evil.
  • Women enter workforce en masse and start outperforming men because of affirmative action and strong preference for women in schooling.
  • Cities are bonkers expensive (Mumbai is more expensive per-sqft than SF)
  • Women enter liberal arts, and import western 3rd wave feminism whole sale
  • These women run all western MSM-aligned and portray men as trash
  • Indian men say fuck-this and live with their bros. Women ain't shit.
  • Eventually, 30+ men are married off to 30+ women in arranged marriages. Both lack co-ed socialization and have knee-jerk dislike for the other.
  • Divorce rates go through the roof.... (we are here right now)

Thankfully, there are a few main differences:

  • India is still poor. So wages haven't stagnated. There is still hope among men that their lives can be better than their parents. Optimism keeps defeatist incel-adjacent ideas sweeping the culture. (still, lots of Indian incels)
  • Indians are more outspoken. The culture is not as suffocatingly conformist as East Asia.
  • New cities are being built. So, while Delhi & Mumbai have become unaffordable, couples are moving to Hyd, Bangalore, Gurgaon, etc.
  • The majority is still rural. So, 3rd wave feminists haven't been able to quite takeover the culture like SK.
  • Lastly, other Indians speak English too. So, the voices of dissent are just as loud, even if western MSM won't platform them.

(Note: I am talking about upper middle class urban culture. Rural & Poor India is a very different world)

It seems like arranged marriage is another big difference, yes? From my understanding arranged marriages still exist in Japan but are uncommon, while they’re very rare in South Korea and the sinosphere.

4B going viral on tiktok, with long-term staying power, would put the nail in the coffin for me that the app is actively designed to destabilize and undermine the United States and its culture.

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