Chicago (AP) Sadie Perez started bringing pepper spray around school in the days following the presidential election. Her mother also bought a self-defense kit for her and her sister, which contained a personal alarm, a concealed knife key, and spikes for their keychains.
It is a reaction to an empowered fringe of right-wing manosphere influencers who have used Republican Donald Trump’s election victory to legitimize and magnify internet threats and misogynistic mockery. The 1960s abortion rights slogan, “Your body, my choice,” has been stolen by many and directed at women both online and on college campuses.
Since some males interpret the election results as a rejection of women’s rights and reproductive rights, many women saw the comments as a concerning portent of what may come next.
“It’s sad that I feel like I have to carry pepper spray around like this,” Perez, a 19-year-old Wisconsin political science student, said. Women are entitled to and desire safety.
Immediately following the election, Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that focuses on extremism and polarization, reported seeing a significant increase in various forms of misogynistic rhetoric, including some very violent misogyny.
According to her, a lot of progressive women have been taken aback by how swiftly and forcefully this rhetoric has taken up.
Nick Fuentes, a far-right internet personality and Holocaust-denying white supremacist who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida two years ago, posted the statement “Your body, my choice” on the social media site X. Trump said in remarks in response to criticism of the incident that he had never met Fuentes and was unaware of him prior to his arrival.
According to Mary Ruth Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis School of Law, the term turns the well-known slogan supporting abortion rights into a personal threat and an assault on women’s autonomy.
According to Ziegler, a specialist in reproductive rights, the inference is that men need to have authority over or access to sexual relations with women.
According to a report by Frances-Wright’s think firm, Fuentes’ post received 35 million views on X in a single day, and the phrase quickly spread to other social networking sites.
On TikTok, women have complained that it floods their comment areas. According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue research and social media accounts, the slogan has also become offline, with men yelling it at women on college campuses or boys chanting it in middle schools. According to the report, one mother claimed that her daughter heard the remark three times while on campus at her college.
Parents have received alerts over the language from school districts in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The wording was removed from t-shirts sold on Amazon.
According to Perez, she has witnessed guys reply, “Your body, my choice,” to Snapchat stories that were shared for their college class.
“I feel like I’ve been violated and disgusted,” she stated. It’s like traveling back in time.
For years, misogynistic assaults have been a common occurrence on social media. But Frances-Wright and others who track online extremism and disinformation said language glorifying violence against women or celebrating the possibility of their rights being stripped away has spiked since the election.
Online declarations for women to Get back in the kitchen or to Repeal the 19th, a reference to the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote, have spread rapidly. In the days surrounding the election, the extremism think tank found that the top 10 posts on X calling for repeal of the 19th Amendment received more than 4 million views collectively.
A man holding a sign with the words Women Are Property sparked an outcry atTexas State University. The man was not a student, faculty or staff, and was escorted off campus,according to the university s president. The university is exploring potential legal responses, he said.
Anonymous rape threats have been left on the TikTok videos of women denouncing the election results. And on the far-flung reaches of the web, 4chan forums have called for rape squads and the adoption of policies in The Handmaid s Tale, a dystopian book and TV series depicting the dehumanization and brutalization of women.
What was scary here was how quickly this also manifested in offline threats, Frances-Wright said, emphasizing that online discourse can have real-world impacts.
Previous violent rhetoric on 4chan has been connected to racially motivated and antisemitic attacks, includinga 2022 shootingby a white supremacist in Buffalo thatkilled 10 people.Anti-Asian hate incidentsalso rose as politicians,including Trump, used words such as Chinese virus to describe the COVID-19 pandemic. And Trump s language targetingMuslimsandimmigrantsin his first campaign correlated with spikes in hate speech and attacks on these groups, Frances-Wright said.
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremismreportedsimilar rhetoric, with numerous violent misogynistic trends gaining traction on right-wing platforms such 4chan and spreading to more mainstream ones such as X since the election.
Throughout the presidential race, Trump s campaign leaned onconservative podcastsand tailored messaging towarddisaffected young men. As Trump took the stage at the Republican National Convention over the summer, the song It s A Man s Man s Man s World byJames Brownblared from the speakers.
One of several factors to his success this election was modestlyboosting his support among men, a shift concentrated among younger voters, according to AP VoteCast, survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. But Trump also won support from 44% of women age 18 to 44, according to AP VoteCast.
To some men, Trump s return to the White House is seen as a vindication, gender and politics experts said. For many young women, the election felt like a referendum on women s rights and Democratic Vice PresidentKamala Harrisloss felt like a rejection of their own rights and autonomy.
For some of these men, Trump s victory represents a chance to reclaim a place in society that they think they are losing around these traditional gender roles, Frances-Wright said.
None of the current online rhetoric is being amplified by Trump or anyone in his immediate orbit. But Trump has a long history ofinsulting women, and the spike in such language comes after he rana campaignthat wascentered on masculinityand repeatedlyattacked Harrisover herraceandgender. His allies and surrogatesalso usedmisogynistic languageabout Harristhroughout the campaign.
With Trump s victory, many of these men felt like they were heard, they were victorious. They feel that they have potentially a supporter in the White House, said Dana Brown, executive director of the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics.
Brown said some young men feel they re victims of discrimination and have expressed mounting resentment for successes of the women s rights movement, including#MeToo. The tension also has been influenced by socioeconomic struggles.
As women become the majority on college campuses and many professional industries see increasing gender diversity, it has led to young men scapegoating women and girls, falsely claiming it s their fault they re not getting into college anymore as opposed to looking inward, Brown said.
Perez, the political science student, said she and her sister have been leaning on each other, their mother and other women in their lives to feel safer amid the online vitriol. They text each other to make sure they got home safely. They have girls nights to celebrate wins, including a female majority in student government at their campus in the University of Wisconsin system.
I want to encourage my friends and the women in my life to use their voices to call out this rhetoric and to not let fear take over, she said.
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