You can’t say it was a fluke. If in 2016, Donald Trump’s novelty, combined with his loss of the popular vote, allowed liberals to retain a bit of plausible deniability about what his presidential win meant about America, this time, there is no such comfort. Donald Trump is no longer a mystery or an amusing diversion: no one can claim that they do not understand full extent of his malignant corruption, or the seriousness of his movement’s hostility to pluralist democracy. And he won the popular vote.
Many postmortems of last week’s election have tried to preserve the notion that Trump’s voter’s did not endorse him and his vision – that they know not what they do. This is dishonest, and a bit patronizing toward Trump’s supporters. Trump’s voters, for the most part, know exactly what he is, and what voting for him means. They are not ignorant or mistaken about him. They endorse him and what he is.
A large part of what a majority of Americans voted for last week was the Trump campaign’s virulent misogyny. Trump himself, an adjudicated rapist who has bragged about both committing sexual assault and engineering the reversal of Roe v Wade, speaks of women in vulgar, degrading terms. He picked a running mate who has denigrated childless women as “psychotic” “cat ladies”. His adviser and funder Elon Musk, who seems to have designs on becoming something of a shadow president in Trump’s second term, is a techno-fascist pro-natalist who goes around offering women insemination.
The Trump campaign positioned itself as a champion of a hierarchical gender order, aiming to restore men to a place of wrongfully deprived supremacy over women. Many of his voters cast their lot in with Trump hoping that he would do just that.
Now, after Trump’s victory, some of his supporters have adopted a slogan which neatly joins the movement’s twin projects of forced sex and forced pregnancy: “Your body, my choice.”
“Your body, my choice,” was coined by the far-right, pro-Nazi internet troll and Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes on the night of the election. “Your body, my choice,” Fuentes tweeted. “Forever.” It’s a taunting inversion of the pro-choice slogan “my body, my choice”, meant to assert women’s autonomy: instead, “your body, my choice” presents women’s full citizenship and freedom as laughable, asserting, in gleeful terms, the male supremacy that will now carry for the force of policy and law under a new Trump administration.
In response to Fuentes’s post, pro-Trump men have adopted the slogan en masse to troll women online. An analysis from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that the use of the phrase soared on social media in the days following the election, along with similar misogynist phrases like “get back in the kitchen”, and the use of sexist slurs directed at liberal and progressive women like Kamala Harris and Rachel Maddow. Female TikTok users reported a flood of such comments, with “your body, my choice” chief among them on the platform. And young girls in schools, along with their teachers and parents, reported incidents of the phrase being yelled out by boys in taunting jeers of harassment and intimidation in the days following the election.
“Your body, my choice” is a rejection of women’s rights to control their own bodies in more ways than one. In addition to the phrase’s sneering inversion of a pro-choice phrase, rejecting the abortion right and claiming the overturn of Roe as a victory for men, the phrase has a second, dual meaning: as a rape threat. The men and boys who use it are not merely taunting women with the threat of an unwanted, forced pregnancy. They are taunting them with the threat of forced sex.
It is not always a connection that the misogynist right has made so explicit. In other eras, the anti-choice movement has adopted an overtly religious attitude of sexual repression, aiming to restrict abortion as a means of restricting sexuality across the board. But this preacherly, sexually repressed masculinity is not the masculinity of today’s misogynist rightwing movement. Rather, the Maga right is one that sees sex not as something that must be rendered shameful and pushed out of the public sphere, but as a weapon that can be used to punish, humiliate and dominate women.
This new, avowedly and vulgarly sexual rightwing masculinity is what Fuentes was crystalizing in his snide little coinage of “your body, my choice”: it is one that aims to use physical and sexual force to coerce women into a degraded gendered role, one subject to men’s domination and only partial, limited and conditional in its citizenship and access to the public sphere. In this sense, their projects in joyfully celebrating rape and restricting women’s access to abortion are two sides of the same coin: the right seeks to dominate women and to commandeer the inside of their bodies so as to force them into a gendered role against their will, be that role as sex object or as mother.
This is why it is fitting that Trump, who was found liable for the rape of one woman and accused of sexual assault by two dozen others, was the president to secure the overturning of Roe v Wade; it is why it is fitting that two of the justices who voted to overturn Roe, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct, each by more than one woman. It is because the sex politics of the right is not an anti-sex, puritanical politics. It is a politics of sexual domination.
There is no use pretending that this is not what the Trump movement is. And there is no use in pretending that this is not what many of the men who voted for Trump hoped to achieve when they supported him. Much of the pre-election coverage of the gender dynamics of Trump’s campaign has disappeared in the days following the election, and perhaps this unpleasant reality is why: most Americans voted for a man they have every reason to believe is a rapist. For some of them, at least, that was not a liability, but an asset.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
