By Autumn Lampounov
“Your body, my choice. Forever.” That’s what Nicholas Fuentes posted on X on election night, Nov 5th, when it was clear that Trump had won the presidency. This X post now has over 90 million views and 35,000 reposts.
So who is Nicholas Fuentes? Nick Fuentes is an extreme right-wing influencer, a self-proclaimed misogynist, and an avid white supremacist – though he prefers the term “Christian conservative.” He’s been banned from Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok for rhetoric that violated hate speech policies, such as questioning the validity of the Holocaust, praising Adolf Hitler, and being “vocal about his disdain for women, Muslims, the LGBTQ+ community and others,” according to this article. He was also banned from X, though he was reinstated by Elon Musk a few years ago (along with other previously banned users who returned to the platform, such as Alex Jones from InfoWars). Fuentes is vocal about concerns such as fearing that America will cease to exist as a Christian nation if it loses “its white demographic core” and “its faith in Jesus Christ.” He attended the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017, only 18-years-old at the time, where a group of white supremacists and Nazis chanted slogans such as “Jews will not replace us” in protest over the planned removal of a Confederate memorial. More recently, he’s been known for having a dinner with Trump back in 2022, which some have called a potential dog whistle.
Andrew Tate also made a now-viral X post a few days after the election. The post reads, “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights,” and received over 688,000 views in less than two hours. Andrew Tate is an ex-kickboxer, but in recent years he’s been more recognized for being a big part of the manosphere community, as well as having a few open cases against him concerning human trafficking, organized crime, and rape. He holds views such as that a woman’s place is in the home, that women can’t drive, and that women are the property of men. He’s known for talking at length about violence towards women, such as explaining how he would beat a woman if she accused him of cheating. He also weighed in on the abortion issue during the #MeToo movement, stating that rape victims should be held responsible for their attacks. He’s a well-known figure in extreme right-wing circles, and his name is recognizable outside them as well: in July of 2022, Google searches for his name exceeded those of Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump and he was the third most Googled person in 2023. He’s been featured on the far-right conspiracy theory and news podcast InfoWars, and he’s a big supporter of Donald Trump. Some people have also been quick to point out that some ideas Trump has shared throughout his campaign sound a lot like Andrew Tate’s, such as how Tate has been known to compare women to dogs and how Trump recently called Kamala Harris a “dog” at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. At the very least, they share a lot of views: a key part of Trump’s campaign centered around abortion issues, and he promised to be a protector of women “whether the women like it or not,” and he’s also given a lot of praise to the effects of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a self-identified group of independent, non-profit organizations whose goal is to safeguard human rights and to fight polarization, extremism, and disinformation, released a study on Nov. 8th detailing increased online abuse towards women in the United States following the election results. They tracked social media websites and forums and saw an increase in misogynistic trends in the run-up to this election (as well as after 2020 and 2022 elections in the past). The organization also states that there was “a spike” in misogynistic content in late October, and that there was a “significant rise in posts focused on repealing the 19th Amendment” (which gave women the right to vote in 1920). Here is a chart of mentions of misogynistic phrases by number over early Oct. to early Nov.
// Institute for Strategic Dialogue
The article also clarifies the statistics: “In the past 24 hours, there has been a 4,600% increase in mentions of the terms ‘your body, my choice’ and ‘get back in the kitchen’ on X.” The phrase “your body, my choice” was also trending on Facebook, with 52,000 posts in the last 24 hours at the time of the article’s publishing.
This movement in online spaces has received a lot of backlash despite its spark in popularity. However, this idea has also been turned into a meme: “My body, her choice,” something some men have been posting along with pictures of fictional characters they find attractive. While some women have been vocal about their feelings of revulsion towards this rise of misogyny, others have embraced it, such as tradwives (married women that embrace traditional gender roles by focusing on homemaking and supporting their household).
