‘Your body, my choice’: Harassment towards women surges online after Trump's win

Trump’s election victory against Harris has emboldened influencers from the ‘Manosphere,’ or interconnected misogynistic online communities, who see his election win as a rebuke of reproductive rights and gender equality, said ISD, a nonprofit that advocates policies to fight extremism.

By Anna Kitanaka

Online abuse, harassment and hate towards women has soared in the days since the US election, with phrases like “your body, my choice” and “get back to the kitchen” exploding on platforms like X and TikTok, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Donald Trump’s election victory against Vice President Kamala Harris this week has emboldened influencers from the ‘Manosphere,’ or interconnected misogynistic online communities, who see his election win as a rebuke of reproductive rights and gender equality, said ISD, a nonprofit that advocates policies to fight extremism.

Manosphere content creators “appear to be using the election results as a permission structure to more overtly and aggressively espouse narratives about curbing women’s rights,” ISD said.

ISD’s findings come after an election that saw gender play a key role in both Trump and Harris’ campaigns, and where pundits often painted the race as a battle of the sexes. Harris took up abortion rights as a cornerstone issue in a bid to shore up the support of women. Trump, meanwhile, counted on men, leaning on the cachet of billionaire Elon Musk, podcasts popular with young men and “locker-room” talk about a golf legend’s genitalia.

Phrases such as “your body, my choice,” promoted by White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, saw a 4,600 per cent increase on Nov 6, ISD said. Posts calling for repealing the 19th Amendment, which enabled women the right to vote in the US about a century ago, surged 663 per cent compared to the previous week. The post by Fuentes on X now has more than 58 million views since Nov. 5.

There were also signs that harassment extended into real life, in schools and university campuses. Young girls and parents have been sharing instances where “your body, my choice” were being directed at girls or being chanted by young boys in classes, ISD said.

Fuentes and others are co-opting the phrase “my body, my choice,” which harks back to the 1960s feminist movement and was further popularized by women’s rights advocates after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and ended the federal right to an abortion in 2022.

In response, some posts online called for women in America to adopt the “4B” movement, a revolt against men with roots in South Korea’s feminist movement. The four tenets are no sex with men, no dating men, no giving birth and no marriage with men, one X user wrote, garnering over 20 million views.

ISD examined platforms including X, forums, blogs, Reddit and Alphabet Inc’s YouTube from Oct 1 to Nov 6. The new surge in harassment is “more than just a continuation of misogynist trends that ISD documented in both the run-up to this election and in the aftermath of previous cycles including 2020 and 2022.”