‘Your body, my choice’: Disgusting trend on the rise after Trump win
A white supremacist’s triumphant response to Donald Trump’s election victory signals a disturbing trend sweeping across America.
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ANALYSIS
“Your body, my choice.”
That was the far-right white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes’s triumphant, four-word message to women after Donald Trump’s trouncing of Kamala Harris in the election of America’s 47th President.
“Hey b*tch, we control your bodies! Guess what? Guys win again. Okay? Men win again,” the 26-year-old continued.
“There will never ever be a female president … It’s over. Glass ceiling? Dude, it’s the ceiling made of f**king bricks. You will never break it. Your stupid face keeps hitting the brick ceiling. We will keep you down forever. You will never control your own bodies.”
It’s impossible to articulate how alarming a display of such blatant misogyny is.
Well known for his extremist views, Fuentes’s bald-faced hatred of women has proven difficult for even Republicans to stomach.
Last month, Vice President-elect JD Vance sought to distance the Trump campaign from his gross rhetoric, after Fuentes attacked Mr Vance’s wife, Usha, over her Indian heritage.
“Of course Donald Trump has criticised this person,” Mr Vance told CBS News’ Face the Nation (though it’s worth noting that Fuentes dined at Mar-a-Lago with the President-elect in 2022).
“The guy’s a total loser. Certainly, I disavow him … Don’t feed the trolls, and they largely go away.”
What’s become abundantly clear in the days since the election is that these trolls do not just “go away”.
In fact, Fuentes’s woman-hating rallying cry has spread like wildfire online among the men (particularly the Gen Z cohort) who turned out in their masses for Mr Trump and view his victory as affirmation that women will never have, and do not deserve, the right to their own bodily autonomy.
“Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say,” Jon Miller, who has more than 100,000 followers, wrote.
Or, as self-proclaimed misogynist and king of the manosphere Andrew Tate put it: “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights … The men are back in charge.”
What’s also become clear is that these views no longer exist in a vacuum. Young men across the globe, including in Australia, have increasingly been mobilised by the likes of Tate, Joe Rogan and Adin Ross, adopting the viewpoint that women are to blame for the supposed plight of men.
“(The manosphere) contrasts the growing challenges faced by men with the increasing social, economic and political success experienced by women,” Curtin University’s Ben Rich and Eva Bujalka wrote for The Conversation last year.
“This zero-sum claim posits that female empowerment must necessarily equate to male disempowerment.”
That a significant portion of Mr Trump’s fanbase hold a particular vitriol for women is no surprise – given the flagrant misogyny reflected by his campaign, his supporters, and the 78-year-old himself.
These attitudes went into overdrive when his opponent switched from another old, white man to a younger, more capable woman of Black and South Asian descent.
America’s newly-reinstated Commander in Chief has a long and troubling history toward women. About two dozen have accused him of sexual assault, and a judge found that the writer E Jean Carroll’s allegation that Mr Trump raped her was “substantially true”.
At a Wisconsin rally in October, he admitted that his advisers had counselled him against describing himself as a “protector” for women. This from the man who, during his last White House reign, positioned a conservative-majority Supreme Court to eventually succeed in the overturning of Roe v Wade.
“They said, ‘Sir, I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say’. I pay these guys a lot of money; can you believe it?” Mr Trump told the crowd.
“I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them. I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in. I’m going to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other things’.”
His “creepy” remarks were less of a dog whistle than Fuentes’s, but disturbing all the same – and were rightly called out by many over the fact they were not dissimilar to the arguments of a domestic abuser.
Ms Harris’ defeat has been presented as a loss to millions of women the world over, and, for those in the US, a horrible flashback to November 9, 2016, when they woke to the news Mr Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton.
But, in her concession speech on Thursday, Ms Harris urged her devastated supporters to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again – a call to arms feminist author Rebecca Solnit also directed at her female followers on Wednesday.
“They want you to feel powerless and surrender and let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I,” she wrote.
“The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”
Originally published as ‘Your body, my choice’: Disgusting trend on the rise after Trump win
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