Guillotine: You should keep your unplanned pregnancy and take it to Spoons

In Anglo-American culture, the figure of the mother is entirely inseparable from the image of the martyr. The Good Mother completes her divine Duty. The considerate Mother, who keeps herself indoors with the crying baby, sequesters herself from the world, martyrs herself for the cause of everyone else’s convenience. Life has imitated and imitated and imitated art. You can feel them, if you think about it for long enough; the countless eyes of the marian pietas, weeping and weeping and weeping in perfect, tragic, motherhood. They’re watching you because they know you’re going​ to become one of them.

 

And you will. Because you do want kids, really. Or, at least, you don’t want to not have kids.

 

And once the bun has clawed its way out of the oven (you), and torn the oven’s rectum (your rectum), and fed upon the calcium in the ovens’ bones (the metaphor does not need further elaborating), someone should probably take time off to take care of it. And you, for a career, wanted to write books about intersectional poetry.

 

And your boyfriend wanted to be an investment banker.

 

So realistically, its going to be you.

 

You, too, locked indoors, the perfect image of goodness and sorrow, you lucky bitch. You can work your fingers to the bone and suffer. Domestic labour is a tricky term; is it love or obligation that keeps you on your feet, washing the dishes, cooking dinner? It doesn’t really matter, not least to your family. They will say ‘you’re the real hero of this family’, they will say ‘you do so much for us.’ They will say that you are ‘selfless’ and ‘self-sacrificing’, with the exact same intonation that they say  ‘I love you.’ They will not recognise that those two terms aren’t the same thing, and neither will you.

 

 

No more, I say.

 

In Anglo-American culture, the figure of the mother is entirely indivisible from the figure of the martyr. This much is true, indivisibly.

 

But luckily for all Isis readers, this writer is not Anglo-American.

 

And therefore, I counsel  another solution: have a baby, and be the worst mother ever.

 

The ‘4B’, or ‘Four Nos’ movement, is a radical feminist doctrine. Originating in South Korea, a country with one of the strongest gender-ideology divides in the world, it tracks its rebellion through a strict line of abstention. The premise is simple: much of society’s continued survival is dependent on silent, unseen female labour. Many societies fail to treat women well, to gratify this labour with kindness, or gratitude, or dignity. So, for followers of the 4B movement, the most effective form of protest is refusal. They abstain from the following:

 

Sex with men
Giving birth
Dating men
Marriage with men

 

Effective? Maybe. Controversial? Definitely. Dogmatic? Too much so for my taste. It’s 2025; almost everything on the internet is AI, barely any content we interact with is real, and absolutely none of it takes itself seriously. Like my 3rd-wave-feminist foremothers, I am proposing a watering down of these beliefs and practices, in order to spread them to a wider audience. This is to say; I propose a rewrite of the 4B movement, for the less-than-principled, not-entirely-conscientious-objector.

 

The amendments run as follows: you can do all of the acts outlawed by the 4B movement, but you have to do a really awful job at all of them.

 

1. Have sex with whoever you like (but make sure that nobody enjoys it).

 

In Brechtian theory, it is unethical to allow the audience to ‘lose themselves’ in the enjoyment of fiction; as Cesar A. Cruz famously wrote, ‘great art should disturb the comforted.’ In this new ideology, the same goes for sex. It is to be a primarily political act; so nobody can have any fun. There are a few ways to achieve this: bring a large tub of broth, and slurp it throughout. Play those weird ‘female rage’ TikTok edits aloud, on your phone, the whole time, try out a German accent, point out every weird mole on your partner’s body. Consider implying that said moles are cancerous.

 

2. Give Birth (at a terrible time)

 

You have officially read it here first. It’s time to have a baby, without considering the consequences, at all. Consume too much content made by vaguely exploitative Instagram momfluencers. Develop crippling baby fever. DO NOT, at any point, consider the implications of having a whole human being dependent on you, for the rest of its life. Have the baby, during prelims if possible, in Exam Schools. Take it with you to Spoons, and then Bridge, and then your 9am tute the morning after. Bring it to the Rad Cam, and let it scream. Let yourself scream, too.

 

3. Date whoever you want (or who will date you).

 

This is pretty self explanatory, because you are already terrible company. Turn that insufferability into something ideological. Do a Despicable Me Gru impression the whole time. Yell ‘cowabunga!’ before leaning in for a kiss.

 

4. Marry every single man

 

I keep getting recommended weird, AI Generated Linkedin posts about how divorce is ruining the country. They normally talk about falling birth rates, or child support. They normally centre the experience of some nobly suffering man who accidentally happened to marry a woman who was, in fact, not a good dutiful wife, but a barren, haggard divorce-witch. They are, obviously, bullshit. I have not been divorced (yet), but it seems a lot of trouble to go through for the sake of it; it feels hard to imagine the decision being taken frivolously.

 

Until now!

 

There is no legal limit on the number of divorces that you can have. Meaning, there is no legal limit on the amount of ex-husbands you can have. Which could be fun! Imagine being the bitch ex wife of a whole college! Abstinence may have worked in previous periods, but right now the prevailing strategy is of proliferation.

 

All of this is to say, there has to be a middle path between abstention and self-immolation.

 

If the cultural script insists that women must either be perfect mothers or principled refusers—martyrs or militants—then let’s reject the binary altogether. Let’s take the script, shred it, and feed it to the baby you brought to Spoons. Let’s take the apocalypse-mood of 2025, the AI-mush that passes for public debate, the collapsing birth rates, the think-pieces on ‘traditional values returning,’ the right-wing panic about civilisation crumbling, and offer them a third option: joyful, chaotic noncompliance.

 

Do the things you’re ‘supposed’ to do, but do them wrong on purpose. Do them so badly, and so flamboyantly, that the idea of women as the silent foundation of civilization begins to look as absurd as it actually is. Motherhood has always been mythologised as sacrifice; so sacrifice the myth instead. Date badly, marry recklessly, parent inconveniently, have sex uncinematically. Treat every social expectation with the same level of care you’d treat the menu at a Wetherspoons: glance, shrug, pick whatever feels stupidly funny, and get on with your night. If motherhood is going to be political anyway, make yours a protest.

 

Preferably one with a pitcher of Woo Woo.

 

Words by Evie Power. Image via Marathon.