Back in 411 BC, the Greek poet and playwright, Aristophanes, wrote Lysistrata, a comedy about a woman who rallies others in a unique plan to end the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. She proposes that all of them deny sex to their husbands and lovers, to force them to negotiate peace.
She says:
By the two Goddesses, now can’t you see
All we have to do is idly sit indoors
With smooth roses powdered on our cheeks,
Our bodies burning naked through the folds
Of shining Amorgos’ silk, and meet the men
With our dear Venus-plats plucked trim and neat.
Their stirring love will rise up furiously,
They’ll beg our arms to open. That’s our time!
We’ll disregard their knocking, beat them off –
And they will soon be rabid for a Peace.
I’m sure of it.
Of course, there is furious debate and the women, so used to being subservient to the men, are fearful of the consequences of this provocative act. What if they are forced, one of the women asks. To which Lysistrata replies:
Yield then, but with a sluggish, cold indifference.
There is no joy to them in sullen mating.
Besides we have other ways to madden them;
They cannot stand up long, and they’ve no delight
Unless we fit their aim with merry succour.
It is not as easy as all that, but in the author’s imagination, anything is possible — the desperate men eventually end the war.
A feminist much before the word was coined, Aristophanes wrote another play, Thesmophoriazusae, in which women angry about the way Euripedes (of Medea and The Trojan Women fame) portrays them in his plays as murderous and sexually depraved, decide to meet at the annual festival of the Thesmophoria to discuss how to get him to stop insulting them in his plays. Happily, they succeed!
In the foreword to his translation of Lysistrata, Jack Lindsay wrote that he thinks it is Aristophanes’s greatest play, “because it holds an intimate perfume of femininity and gives the finest sense of the charm of a cluster of girls, the sweet sense of their chatter, and the contact of their bodies, that is to be found before Shakespeare, because that mocking gaiety we call Aristophanies reaches here its most positive acclamation of life, vitalizing sex with a deep delight, a rare happiness of the spirit.”
The plays were funny, bawdy and timeless — considering they are still being translated and performed somewhere in the world.
These works about the power of women’s unified protest came to mind on coming across stories about the Korean 4B movement that is catching on with women, particularly in the US, now that Donald Trump has returned as President.
South Korea is associated with K-Pop bands, popular K-web shows, skin products and fashion, but it is a deeply patriarchal society, with a long history of the oppression of women. A World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Index, quoted in service95.com, ranked South Korea at number 99 out of 146 countries for gender equality. A January 2023 article in South Korean newspaper The Sisa Times reported that 65% of women in the country do not want children. Some 42% do not want to get married, with over 80% of those citing domestic violence as their key reason.
The drastic drop in birth rate led to the government launching a national pink birth map, visualising the number of women of reproductive age in each district, according to a piece in the conversation.com. It sparked outrage. Women criticised it as reducing them to reproductive tools, proclaiming, “my womb is not national property” and “a woman is not a baby-making machine”. Still, anti-woman legislation continues to be introduced in South Korea and elsewhere.
At some point, a few Korean women decided they had had enough, and the rather stringent 4B Movement was founded. They no longer wanted to fight misogyny, they simply created their own small society without men. 4B is based on four principles: Bihon (no to heterosexual marriage), Bichulsan (no to childbirth), Biyeonae (no to dating), and Bisekseu (no to heterosexual sexual relationships), thus rejecting traditional gender roles.
Once they accept 4B, they no longer conform to male-pleasing beauty standards, have no pressure to be subservient to boyfriends and husbands or put up with domestic abuse. The 4B movement inspired 6B4T, which includes rejecting consumerism and fostering mutual aid among unmarried women.
Gina Cherelus writes in The New York Times, “Searches for ‘4B Movement’ in the United States spiked the day after the election, according to Google Trends. Dozens of videos on the topic have popped up on TikTok in the last 48 hours, with users sharing why they are for or against the movement’s gaining steam in the United States. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Mr Trump’s opposition to abortion, there’s concern that his administration could enact a federal abortion ban. Couple that with the spread of online misogyny, known as the manosphere, and its subset of incel culture, among self-described involuntary celibates who disparage women, there’s increased concern that women’s rights will be further eroded.”
Mariel Padilla reports in PBS.org, “In the United States, there is a growing ideological divide between young men and women: Women aged 18 to 30 are 30% more liberal than men of the same age, according to The Financial Times. Some experts point to the 2018 #MeToo movement as the key trigger in the rise in feminist values among women and the subsequent backlash among young men.”
Of course, there was a backlash to #MeToo and also to 4B. There is the very real possibility of violence against women subscribing to the radical movement; the women are accused of being anti-social or promoting homosexuality. If 4B is still appealing to women in relatively progressive societies, then there is something broken that needs to be mended. Did Aristophanes have the answer in 411 BC?
Deepa Gahlot is a Mumbai-based columnist, critic and author
