CHICAGO (AP) — In the days after the presidential election, Sadie Perez began carrying pepper spray with her around campus. Her mom also ordered her and her sister a self-defense kit that included keychain spikes, a hidden knife key and a personal alarm.
It’s a response to an emboldened fringe of right-wing “manosphere” influencers who have seized on Republican Donald Trump ’s presidential win to justify and amplify misogynistic derision and threats online. Many have appropriated a 1960s abortion rights rallying cry, declaring “Your body, my choice” at women online and on college campuses.
For many women, the words represent a worrying harbinger of what might lie ahead as some men perceive the election results as a rebuke of reproductive rights and women’s rights.
“The fact that I feel like I have to carry around pepper spray like this is sad,” said Perez, a 19-year-old political science student in Wisconsin. “Women want and deserve to feel safe.”
Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focusing on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large uptick in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some “extremely violent misogyny.”
“I think many progressive women have been shocked by how quickly and aggressively this rhetoric has gained traction,” she said.
The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to a post on the social platform X from Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and far-right internet personality who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida two years ago. In statements responding to criticism of that event, Trump said he had “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before he arrived.
Mary Ruth Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said the phrase transforms the iconic abortion rights slogan into an attack on women’s right to autonomy and a personal threat.
“The implication is that men should have control over or access to sex with women,” said Ziegler, a reproductive rights expert.
Fuentes’ post had 35 million views on X within 24 hours, according to a report by Frances-Wright’s think tank, and the phrase spread rapidly to other social media platforms.
Women on TikTok have reported seeing it inundate their comment…