4B and Me
Sorry, Charlie, not tonight
If you’re not on the right social media at the exact right moment—or if the salient content has been blocked or restricted or simply doesn’t show up on your feed—you might not fully understand what’s really behind the latest right-wing attacks on women’s rights, or why American sperm-producers are suddenly so gung-ho to demote women from full citizenship back to men-owned chattel.
Sure, it started with the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, but how did that single match set the whole country aflame, burning down not only well-established legal precedent, but seemingly all rational thought about women’s purpose and function in the grand scheme of life, liberty, and the pursuit of safety? Does the radical right want to give license to the growing number of rapists and incestuous predators who know in their heart of hearts—and have case-history evidence to prove—that the likelihood they’ll ever be held accountable barely rises above nil?
I think not. I suspect the true cause-effect tide turner against our species’ smarter, stronger fifty percent is the simple fact that women are winning the Battle of the Sexes (cue superhero soundtrack). By not engaging. Literally. And it’s driving the other half right off their port-a-potties.
I’m writing this with the understanding that it's no secret I’ve lived as girl for over seventy years. I’ve already beaten into the ground in this Turtle series the fact that girlness has always felt foreign to my psyche, even though my body did produce ovum, not sperm, in my youth. That single fact is sufficient to classify me as girl, according to those whose corporeal masses produce sperm. I’ve certainly always been treated as woman.
And I get that. Basic biology, which sperm producers (SPs) only acknowledge when it serves their binary/religious purpose.
Gotta wonder how SPs classify those shapely critters who do not in fact produce viable ovum, or any ovum at all. Or the ovum producers (OPs) who cannot lactate. Or the lactaters who can breastfeed without being pregnant. They can’t be non-women because that might give sanction to a third gender, which their pulpit-teers forbid. Hey—what about guys with azoospermia, i.e., penis-wielding non-sperm-producers? Would they be labeled non-men?
Betcha not.
But I digress because azoospermia is too hidden a topic to prompt today’s growing efforts to dehumanize females. For the roots of that scenario, we must needs look to South Korea, home of penis power gone amok.
All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph then a virgin, nurse then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24∕7, baby machine
So he can live out his picket fence dreams
It's not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labor[1]
Back in 2019, OPs in South Korea began a subtle yet ego-ravaging resistance to traditional OP servitude. Even though ovum carriers have been treated as third-class citizens at best for millennium, there comes a point in every forward flow when the have-nots have had it with the anti-evolutionists. In this case, the nonentities looking for a way onto the ladder’s first step didn’t bother to carry signs or brandish weapons. They merely said no.
No dating. No sex. No marriage. No children.[2] In Korean, all those words start with B. Bihon. Bichulsan. Biyeonae. Bisekseu. Hence, the 4B movement.
SPs across southeast Asia chortled. After all, they had their penis, their upper-body musculature, their weapons, their authority. But what they didn’t have five years later was enough offspring to fill first-grade classes in over 150 elementary schools.
Did Korea suffer another airborne virus? A medical terrorist attack of some new concoction that causes azoospermia? Nay, nay—it merely suffered an outbreak of slow-simmering, long-in-coming ovum power.
Of course not all ovum producers have gone 4B. (Nothing’s ever all ovum producers, just like nothing’s ever all sperm producers.) But the chatter between friends coalesced into a pact, which grew into a trend that gave rise to a cause and blossomed into a movement that eventually wafted across SPs’ invisible borders and is slowly slowing population growth rate in various parts of the world.
Including parts of the US. Seems more and more OPs are saying no to men in all the old, familiar way: no dating, no sex, no marriage, no children.
All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph then a virgin, nurse then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24∕7, baby machine
So he can live out his picket fence dreams
It's not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labor
As an OP who has chafed against my own reproductive organs since toddlerhood, I can respect, even somewhat sympathize with the myriad rejected-SPs’ complaints. It’s not fair. What do women want from them, anyway? To paraphrase Bill Sikes in Oliver!: “Of course I love ya! I live with ya, don’t I?”[3]
Yet I must needs stand with my ovum sisters—with apologies. See, I thought it was just me who lived a life of all responsibility, no authority. I didn’t realize so many other pots were burbling over so many other low flames. Nothing I saw, read, or heard had clued me to the universality of my non-comfort as girl in relationship with boy, much less as non-girl in relationship with boy.
Does that mean I’m no longer transgender? Nay, nay. New knowledge about one facet of my essence doth not erase all previously acquired data. Yet another difference between religion-dominated existence and scientific (aka rational) life, this one’s called “growth,” I believe. What a concept, nu?
And while I’ve always known that despite non-understanding or resonating with most of my OP facets, they nevertheless constitute my underlying strengths. My bulldoze nature is unquestioningly vested in girl grit; had I appeared boy, the obstacles woulda been fewer, lower, easier. After all, true power lies in the ability to write your name in the snow with your reproductive organ.
Thanks to my dual nature, I seethed at being treated as girl and raged at how girl was treated. Who knew my OP amigas wrestled the same fury, the same constant, daily exasperations that our foremothers accepted as their daily fare to the point of wearing them as badges of pride?
All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph then a virgin, nurse then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24∕7, baby machine
So he can live out his picket fence dreams
It's not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labor
All my after-Tom-departed daydreams were of sex, not companionship. Satisfaction, not happily ever after. I had a never-ending list of excuses for not seeking someone to replace Tom. I chalked it up to specifics: OPs widowed by my husband’s strain never sought a second mate. They were a hard act to follow, we all said, but for my part, ‘twas more “done my bit for king and country” if’n I’m a-be honest. Some guilt about the relief and freedom. Straight SPs are naught but obligation and anchors in my world—a more typical attitude than I’d have ever imagined.
The further I grow into myself, accepting my boy/non-boy over my girl/non-girl, the happier I am. Calmer. Peaceful. My store of cis-gen hetero compatriots has winnowed from handfuls back in the day to, well… one… since Tom died, with No Dating, No Sex, No Marriage, No Children for fourteen years and counting. I guess if anything, the 4B movement has validated my reaction to the nonsensical query, “But are you living your best life?”
I’m living my own life. All day, every day.
[1] “Labour” by Paris Paloma on the album Cacophony, 2024
[2] Point of order: that’s no heterosexual dating, sex, marriage, child rearing.
[3] Oliver! , the musical, book, music and lyrics by Lionel Bart, directed by Carol Reed, released and distributed by Columbia Pictures in 1972, based on Oliver Twist, a novel by Charles Dickens originally published in serial as The Parish Boy’s Progress from 1837-39.