"Your body, my choice:" Hate and harassment towards women spreads online

8 November 2024

By: Isabelle Frances-Wright and Moustafa Ayad

Content warning: This article contains offensive and obscene language.

In a national election heavily focused on women and reproductive rights, women in the United States have faced an onslaught of online abuse, harassment, and denigration following Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss. This is more than just a continuation of misogynist trends that ISD documented in both the run-up to this election and in the aftermath of previous cycles including 2020 and 2022. As an emboldened group of ‘manosphere’ influencers, extremist ideologues and politicians exploit Donald Trump’s election as a rebuke of both reproductive rights and women’s rights, the impact on women could extend into the next presidential election and beyond.

While Trump’s victory has been a focal point for communities which support restricting women’s reproductive rights, there was a spike in misogynist content in late October. ISD found a significant rise in posts focused on repealing the 19th Amendment (which gave women the right to vote). This appears to reflect the Harris campaign’s acute focus on securing a sizable majority of women voters. Many of these posts – which targeted women and supporters of their rights – faced quick rebuke. Their spread nevertheless demonstrated the influence of an increasingly vindicative set of online actors, who appear to be using the election results as a permission structure to more overtly and aggressively espouse narratives about curbing women’s rights.

ISD researchers tracked narratives targeting women and the discussion of those narratives between November 4 and 6, 2024 across X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Facebook and Reddit. The use of derogatory and misogynistic language was already rife among well-noted manosphere and extremist communities on these platforms, and this activity has only gained steam in the past three days since the election. ISD also observed reports of these narratives being used to harass women offline, particularly on high school and college campuses.

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. Similarly misogynist language, such as the use of “dumb cunt” to target Harris, television personalities such as Rachel Maddow and others, received more than 64,000 mentions on X from more than 42,000 accounts on November 5.
Nick Fuentes, an influential white nationalist podcaster, appears to be one of the early instigators in promoting the phrase on November 5. His X post, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” has since received 35 million views.
On TikTok, female users are reporting that accounts are commenting “your body, my choice” en masse on their posts. One TikTok creator stated: “I had to delete a video because I was being threatened and several men commenting [sic] saying they couldn’t wait until I get raped or ‘your body my choice.’” Another stated: “I woke up this morning to men commenting ‘your body, my choice.’ In a TikTok forum on Reddit, a user posted: “Last night I reported one of the many comments I’ve seen saying ‘Your body, my choice.’ The comment has been left up and the report has been marked as not a violation. How? HOW THE FUCK is that not a violation?”
The phrase “your body, my choice” appears to have made its way offline, specifically into schools. Young girls and parents have used social media to share instances of offline harassment. They include the phrase being directed at them within schools or chanted by young boys in classes.
On Facebook, the phrase “your body, my choice” is currently trending, with 52,000 posts in the last 24 hours. One parent stated: “Today my daughter was told three separate times on campus ‘your body, MY choice.’ The third group of boys told her to ‘sleep with one eye open tonight.’”
On Reddit, users utilized the platform to warn others of offline harassment. One user stated, “Women were being harassed today at UNM and told to ‘go home where they belong’ by gangs of men in MAGA gear.”
In some instances, women influencers that cater to “traditional values” joined male counterparts. Their content included videos of women upset by the election loss of Harris, referring to them as “retards;” they have also parroted Trump’s remarks from a leaked Access Hollywood video in which he told a TV personality that he grabs women by the genitals. One woman influencer on X posted that Trump had just grabbed Harris by the “pussy” on election day. That post received 33,000 views.
Previous calls to repeal the 19th Amendment, which previously spiked on X on October 22, resurfaced online. Posts calling for the repeal of the amendment increased by 663 percent compared with the week prior. The top 10 X posts at the time calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment received more than four million views collectively.
A subset of the narratives were threatening women with sexual assaults, ISD found five posts on X that called for “rape squads” or “rape,” the largest of which had 18,000 views and came with the phrase “your body, my choice.”
Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, in a post on X on November 7, stated: “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights.” The post received 688,000 views in under two hours. Another X user, stated: “women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say”; the post has received 10 million views.