“Your Body, My Choice”: A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Toxic Right

In 1970, Roe v. A few years before Wade, feminists advocating abortion rights held signs reading “My Body, My Decision” at a protest in Philadelphia; This slogan evolved over the next decade into the slogan: “My body, my decision.” This became the defining expression of the pro-choice movement, a line along which feminism eagerly and asymptotically progressed. The next topic to come into the frame was sexual assault: Within two decades, the woman’s claim that she had the legal right to choose when to have sex with her husband went from laughable to binding. The first spousal rape case was heard in 1978, and spousal rape became illegal throughout the United States in 1993. The twenty-teens’ calculus of sexual assault tried to give finality to “My body, my choice”: it’s the woman’s choice what she does with her body, even if she’s drunk, even if he’s famous, even if he’s acted like he wants her before. At the time I had the naive idea that something had changed permanently. I thought we had already seen the reaction, that it was represented by Donald Trump’s reaction. First The election victory and the idea that women were fully human were enough consensus that seismic, yet complex, progress as in 2017 could still occur. #Me too. Now no more Roe and Trump I’m about to become president againand it took less than twenty-four hours after his re-election for young men to adopt a slogan that could define the coming era of decline: “Your body, my choice.”

First of all, this is a joke! Get a hold of yourself, you triggered the libfems easily! It all started with a tweet from twenty-six-year-old broadcaster Nick Fuentes, a self-described “proud incel” who, beneath the harsh veneer of what must have seemed like irony, regularly praised Hitler and expressed his desire to do so. “Catholic Taliban rule” in America, as well as for future marriage to a sixteen-year-old boy. (Fuentes was considered so toxic that Trump was denounced by members of the Republican Party after having dinner With him in 2022; It seems likely that such a stance will change at this moment of unmasking.) On Election Night, Fuentes said, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Young men began echoing it on young women’s social media accounts, commenting, “‘Your body, my choice'” and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focused on extremism, reported “‘your body, my choice’ and It found a 4,600% increase in the use of the terms ‘back to the kitchen’. X”—the platform itself is of course owned and controlled by him a billionaire He was so obsessed with impregnating women that he tweeted to Taylor Swift, “I’m going to give you a child.” (X’s shift to the right under Elon Musk can be seen in his responses to a post by Jake Paul, himself a Trump supporter, telling the “Your body, my choice” crowd to “Shut that shit up”; top comments mostly call him mean, female , paid accounts saying womanizer, slut.) This was all mostly online stuff; We could ignore the man holding a “”.Women Are PropertyIf we want, we can sign at Texas State University. But, as Fuentes knows all too well, the fact that the phrase is a meme and thus an alleged joke makes it, in a way, more worrying. “Women are fucking morons,” Fuentes shouted in a gleeful reaction video. “How many TikToks have you seen in the last forty-eight hours of women crying and filming themselves crying?” “Women like all this,” he continued; they are “bothered by it” because they understand themselves as victims. Subtext takes trolling one step further; Why don’t you go ahead and give them something to actually cry about?

Fuentes managed to create mayhem. Horrified by the sudden ubiquity of casual rape threats, thousands of young women are actually posting tearful videos on TikTok staring straight ahead. (In this – in this whole thing – we are experiencing the consequences of TikTok being one of the most popular apps. environments Young women now receive and process the news; plus podcasts and YouTube are the top news sources for young men.) Right-wing men are compiling these tear-jerking videos into supercuts. People on the left are broadcasting revenge-filled rape fantasies involving Fuentes. The first theme is violence: Women encourage each other to learn concealed carry; A mother joked that her son would have an extremely late abortion if he found out he was Groyper. Some conservative women have proudly embraced this motto, posting thirst traps or couple photos with the caption “My body, her choice.” One of them wrote: “Just posting this to watch the mental breakdowns of liberal women on TikTok.” A few “Your Size, My Choice” shirts went on sale on Amazon last Monday, but they sold out that evening; a handful of “My Size, His Choice” shirts were also taken offline.

If you heard the phrase “Your body, my choice” anywhere before last week, it was probably in the context of a public policy the speaker opposed. This was a good summary of the return to abortion ban: Dayna Tortorici in 2022 wroteinside n+1If Roe’s slogan was “My body, my choice,” the subtext of the Dobbs decision was “Your body, my choice.” In recent years, this has become something of a rallying cry among anti-Vaxxers to satirize the Biden Administration’s criticisms. COVID-vaccination obligation. Even more popular among anti-vaxxers was the original phrase: If those of us who love abortion so much talk about bodily autonomy, then “My body, my choice” should also apply to those who just want to have an abortion. live clean.

The possible distortions and meaning of the expression seem essentially limitless. A writer for the fundamentalist Christian organization Focus on the Family defended Lately, “My body, my choice” has become a pro-life slogan because it applies to fetuses, too. (“Rights should never go so far as to deny one person the rights of another,” he argues, a delightfully radical idea that, taken to its logical conclusion, would abolish national borders and the prison system and enable the incubation of freedoms that would only be fully moral when realized by the artificial womb.) a fetus.) A pregnant doctor wrote to One man responded: “I hate to get into semantics, but my choice is how to define abortion literally.” Did they agree? Do people wonder if these words are good or bad?

There’s something absolutely mind-blowing going on here: How can “my body, my choice” be true when it comes to abortion, but wrong when it comes to vaccination instructions? “Your body, my choice” may be wrong when it comes to rape, but can it be true when it comes to the fetus? chirp From the interesting year of 2017: “Oh, are you upset about something? Well, would you be angry if the situation were different, just the way I envisioned it for this argument?” This country, more or less trapped in a two-party system, has always been full of people who think the other half of the population has lost their minds. Now the youngest generation of voters will never again know the reality of consensus on any issue. Some Americans think that the government should force women to bear children, but that it is immoral to mandate the eradication of polio through vaccination; Some Americans think women should be allowed to end the life of their fetuses, but people shouldn’t be allowed to have sex with women against our will. “I’ll take it”VOTE RED. . . LAUGHING OUT LOUDThe graffiti that appeared last week near my apartment in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, where more than ninety percent of voters support Kamala Harris, is yet another reminder that we are often closer than we think to the people who find us ridiculous and unattractive. .

On the one hand, we must be careful about reducing the world to what people share on social media. On the other hand, sharing now creates political reality. A school district in Minnesota wrote in a letter to parents last week that there were reports of text messages targeting black students that talked about slavery and plantations. It was stated that in another district of the state, female students were given messages saying “it’s your body, it’s my choice”. There are parents on social media reporting that their children have heard this phrase from boys at school. A therapist at a university in the upper Midwest told me that a student she worked with went to a student party, where a man was yelling and the people around him didn’t address him.

One of the things that is so sad to me about the popularity of this slogan among young people is that those who embrace it (both men and women) have frankly not had enough sex to know what they are talking about. There’s a narrative among young conservatives that “hot girls vote for Trump” and that the woke left can’t handle masculine men or something. There’s a suggestion here that what’s triggering about “Your body, my choice” is the mind-blowing idea that women surrendering their bodies to men is hot for both men and women. In fact, this is one of the most commonplace sexual tendencies in existence. And now the eager, lustful spirit of domination and submission in the bedroom is wagging the tail of forced sex, forced pregnancy, forced motherhood, forced marriage.

But the inexperience of people who repeat “Your body, my choice” also means that many, especially the very young, have not yet embraced this ideology. I talked to a sex education educator in New York. A few days after the election, the nonbinary educator was teaching sixth graders, ages eleven and twelve, about consent. One child chanted, “Your body, my choice,” and before the teacher could react, another child stood up and said, “If you say that again, I’ll slap you.” The whole class started cheering. They said the teacher eased the tension. They asked the first child if he knew what “Your body, my choice” meant, and he said no; They told the boy that this means a boy decides when he wants to hurt a girl, that it is normal to rape another person. “After that, the child’s eyes started to tear up,” they said. “He was confused, although not entirely honest, when he said he didn’t know.” The boy had told them that the person he heard saying, “Your body, my choice” looked very confident and cool.

Nick Fuentes’ personal information has been deleted; His address started circulating on the internet last weekend. A woman who lived near Fuentes’ home in Illinois went to his house on Sunday; he later told chicago Tribune He said she opened the door and pepper-sprayed him before he even knocked. In his statement to Chicago Sun Times“Don’t go to the door of someone who wants to cause trouble,” Fuentes said. He also retweeted a post by Tristan Tate, another right-wing influencer who is under court supervision and awaiting trial in Romania on charges including human trafficking; If a man came to a woman’s house and confronted her about her politics, “He could literally shoot her to death and no one would care. “I also completely agree with him and his right to defend his home.” Being threatened – they make it seem so serious that they insist that anyone changing their panties about a boob is a stupid loser, even if they insist that something about it is a joke somewhere.