Has Trump turned American women off sex? Google search data says ‘yes’

No dating, no sex, no marriage and no babies. Of all the impassioned reactions to Trump’s presidential election, the embrace of South Korea’s controversial “4B” movement – in which women reject any interpersonal contact with men – is probably the most eye-catching.

In the hours following Trump’s victory last week, there was a surge in Google searches in the United States about 4B, according to Google trends.

Many American women are concerned Donald Trump’s victory proves to them that men don’t respect them or their bodily autonomy.Credit: Reuters

The radical feminist movement – which stands for the four pledges that begin with “bi”, meaning “no” – emerged in South Korea in about 2017. It was an enraged response to the stabbing murder of a 23-year-old woman in the public bathroom of Gangnam subway station by a man who said he killed her as revenge for all the women who looked down on him.

Its timing merged with general female outrage over what is dubbed South Korea’s “spy-cam epidemic” – it is common for men to film sexual partners and women using the bathroom, without their consent, with the resulting footage exploited as pornography. 4B also coincided with the emergence of South Korea’s “Escape the Corset” cause, which calls on women to reject toxic beauty standards. Adherents shave their heads and shun plastic surgery and make-up.

But these issues were just the catalysts – despite its affluence and sophistication, South Korean society still has rigidly traditional gender roles.

It has the most highly educated female population in the OECD, but also the largest gender pay gap in the developed world (69 female cents for every male dollar). It has high rates of intimate partner violence despite overall low levels of crime.

While South Korean women are better educated and more likely to work outside the home than ever before, they still overwhelmingly bear the load of domestic labour. Many women fear if they take time off work to have a baby or care for a newborn, they will lose their jobs.

More South Korean women are deciding not to have children because they believe it’s too difficult to do so in a society so profoundly unfriendly to motherhood.Credit: Bloomberg

As the BBC reported in February: “Over the past 50 years, Korea’s economy has developed at breakneck speed, propelling women into higher education and the workforce, and expanding their ambitions, but the roles of wife and mother have not evolved at nearly the same pace.”

These conditions are not just a problem for women – they have created a social and economic crisis. South Korea’s birth rate is the lowest in the world, well below replacement rate. Increasing numbers of young women are deciding not to have children, not because they are 4B adherents or even feminists, but because they logically conclude it is too difficult to have babies in a society so profoundly unfriendly to motherhood, especially working motherhood. Projections show that in 50 years’ time the working age population will have halved.

In 2021, President Yoon Suk Yeol said feminist movements were “blocking healthy relationships” between men and women in South Korea.

Young women conceive of the phenomenon differently – they call it bihon, which translates as “willingly unmarried”.

Bihon is both the inverse of and the answer to the American “incel” (involuntary celibate) movement, populated by men who blame women for their lack of romantic success.

They are two sides of the same, deeply depressing coin, a symptom of the political gender divide between young people, and a product of the mismatch between young women’s eagerness to embrace social change and the inability of many young men to navigate it. Both movements represent a retreat into individualism that is profoundly antisocial.

Following Trump’s victory last week, 4B jumped the Pacific and landed stateside with an emphatic thump.

Gen Z TikTokers leaned heavily into 4B content. One advised women to take self-defence classes, delete all dating apps and have gynaecological check-ups. “Hell,” she said. “Remove your uterus, just to be safe.”

New York magazine published a story titled “Women are suddenly very interested in the 4B movement”, reporting that “following a blatantly misogynistic” election campaign, men such as the far-right political pundit Nicholas J Fuentes are openly trolling women with the slogan “your body, my choice”. Women were responding by threatening to reject all contact with men.

The New York Times published an opinion column titled “A sex strike is a losing strategy for American women”. Young American women already have a vibrant discourse about “de-centring men” and going “boy sober”. In these online communities, young women discuss the benefits of focusing on self, career and friendships instead of building their lives around the elusive (not to mention statistically unstable) construct of a happy heterosexual partnership.

The idea that the institution of marriage does not serve women is not new. As Charlotte Bronte wrote to her best friend in 1854 while on her honeymoon: “It is a strange and solemn and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. Man’s lot is far – far different.” (Some honeymoon that must have been.)

But there is a reason the idea has popped up with such urgency in the present political moment. Shunning men may seem a logical step for some American women who feel the election result proves to them that men don’t respect them or their bodily autonomy.

Family-first conservatives, with their intent focus on female fertility, have managed to bring about a phenomenon in which young women increasingly shrink from motherhood/marriage as too costly, too difficult or too scary. It’s not a great result for romantics or for baby-tragics (such as your columnist).

But the 4B movement, and American interest in it – no matter how fleeting – is a powerful reminder of how extremes breed greater extremes, and how division entrenches division.

It also shows, yet again, that gender equality is the only way to achieve a family-centred society – at least, for any civilisation that doesn’t wish to control its female population. American women are, very reasonably, asking which path the incoming Trump administration will choose.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.

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