Black Ops 4B

Some women are saying they won't date as long as Trump is in office. Everyone else is saying: "thank you!"

My goal with Second Person is to develop deep ideas in slow arcs. To write essays that would be read over a long time, and in no particular time. I don’t want to chase the news cycle.

But sometimes it feels like the news cycle chases me. The last three posts I wrote were on “the discourse”, dating markets, and on politics and sex wars. And then I woke up to a discourse about dating markets breaking because women have declared a sex war over politics. Here’s a moodboard of the 4B movement:

The name comes from the feminist separatist movement in South Korea. It was born as a reaction to conservative mores and pro-natalist policy in a country that’s ranked near the bottom of every single metric of gender equality among developed nations. In the United States, “4B” means women posting online about going on a sex strike as a revenge for young men voting for Donald Trump with the overwhelming margin of… 51%-45%.

I’m glad we’re not worrying about “cultural appropriation” anymore.

Young people are generally worried about sex relations and the dating market, and a politically-motivated sex strike is good reason for anxiety. While I’m just armchair theorizing, Cartoons Hate Her has actually gone out to ask real young people how worried they actually are about this:

Well, here’s my armchair theory: a major event did take place last week that will impact the dating market for young people. That event was the release of a Call of Duty game that doesn’t suck. Compared to CoD, the impact of 4B4Trump on dating will land somewhere between not noticeable and slightly positive.

Numbers Game

First: the raw numbers. The Call of Duty franchise has sold 500 million copies, and the success of the latest launch paves the path to 500 million more. If every copy takes a man out of the dating market for two weeks, that’s a billion man-weeks of dating lost to Call of Duty.

Based on total turnout and exit polls, about 9 million women under the age of 35 voted for Kamala Harris. It would take more than half of them to abstain from dating for the entire 4 years of Trump’s term to subtract a billion woman-weeks of dating from the market.

I don’t think that’s quite going to happen.

But the main reason why 4B4Trump is not going to adversely impact anyone’s dating prospects other than their own is that the women participating in 4B are almost entirely from progressive feminist communities.

Progressive feminist communities skew female anyway, for obvious reasons. Most people adopt this political identity in their early twenties, an age where it’s easy for women to find suitors of their own age and older. But as they get older, the sex ratio among very feminist singles becomes extreme as all the following happen at once:

1. A lot of couples pair up, leaving a steeper ratio among singles.

2. Fewer older men are interested.

3. Men are much more likely to compromise on political alignment in dating.

Here’s an illustration for the visual learners in the crowd:

4Bers dropping out of the progressive dating markets is good for the rest of the women in that dating market because the sex ratio slightly evens out. And it’s also good for the men: they likely prefer to date women who aren’t much more extreme in their politics than they are, and the 4Bers are surely on the most extreme tail. 4Bers going their own way should be met with a sigh of relief among any progressive feminists still looking to date.

And any dating markets containing a significant portion of Trump-voting men include approximately zero point zero 4Bers. If they hear about this movement at all, it’s entirely in the context of these women being made fun of on conservative social media.

Dating markets are quite polarized by politics in the United States. I think this is bad — political engagement is a memetic competitor to dating, and political agreement is a poor foundation for a successful relationship.

But a few women from one extreme of the political spectrum threatening to drop out isn’t making that polarization worse. Hopefully, the general ridicule 4B is meeting with in the US will convince more people to leave politics out of the bedroom. And if these women do abandon the dating market, it will just leave the remaining women closer on average in their politics to the remaining men. These men will be happy to date them — as soon they finish the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign, that is.