By Since the reelection of Donald Trump, there has been a surge in misogynistic comments online. On the 6th November, far-right activist and white supremacist Nick Fuentes changed the well-known feminist slogan „My body, my choice” and tweeted „Your body, my choice. Forever”, implying that now it’s men’s turn to get back the power and put women back to where they belong.
Considering that his post was seen by 99 million people, liked by 52 thousand and retweeted 36 thousand times, he’s not alone in his sentiments. According to his followers, women are only allowed into the holy trinity of the kitchen-bedroom-maternity ward. Apparently, men have been repressed by militant feminists and the origin of everything bad that has been happening in the world can be traced back to independent women and the woke agenda.
The whole phenomenon and how it started spreading after Trump’s reelection is not surprising if we look at him and his comments about women.
He never tried to hide his opinions, and that might have been appealing to men who felt emasculated. Many men feel that they can’t say out loud what they think anymore, therefore when they hear a rich and powerful man saying things like „grab’em by the p*ssy”, who then becomes the President of the United States, why would they think that there is something wrong with this attitute? He became the voice of common sense and traditional values, transporting his country back to the pre-pc era.
Land of Freedom – For Men
To understand why men feel frustrated, we need to look at the transformation of the place of women in American society. However, we do not need to look too far.
When Katherine Switzer registered to run the Boston Marathon in 1967, it wasn’t common for women to run at all, let alone marathons, so she filled out the form as K. V. Switzer. The organisers tried to stop her at the start, and later on the course, her coach and her teammates had to shield her because the race manager tried to remove her bib number. She finished the marathon as the first woman, but as a result, the Amateur Athletic Union banned women from competing in races against men. Boston Marathon’s women’s race was only established in 1972 which sounds unbelievable, considering that women had been competing in the Olympics since 1900.
As unbelievable as it looks, women in the United States of America could not open a bank account without the approval of their husbands up until 1974, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed. As women were free to open their own bank accounts, they were no longer dependent on their husbands and they could leave abusive marriages without the fear of poverty.
Going to university was also considered abnormal, the only reason women would go to schools like Cornell was to get themselves a husband. According to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she was asked at Harvard if she felt bad for taking the place from a male student. One could see that when women attained equal rights, some men might have felt that their rights were restricted because they either lost their power over women or they had to fight for something which used to be a (white) male privilege.
Who Voted for Trump?
One would think that Trump received the majority of his votes from white men who feel powerless and want to blame their misery on someone else, (among others) on empowered women. While there is some truth in that, and the majority of these men does indeed support Trump, he could not have won only with these votes. Despite the fact that he did not hide his feelings about women, many of them voted for him, which might be suprising at first glance, but not so much when we look at their motives. As opposed to Kamala Harris, Trump is expert in populism and knew perfectly well what most people cared about. Abortion rights and women’s safety are indeed very important topics, as is the protection of democracy, but these are not something the average American cares about. Harris made the mistake of campaigning mainly with intellectual topics in a country where the majority of people are not, in fact, intellectual.
From Europe, we tend not to see the reality of small-town and rural America. There is poverty, hopelessness, the opiate crisis…Trump realised that the economy was more tangible for the average American than abortion rights. He campaigned by promising more jobs for American people, saying that he will deport illegal immigrants who steal these jobs from them. He also emphasised the importance of returning to traditional values and took advantage of the nostalgia for the long-lost American dream and Reaganism (hence his stolen slogan) which resonated with many conservatives, religious voters, many of them women.
All these above prompts the question about Project 2025 and its reception within American society. During the campaign, everyone denied that Project 2025 was Trump’s programme for his next presidency. He repeatedly disawoved it, sensing that even his supporters might find it way too radical so he needed to distance himself from it. Since his reelection, more and more people from Trump’s circles are saying that they were lying and now they can admit that it will be enacted.
A major problem with the programme is that there is a discrepancy between the Republican’s official programme and Project 2025’s view on abortion.
According to Project 2025, references to „abortion”, „reproductive health” and „sexual and reproductive rights” should be eliminated from all federal rules, regulations and contracts in order to promote Project 2025’s „Life Agenda”. Trump’s critics have started ringing the alarm bells, scared that the US will be turned into Margaret Atwood’s dystopia for women, like many states have already done with the overturn of Roe v Wade.
Where is the US Now?
It’s not suprising that radical feminist movements started from the US, where the American dream still to this day means having a big house in the suburbs, two cars, a bunch of kids and a man with a job high paying enough for the wife to stay home and raise the children.
In the traditional equation, the man’s only job and responsibility is to go to work and earn money, while his wife does no work. She is expected to be grateful that her husband provides her with a comfortable life, one which is fulfilled by doing her duty as a mother and wife. This is the idea behind the new trad wife movement and the toxic masculinity that influencers like Andrew Tate, or pseudo-intellectuals like Jordan Peterson spread all over the internet. They are popular because their message is similar to Trump’s: getting back power, but in this case, not from immigrants, but from women. As I mentioned above, in their eyes, women getting equal rights means that their rights are restricted. For example, after allowing women to run the Boston Marathon too, men realised that women could do things better than them, and getting defeated by someone they consider inferior hurts their ego. It’s not about equal rights anymore, it’s being upstaged by people they don’t value, therefore they feel like their existing rights are being limited. Thanks to men like Tate, toxic masculinity is spreading like a virus, especially among young boys. According to teachers both in the UK and in the US, there’s been an uptake in misogynistic comments from boys. One teacher said that she is seeing a huge increase in rape jokes that the boys are making.
Where is this Leading?
This leads us to a fairly new phenomenon: there is an old-new conflict in society, men versus women. Even though in 2025 women start from a much better position than Emmeline Pankhurst and her group of suffragettes, they probably never would have thought that these battles would still exist in 2025. Researches and polls show that young women tend to be more liberal while young men tend to be more conservative, which causes friction. Apparently, young men are being rejected on dating apps when women realise that they are conservatives. Thanks to Trump and his fellow „conservatives”, being a conservative nowadays equals to regarding women as inferior, and this naturally upsets many women. It is clear that this is a vicious cycle, the more men get rejected by women, the more they will hate them.
And this brings us to the incel culture. Involuntary celibates believe that they have certain rights and needs that are not met, due to women only preferring rich, good-looking men. When they get rejected, most of the time thanks to their misogynistoc views, they blame it on the woman. I am not going to go deeper into the rabbithole of incel culture, but I hazard a guess that these men most definitely voted for Trump. Seeing the surge in misogynistic comments and threats online since Trump’s reelection, many people must feel empowered again. Misogynistic terrorism is not wide-spread yet, but since 2014, 10 such attacks have happened, while there were only four between 1984 and 2014. The US’s famously liberal firearm laws certainly will not stop people. One can only hope that the next four years of Trump’s reign will not be turned into a civil war between men and women.
