Has Trump turned American women off sex? Google search data says ‘yes’

No dating, no sex, no marriage and no babies. Of all the impassioned reactions to Trump’s presidential election, the embrace of South Korea’s controversial “4B” movement – where women reject any interpersonal contact with men – is probably the most eye-catching. In the hours following Trump’s victory last week, there was a surge in Google searches in the United States about 4B , according to Google trends.

Many American women are concerned that Donald Trump’s victory proves to them that men don’t respect them, or their bodily autonomy. Credit: Reuters The radical feminist movement – which stands for the four pledges that begin with “bi”, meaning “no” – emerged in South Korea in about 2017. It was an enraged response to the stabbing murder of a 23-year-old woman in the public bathroom of Gangnam subway station , by a man who said he killed her as revenge for all the women who looked down on him.



Its timing merged with general female outrage over what is dubbed South Korea’s “spy-cam epidemic” – it is common for men to film sexual partners and women using the bathroom, without their consent, with the resulting footage exploited as pornography. 4B also coincided with the emergence of South Korea’s “Escape the Corset” cause, which calls on women to reject toxic beauty standards. Adherents shave their heads and shun plastic surgery and make-up.

But these issues were just the catalysts – despite its affluence and sophistication, South Korean society still has rigidly traditional gender roles. It has the most highly educated female population in the OECD , but also the largest gender pay gap in the developed world (69 female cents for every male dollar). It has high rates of intimate partner violence , despite overall low levels of crime.

While South Korean women are better-educated and more likely to work outside the home than ever before, they still overwhelmingly bear the load of domestic labour. Many women fear if they take time off work to have a baby or care for a newborn, they will lose their jobs. Increasing numbers of young South Korean women are deciding not to have children because they believe it’s too difficult to have babies in a society so profoundly unfriendly to motherhood.

Credit: Bloomberg As the BBC reported in February : “Over the past 50 years, Korea’s economy has developed at breakneck speed, propelling women into higher education and the workforce, and expanding their ambitions, but the roles of wife and mother have not evolved at nearly the same pace.”.