Emboldened ‘manosphere’ steps up threats and demeaning language towards women after US election

In the days after the presidential election, Sadie Perez she started carrying pepper spray with her around campus. Her mother also ordered a self-defense kit for her and her sister that included key fob spikes, a hidden knife key and a personal alarm.

It is a response to a fringe encouraged by right-wing “manosphere” influencers who have seized the Republicans. Donald Trump his presidential victory to justify and amplify misogynistic mockery and threats online. Many have appropriated an abortion-rights rallying cry from the 1960s, declaring “Your Body, My Choice” to women online and on college campuses.

For many women, the words are a troubling harbinger of things to come, as some men see the election results as a rebuke of reproductive rights and women’s rights.

“The fact that I feel like I have to wear pepper spray like this is sad,” said Perez, a 19-year-old political science student from Wisconsin. “Women want and deserve to feel safe.”

Isabelle Frances-Wrightdirector of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focused on polarization and extremism, said he saw a “very large increase in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric right after the election,” including some “extremely violent “. misogyny.”

The phrase “Your body, my choice” was largely attributed to a post on social platform X from Nick Fuentesa Holocaust-denying white nationalist and far-right internet personality who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida two years ago. In statements responding to criticism of that event, Trump said he had “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before his arrival.

Mary Ruth Zieglerlaw professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said the phrase turns the iconic abortion rights slogan into an attack on women’s right to autonomy and a personal threat.

“The implication is that men should have control or access to sex with women,” said Ziegler, an expert on reproductive rights.

Fuentes’ post had 35 million views on X in 24 hours, according to a report by Frances-Wright’s think tank, and the phrase quickly spread to other social media platforms.

Women on TikTok reported seeing it flooding their comment sections. The slogan has also made its way offline, with boys chanting it in middle schools or men directing it at women on college campuses, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue report and social media reports. One mother said her daughter heard the phrase on her college campus three times, the report said.

School districts in Wisconsin and Minnesota sent parents notices about the language. T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase have been pulled from Amazon.

Perez said she’s seen men reply to Snapchat stories shared about their college class with “Your body, my choice.”

“It makes me feel disgusted and violated,” she said. “… It’s like going backwards.”

Misogynistic attacks have been part of the social media landscape for years. But Frances-Wright and others who monitor extremism and misinformation online said language glorifying violence against women or celebrating the possibility of their rights being stripped has increased since the election.

Online calls to women to “Get back in the kitchen” or “Repeal the 19th,” a reference to the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote, spread quickly. In the days surrounding the election, the extremism think tank found that the top 10 posts on X calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment received more than 4 million views collectively.

A man holding a sign reading “Women are property” sparked protests at Texas State University. The man was not a student, faculty or staff member and was escorted off campus, according to the university’s president. The university is “exploring potential legal responses,” he said.

Anonymous rape threats were left on TikTok videos of women denouncing the election results. And in the farthest reaches of the internet, 4chan forums have called for “rape squads” and policies in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a dystopian book and TV series that depicts the dehumanization and brutalization of women.

“What was scary here was how quickly it manifested itself in offline threats,” Frances-Wright said, noting that online speech can have real-world impacts.

Previous violent rhetoric on 4chan has been linked to racially motivated and anti-Semitic attacks, including a 2022 shooting by a white supremacist in Buffalo that killed 10 people. Incidents of anti-Asian hate have also increased as politicians, including Trump, have used words such as “Chinese virus” to describe the COVID-19 pandemic. And Trump’s language targeting Muslims and immigrants in his first campaign correlated with a rise in hate speech and attacks on those groups, Frances-Wright said.

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reported similar rhetoric, the “numerous violent misogynistic tendencies” that have gained traction on right-wing platforms like 4chan and spread to more popular ones like X since the election.

During the presidential race, Trump’s campaign relied on conservative podcasts and messages tailored to disaffected youth. As Trump took the stage at the Republican National Convention over the summer, James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” blared over the speakers.

One of several factors in his success in this election was a modest increase in his support among men, a shift concentrated among younger voters, according to AP VoteCast, the survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. But Trump also won support from 44 percent of women ages 18 to 44, according to AP VoteCast.

For some men, Trump’s return to the White House is seen as vindication, gender and politics experts said. For many young women, the election felt like a referendum on women’s rights and the Democratic vice president Kamala Harris the loss felt like a rejection of one’s own rights and autonomy.

“For some of these men, Trump’s victory is a chance to reclaim a place in society that they think they’re losing around these traditional gender roles,” Frances-Wright said.

None of the current online rhetoric is amplified by Trump or anyone in his immediate orbit. But Trump has a long history of insulting women, and the peak of such language comes after he ran a campaign that was centered on masculinity and repeatedly attacked Harris for her race and gender. His allies and surrogates also used misogynistic language about Harris throughout the campaign.

“With Trump’s victory, many of these men felt they were heard, they were victorious. They feel they have a potential supporter in the White House,” said Dana Brown, executive director of the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics.

Brown said some young people feel discriminated against and have expressed growing resentment at the successes of the women’s rights movement, including #MeToo. The tension was also influenced by socioeconomic struggles.

As women become the majority on college campuses and many professional industries see increasing gender diversity, this “has led to young men scapegoating women and girls, falsely claiming that it is their fault that they no longer enter the college rather than looking within,” Brown. said.

Perez, a political science major, said she and her sister leaned 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 victories, including a female majority in student government on their University of Wisconsin system campus.

“I want to encourage my friends and the women in my life to use their voices to call out this rhetoric and not let fear take over,” she said.

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Reprinted with permission from The Associated Press.

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