Women are choosing to remain single

A few years ago I heard about cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and his sister pianist Isata. They were big news in classical music. I soon learned they had five siblings also highly gifted in music. I’ve since seen a video of Isata performing and watched a livestream of Sheku playing with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. A couple years ago I heard about the book House of Music, Raising the Kanneh-Masons written by their mother Kadiatu. Since it was published in Britain the word was I had to get it through something like Amazon-UK. Since I avoid Amazon I thought getting the book might have to wait until I visited Britain. But a few months ago I checked Barnes and Noble and found they had it for sale. So I bought. And now I’ve finished reading it. The mother spent hear early years in Sierra Leone, the daughter of local man and a Welsh woman. She was and part of a large extended family. Her father died and her mother brought her and her siblings to England and Wales to be with her parents. The grandparents were supportive of mixed-race children, the rest of England – not so much. She recounts some of the racism she experienced and the effect it had on her. She married Stuart, whose family lives in Antigua. Both are reasonably proficient in music. And their seven children are all prodigies. Isata, the oldest, wrote and performed a piano concerto by the age of twelve. Sheku won a prestigious young talent competition at sixteen and was invited to play at Harry and Meghan’s wedding. The mother wrote about recognizing her childrens’ talent and then doing all the family could to nurture and train it properly. The family was not rich and paying for all those lessons, including weekly train trips from Nottingham to London, and keeping the children supplied with good quality instruments that matched their size and talent was difficult. They were amazed with how generous people could be with time and resources. Music became a secret language between the siblings. They practiced together and offered each other suggestions on how to improve. They seemed to mind-read what the others were about to do. They were also quite talented at improvising – one could start a tune and others would add harmony and suggest new melodic ideas the others would take up. When Isata and Sheku are not in front of an orchestra they play duets or add brother Braimah and his violin for a trio. By 2019 the older ones were getting so many concert dates Mom couldn’t attend them all. The book ends with their experience with the COVID shutdown and seven creative people stuck in one house. I quite enjoyed the book. Of course, I quite enjoy classical music. Since the nasty guy won the election the 4B movement from Korea is trending in the US, as tonyahky of the Daily Kos community discussed. The movement is in response to the...

rampant sexism, abuse, and exploitation of women in that country. The term 4B stands for the four Korean words bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae and bisekseu, or the four “no’s” --no marriage, no childbearing, no dating or sex with men.

It’s not new as more women are choosing to remain single or staying single after divorce.

Only 38% of single women vs 61% of single men are interested in dating at all. And the reason more women want to remain single is because of the toxic behavior of large numbers of men, especially on dating apps.

Those numbers look quite unbalanced. In the US high levels of women experience rape or severe physical violence. Add to that women are less likely to have access to an abortion or be treated as a criminal if they do and add the possibility of birth control made illegal. And many women want to get their tubes tied (and do it soon while it is still legal).

Unfortunately, most white men in this country voted Republican, showing they have little to no respect for the women of this country at all, along with 53% of white women (who show they have no respect for themselves.) In a country like this, 4B may represent the only way many single women will be able to live their lives with any measure of peace, safety, health, or freedom.

Morgan Stephens of Kos also looked at the movement

And why are American women taking action? Because in Tuesday’s election, a majority of Gen Z men, or "podcast bros," cast their votes for Trump—a man whose handpicked conservative Supreme Court majority stacked the deck against women’s rights and overturned Roe v. Wade. The president-elect is also a textbook misogynist who used sexist language in the weeks leading up to the election when he said he’d “protect” women “whether they like it or not.” He is a serial adulterer who was also found liable for sexual abuse and has been accused of assault by dozens of others—and American women have had enough. With mounting solidarity, they are banding together (with some even shaving their heads in protest so as not to appeal to the male gaze) to adopt the 4B strategy: no more children, no more marriages, no more dating men until women’s rights are restored. Late on Election Day, when it was clear Trump had won his latest bid for president, 26-year-old white nationalist Nick Fuentes posted a short and infuriating statement on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Fuentes, who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, later went on his show “America First” and said to his 113,000 followers, “Hey bitch! We control your bodies. Guess what? Guys win again, okay? Men win again.”

In South Korea government leaders have noted a drop in the birth rate. They’re panicking over the 4B movement. The solution is simple: Give women the same rights and respect as men. While I applaud women asserting their power, there is a downside. I’ve mentioned the term incel, which stands for “involuntary celibate” – a man who women find so obnoxious they won’t date or sleep with him. Incels have been linked to mass violence. Many feel emboldened with the nasty guy’s election. Will women refusing to date all men increase the number and violence of incels? For that, perhaps we as a society should start dealing with the “loneliness epidemic” as Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote about in 2017. Lonely men are more easily radicalized. The threat of incel violence should not be a reason for women to stop their campaign for rights. The description of the 4B movement got me thinking of the play Lysistrata by Aristophanes, first performed in 411 BC. I have not seen a performance. Wikipedia describes the play with:

Lysistrata persuades the women of the warring cities to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace.

Yeah, the idea is old – 2400 years old. A couple cartoons in the comments of a pundit roundup for Kos. One posted by Assigned Male starts with a boy saying Fuentes’ line “Your body, my choice.” A girl argues back, ending with...

The wannabe fascist podcasters who told you that other people’s bodily autonomy was a threat you your masculinity forgot to mention how weak it makes you look.

And exlrrp included a tweet from Jack Peat, “Taliban congratulate Americans for ‘not handing the leadership of their country to a woman.’ Donald Trump signed the deal that paved the way for the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, allowing the Taliban to storm to power.” In a second pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos had a few good quotes. First, Steven Benen of MSNBC discussed what retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter said.

After quoting Benjamin Franklin’s admonition about democracy struggling to survive “too much ignorance,” the retired justice added, “I don’t worry about our losing republican government in the United States because I’m afraid of a foreign invasion. I don’t worry about it because I think there is going to be a coup by the military, as has happened in some of the places. What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough ... some one person will come forward and say, ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’ That is how the Roman republic fell.”

Dworkin implied that Democrats didn’t fix the real problems when they had the majority. Stephen Waldman of Politico Magazine discussed polling and suggested one area pollsters didn’t ask about – where did they get their news? Down in the comments Mr. Race Bannon proposed a new map of Canada that includes the US states that voted for Biden (though they left out Illinois, Colorado, and New Mexico). In a third pundit roundup Dworkin had some good quotes. From Andy Beshear, Democratic governor of Kentucky

Yes, there are a lot of big, important issues facing our country, but when families are struggling in these core areas, it’s hard to focus on or reach anything else. If you are staring at the cost of your child’s prescription and wondering how you are going to pay for both it and your family’s dinner, the offense of the day in Washington, D.C. or the latest crazy thing a politician said just isn’t as important.

Dworkin added:

I am reminded of Bertolt Brecht in The Threepenny Opera: Food comes first, then morals.

I’ll summarize a quote from Nicholas Grossman of Arc Digital. Authoritarians want you to quit. Do not accept this is over. Other authoritarian regimes have fallen. This situation is bigger than you. Do something you can control, like rake your neighbor’s leaves. Down in the comments, as a commentary on a meme, exlrrp wrote “The American ‘Justice system’ is broken. Couldn’t put a convicted criminal in jail.” The meme has a picture of AG Merrick Garland and quotes Tristan Snell, former New York Assistant Attorney General:

Our prosecutors completely failed us. They had 4 years to enforce the laws against Trump, and they delayed, and they hesitated, and they were too cautious, and they finally went after him – but it was too little, too late. History will judge them, if there is any history left!

It was too late because the nasty guy was able to delay various proceedings until he was back in power and could dismiss them. A meme posted by exlrrp shows women in red hats working in a garden and says

With Trump’s plan to deport millions of migrants, MAGA cult members can now realized their childhood dreams of spending summers working the fields from dawn to dusk in the scorching heat with few breaks.

And another quotes Senator Sheldon Whitehouse:

The creepy billionaires who put him there will be coming for plunder. It’s a safe bet that epic corruption will stain the Trump years. The plunder of America will be through fat contracts, special interest favors, massive tax cuts, and license to pollute for free. To pull off their plunder, they will try to break America’s democratic institutions. So the fight will not be just against the inevitable individual acts of thievery, but against the degradation of whatever American institutions might stand in the way of their plundering.

David Hayward posted a cartoon of a sinking Capitol building pulling down a church. When the church ties itself to the state the state can pull down the church. And the church can pull down the state. Dr. MacLeod Cartoons posted one that says, “It’s hard to be a political cartoonist when you can’t bear to watch the news.” In one more pundit roundup, this one from just before the election, Chitown Kev included a three minute clip of Harris appearing on Saturday Night Live with the woman who plays her on the show.