Emboldened ‘manosphere’ accelerates threats and demeaning language toward women after US election

By CHRISTINE FERNANDO

Updated 10:10 AM CST, November 30, 2024

CHICAGO (AP) — In the days after the presidential election, Sadie Perez began carrying pepper spray with her around campus. Her mom also ordered her and her sister a self-defense kit that included keychain spikes, a hidden knife key and a personal alarm.

It’s a response to an emboldened fringe of right-wing “manosphere” influencers who have seized on Republican Donald Trump ’s presidential win to justify and amplify misogynistic derision and threats online. Many have appropriated a 1960s abortion rights rallying cry, declaring “Your body, my choice” at women online and on college campuses.

For many women, the words represent a worrying harbinger of what might lie ahead as some men perceive the election results as a rebuke of reproductive rights and women’s rights.

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

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.”

“I think many progressive women have been shocked by how quickly and aggressively this rhetoric has gained traction,” she said.

The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to a 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 University of California, Davis School of Law, said the phrase transforms 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 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, and the phrase spread rapidly to other social media platforms.

Women on TikTok have reported seeing it inundate their comment sections. 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 reports. One mother said her daughter heard the phrase on her college campus three times, the report said.

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

Perez 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 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. 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, including a 2022 shooting by a white supremacist in Buffalo that killed 10 people. Anti-Asian hate incidents also rose as politicians, including Trump, 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 spikes in hate speech and attacks on these groups, Frances-Wright said.

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 that was centered on masculinity and repeatedly attacked Harris over 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 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.

This article was originally published by The Associated Press.