“How desire is a thing I might die for.”— Leila Chatti, After Touching You, I Think of Narcissus Drowning

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Desire is a zugzwang. In chess, the term derives from the German “compulsion to move” and describes a scenario where a player can only worsen their position by making a move, yet must move. There is no position you can occupy without loss. For some women, acting on desire is no longer worth the toll. Movements such as 4B (a movement originating in South Korea in which women collectively abstain from heterosexual sex, dating, marriage, and childbirth) have risen in response, as desire is increasingly understood as a liability. But is the solution to boycott desire entirely?

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The 4B movement could be seen as an extension of other forms of self-denial women are conditioned to enact, such as the restriction of food, speech, or agency. However, to believe that this self-denial is the most liberatory choice available reflects the exhaustion that fuels such an ethos. When you have already denied yourself so much, one more denial may barely register as a loss. To choose it of your own volition may feel like the only form of agency available.

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The denial of appetite may be a rehearsal for the greater sacrifices down the line. The use of Ozempic and other GLP-1s has become widespread among women in the US, with roughly one in five reporting prior use for weight loss or the treatment of a chronic condition. These drugs subdue the appetite and, in some cases, other desires alongside it, with some users experiencing anhedonia, a diminished capacity for pleasure. The 4B movement elicits the same suppression under a diametrically opposed rationale: GLP-1s suppress desire in conformity with cultural expectations, 4B suppresses it in defiance of them.

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Women producing “decentering men” content on social media are regularly condemned for falling in love, with many of their followers claiming that one cannot truly “decenter men” while loving one. However much these creators’ points may resonate, they cannot express any desire
for romantic love, lest it be interpreted as a sign of weakness, stupidity. The options for many remain, then, to be alone and project an aura of perfect contentment, or fall in love and be flamed for their hypocrisy. There is no position that does not require self-erasure.

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Every romantic encounter is a confrontation with the appetite. To satisfy desire is to consume and to consume is to destroy. One is either consumed or consuming, and certain subjects are conditioned to be self-sacrificial. For some, this cultural script may become so deeply
internalized that it saturates their own desires.

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Histoire d’O (Story of O), the infamous novel written initially as a series of love letters, follows O, a Parisian fashion photographer, and her total submission, first to her lover René, and later to Sir Stephen. O revels in her own erasure, experiencing genuine transcendence through her submission. The reader never learns “O”’s name and perhaps this is the point: an O is an empty circle, containing nothing. This is her fate, to relinquish her personhood in the process of becoming the ideal object of desire. Even after she fulfills her lover’s every demand, including being branded, she is abandoned. In one ending of the novel, she is granted permission to commit suicide once her lover no longer desires anything from her at all.

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Desire, Kojève writes, gives rise to action and that action satisfies only through negation: the desired object must be destroyed or otherwise transformed. Hunger, he writes, is satisfied only by the destruction of food. Desire, then, does not aim at preservation but at annihilation. If I want to be desired, does it follow, then, that I want to be destroyed, consumed, eaten? If I desire you, does it follow, then, that I want to destroy you? True symmetry would be mutual annihilation. Anne Carson writes: “Eros is an issue of boundaries. [...] [I]t is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.” She later adds: “Union would be annihilating.”

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If I desire a union that is annihilating, then what I truly want is annihilation. For Bataille, this is the only logical conclusion: I want to die as an independent being and merge with the object of my affection. I want to die without dying. Or kill without killing. Bataille writes: “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.” He continues, “What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain.” We are discontinuous beings, separate and mortal, and to desire to breach that separateness is to desire one’s own dissolution. The continuity Bataille describes is consummated through destruction.

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The capacity for romantic sacrifice is constitutive of feminine identity under prevailing social conditions. Women become women through the practice of sacrificing themselves for love and this may entail different degrees of violence and danger. This framework produces feminine subjects who may not be able to experience themselves as complete without such martyrdom. Though this self-sacrifice may be a result of an internalized cultural script, the pleasure and transcendence women may experience from its enactment cannot be discounted. It is not enough
to say, this is not what women “truly” desire. Many women may experience genuine fulfillment or relief from their own self-erasure.

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Their fulfillment is real because the cultural narrative it draws on is not external to the self but constitutive of it. Power is not internalized after the fact; it is, Judith Butler argues in The Psychic Life of Power, the very condition through which we become subjects at all. There is no preexisting self that is later shaped by power; the self is, from its conception, constituted by the social domain in which it occurs.

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To become a woman under these conditions is to be defined by norms that simultaneously grant identity and demand subordination. One need not search for long on social media to find content that encourages women to erase themselves in order to increase their desirability: be nothing and you become the ideal object of desire. O is the culmination of such a script, a woman who forgets her self so completely that her lovers desire becomes a proxy for her own.

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As GLP-1 use becomes widespread, women participate willingly in the erasure of their desire, and may even experience this erasure as a kind of relief. That said, erasure is rarely its own end. For many women, it is a kind of offering made in pursuit of the fulfillment this script promises, becoming who they “really” are. The diet industry has long sold this fantasy: suppress your. appetite and become who you were meant to be all along. Surrender your appetite and you can finally have it all.
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Sacrifice is a key feature of how women are formed and defined as subjects capable of love. Bataille writes that both religious sacrifice and the act of love strip a creature of its identity and initiate it into the infinite nature of sacred things. Through sacrifice women are both erased and consecrated, but consecration is not the same as personhood. In the romantic encounter, one is not simply devoted to their lover as a pseudo-deity but offered as a sacrificial object. Neither position permits full humanity: the deity is elevated beyond human limitation, the sacrifice is
reduced to a consumable object.

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Bataille proclaims “a kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.” To him, the parallel is clear: the erotic impulse and the cannibalistic one share an aim. Both seek to sever the boundary between self and other through consumption, to incorporate the desired one into oneself. Romantic desire can then be understood as a sublimated cannibalism in which the urge to consume the beloved extends beyond their flesh into their time, which is to say their life. Someone must eat; someone must be eaten. Movements like 4B are, in essence, a refusal to be eaten, even if that means starving yourself. Some may lose their appetite altogether. Romantic consumption is not a transaction between two subjects, but a reproduction of the power relations that formed those subjects in the first place. O offers everything, including her life. This may be what she truly desired.

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Asymmetries in consumption operate on a spectrum. The complete fulfillment of desire, total consumption of the other, would constitute cannibalism, murder, or perhaps suicide, as we see with O. Most relationships never approach this extreme. Instead, one partner contracts their life so the other’s can expand. Even when this negation becomes incorporated into the subjects own desire, as with a woman who freely gives herself over, the danger remains latent. One might argue that this interpretation is excessively pessimistic, that it disregards the genuine reciprocity possible in romantic relationships. This may be true. But if self-sacrifice is constitutive of feminine subjectivity itself, equity at the level of conscious negotiation cannot address the asymmetry that has formed these subjects to begin with.

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For Bataille, desire culminates in dissolution, violent and transgressive. But Butler elucidates the deeper problem: for certain subjects, self-sacrifice is not imposed but constitutive. The feminine subject under these cultural conditions is unable to refuse romantic consumption without refusing
the very terms through which her personhood is furnished. She has been told her self-annihilation is the fullest expression of her capacity for love.

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The fulfillment desire seeks is not opposed to destruction but realized through it. Certain subjects are formed precisely to offer this realization. Movements like 4B are asking the right question: what do you do when desire itself is dangerous? But suppressing desire is its own kind of sacrifice, starving oneself to avoid being eaten. The protest 4B and similar movements enact is not insignificant. To waste away on one’s own terms is not the same as being devoured. That said, the choice remains which loss you accept.

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Even hunger feeds on the flesh that denies it.

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