As it became increasingly clear that Donald Trump was heading to a decisive victory on the evening of the US election last week, notorious far-right activist and white supremacist Nick Fuentes took to X/Twitter to offer some analysis. “I’d just like to take the opportunity to thank men for saving this country from stupid b*****s who wanted to destroy the world to keep abortion,” he wrote. “Your body, my choice. Forever.”
Fuentes, who once described his “ideal wife” as 16 years old and has in the past praised Hitler, was one of a cadre of manosphere figures to take to social media in the days post-election. Elon Musk, who has become one of Trump’s most influential cheerleaders of late, declared: “The cavalry has arrived. Men are voting in record numbers. They now realize everything is at stake.” Below his tweet came a reply from the infamous influencer and accused rapist and human trafficker, Andrew Tate: “It’s men vs gays n chicks.”
Despite the grim, incel filtering, their posts did speak to an uncomfortable truth, and what many had feared about a Harris vs Trump contest – that the election had turned into a war of the genders, and men had come out on top: 55 per cent of men voted for Trump, compared to 45 per cent of women. What is perhaps more alarming, though is his surge in popularity among younger men According to the Centre for Information and Research on Civic Learning, 56 percent of young male voters picked Trump in 2024 — a dramatic increase from 41 percent in 2020. In comparison, 58 per cent of young women voted for Harris.
Among liberal women, the backlash has been swift and decisive. Videos on TikTok viewed hundreds of thousands of times offered one radical way for women to take back control: by cutting off all sexual contact with men.
“After this election — where women were pretty much told to their faces that no one gives a shit about them…don’t forget, ladies, we do have power,” began one woman on TikTok. “And you know the kind of power I’m talking about. Giving up our bodies to men is a choice. We don’t have to do this.”
“I encourage you to reclaim your power and have really honest conversations with yourself about whether being in a romantic relationship with men at this point in time is worth it,” argued another.
Both videos were hashtagged #4B, a reference to the South Korean feminist movement. Named after the Korean prefix bi, translating to “no”, followers of the 4B movement adhere to four tenets: no heterosexual marriage, no heterosexual dating, no heterosexual sex, and no childbearing. On the day after the election, Google searches for “4B” surged by 450 per cent, with the most traffic coming from Washington DC, Colorado, Vermont and Minnesota.
It’s hardly difficult to see why the movement is taking off amongst progressive women in the US
Originating as a response to the South Korea spycam scandal in 2017, which saw hordes of women secretly being filmed during intimate moments or while using public toilets, the protest movement precipitated a broader #MeToo style reckoning in the country, with some activists cutting their hair and eschewing makeup in a rejection of patriarchal beauty standards.
In the last year, a voluntary celibacy movement among women had already begun to gain ground on social media — female celebrities including Khloé Kardashian, Julia Fox, Kate Hudson and Tiffany Haddish have recently touted its benefits. Sex strikes, too, are hardly a novel concept — radical second wave feminists in the late 20th century advocated celibacy and political lesbianism, and they even date back to Ancient Greece: in Aristophanes’s 5th century BC comedy Lysistrata, women withhold sex to try and stop the Peloponnesian War.
It’s hardly difficult to see why the movement is taking off among progressive women in the US. For many, the idea that a man who has been found liable for rape and been accused by more than 27 women of sexual assault, and whose presidency precipitated the overturning of the constitutional right to abortion, could be re-elected by an overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens is simply too much to bear. Another women’s march, more campaigning and organising – all seem futile in the face of a vituperative and increasingly radicalised bloc of men whose main political motivation seems to be the denigration of the opposite sex. We tried taking the high road, women are saying, and how far did that get us?
The movement, of course, is hardly infallible. Some have expressed concern about whether 4B implicitly frames heterosexual sex as a means of pleasure granted by women to men, rather than something enjoyed by women too. There is also the fact that, once the exit poll stats are disaggregated further, the gender divide starts to become slightly blurred. How, for example, does the movement factor in the fact that 53 per cent of white women voted for Trump, or that 80 per cent of black men voted for Harris?
Imperfect though it may be, it is a way to take back some element of control in an increasingly hopeless political landscape. Eight years on from Trump’s first round in the White House, the outpouring of grief, desperation and rage from women has calcified into something far colder: revenge.
Emma Loffhagen is a writer for The Standard
