‘Extremely Violent Misogyny’ – Post-Election, Young Women Face Attacks Online, on Campus

For many women, words from an emboldened fringe of “manosphere” influencers who have seized on Republican Donald Trump ’s presidential win to amplify misogynistic derision and threats online represent a worrying harbinger of what might lie ahead as some men perceive the election results as a rebuke of reproductive and women’s rights.

Many of those right-wing influencers have appropriated a 1960s abortion rights rallying cry, declaring “Your body, my choice” at women online and on college campuses.

Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focusing on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large uptick in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some “extremely violent misogyny.”

The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to an Election Day post on the social platform X from Nick Fuentes, a 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 he arrived).

Mary Ruth Ziegler, a law professor at the UC Davis School of Law, said the phrase transforms the iconic abortion rights slogan into an attack on women.

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

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

Women on TikTok have reported seeing it inundate their comments. The slogan also has 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 posts.

School districts have sent notices about the language to parents. T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase were pulled off Amazon.

Sadie Perez, a 19-year-old political science student in Wisconsin, said she has seen men respond to shared Snapchat stories for their college class with “Your body, my choice.”

“It makes me feel disgusted and infringed upon,” she said. “… It feels like going backwards.”

Misogynistic attacks have been part of the social media landscape for years. 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, which has an office in Washington D.C., 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 at Texas State University. The man was not a student, faculty or staff, and was escorted off campus, according to the university’s president.

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, including a 2022 shooting by a white supremacist in Buffalo that killed 10 people. 

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reported similar 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 on conservative podcasts and tailored messaging toward disaffected 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” by James Brown blared from the speakers.

One of several factors to his success this election was modestly boosting 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 President Kamala Harris ’ loss 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 of insulting women, and the spike in such language comes after he ran a campaign centered on masculinity with repeated attacks on Harris over race and gender.

“With Trump’s victory, many of these men felt like they were heard, they were victorious,” 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.