MAGA Has a Penis Obsession. 4B Feminism Is a Logical Response

Men have been explaining things to me. They have explained that Donald Trump’s win wasn’t about gender—about America not being ready for a woman president; about people not caring whether all Americans can enjoy equal bodily autonomy—or about race, but instead that it was about the economy. They have explained that it was about elite condescension, a wokeness backlash, that Democrats have made a major miscalculation in siloing certain commentators and platforms. Harris, for instance, should have gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast, wrote Ezra Klein. Bernie did it! Trump gave Rogan three hours of his time, in his studio, and Rogan rewarded him with an endorsement.

Maybe that’s right. Maybe Harris should have acceded to Rogan’s condition. Maybe Harris, a Black woman who is the sitting vice president, should have traveled to the Austin podcasting studio of a white man who considers it his bailiwick to discuss the merits of famous women’s “pussies.” (Incidentally, Rogan in 2022 told fellow white guy Jordan Peterson that he thought the term “Black” should be reserved for “someone who is 100% African, from the darkest place,” and over the span of 12 years deployed the N-word at least 20 times on air. He later apologized, clarifying that he’s “not racist.”)

There were, inarguably, major flaws in a Democratic campaign that, among other problems, anointed a presidential candidate a mere 107 days before the election—and in a party that has had issues with its messaging for years. But perhaps, as others have pointed out, the outcome of the election wasn’t just about the economy, wasn’t just about gender, but that illusive third thing—their inherent interconnectedness.

It’s hard to argue that gender didn’t affect the results of the election when, in its aftermath, men have been making “jokes” about sexually assaulting liberals. Nick Fuentes, the 26-year-old white nationalist, former YouTuber, and onetime Trump dinner companion, went on a particularly unhinged rant. “Hey bitch, we control your bodies,” he said, pausing to cackle. “Your body, our choice.” One source received a digitally created image of Trump anally raping Harris with the caption “Daddy’s Home.” Another circulated GIF depicts an anatomical drawing of a penis becoming erect, overlaid with the image of an eagle, which ejaculates stars from the American flag. No doubt there are people who’ve shared such imagery who would say they voted for gas prices.

We know the GOP, and the MAGA movement in particular, to be obsessed with penises and testicles. In 2022, following the release of the redacted affidavit the FBI used to obtain a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump Jr. posted an image of his father on the golf course, grasping his belt buckle, with a long black bar added from his crotch to his knees. “Redact this!!!” Trump Jr. wrote. This year, he weighed in on X and Instagram about Biden having reportedly joked that the key to his marriage was “good sex”: “There’s literally no amount of Viagra on earth that’s going to give Joe Biden…wood.” Trump himself seems equally fascinated by penis size—his own and others. Back in 2016, after his Republican primary opponent Marco Rubio said that he had small hands (“And you know what they say about men with small hands? You can’t trust them”), Trump attempted to assure voters that there was “no problem” with the size of any part of his anatomy, hands or otherwise. He has talked about deceased golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis (drawing a rebuke from one of Palmer’s daughters). Days before the election, after melting down about a “too low” microphone stand, Trump mimed giving it oral sex.

A company called MAGA Nuts sells branded “trump nutz,” a.k.a. rubber scrotums that dangle from a truck’s trailer hitch—the company suggests that customers hang them other places, including strollers. Trump backer Elon Musk has been locked for years in a rocket battle with Jeff Bezos to see who can out-penis each other in space. (Space: Olivia Rodrigo’s ultimate red flag—cosigned by Grimes, with whom Musk fathered three children.) In 2022, Tucker Carlson paused from spreading racist and antisemitic “replacement theory” rhetoric to promote red-light testicle tanning in his documentary special, The End of Men.

Lately, beef testicle supplements have flooded the market, with apparently unregulated marketing copy that ranges from promises to boost libido and virility, to MAGA-coded messaging that they’ll “make men great again”—perhaps in response to a perception, perpetuated by Carlson and others, of a widespread decline in testosterone levels. (RFK Jr. has credited his muscles with testosterone replacement therapy.) Pieter Cohen, an internist at Cambridge Health Alliance and associate professor at Harvard Medical School who specializes in dietary health supplements, pinpoints the rise in anxiety about low testosterone to “10, 15, 20 years ago, whenever testosterone got some of its more general approvals,” he says. “Some pharmaceutical companies realized that they could profit greatly from selling it.” These days, in his practice, male patients frequently arrive requesting that he test their levels—it’s a concern that transcends one political party, he believes, and “definitely seems like a very active conversation today.” What he can say for sure: “I’ve never heard of a reason why anyone needs to add beef testicle to their diet to improve their health.” Like the pharma companies before them, the supplement manufacturers are merely “brilliant from a sales perspective.”

(Women’s issues are hardly immune to this kind of mythologizing, but when Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop marketed its vagina jade egg to regulate hormones, among other claims, it ended up paying $145,000 in civil penalties as part of a settlement agreement with a California task force.)

All of which might explain why, in the days after the election, the 4B movement began trending on TikTok. Its proponents refuse to have sex with, date, marry, or bear children for men. The fringe political protest started in South Korea in the 2010s as resistance against a patriarchal system and gender-based violence, and over the last week women stateside have posted videos saying that they’re joining the cause: they’re breaking up with their Republican boyfriends, they’re shaving their heads to protest mainstream beauty standards..

I have spoken to and read arguments by people who say that the 4B women are like the rape shitposters, that both groups are just online extremists contributing to increased polarization. In the case of the 4B women, the argument goes, their demonization of men ends up hurting their own cause: here is more loony behavior from the snowflake libs.

Let’s not get into the reality that, in this country, one in five women has experienced completed or attempted rape in her lifetime, or that Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy complications than white women. Let’s ignore the 13-year-old girl who became pregnant after she was raped, but who was not legally able to get an abortion. Let’s not think about the Texas women who died after being denied treatment for miscarriages of desired pregnancies. Let’s set feelings aside.

Let’s just talk facts about sex, and about money. In 13 states, abortion is banned without exceptions; eight more ban abortion at or before 18 weeks. Both abortion-rights and antiabortion activists agree: It is within Trump’s power to override state abortion protections. Despite enormous strides toward equality made since the 1980s, the closing of the gender wage gap has slowed in recent decades: In 2002, women made 80 cents for every dollar made by men; in 2022, women made 82 cents. According to the Pew Research Center, the wage gap widens most significantly during the years when women are most likely to have children under the age of 18.

It is increasingly difficult to terminate a pregnancy, and raising a child is an expensive endeavor. Why is the fact that, in a world driven by capital, a small portion of women saying that they’ve decided not to have sex with men—I’m talking about the idea of 4B—seen as a threat to masculinity, rather than a sound economic decision?

Another option, as Tressie McMillan Cottom has pointed out, is to marry a man who will put economic decisions above all else.

Fifth-century Athens was also enamored of the penis. Phalluses were all over the place: painted on ceremonial jugs, used as stage props. Sometimes they had wings. They were a source of comedy, a symbol of fertility, a warding away of evil. The concept of “phallocracy,” writes the scholar Eva C. Keuls, “denotes a successful claim by a male elite to general power, buttressed by a display of the phallus less as an organ of union or of mutual pleasure than as a kind of weapon: a spear or war club, and a scepter of sovereignty.”

From the Greek context sprung Aristophanes’ Lysistrata—perhaps the urtext of female sexual protest, though not a particularly feminist story—a comedy, first performed in 411 BC (by a likely all-male cast), wherein the women of the warring Greek city-states of Athens of Sparta form a pact not to have sex with the men until they reach a truce.

North Miami’s CAMP Gallery founder Melanie Prapopoulos chose Lysistrata, and Spike Lee’s modern adaptation of the play Chi-Raq (2015), as the jumping-off point for this year’s annual fiber arts show, dubbed “We Got The Power.” The work of more than seventy women artists, as well as one man and two nonbinary artists, fills the gallery space as a frieze that snakes through the newly pink-painted gallery. “The whole thing about the fiber show—it’s anti-patriarchal,” Prapopoulos told the Miami Herald in an article published the day after the election. “It’s women responding to institutions, the business establishments that are all male-centered.”

Prapopoulos started conceptualizing the show more than a year ago: she had in mind, she says, “Ukraine and Israel and Russia and Palestine,” and the idea grew from there. In reading about the rise of 4B, “For a moment, I was like, oh my God, I’m super psychic,” she says to me, this week. “But then I was like, no, Melanie. It’s just a predictable world.”