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A surge of misogynistic social media posts featuring men laying claim to women’s bodies has coincided with President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory last week, according to a new report.
Trump ran a campaign that included denying women their free will. He vowed to be women's protector “whether the women like it or not,” and he repeatedly praised the chaos that has ensued after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn women’s federal right to abortion as “beautiful.” His victory has some in the MAGA movement eager to subjugate women, and their remarks all but affirm some people’s fears that a Trump win would unleash misogyny akin to that in “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The nonpartisan Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks the spread of disinformation and propaganda online, released a report Friday that found an initial spike in blatantly misogynistic statements — including men telling women “your body, my choice” and calling for women’s voting rights to be repealed — following Trump’s victory.
I’d been keeping track of such misogyny in the lead-up to Election Day. But the ISD report explains how this kind of bigoted bile exploded online after Trump’s win.
According to the report:
In a national election heavily focused on women and reproductive rights, women in the United States have faced an onslaught of online abuse, harassment, and denigration following Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss. This 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. As an emboldened group of ‘manosphere’ influencers, extremist ideologues and politicians exploit Donald Trump’s election as a rebuke of both reproductive rights and women’s rights, the impact on women could extend into the next presidential election and beyond.
The “manosphere” is an online, multiplatform community of angst-ridden men who believe feminism — and women’s independence, more broadly — is a key source of society’s problems.
The report quotes a widely shared post-election tweet from far-right manosphere podcaster Andrew Tate, who suggested he hit the gas pedal in his car when he saw a woman at a crosswalk because “you no longer have rights.” It also quotes a social media post from Nick Fuentes, Trump’s white nationalist dinner date from 2022, who tweeted, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” and garnered tens of millions of impressions.
In just a 24-hour span after the election, researchers reportedly found a “4,600% increase in mentions of the terms ‘your body, my choice’ and ‘get back in the kitchen’ on X.” The report refers to multiple social media users who said they or their children were told "your body, my choice" in class. The researchers found tens of thousands of accounts using the phrase “dumb c--t” to refer to Vice President Kamala Harris and other women on Election Day itself, using an insult Elon Musk’s super PAC referred to in a suggestive anti-Harris ad. And the researchers also found calls for “rape” and “rape squads” garnered thousands of views on social media after last week’s election.
This research aligns with research from other experts who’ve talked about invective targeting women in politics. Disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, for example, wrote for MSNBC that the vicious attacks Harris has received are incomparable to those any woman in politics before her has faced.
And this fits a troubling global trend. Around the world, many of the repressive, authoritarian-like figures Trump and his movement idolize have all been bolstered by movements of petulant men who harass and threaten women. They include Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Argentinian President Javier Milei and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
All have learned how to use the misogynistic angst of their country’s men to their political advantage, and Donald Trump is no different.
The topic of "MAGA masculinity" is one I've been covering closely over the past several months, and I'm going to stay on this beat. To read some of my previous coverage, check the links here, here, here, here and here.