Hello and happy Thursday. There are 67 days until our new president is sworn in, and today we are talking about how funny it is to threaten women, I guess?
In the waning days of the election, President-elect Donald Trump promised to protect women, whether they like it or not.
It was a strange cultural moment, as so many are these days. For some women, it was a welcome pledge to ensure safe communities — ones that the boogeymen of propaganda and lies have led many to believe are overrun with violent migrants.
For other women, Trump’s statement was further proof this was, at best, a man deeply out of touch with American women and at worst, one who will continue (as he did with his role in overturning Roe vs. Wade) to erode women’s ability to take part in society as equals.
Without rehashing the tales of Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll and the two dozen other women who have personally accused the incoming president with sexual misconduct ranging from rape to general scuzzballery, it is safe to say Trump comes with baggage. A lot of baggage.
Yes, he has appointed women to his inner circle as he prepares to move back into the White House. But Trump’s election has also crumbled any pretense that the MAGA assault on female autonomy is limited to rolling back reproductive rights. This isn’t about pregnancies, wanted or not. It’s about women’s role in public life — and the increasing pressure to cede spaces hard-won by previous generations.
That hit home for me, and many others, when far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes posted this charming message on social media after the election: Your body, my choice. Forever.
A joke? A threat? Maybe a bit of both. But definitely an indicator of what’s to come.
“In any election where the victorious candidate has crowds of people at their rallies, shouting stuff like ‘Daddy’s home,’ we know that we’re taking a step back,” Juliet Williams told me. She’s a professor of gender studies at UCLA, a field of study Trump has already promised to attack.
“This election is very much about women’s roles,” she said. “This is a revolt against a model of society that says men and women get to be treated as equals.”
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A joke, ‘sort of’
For those of you blessedly unaware of who Fuentes is, he’s made a name for himself in the so-called manosphere where any pretense of equality for anyone who is not a white male is a laughable concept. Fuentes has millions of followers on his various social media platforms, where he rails against women, Jewish people and many others. Though he now claims he doesn’t support Trump (who apparently isn’t extreme enough for him anymore) Fuentes has dined with him at Mar-a-Lago.
Fuentes’ “your body, my choice,” post has 94 million views and 36,000 reposts on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, which has skewed even harder right since Musk has become the First Buddy.
While Fuentes has said in a video on social media site Rumble that his post was “sort of” a joke, he also said that there was a “very serious point underlying” it — then proceeded to attack those who use the “my body, my choice” slogan in the fight for reproductive rights:
“Women actually deserve to be mocked for this. Not all women, obviously not women who are mothers, not women who are married, not women who are Trump supporters and the like. But we are talking about a very pernicious faction of women. They may be the majority, they skew younger, and they are radical, shrieking, shrill, whining, b—, and they are ruining this country, and everybody knows it. They are shrieking about rape. They are shrieking about sexual assault. They hate men, and they’ll say they don’t hate men, but they hate men that are masculine.”
For the record, I don’t hate men. I do hate rape culture, and a world where women who push back against casual misogyny are vilified. I don’t agree that only women who are married mothers are worthy of respect.
But since Fuentes made his remark, the phrase has taken on a life of its own. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks internet stuff, found that just after the election, there was a 4,600% increase in the use of “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen” on X.
It also trended on TikTok and Facebook, where it had 52,000 posts in the days just after the election. And please don’t soothe yourself with the idea that this kind of hate is constrained to the internet. Girls in schools across the country have reported having the phrase yelled at them by male classmates.
One in three women in America has experienced sexual violence. Take a moment to imagine what it feels like for a woman or girl who has survived an attack to see this phrase — this threat — become part of our popular culture.
But, post-election, our outrage has been drained into acceptance or maybe numbness. For the moment, anyway.
Normalizing inequality
Which may be why there was barely a blip in our consciousness when this week Trump announced Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as his new attorney general, the highest law enforcement office in the land.
Gaetz, you may recall, was investigated by the very Department of Justice he will now lead in a sex-trafficking probe that ended last year without charges. That case involved allegations about the congressman and his relationship with an underage girl, which he has denied.
The House Ethics Committee announced in June that it was investigating whether he “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.” That ended Wednesday when Gaetz resigned from Congress.
Gaetz isn’t the only appointee whose ideas about women may raise concerns.
Just before that choice, Trump announced Army veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth as his choice for Defense secretary.
Hegseth has said he opposes allowing women to have equality in the military.
“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” he said during a recent podcast interview.
No more women fighter pilots, no more women special forces, no more women rising to the top of the ranks. The military has long been plagued by inequity toward women — including excessive cases of sexual assault. Now we are putting on the table a decimation of 10 years of achievements.
Williams, the gender studies professor, expects to see that kind of blowback in other professions, especially ones like teaching that are predominantly women. And, most dishearteningly, she sees it as an indicator that women can expect greater pressure in the next four years to accept what we have, rather than fighting for what should be, in all aspects of public life.
“Now a whole new generation of women are not just going to hear about the backlash from their moms,” she said. “They’re about to be subjected to it themselves.”
Reality check
Subjected, of course, is not the same as subjugated.
Like many people for whom equality in all spheres is a priority, I am feeling a wee bit overwhelmed by the force and speed with which Trump 2.0 is reshaping society.
So I’ll end with the wisdom of Alice Walker, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and a reminder that the only limits that hold us back are the ones we place on ourselves.
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any,” Walker famously said. And that is the greatest problem the new Trump administration will face.
Women do have power. And we’re not going back.
What else you should be reading:
The must-read: Even Republicans are stunned by Trump’s Gaetz Cabinet pick: ‘Absolute gut punch’
That too painful to be funny: Trump Chooses Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence
The L.A. Times special: California Gov. Kamala Harris? New poll finds she’d have a clear advantage
Stay golden,
Anita Chabria
P.S.: In Trump’s flurry of announcements, he has also appointed two friends to lead an official-sounding agency that doesn’t actually exist: the Department of Government Efficiency. This, of course, is the brainchild of Elon Musk, who has ingratiated himself into Trump’s inner circle by doling out hundreds of millions of dollars and an equal number of fawning compliments. His reward is co-head of this imaginary agency with fellow Trump acolyte Vivek Ramaswamy.
The two are charged with coming up with ways to fire thousands of federal workers and supposedly cut regulations (and money) from the federal budget — though they have no direct power to implement whatever half-baked ideas they dream up. But of course, Musk has wasted no time putting up a gazillion self-aggrandizing memes on his right-wing social media site, and creating a profile for his made-up job. But if I have to see this stuff, you do, too.
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