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The night of the election, when it had become clear Donald Trump was winning the race, a call to action reverberated across the internet. “Ladies, I’m being so fr when I say this, it’s time to close off your wombs to males. this election proves now more than ever that they hate us & hate us proudly. do not reward them,” a viral post on X proclaimed (18 million views and counting). Other social media posts recommended that American women embrace the imperative of the South Korean radical feminist movement 4B, which stipulates no marriage (비혼, bihon), no childbirth (비출산, bichulsan), no dating men (비연애, biyeonae), and no sex with men (비섹스, bisekseu) in protest against widespread misogyny, sexual harassment, and intimate partner violence.
4B took off in 2016, following the brutal murder of a twenty-something woman in Seoul by a 34-year-old man who later explained, “Women have always ignored me.” By 2019, the 4B movement boasted 4,000 members. Supporters are easily recognizable in their all-black clothing and closely-cropped haircuts, a “fuck you” to South Korea’s hyperfeminine beauty standards and government that has responded to the country’s record-low fertility rates by offering women financial incentives to reproduce.
Trump’s reelection has helped spread this sense of crisis to the United States. “I think Trump’s reelection would have given this sense of crisis to minorities,” Lee Min-gyeong, a South Korean feminist author and participant of the 4B movement, told ABS-CBN News. “I think there has been a lot of interest [among women in the US] to join this movement because they must have felt the need for some sort of action to solve this issue by themselves.”
Alongside the rise of far-right parties and figures in the US, Hungary, Brazil, and beyond, the last several years have seen misogyny staged as a return to world order: men “taking back” what was “stolen” from them (as they see it), a veritable attempt to “make America great again” (whatever that means). Inseparable from this logic is the mainstreaming of a horrific, shamelessly candid brand of misogyny. As right-wing influencer Nick Fuentes succinctly put it: “Your body, my choice. Forever.”
This reinvigorated populist sexism—and the double standards it celebrates—has not gone unnoticed by women. In a Survey Center on American Life study, 38 percent of women polled said they weren’t dating because they couldn’t find someone who met their expectations. And far before calls for an election-induced sex strike, some women were already opting for voluntary celibacy, leaving dating apps en masse. A widely circulated meme transposed a cartoon of a curvy woman with flowing black hair or a picture of Monica Bellucci in Malèna with the text, “Becoming disgusted by the bare minimum has saved me from so many losers.” The meme underscores a widespread dissatisfaction with heterosexuality, identified by cultural theorist Asa Seresin as “heteropessimism.”
In the US, women continue to outpace men in education, and 29 percent of marriages feature both men and women as earning roughly the same income; 16 percent of marriages star women as the sole breadwinners. This state of affairs is in direct contrast to the aims of right-wing influencers like Andrew Tate, who has recommended that women “shouldn’t have to work because being a good partner is a full-time job for a woman.” Women, Tate reasons, should be “barbie dolls” who are “always smiling” and grateful— and not “unshaven and exhausted” after a long commute from work. Meanwhile, some women’s dissatisfaction with dating and the new status quo has presented an opportunity for tradwife influencers, who sell women a fever dream of an idyllic lifestyle in the woods (or any landscape with teeming verdure, as the TikTok videos show) in the company of a boyfriend/husband who is—shock! surprise!—committed to the relationship. With this fantastical glorification of matrimonial bliss—the bare minimum of men investing effort in their relationship—it’s no wonder tradwives like Hannah Neeleman and Nara Smith have forsaken independence to bake sourdough bread and raise children on a remote farm or, in Smith’s case, in a home so minimalist it “makes Dallas look like Scandinavia,” as one TikTok user observed.
Since the return of a Trump administration, more women or nonbinary people have sworn off romantic and sexual relations with men. But the stance reflects a dissatisfaction that goes beyond politics—Trump’s election win simply struck the death knell for an institution already in crisis. “It’s a labor strike of emotional, sexual, or any kind of traditional submissive patriarchal expectations,” London Edwards, a 31-year-old in Mississippi, told The I Paper. And as a user on X joked, in a viral post: “‘we have to stop dating and having sex with men’ ah yes. Stop. this is definitely a change to the behavior that i was already doing. this is new for me and very challenging.”
The 4B movement is still a fringe movement in South Korea; time will tell what impact it will have in the United States. Sex strikes have only so far succeeded when concrete political demands are on the table, such as the Iroquois nation vesting women with the power to veto war in the 1600s and women in Colombia disarming a gang war in the early 2000s. Breaking up with your boyfriend who voted Trump is fine, but it’s hardly relevant when 53 percent of white women helped hand Trump the election. For now, the call to boycott men is a symbolic expression of women’s rage at #MAGA’s return to office: a much-needed primal scream.
