‘Your body, my choice’? Think before you engage.
Supporters of feminism rally in Seoul on Feb. 12, 2022. (Ahn Young-joon/AP)
By Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor writes the Many Such Cases Substack newsletter, where a version of this essay initially appeared.
“Your body, my choice. Forever.”
A subversion of the feminist slogan of bodily autonomy “my body, my choice,” it’s a line intended to infuriate, and it did. It’s a line that the man who said it — Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who shared the message on X the night of Nov. 5 — clearly wants women to think reflects the broader culture that won the election. Men like him want you to think that the 55 percent of men who voted for Donald Trump did so because they at best have zero regard for your well-being, and at worst actively want to hurt you and curb your rights.
The post became a rallying cry for many women. Some took the phrase as evidence that all men should be abandoned.
Above all, the post-election response has confirmed that a strong, loud subset of men and women really do fundamentally hate each other and have for a long time. The anger and resentment on display are not purely a response to Trump winning: They are a release of emotions that have been settling in for years. The current moment is more of an opportunity for an outlet for that animus than anything else. There are men who are gloating, and women who are committing to fighting back by abstaining from relationships and sex with men.
Still, we are overestimating just how much of the broader population these groups represent.
Most men are not Nick Fuentes. Most men are not celebrating the fearmongering belief that men will now own women’s bodies — even if all Trump-voting men did feel that way, just under half of male voters chose Kamala Harris, remember. And most women are not hard-line “SCUM Manifesto”-reading radical feminists calling for universal male castration. But if you spend much time on X or TikTok, you might believe otherwise — and some of these ways of thinking are creeping into the mainstream.
In the days after the election, posts calling for women to divest from men went viral in ways I’d never seen. “Ladies, I’m being so fr when I say this, it’s time to close off your wombs to males. this election proves now more than ever that they hate us & hate us proudly. do not reward them,” one woman wrote, amassing more than 271,000 likes. “Women need to stop dating & having sex with men immediately and im not even joking or being dramatic in the slightest,” said another with 436,000 likes, encouraging women to “take a page from the feminists in South Korea.” Many American women have been encouraging each other to take up the South Korean feminist “4b movement,” which calls for women to reject marriage, children, sex and relationships with men. (In Korean, each of the four principles begins with “bi,” which means no.)
Promoting animosity between genders has become an online trend. Not all women who share their anger are doing so with poor motivations. Rather, it has become a popular form of in-group signaling that persuades them to lean in to the negativity at their own expense. It is trendy to pledge your allegiance to 4b on TikTok — women with husbands and boyfriends are posting to ask if they can still participate despite their male partners, some saying they feel “suckered in” to the ideology.
Men who hate women want us to be mad. Some of these men (and even some women!) who have spouted similar vitriolic phrases do genuinely want women to have less authority over their bodies for no reason other than misogyny. There will be some states that further clamp down on reproductive freedoms, and there will be women who will suffer. That much is real, and it is worth being angry about.
But there is a gross overestimation of who these guys represent. Most of Fuentes’s live streams achieve between 40,000 to 250,000 views. Podcasters and streamers indeed helped shape this election, but Fuentes’s influence pales in comparison with someone like Joe Rogan, a far more moderate conservative who hosted Trump on his show ahead of the election and ranks No. 1 on Spotify’s charts. He might get plenty of media attention with his inflammatory remarks, but the majority of young men who voted Republican this year are more likely to be listening to guys like Rogan, Theo Von and Andrew Schulz, many of whom don’t publicly align with any specific political group.
Most people want the same things. They want to pursue happiness, connection, sex, family and friendships. Most even want to get married and have kids. In an election, both sides obfuscate that reality to achieve their ends. The medium through which most of us digested the election and our cultural response to it — our phones — obfuscates that, too.
Social media prioritizes the inflammatory; it makes conflicts that aren’t even our own immediate to our lives. This, too, is part of the issue with the Americanized 4b movement: Its main accomplishment will be to push women further online, seeking digital community and an outlet for their frustrations. They’ll be more exposed to the hate of misogynistic men, who will see this as further justification for their hatred. The cycle will only continue.
As fellow sex writer Camille Sojit Pejcha wrote after the election, “Within this cultural context, abstinence may be the best choice for many U.S. women. But I don’t think we should feel empowered by it — because the fact that so many women are resorting to celibacy isn’t a sign of our collective agency, but a symptom of the fact that we’re being progressively disincentivized from making other choices. And if the only way to preserve our autonomy is by giving something up, that is not evidence of our empowerment, but its opposite.”
This online gender war discourages us from making other choices. Giving up on sex and dating when these are things we would otherwise want fuels this process. What we are already witnessing is a consequence of too much time spent alone on our phones and computers, fed by a limitless algorithm that knows that divisiveness will keep our attention. Disconnection, loneliness and antipathy are what got us into this position where online hatred has such influence. How could anything that proposes more of it provide the solution?
Sex is political. Our bodies are political. Both things have political consequences. They are part of why this election went the way it did. But that is not all they are. They are something for you to determine and experience and enjoy. This is something the gender war wants you to forget — that your life and your desires are more than just a tool used to define a broader cultural narrative, more than an object to sacrifice for a cause. We are being asked to abandon our own desires for the sake of an online battle, as if giving up on intimacy would really stick it to guys like Fuentes whose intention is to enrage.
Whether we want relationships and sex and to commune with each other is something we should decide for ourselves, rather than letting the anger of the internet decide for us. Whose choice would it be, then?
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Source : https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/03/gender-wars-sex-politics-choice/
older version: https://archive.ph/56H1j - Title was Don’t believe the hype. Not all men and women hate each other, not the current one..
new archive: https://archive.ph/wip/1WGCu
Supporters of feminism rally in Seoul on Feb. 12, 2022. (Ahn Young-joon/AP)
By Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor writes the Many Such Cases Substack newsletter, where a version of this essay initially appeared.
“Your body, my choice. Forever.”
A subversion of the feminist slogan of bodily autonomy “my body, my choice,” it’s a line intended to infuriate, and it did. It’s a line that the man who said it — Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who shared the message on X the night of Nov. 5 — clearly wants women to think reflects the broader culture that won the election. Men like him want you to think that the 55 percent of men who voted for Donald Trump did so because they at best have zero regard for your well-being, and at worst actively want to hurt you and curb your rights.
The post became a rallying cry for many women. Some took the phrase as evidence that all men should be abandoned.
Above all, the post-election response has confirmed that a strong, loud subset of men and women really do fundamentally hate each other and have for a long time. The anger and resentment on display are not purely a response to Trump winning: They are a release of emotions that have been settling in for years. The current moment is more of an opportunity for an outlet for that animus than anything else. There are men who are gloating, and women who are committing to fighting back by abstaining from relationships and sex with men.
Still, we are overestimating just how much of the broader population these groups represent.
Most men are not Nick Fuentes. Most men are not celebrating the fearmongering belief that men will now own women’s bodies — even if all Trump-voting men did feel that way, just under half of male voters chose Kamala Harris, remember. And most women are not hard-line “SCUM Manifesto”-reading radical feminists calling for universal male castration. But if you spend much time on X or TikTok, you might believe otherwise — and some of these ways of thinking are creeping into the mainstream.
In the days after the election, posts calling for women to divest from men went viral in ways I’d never seen. “Ladies, I’m being so fr when I say this, it’s time to close off your wombs to males. this election proves now more than ever that they hate us & hate us proudly. do not reward them,” one woman wrote, amassing more than 271,000 likes. “Women need to stop dating & having sex with men immediately and im not even joking or being dramatic in the slightest,” said another with 436,000 likes, encouraging women to “take a page from the feminists in South Korea.” Many American women have been encouraging each other to take up the South Korean feminist “4b movement,” which calls for women to reject marriage, children, sex and relationships with men. (In Korean, each of the four principles begins with “bi,” which means no.)
Promoting animosity between genders has become an online trend. Not all women who share their anger are doing so with poor motivations. Rather, it has become a popular form of in-group signaling that persuades them to lean in to the negativity at their own expense. It is trendy to pledge your allegiance to 4b on TikTok — women with husbands and boyfriends are posting to ask if they can still participate despite their male partners, some saying they feel “suckered in” to the ideology.
Men who hate women want us to be mad. Some of these men (and even some women!) who have spouted similar vitriolic phrases do genuinely want women to have less authority over their bodies for no reason other than misogyny. There will be some states that further clamp down on reproductive freedoms, and there will be women who will suffer. That much is real, and it is worth being angry about.
But there is a gross overestimation of who these guys represent. Most of Fuentes’s live streams achieve between 40,000 to 250,000 views. Podcasters and streamers indeed helped shape this election, but Fuentes’s influence pales in comparison with someone like Joe Rogan, a far more moderate conservative who hosted Trump on his show ahead of the election and ranks No. 1 on Spotify’s charts. He might get plenty of media attention with his inflammatory remarks, but the majority of young men who voted Republican this year are more likely to be listening to guys like Rogan, Theo Von and Andrew Schulz, many of whom don’t publicly align with any specific political group.
Most people want the same things. They want to pursue happiness, connection, sex, family and friendships. Most even want to get married and have kids. In an election, both sides obfuscate that reality to achieve their ends. The medium through which most of us digested the election and our cultural response to it — our phones — obfuscates that, too.
Social media prioritizes the inflammatory; it makes conflicts that aren’t even our own immediate to our lives. This, too, is part of the issue with the Americanized 4b movement: Its main accomplishment will be to push women further online, seeking digital community and an outlet for their frustrations. They’ll be more exposed to the hate of misogynistic men, who will see this as further justification for their hatred. The cycle will only continue.
As fellow sex writer Camille Sojit Pejcha wrote after the election, “Within this cultural context, abstinence may be the best choice for many U.S. women. But I don’t think we should feel empowered by it — because the fact that so many women are resorting to celibacy isn’t a sign of our collective agency, but a symptom of the fact that we’re being progressively disincentivized from making other choices. And if the only way to preserve our autonomy is by giving something up, that is not evidence of our empowerment, but its opposite.”
This online gender war discourages us from making other choices. Giving up on sex and dating when these are things we would otherwise want fuels this process. What we are already witnessing is a consequence of too much time spent alone on our phones and computers, fed by a limitless algorithm that knows that divisiveness will keep our attention. Disconnection, loneliness and antipathy are what got us into this position where online hatred has such influence. How could anything that proposes more of it provide the solution?
Sex is political. Our bodies are political. Both things have political consequences. They are part of why this election went the way it did. But that is not all they are. They are something for you to determine and experience and enjoy. This is something the gender war wants you to forget — that your life and your desires are more than just a tool used to define a broader cultural narrative, more than an object to sacrifice for a cause. We are being asked to abandon our own desires for the sake of an online battle, as if giving up on intimacy would really stick it to guys like Fuentes whose intention is to enrage.
Whether we want relationships and sex and to commune with each other is something we should decide for ourselves, rather than letting the anger of the internet decide for us. Whose choice would it be, then?
About guest opinion submissions
The Washington Post accepts opinion articles on any topic. We welcome submissions on local, national and international issues. We publish work that varies in length and format, including multimedia. Submit a guest opinion or read our guide to writing an opinion article.
Post Opinions also thrives on lively dialogue. If you have thoughts about this article, or about anything The Post publishes, please submit a letter to the editor.
Popular opinions articles
HAND CURATED
(+)
Source : https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/03/gender-wars-sex-politics-choice/
older version: https://archive.ph/56H1j - Title was Don’t believe the hype. Not all men and women hate each other, not the current one..
new archive: https://archive.ph/wip/1WGCu
