If you were looking for a single example of just how strange things were getting between men and women this election cycle, one political ad seemed to capture the mood perfectly. Narrated by Julia Roberts, it featured a woman who was accompanied by her husband to the polls but alone in the voting booth. As she considers her options, she catches another woman’s knowing eye before privately filling in the Harris-Walz bubble. He’ll never know, their subtle nod to each other seems to say, and he’ll never understand.

“Did you make the right choice?” the woman’s husband asks when she emerges. “Sure did, honey,” she replies.

The sly implication was that women were at odds with men, that men were clueless and that heterosexual attachments required some negotiation and cunning to survive. That those ideas could be so easily understood in a 30-second spot suggests just how much they have gotten into the bloodstream.

In the last year alone there has been an explosion of young women who say they are deleting dating apps, whose market value has plummeted; female celebrities (among others) who have taken vows of celibacy or identify as “self-partnered”; divorce memoirs by older millennial and Gen X women expressing profound disillusionment with heterosexual marriage; and trends like “boysober,” which preaches the virtues of “decentering men” to focus on self-improvement and platonic relationships.

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s decisive election victory last week seemed to turbocharge these feelings of unrest, at least among those who didn’t vote for him, leading to a surge in interest in South Korea’s 4B movement, which encourages women to reject dating, marrying, having sex with and having children with men. The speech swirling on social media platforms over the last few days is noticeably spikier than the “male tears” mugs of the 2010s or the almost cheerful hyperbole of the 2019 book title “How to Date Men When You Hate Men.” Online, women are exhorting one another to abandon men as a form of self-protection — buying a vibrator, or even a gun, might not be a bad idea either, a few suggested.

It is just one reaction among many from left-leaning women, who are far from united in what to do or how to think about a second Trump presidency. Disappointed by the defeat of another female nominee, some feel numb resignation, while others — particularly young women online — are channeling their disappointment into anger toward men as a whole.

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