When Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, the boys crowed and the girls cried. At least that’s what America’s elite media told us. Sixteen-year-old Naomi Beinart reported in the New York Times that the girls at her New York City school were lying “under a blanket of despair” while the boys played computer games. Intense anxiety left the girls “gasping for breath” as the boys “breath[ed] easily.” Teen Vogue gathered the reactions of young women from across the country. One twenty-four-year-old called the election result “heartbreaking.” A college senior described herself and her female classmates as “angry and frightened.” Another college student reported that “most people I’ve talked to today have been crying, mostly nonstop.” As for men, they “have been radicalized by Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate” and supported Trump out of “racism, toxic masculinity, and misogyny.”
These girls’ older professional-class sisters fell into high-functioning depression. Female therapists were as rattled as their patients. An upstate New York counselor reported “more or less crying while my client was crying.” One from Massachusetts struggled to “manage [her] own despair” while treating others. A New York City therapist of thirty years equated Trump’s victory to 9/11 and the Covid pandemic.
The elite media framed a narrative: Through the shared trauma of Trump’s victory, young American women had realized a sisterhood. Facing a future without abortion on demand, without contraception, and without the dignity of gender equality, some did more than cry. They organized. They proclaimed an American 4B movement.
4B is a South Korean feminist movement that emerged in the late 2010s. It is better translated into English as the “Four Noes” movement, after the Korean word bi, which begins the movement’s four tenets: no dating (biyeonae), no sex (bisekseu), no marriage (bihon), no childbearing (bichulsan). Some versions of 4B incorporate other noes, such as no makeup, no skin care routines, no fashion. As soon as Trump’s victory became apparent, TikTok and Instagram in America witnessed a cascade of 4B enthusiasm. Reddit was peppered with stories of young women dumping their Trump-voting boyfriends. Tim Walz’s daughter recommended that girls take a close look at their relationships. Following Joe Rogan, the country’s number-one podcaster, should be regarded as a dating red flag.
American 4B faded as quickly as it had emerged. Within two weeks, “4B” as a Google search term in the US reverted almost to its pre-election obscurity. The likelihood that a 4B movement will sweep the United States or any other Western country is extremely low. 4B was born of conditions peculiar to South Korea, and it will die in South Korea. (Whether it will take the South Korean people with it is anyone’s guess.) But the significance of America’s post-election 4B enthusiasm does not lie in the movement’s peculiarities. It lies instead in a profound cultural funk around gender, sex, coupling, and childbearing, which is common across the rich democracies. This funk is the root of our loneliness epidemics, sex recessions, and fertility crises. Some have labeled it “heteropessimism,” a malaise contractable particularly by women, who express “regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience”—in other words, despair about sexual-romantic relationships with men.
Gender troubles among the young lead to predictable outcomes: failure to marry and failure to bear and raise children. Since 2010, the U.S. marriage rate has been stagnant, propped up by the old as the young abstain. Over this period, the share of never-married forty-year-olds has risen from 20 to 25 percent, and mean age at first marriage has increased about 2.5 years for both men and women. Fewer years in marriage means fewer children. The U.S. total fertility rate (TFR) was above the 2.1 replacement level as recently as 2007. Now, it is just 1.62 children per woman over a lifetime. As marriage among people of child-bearing age has declined, the most common number of children born to an American woman aged twenty-five to forty-four is now zero (that is, more women have no children than have any other number). Lifetime female childlessness, currently around 15 percent, is on track to set a national record by surpassing 25 percent as soon as the cohort born in the late 1980s (women currently in their late thirties) reach the end of their child-bearing years.
Social conservatives often fix on the retreat from marriage as the principal cause of our current troubles. Marriage-promotion schemes, whether of George W. Bush or Viktor Orbán, are praised as effective responses. But the causes of the gender funk lie deeper than education programs and financial incentives can reach. In the twenty-first century, we are experiencing a profoundly consequential retreat from lifelong, socially binding care relationships, including marriage and parenthood. This retreat is being led by women—a social fact recognized by everyone from TikTok tradwives to academic feminists. The consequences of the retreat will be literally epochal. Across the globe, rich democracies are pioneering a society such as was never seen before in human history, one in which women’s lives are no longer ordered toward care.
America’s 4B moment was a temporary but revealing expression of this new society, a name placed on an emergent reality. None of the rich democracies are prepared for the population declines they are already experiencing (Japan, Italy, Greece, all of post-communist Europe) or will soon experience (South Korea, Spain, Germany, Austria), but they at least are cognizant and concerned. By contrast, the retreat of women from care relationships has yet to be imagined, even as it poses the far greater challenge to our social order. It poses not simply a long-term concern, with implications to be worked out over generations. The retreat from coupling, marriage, children, and parenthood deprives us of the expectation of a shared future. Relationships of care, in which we see others not as members of categories but as particular human beings in need of us as particular human beings, play an essential role in reconciling human divides and differences. With the attenuation of a shared future, we become trapped in a shared present, populated by a multitude of strangers experienced as irritants, increasingly unbearable.
In nearly all the rich democracies, fertility has been on a ten-to-fifteen-year slide. The decline has ranged from dramatic to catastrophic: down 20 percent in France and the US, 30 percent in Sweden and Finland, 40 percent in Argentina and Chile, 50 percent in South Korea. Fewer children means fewer jobs in education and childcare, more spending on healthcare, higher taxes on workers or lower benefits for retirees (or both), slower economic growth and dynamism, declining military power and, for some, the specter of national extinction. Even liberal governments—officially loath to intervene in the intimate arena of male-female coupling and dedicated to the bywords “freedom,” “privacy,” and “choice”—have come to care about their national fertility crashes. The last time the UN asked, in 2019, a quarter of countries worldwide, and half of the prosperous OECD members, reported policies designed to increase national fertility.
Developed societies have experienced dramatic fertility declines before. Pre-industrial, pre-urban fertility levels could run to seven or eight children on average per woman over a lifetime, and reductions from such rates are rightly considered an improvement. What makes the current fertility decline different is its remarkably lower starting point. Consider the United States. From 1914 to 1933, the country’s general fertility rate fell by 40 percent, and from 1957 to 1976 it fell by nearly 50 percent. But in 1914 the average American woman was bearing about 3.6 children over a lifetime; in 1957 she was having 3.7. Before our current fertility decline, the average American woman was having just 2.1 children, around the low point of the 1930s and only slightly above the nadir of the 1970s. And yet, compared to nearly all the other rich democracies, America’s 2.1 made it a fertility powerhouse. Nearly all other OECD countries began their current declines from levels well below replacement. Today Italy’s fertility rate has fallen so low that without immigration, the country’s population will halve in forty years. South Korea’s will halve in twenty-two.
A crash so steep across so many countries at once has put social scientists on the back foot. Though economic research shows that material factors such as housing prices and student debt are marginally relevant to fertility levels, economic modeling has failed to explain much of anything at all. Blaming liberalism or capitalism can offer the foundation of an argument, but cannot account for why now and why so steep. Sociobiology grants some insights into individual behavior but does little to explain society-wide fertility change. Even if social scientists accept biological arguments emphasizing disease or endocrine disruptors, questions of timing and degree of decline will remain salient.
The shortcomings of social-science accounts of our current predicament explain why cultural arguments have risen to the fore. If it’s not about income (poor women still have more children than rich women) or childcare costs (OECD countries with the most affordable child care tend to have the lowest fertility), then it must be about values. But how can a cultural argument explain a global phenomenon? China has had a total fertility rate below replacement for more than thirty years, and its rate currently hovers just above 1.0. India, now the most populous country in the world, has experienced below replacement fertility for nearly a decade. The same is true for countries as diverse (and large) as Mexico, Iran, and Vietnam. Chile, Costa Rica, and Thailand have fallen into the “lowest low fertility” range, with TFRs below 1.3. Evidence suggests such a level may create a fertility trap from which no society can escape back to replacement rate.
Economists often explain economic growth by the concept of “total factor productivity,” and sociologists account for different labor-market outcomes between whites and blacks or between men and women as “discrimination.” These are not so much explanations as labels for the lack of an explanation. They are names for a residual—the proportion of an outcome unexplained by every other variable a researcher can think of. In economics, recourse to hand-waving “total factor” concepts has famously been dubbed the “measure of our ignorance.” Cultural accounts of fertility decline seem to be measuring the same thing.
Rather than start at the end of the fertility story, let’s start at the beginning. Coupling makes babies. This is obviously true in the euphemistic sense (the English copulate has its origins in the Latin cōpulāre, to fasten together), but it is more importantly true in the social sense. Male-female pairs bound together by social norms produce children. For most societies, throughout most of human history, this culturally sanctioned pairing is known as “marriage.” Outside Western Europe and its settler colonies, universal female marriage has been the historic norm. Even in the individualistic countries of the West, until recently, 80 to 90 percent of women have married. The decline of marriage, not only in the West but across Eurasia, thus marks a social transformation of unprecedented significance.
The normative retreat of marriage does not necessarily mean less coupling, however. Informal cohabitation is replacing marriage in many Western countries (and has always been prevalent in Latin America), at least as a first union. We can see this phenomenon in countries as different as the United States and France. Until around 2010, in both countries the age at which women formed a first union (either marriage or cohabitation—what the French call concubinage) remained steady, even as their age at first marriage continually rose. Even in countries where marriage is fading away, the overwhelming majority of children continue to be born to couples. In Norway in 2023, only 37 percent of children were born to married parents—one of the lowest levels in the world—yet 90 percent were born to either married or cohabiting couples. Even in the United States, a country with an unusually high birth rate to single women, more than 85 percent of children are born to couples.
Yet over the past ten to fifteen years, fewer people of child-bearing age are coupling. The percentage of American women under thirty who had ever formed a union (marriage or cohabitation) dropped markedly from the late 2000s to the late 2010s, while for women in their thirties the rate remained flat. Moreover, cohabitation is less and less likely to turn into marriage. The same trend exists in Sweden and Finland. The effect on fertility is direct: Fewer couples means fewer babies. The recent fertility declines in these countries have been driven by declines in first births. In the U.S., nearly 50 percent of the overall fertility fall is due to childless women’s remaining childless. In the Nordic countries, the figure is closer to 90 percent.
There is an optimistic reading of these rather pessimistic data. It sees the cause of less coupling and fewer births not in changing desires regarding marriage and children but instead in changing social and economic environments. If we simply change the “external” conditions of family formation, the argument goes, the “internal” drive to couple and reproduce will flourish. A 2023 Gallup poll headline declared, “Americans’ Preference for Larger Families Highest Since 1971,” with Americans considering an average of 2.7 children per family as ideal. This stated preference is more than 60 percent higher than the country’s actual total fertility rate. Demographers find that the average woman in almost every rich democracy wants at least two children, and that actual fertility falls short of this desire in them all.
This reading of recent fertility declines is mistaken. The youngest generation exhibits a waning interest in children. In both the United States and Finland, the fertility ideals of those under thirty are significantly lower than the ideals of any other recent cohort, a shift driven largely by the rising desire for permanent childlessness. A 2023 Pew poll found that only 26 percent of Americans regarded having children as extremely or very important to “liv[ing] a fulfilling life.” (A mere 19 percent of Democrats expressed that belief.) Another 2023 Pew poll recorded an increase of ten percentage points over only five years among currently childless Americans aged eighteen to forty-nine who say that they are “unlikely” ever to have children. When they were asked to explain why, the most common response was that they simply don’t want to.
Women are leading this turn away from parenthood. Pew found that American women were 7 percent less likely than men to agree that children are important for a “fulfilling life” (and 10 percent less likely to say the same about marriage). Pew also found that childless women aged eighteen to thirty-four were 12 percent less likely than childless men of the same age to say that they want to be parents someday, and 6 percent more likely to say that they definitively don’t. There is a similar gender gap when it comes to coupling. Among eighteen- to thirty-nine-year-olds, single women are 6 percent more likely than single men to say that they are not looking to date. Women are half as likely as men to explain their lack of interest as the product of the opposite sex’s being uninterested in them. They are far more likely to offer positive reasons, such as that they have more important priorities or simply like being single.
Radical feminists retort that the gender gap in attitudes toward marriage and children is nothing new. They point out that women bear the greater burden of pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare, and so of course they will be less interested in parenthood than are men, who draw benefits such as social status or the passing on of a family name, without the hardships. It is only with the demise of legal patriarchy and the rise of female economic independence that women have been able to express their true preferences—and now they are doing so emphatically. Liberal feminists take a different view. They insist that a pro-woman society can also be pro-natal. Just look at the Nordic countries! Just look at women’s fertility ideals! Yet, when Finland’s total fertility rate is 1.26 and young women throughout the rich democracies increasingly want to remain childless, liberal feminist arguments are increasingly unconvincing.
The optimistic assessment of the gap between desired and realized fertility has an even more fundamental problem: Fertility preferences do not exist. At least, they do not exist as stable, long-run intentions that direct individual behavior. Fertility preferences have poor predictive validity. They are often uncertain or weakly held, particularly among women under age thirty-five. They vary over time. Among the childless, they generally reflect social stereotypes rather than an internal drive. Most damning for their use in policy debates, fertility preferences follow fertility behavior more often than they lead it. Women at the end of their fertility tend to “desire” the number of children they actually have, rather than the number they said they wanted in their youth. Any argument or policy based on the premise that women in the rich democracies want more children than they are having is chasing a will-o’-the-wisp.
What if women’s behavior, rather than women’s stated ideals, is the better indicator of their fertility preferences, especially in societies with high levels of gender equality and female autonomy (making a “free choice” most possible)? The fertility behavior of highly educated women in socially progressive countries today is instructive. Such women have high levels of income, live in countries with high levels of children born outside of marriage (indicative of high levels of female freedom), and enjoy the highest marriage rates in their societies (presumably demonstrating the greatest ability to find suitable partners and demand concessions in exchange for fertility). Would a society of such empowered and self-actualized women produce “enough” children? In the most recent period in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Austria, the total fertility rate of women with a four-year college degree was around 1.4. This is where Germany has been for fifty years, well below replacement and showing every sign of being in a fertility trap.
This outcome shouldn’t be surprising. Female empowerment and gender egalitarianism have always been premised on the ability of women to say no to marriage and children. Feminists have been saying as much since the nineteenth century. And since the 1990s so, too, have the governments of the world. Working through the United Nations, they replaced global population control with global development and made “gender equality, equity and empowerment of women” a universal goal. For years, the UN Population Division operated under the naive presumption that the average empowered woman anywhere on Earth would magically bear no fewer than 1.85 children. Even the least fecund societies would experience only a moderate rate of population decline, easily managed through moderate levels of immigration. This presumption allowed us to avoid unpleasant thoughts concerning the compatibility of feminism and fertility. Now the UN more realistically predicts continuing national fertility declines, in a world that has no fertility floor.
Contemporary South Korea has the lowest fertility rate of any known national population in world history. In 2023, the average South Korean woman was projected to bear 0.72 children over her lifetime. Neither war nor famine nor the collapse of communism (augmented by contraception and abortion) ever achieved such a feat. The fact that this fertility collapse has occurred in one of the most developed societies in the world (ranking above the United States in the latest Human Development Index) and in a time of economic expansion and peace makes it all the more shocking.
The 4B movement is both a consequence of South Korea’s fertility crisis and a cause. The movement’s militancy is born of the gender woes peculiar to that country: the unsatisfactory judicial response to the “Gangnam Station femicide” of 2016, in which a thirty-four-year-old man murdered a twenty-three-year-old female stranger in a public restroom because of his hatred of women; the ongoing problem of spycam crime, in which men set up hidden cameras to record women in intimate situations; the social contradictions between Korean society’s gender traditionalism and its economic postmodernity; and the sometimes misogynistic backlash against Korean feminism that fueled the country’s 2022 “incel election,” won by the now-embattled President Yoon Suk Yeol. Yet South Korea’s already low and declining birth rate began crashing only in 2016, when the movement blossomed. The 4B call for sex and birth strikes cannot but have contributed to the downward spiral.
A parallel can be drawn between 4B and the syndicalist movement of the early twentieth century. Criticizing the depredations of capitalism and despairing of the system ever collapsing of its own accord, Georges Sorel and other syndicalists insisted that only violent action on the part of a national revolutionary working class could realize the ideals of socialism. Syndicalism’s best remembered element is the myth of the general strike: a revolutionary collective action—the united refusal of workers to perform their socially necessary role, namely, to work—that would bring about the ultimate destruction of capitalism. A similar general strike—against men rather than capitalists, refusing to reproduce (and all that precedes reproduction) rather than produce—is precisely what the four noes are about.
In the contemporary West, a militant 4B movement would be as quixotic as a return of revolutionary syndicalism. Western women are not interested in a sex strike. Outside of tiny circles of radical feminists, no Lysistrata is inciting resistance to the patriarchy. Political lesbianism is not making a comeback. Our gender funk is only weakly politicized. Nevertheless, it is more than sufficient to undermine the means of reproduction.
Which makes our condition of low and declining fertility all the more distressing. Its cause, if we can even ascribe one, is not a great contradiction destined to be resolved through revolution or evolution. Our current condition is the fulfillment of precisely what we have been trying to accomplish for three generations. Thanks to our concerted efforts, the global population growth rate has dropped by more than 60 percent since 1963 and is forecast to hit zero by the 2060s. The teen birthrate in the United States has fallen by 78 percent since 1991. More than half of American women aged fifteen to forty-nine are using nearly 100-percent-effective forms of contraception (abstinence, female or male surgical sterilization, or long-acting reversible contraceptives such as IUDs and birth control implants). Across the OECD, 54 percent of women aged twenty-five to thirty-four now complete tertiary education—13 percent more than young men. The expansion of women’s freedom—to marry or not, to bear children or not, to look after elderly relatives or not—is borne out in all our statistics. The gender funk is not the measure of our failure. It is the measure of our success.
Could these patterns reverse themselves? The total fertility rate is just a snapshot in time, after all. Western women born in the first decade of the 1900s were followed by those born in the 1920s and 1930s, who created the baby boom. Many of the women who opted out of childbearing in the 1980s had children in the 1990s instead. But a snapshot is useful for describing the fertility hill any society needs to climb in order to stave off the worst effects of low fertility—some combination of perpetual mass immigration, rapid social aging, social dislocation, and economic torpor. For most of the rich democracies today, that hill is far higher than at any point in the past. The Baby Boom was caused not by postwar optimism and prosperity (fertility began rising dramatically during, not after, the war), but by a mysterious enthusiasm for marriage, combined with the absence of effective contraception. Such a turn of events today would require a repudiation of every cultural priority that the rich democracies have been pursuing for the past half-century, a turn so dramatic in scope and depth that it is nearly impossible to imagine.
Before the recent and dramatic expansion of female freedom, no one needed to ask, “What are care relationships for?” Women simply entered them, propelled by some mixture of biological drive, traditional cultural expectations, and patriarchal force. Today, nearly all of us in the West live after nature, after tradition, and after patriarchy. The question thus becomes unavoidable: If the purpose of freedom, the project of our entire civilization, is to enable self-actualization, why shouldn’t unprecedented numbers of women choose neither husbands nor children, and why shouldn’t those who do choose the latter choose fewer of them?
Women’s “no” to lifelong socially binding care relationships is self-reinforcing. It exacerbates the gender funk, which in turn further lessens the appeal of the old patterns of intimate life. Children are not only the fruit of male-female bonds but their glue. Children are a couple’s common project, one that connects them to their wider family and their community. They are a call for self-sacrifice that a culture of autonomy cannot comprehend. In a world of incels and femcels, 4B and men going their own way, what can reconcile us to each other for the good of the children we will never have?
