Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned at the ballot box. But after Vice President Kamala Harris’s gracious concession speech and her niece sharing a photo of Harris laughing, drinking wine, and playing Connect Four with her family, it’s clear the furious woman isn’t Harris. It’s many of the women who voted for her.
White liberal women are afraid of being lumped in with Donald Trump voters, and if they care about what the legacy media say (presumably, they do), they have a good reason. MSNBC’s Joy Reid accused white women of failing to fight the patriarchy, and a Los Angeles Times news and culture critic called white women, 53% of whom voted for Trump, “weak sisters.”
Now, white women who want to signal that they voted for Harris are wearing blue bracelets to show their solidarity. “I’m ashamed & hate that others might assume I’m a part of [the group of women who voted for Trump],” one blue-bracelet-wearing TikTok user wrote.
This is fairly tame as far as TikTok trends go. Other women are going so far as to shave their heads to escape the “male gaze” and make themselves less desirable to men, who must be punished for President-elect Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House. (Ironically, this raised the ire of at least one woman with not-self-imposed hair loss: “You say you’re shaving your head so ‘men won’t want you’ but does that mean that men shouldn’t want women that have struggled with hair loss due to alopecia or chemo?”)
Women are also embracing South Korea’s “4B movement,” in which they swear off dating, sex, marriage, and childbirth.
“If we can’t control what they do in terms of legislation and abortion rights, we have to do something for ourselves,” 25-year-old Jada Mevs said. Mevs suggested “cutting out the male influence in our life,” explaining, “What really drew me to participating in this movement was taking my body and my best interest into my hands.”
Of course, sex striking is nothing new. The 4B movement was popularized in South Korea in 2019. Two years before that, singer Janelle Monáe told Marie Claire, “Until every man is fighting for our rights, we should consider stopping having sex. I love men. But evil men? I will not tolerate that. You don’t deserve to be in my presence.” Go back a couple thousand years before that, and Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote a comedy about Lysistrata and her quest to end the Peloponnesian War via sex strike.
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Often, women, and men, just need to feel like they’re tapping into something bigger than themselves. So surprisingly, this trend may be the least toxic trend of all. Not because swearing off relationships and motherhood is a good thing, but because it signals women are ready to take their dating lives seriously. As one X user who goes by Mason suggested, “The best way to understand 4B and similar social media trends is as a way for young women to create a romantic narrative arc for themselves, one where only a man who proves himself can reluctantly wrestle the heroine down from her perch.”
These women aren’t likely to swear off men forever. Beneath the worries and the election despair, they may just be looking for an excuse to wait for Prince Charming.