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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33714 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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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.

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