The Biggest Winner Is Chastity

7 Thoughts on Post-Election Meltdowns, Jesus, and Toxic Femininity

File: D322 - Les femmes sages lisant Lysistrata.png - Wikimedia Commons

I didn’t fall off the end of the earth! Yesterday I got wrapped up in my girls’ end-of-the-quarter assignments. Who arranged for the end of the quarter to fall in the dying embers of election week? That’s what I’d like to know.

Anyway, rather than disparate and scattered takes today, even though it is Friday, I have one single thought divided into three and then subdivided into seven. That thought is this: I am grieved for the women who felt they had no recourse but to shave their heads in protest of the results of this election, pity for those who have no hope, and a little bit of amusement over those who have reverse engineered chastity as if it is something new that no one ever thought of before.

Being too online, but apparently not online enough, I missed a trend, begun a few years ago, called the 4Bs:

The 4B movement's name centers itself around the four Korean words with the prefix "bi," which translates to "no" in English. Here's what each "B" word stands for:

• Biyeonae: No dating men.

• Bihon: No marrying men.

• Bichulsan: No having children with men.

• Bisekseu: No having sex with men.

Perhaps you have seen, in the last 48 hours, TikToks with a little “4b movement” floating above the head of the person melting down. This is what they’re talking about. Here’s one. Here’s another. Here’s a compilation. And here’s a bonus normal-looking person who nevertheless believes the apocalypse is upon us and that you should run out and buy a lot of birth control and that abortion drug that you can get over the counter. The government, she explains, will track you through the app you use to track your cycle. You might have to move away. It is definitely time to panic.

Back to the subject of the 4Bs, here’s a snippet from WaPo:

While to some, 4B’s tenets might sound radical, to Michaela Thomas, a 21-year-old artist who lives in Georgia, 4B is simply a way to “show people that actions have consequences.” Thomas learned about 4B online a year or so ago, she said, and attributes the recent surge in interest to young men voting for Republican candidates. “Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not be able to have access to abortion. They can’t have both,” she said, referring to many Republican leaders’ antiabortion stance. “Young women don’t want to be intimate with men who don’t fight for women’s rights; it’s showing they don’t respect us,” she added.

Not being very well educated myself, I didn’t know that there is an ancient Greek play by Aristophanes delineating, in substance, this very plan. It’s called Lysistrata and you can check out a summary on Wikipedia if you are as ignorant as I am. A comedic effort, the idea that Athenian and Spartan women, so anxious to bring about the end to a tedious and exhausting war, would somehow be able to deny themselves the pleasures of conjugal unpleasantness in order to persuade their husbands and lovers to stop fighting, seemed ridiculous and absurd to Aristophanes. Hilarity, it seems, ensued. Like many of the TikToks, which are full of profanity along with pathos, this play appears to be replete with lewd jokes and other sorts of innuendo your delicate sensibilities may not prefer. Viewer beware, I imagine.

Anyway, I just labored through the lections appointed for today in the Daily Office, and I have a few thoughts.

First, I say this all the time, so I might as well whisper it again. It is so disappointing how quickly knowledge and wisdom are forgotten. It shouldn’t be disappointing, because it is the estate of all mankind to harden their hearts as they did at the waters of Meribah, though they had seen the Lord’s wrath, and yet I am continually disappointed. If only some of the bad things befalling young women today could have been foreseen. Oh, wait! They were. Picking at random, remember how the Moral Majority in the 80s was thought to be so dumb? How so many people who warned about the slippery slope were laughed away to the fringes of good evangelical society and splained that it was a fallacy? How hysterical they were, blathering on about what cultural ruin might be on the horizon if sexual degeneracy were normalized in every sphere. Tragically, the people who are most disappointed as the weekend looms over us, are young women who have been betrayed by the wisdom of this world, by the vaunted “freedoms” of the sexual revolution. Dear Hearts, having sex with men to whom you are not married, regardless of who they voted for, was never a good idea. Promiscuity is not empowering. It is the opposite of that. It is enfeebling. It is foolish. It is a bad idea. This clever man says it better than I can.

Second, as the youth of the Washington Post so astonishingly observed, actions do have consequences. One consequence of a post-Christian world is the loss of the reasoning mind. It is counterintuitive, of course, but the best way to become clever and wise is to read a lot of the Bible. Not like Kevin M Young of Twitter who can’t seem to work his way out of his theological paper bag reads it. No, you have to believe that God is God and that the Bible is about him. You have to go to the text already accepting who he is. When you do that, your mind can begin to come into proper order, the consequence of which is nice things.

Third, some of those nice things are a family, for sure. But beyond that, the thing you get when you read the Bible in order to discover who God is, is that you discover who God is. And who is God? If you just take the readings for today, for example, you can discover that God is someone who does not stand afar off from you in your troubles. You discover that he robes himself in human flesh, coming to you in the afflictions brought about by sinful rebellion, who takes up your hopeless lament, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me, why are you so far from my cry?” The Psalmist writes the words, and the scene cuts to Jesus, staggering in Gethsemene, imploring the Father not to make him go through the bitter ruin of alienation wrought by human sin, yet not his will but the Father’s. What kind of love is that? What kind of rescue includes enduring all the consequences of rejection and shame in order that we might be saved?

Fourth, the modern young lady unmoored by this election cycle has been nursed and nourished by an anti-culture that never had her best interests in mind. If it was God’s will to go into the depths, to brave not just the shadow of death, but death itself, and emerge victorious, what does that say about suffering in general? At the very least it says that the girl-boss/Mary Sue version of feminity is sorely inadequate for shaping a mind and heart able to deal with reality. If you begin and end by being good, if you never undergo any trial that transforms you into something else, you are a really bad storyteller, especially of your own life.

Fifth, the really shocking thing, and why so many young ladies in particular are melting down, is the brand of masculinity that America elected this week. If you look at Mr. Trump and the assemblage of people gathered around him, he is clearly in charge. He is the one making the decisions, just to state the obvious. But sometimes he talks for a long time. Like in the early dawn when he had won and the stage was full of his family and friends and he was explaining—at length—how great America is going to be now. And many of us watching, for we were all still awake, kept telling the television screen that someone should touch his arm, or get his attention, and remind him that everyone is exhausted and would like to go to bed. And yet no one did. I spent the whole day pondering this detail. How respectfully his entourage stood around him. And not displaying the obsequious posture of those hoping not to be imprisoned and killed by the Dictator Du Jour. It was more like joyful complacency, the triumph of those who have chosen to be led by a particular person, a flawed hero, a man who, in spite of everything, including shame, humiliation, and the fury of a million AWFLS (Affluent White Female Liberals) got his way. It was a bit how I would sit and listen to my grandfather as if he had a right to speak and I did not have the right to interrupt him.

Sixth, the question for our time is, do men have a right to be men, or do they all have to become the sort of men that Ruth Whippman would prefer? Speaking as a woman, I find the kind of masculinity that accepts to be dictated to by a woman grotesque. I hate being patronized. I also hate watching a man being deflated by a woman who presumes to know more about his life and interests than he does himself. We don’t have to go back to the 1950s or the 1850s or the 1250s if we don’t want to. But one thing we should do is stop the scolding, the fake mothering, the idea that women—both corporately and individually—know better than men.

Seventh, and finally, below the line is a short Read the Comments pod for all you generous supporters. Hope you have a great weekend!