Why Women Are Going On A Sex Strike Over Trump's Win
There is a long history of women converting frustration in politics into frustration in sex. Two and a half millennia ago in the play Lysistrata, Aristophenes described the women of Peloponnesian War withholding sex from their male partners in order to leverage peace. The ancient Greek play is a comic account, but it turned serious in modern times, when Liberian women, led by the Nobel prize winning peace activist Leymah Gbowee, deployed a similar tactic in the Liberian War.
More recently, Korean women, exhausted by misogyny and abuse, in turn created the 4B protest movement, pledging celibacy from men. If there are many things political scientists failed to predict about the 2024 US election, it’s that American women might follow suit.
But that’s exactly how some have responded to the re-election of Trump, felt as a catastrophic blow to women’s rights. In the days after the US election, American searches for the 4B movement increased almost 500%. Women vented their anger on social media against their male peers, saying they would swear off sex, marriage and childbirth, until their bodily rights were restored.
Whether women will see through this threat or not, is not the point. It’s the perception of division between men and women that has become such a profound legacy of this political race.
Exit polls showed men and women mirroring each other, with women favouring Harris in a 10% lead, and men favouring Trump to the same extent. When disaggregated by gender and race, the trends are even starker. In a widely publicised chart, white men were Trump’s biggest supporters, 61% voting for him against only 39% for Harris. But white women also favoured the Republican candidate, 55% supporting him, compared to 44% for Harris.
Black women, and black women alone, voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats, with 90% choosing Harris on polling day. 'This country does not deserve Black women,' the re-elected Mayor of Baltimore, Brandon M. Scott said in a melancholic response. 'I know how heavy this is weighing on black women. They have carried this country and saved this country too many times, and continue to be the most disrespected human beings on the planet. Quite frankly it disgusts me.'
We knew that gender would play a role in this election, but that hasn’t diminished how stark a picture the numbers paint. Charts, graphs and raw numbers published from exit polls Men pulled away from their female counterparts in all ethnic groups. Latino, East Asian and Black men all voted for Trump in greater numbers that women from the same backgrounds.
Ethnic minorities’ disillusionment with two party systems is visible on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain’s election in 2024, black and Asian voters voiced dismay at the Labour party’s failure to offer them favourable policies, in return for their decades’ loyal vote. Many felt doubly betrayed when longstanding black politicians like Diane Abbott and Dawn Butler, beloved by their communities, were censured for their views on race. In the US, many black people feel the Democrats have taken their vote for granted and failed to address economic concerns.
Added to that are the left’s failure to grasp these communities’ conservative values, in black, Asian and Latin cultures that deeply prize family, community and faith.
These concerns resonate across both white and minoritised groups, yet women continue to reject right-wing candidates in greater numbers. The case of Donald Trump is all the more stark, because of his own track record on gender. 'Here's A Message To Fellow Sexual Assault Victims Who May Be Struggling After Donald Trump's Win,' wrote one female journalist, describing the trauma of watching someone who boasted of assaulting women being re-elected for the highest office.
Women have repeatedly voiced concerns about Republican assaults on abortion rights. Trumps victory raises the prospect of a federal ban on abortion, pushing back or rescinding access to abortion pills, or relying on the Supreme Court – which Trump has largely reshaped - to reinterpret obsolete laws that could make their use.
Yet since the Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the case that previously guaranteed abortion rights, individual states have been moving to enshrine them. Analysts think this – as well as Trump’s personal flip-flipping on his prior anti-abortion stance - could have neutralised voters fears.
One thing is clear. Whereas the Trump campaign deliberately targeted male voters in the ‘manosophere’, the online world of men advocating masculine dominance, there was no equivalent attempt to woo feminists.
If Trump wanted to deliberately target the female vote, he did a terrible job. His promise just before the election to protect female voters “whether they like it or not” could not have more ill-judged. With the notable exception of black women, American women voted for Trump anyway. Like men, they cited the economy, the desire to withdraw from foreign wars, the wish to ‘Make America Great Again.’
Few answered the question that deep down, we are all asking. Was the deciding factor really the appeal of Trump, or was it hostility to Harris? Was the prospect of a black woman president, no matter how centrist her views, still simply a radical step too far.
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