Are American Women Really Going on a Sex Strike?
Don't let the internet fool you.
"Women need to stop dating & having sex with men immediately and im not even joking or being dramatic in the slightest," said one X user in a viral post on November 6th. "take a page from the feminists in south korea."
"Ladies, we need to start considering the 4B movement like the women in South Korea and give America a severely sharp birth rate decline," reads another popular post. "We can't let these men have the last laugh…we need to bite back."
Are women really taking a page from South Korean activists and going on a sex strike to protest Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election? While claims like this have swept the internet since Trump's victory, there's no evidence that this is happening, and no reason to think it ever will.
According to online posts about the topic, talk of a sex strike takes inspiration from the South Korean 4B movement, which encourages women not to date, marry, or have sex with men, and not to have children. The trend began in backlash to the 2016 killing of a young woman near a Seoul subway station. However, it's worth noting that South Korean men are much more hostile to feminism than men in the United States, and the nation retains larger gender gaps than most other developed nations. According to one poll, 76 percent of Korean men in their 20s and 66 percent in their 30s reported that they strongly opposed feminism. South Korea also has the largest gender pay gap among OECD nations, with men making more than 31 percent more than women.
Seventy-three percent of South Korean women reported that marriage was disadvantageous to women, and 84.4 percent agreed that having a child was disadvantageous to women. And these results aren't exactly surprising—in South Korea, women in dual-income households still spend an average of 3.4 times as many hours on housework than their male partners. A gender gap in household chores exists in the U.S., but it seems to be smaller. However, that's not the only reason to be suspicious that a 4B-style movement will take hold in the United States.
While online supporters of an antimale sex strike seemed to blame Trump's victory on men specifically, the gender gap in this year's election wasn't unusually large—around a 10-point gap between men and women's support for Trump. A full 45 percent of women voted for Trump according to CNN's exit poll, with 53 percent voting for Harris. Fifty-five percent of men said they voted for Trump—a majority, but hardly enough for a Harris-supporting woman to rationally conclude that men as a class are responsible for Trump's victory. In contrast, the gender voting gap in South Korea was an astonishing 25 percent in a recent election.
Further, it's simply difficult to believe that enough women—even fervent Harris supporters—care enough about the election results to consider such a drastic action, especially since taking a vow of celibacy can't reverse unfavorable election results.
Some media outlets have also jumped on the theory somewhat credulously. This week, The Columbia Journalism Review wrote that the trend "reflects a growing sense of frustration among women who fear that Trump's second term will be characterized by unchecked misogyny and the continued rollback of bodily autonomy in the US," while one Guardian writer argued that "moving away from men might be a needed defence mechanism for women," adding that "It is powerful in the message that it sends: that women don't have a duty to show compassion to men who deny them basic respect."
Are Harris-supporting women really going to embark on a mass movement toward celibacy in protest of the election results? The idea is so far-fetched that it's difficult to take seriously—even more so when considering that a little under half of all women voters didn't even support Harris to begin with. Rather than heralding the start of this separatist feminist movement in the U.S., online talk of a sex strike seems more akin to threatening to move to Canada if your candidate loses than a reflection of real political sentiment.
