“Your body, my choice”: The misogynist MAGA attack, explained

Donald Trump is headed to the White House, again, so it’s not surprising that Americans are again contending with a rise in hate speech. 

This time around, one of the attack lines is “your body, my choice.” Attributed by some to an election night post on X by white supremacist Nick Fuentes that read “Your body, my choice. Forever,” the phrase transforms the longstanding feminist and abortion-rights slogan “My body, my choice” into an attack on women’s autonomy, and, at worst, a threat of rape.

In the days following the election, TikTok creators have reported seeing the phrase crop up in comments on their videos, according to a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a global nonpartisan think tank that studies disinformation and extremism. One creator said she had to delete a video because commenters were “saying they couldn’t wait until I get raped or ‘your body my choice.’” 

Girls and young women are also hearing the line in schools, according to family members, with one mom posting on Facebook that her daughter had heard it three times on campus, and that boys told her to “sleep with one eye open tonight.”

Instances of the phrase increased 4,600 percent on X between last Thursday and Friday, according to the report. Meanwhile, Fuentes’s original post has been reposted more than 35,000 times. 

The spike in sexist hate is a reflection of one of the dominant narratives of the election: that it was essentially a triumph of men over women. Trump tailored much of his campaign to disaffected American men — especially young men, many of whom feel they are victims of discrimination and who have expressed resentment against feminist movements like Me Too. For a lot of these men, the election feels like vindication, and for some, it’s more than that: a chance to put women back in their place. 

For anyone on the receiving end of the misogynist insults in the last few days, meanwhile, the phrase feels like a scary harbinger of things to come. At the same time, experts told Vox that Americans have experienced this kind of hate speech before, particularly in the aftermath of Trump’s first election in 2016 — and that history can hold lessons for navigating the present.

The phrase is part of a larger pattern of misogyny

The feminist phrase “my body, my choice” was used regularly in chants at rallies by 1970, though it’s not clear who originally coined it, said Laura Prieto, program director of Our Bodies Ourselves Today, a digital platform that is an iteration of the iconic reproductive health book Our Bodies, Ourselves. In the years before Roe v. Wade, it was a call for abortion rights, but it was also “a statement about women demanding their right as equal human beings to have decision-making power over what happened to them,” Prieto said.

The term has become less popular on the left in recent years, especially after it was adopted by anti-vaccine activists. Now “my body, my choice” has been co-opted by Fuentes and others, who have transformed it into a tool to harass and intimidate women. 

Others aren’t using the phrase, but are echoing the idea that with Trump’s election, women must submit to the will of men. On social media, posts have ranged from “more coded misogyny” to “very direct threats of rape,” Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and one of the authors of the report, told Vox.

Many of the sexist posts stem from “manosphere” influencers like Andrew Tate and their followers, according to the report — Tate, for example, posted on X on November 7, “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights.” 

“Manosphere” creators are part of a larger online ecosystem directed at men that’s lurched hard to the right in recent years, and helped carry Trump to victory, Vox’s Rebecca Jennings reported. Fifty-five percent of male voters cast their ballots for Trump this year, compared with just 45 percent of female voters, according to exit polling by the Washington Post. (Though we ought to note that exit polling is preliminary, and therefore unreliable, data.)

Online, that gender divide emerged before the election. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue reports spotting a rise in misogynistic posts (including calls to repeal the 19th amendment) starting in October, apparently in response to the Harris campaign’s focus on women voters and reproductive rights. The spread of the posts “demonstrated the influence of an increasingly vindictive set of online actors, who appear to be using the election results as a permission structure to more overtly and aggressively espouse narratives about curbing women’s rights,” Frances-Wright and co-author Moustafa Ayad write in their report.

A similar pattern emerged after Trump’s first election in 2016, when civil rights groups and law enforcement agencies saw a spike in hate speech and attacks on women and people perceived to be Muslim or immigrants — all groups Trump explicitly or implicitly denigrated in his first campaign. The harassment even made its way into classrooms; a BuzzFeed analysis found more than 50 incidents of a student invoking Trump’s name or message to attack a classmate during the 2016-17 school year.

The fact that the attacks aren’t new doesn’t make them less scary for the people on the receiving end. “It is very traumatic, particularly the younger that you are,” Frances-Wright said. Implicit threats of rape can feel doubly frightening in a country where Trump just cruised to victory despite multiple allegations of sexual assault.

How to counter post-election hate

Since the harassment people are experiencing today is part of a longstanding pattern, however, there’s an existing playbook to counteract it. Some organizations, including schools and bookstores, have issued statements in recent days clarifying that they will not tolerate discrimination or harassment.

It’s also a time to remember the long history of “my body, my choice,” and everything it stood for — including hardships for women that must have seemed, at times, impossible to overcome, including a lack of many basic rights like the ability to open credit cards in their names or serve on juries. 

“A lot of things that we take for granted, just because they seem to be really powerful right now, it doesn’t mean that they always will be,” Prieto said. “The one thing you can count on is that things are going to change.”