A New Target for Election Anxiety: Sex

People were already not having sex. Now they're not having sex...harder.

I teased this article a little bit last week. My plan was initially to not write about the election at all, because that’s just not my strength and I feel like that’s not why people read this Substack. But if there’s one thing I can talk about, it’s neurotic young people who don’t want (or really want) to fuck. So…onward!

(Also, do not mistake this article as me saying that young people having sex is the “most important thing” to worry about coming out of the election- I don’t think that, but it is the only thing I feel qualified to write about.)

Update: Okay, another disclaimer! Want to make it clear that I’m trying to just talk about “what’s happening,” not “what I think should happen.” This article partially gets into women who are avoiding men, or just Trump-supporting men, and I’m not moralizing their decision. Personal choice is personal choice and you can choose to date or befriend people (or not!) for any reason you want. My only concern vis-a-vis this phenomenon is what it says about the gender relations overall and the direction things are going, including for men and women who voted the same way. Sorry, this might be a bit of a spoiler, but this probably needed to be clarified that I’m not scolding anyone for their sexual or dating choices or begging women to start dating guys who voted for Trump, or whatever.

Anyway, if you’ve been on Twitter (or really any form of social media) lately, it might feel a bit like eating too much Halloween candy, where you enjoy doing it in the moment but as soon as you stop you feel nauseous. Just nonstop rage baiting and gloating from every possible direction, often incredibly unhelpful (no, I do not feel like crowning “white gays” or “light-skinned Latino men” as the new villain du jour, no matter how disappointed I may be!) Speaking of which…George Santos, this is your fault.

But one thing you might have noticed is a wave of animosity from young people about sex—as if that wasn’t bad enough already. And I’m not just talking about right-wing men and left-wing women, although obviously that’s where the majority is coming from. It’s much more nuanced than that—it’s not just about anger and politics, it’s about insecurity, desire and most of all, vulnerability. So naturally, I got a bunch of young people to anonymously write to me to tell me why this election is making them nervous about sex and dating.

One of the obvious trends that hit social media over the past week is an American version of the 4B movement from South Korea. 4B isn’t new (it originated in 2019, but it’s basically just a version of radical feminist separatism.) The idea is that women stop interacting with men in four ways: no sex, no dating, no marriage, and no giving birth. The 4B movement is a backlash against what many see as the South Korean government’s patriarchal and pronatalist positions. But for all the buzz across TikTok and Twitter, there aren’t that many women involved. It was reported that in 2019, there were only 4,000 women participating in 4B, and it’s not clear how many of them are still involved today.

Although American woman have flirted (no pun intended) with 4B before, things have really ramped up around the 2024 election. It doesn’t help, of course, that certain young American groypers (led by none other than Nick Fuentes, who has described sex with women as “gay”) started tweeting the unfortunately-viral phase, “Your Body Our Choice.” So let’s just be clear: whether you think it has merit or not, the 4B movement in American (or the proposal of it) isn’t just women being petulant about their preferred candidate losing. For many women, it feels as though men have declared war on them, and this is their response. And to their credit, there is no moral equivalence between raping someone and refusing to have sex with someone.

I heard from a 21-year-old woman who said, “It's scary to know that the population I am meant to date/marry/have kids with is so flagrant about my safety and rights in this country. I don't really do casual hookups anymore but this election has definitely solidified that decision.” It’s important to note that she didn’t mention the 4B movement, nor did she say she would abstain from serious relationships—but the sentiment of wariness is there for her and many other young women who might not consider themselves fully 4B-pilled.

Although this movement aims to fight back against men, not just the ones who voted for Trump, the groypers making these threats seem the least disturbed by it. Their arguments range from “Nobody would ever have sex with you anyway” (as if horny men are suddenly filtering out women by political leanings) to the much more disturbing “like you’d have any say in the matter.” (The community note is encouraging, I suppose)

This has ricocheted to men on the left—proportionately a smaller group than men who voted for Trump, but a much bigger group than full-on groypers. Some of these men were already feeling dismayed with the state of gender relations, and now they’re feeling even more pessimistic about the odds of men and women happily coexisting, but they don’t know how to talk about it. Despite the characterization of the “incel” as a fascist, misogynistic asshole, there is a much larger group of young men who are anxious, lonely, and socially awkward but don’t harbor misogynistic views—and many even voted for Harris. One of the people who spoke to me was a 23-year-old left-leaning man, who said, “The prevalence of Trump's bullshit misogyny will make things a lot harder for women because of the normalization of misogynistic rhetoric, and it will also make it a lot harder for men to talk about the issues that they genuinely face in the dating market without being labeled as a men's rights activist.”

And he’s not wrong. While certain men argued that their vote for Trump was a rebellion against decreasing boob size in video games, other men anxiously responded to the discourse with concern about how much worse gender relations could get, and how they expected that animosity to impact their already abysmal levels of loneliness. And regardless of the degree of sincerity or misogyny, these guys were generally told to shut up.