Francis Wilkinson: How we got to 'your body, my choice' from #MeToo

President-elect Donald Trump received more than 77 million votes after having been held liable by a jury for sexual abuse in a civil case. (His previous election victory, in 2016, followed the release of a tape in which he bragged about groping women.)

In turn, Trump has nominated men for some of the most important positions in government — including secretary of defense — who’ve also been accused of sexual assault. Meanwhile, a long list of Trump hangers-on have also faced alarming accusations. Although they deny the charges — and Trump excused his own comments as “locker-room talk” — the pattern of elevating accused sexual aggressors is clear. Meanwhile, for the first time in two decades, there will be no female committee chairs in the next GOP-controlled Congress.

To analyze all this, I spoke by telephone and email with Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University and author of Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. Her new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, is scheduled for publication by Princeton University Press in September 2025. Our conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

Francis Wilkinson: Dr. Millier-Idriss, can you help us understand how we got here?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Trump’s comments about groping women go back years before his first presidency. But previously he partnered with somebody like (former Vice President) Mike Pence, who was sort of in the other direction, of benevolent sexism, saying he would refuse to have dinner with a woman who wasn’t his wife.

What’s happened since is this widening ecosystem of the manosphere, helped along by people like Trump. It includes influencers like self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who sell the exploitation of women for their own profits, selling a package of beliefs that include hierarchies of superiority and inferiority among men and women.

FW: How has manosphere content become so influential?

CMI: A report from Dublin City University in Ireland earlier this year showed how quickly sock puppet accounts purporting to be 16- and 18-year-old boys encounter manosphere content even when they are only seeking content about sports, video games or gyms. For 16-year-old boys, it takes less than 9 minutes on Tik Tok or 17 minutes on YouTube Shorts. If the sock-puppet account watched the (manosphere) content, then the vast majority of subsequent content directed at the sock puppet began to be manosphere content.

What we’re seeing normalizes anti-feminist content, entitlement to women’s bodies, their service, their sexual favors. We’ve had a complete normalization of egregiously bad behavior that people would’ve been fired for in the past. Not only is that not happening, but people are being rewarded for it.

FW: Why has this content found such fertile ground?

CMI: There are real challenges to masculinity in a world where many men, especially men without college educations, are falling behind. I don’t think Democrats have done a particularly good job of messaging to men and boys about these issues, about how they’re in crisis.

Masculinity is the last bastion of rigidity: We haven’t made the cultural definitions of manhood more flexible. A study I read over the summer found that high school boys in the U.S. increasingly accept same-sex relationships among boys, but you have to be bro about it. It’s OK to be gay, but it’s not OK to be effeminate or flamboyant. And that is fascinating to me. Sexuality has become fluid, but God forbid we challenge masculinity.

FW: MAGA has very rigid feminine standards, as well. There’s a very distinct Trump Woman.

CMI: Absolutely. Women are expected to look a certain way. They have long hair; there’s a very specific kind of makeup and fillers and slenderness. Trump has made comments about women’s bodies and their attractiveness that we, as a society, somehow keep looking past.

You also have this “trad wife” surge online of women promoting a submissive relationship with a husband, which, of course, is also very White. Who were the maids enabling that 1950s lifestyle? Immigrants and women of color didn't have “trad wife” experiences. Nor did men who were immigrants or men of color.

FW: The #MeToo phenomenon, in which powerful men were brought low and even jailed for sexual abuse, seems to have been a moment rather than a movement. What happened?

CMI: There’s a clear backlash against #MeToo, even in the form of men lamenting that strictures on behavior are so severe that they “can’t even flirt anymore.” That backlash is not only directed against norms against sexual harassment and assault, it’s a more generalized backlash against progress and visibility in women’s and LGBTQ+ rights and the gendered social changes that are part of the culture war. Hundreds of legislative bills have been introduced across the country targeting women’s reproductive rights or policing trans people’s health care and access to bathrooms or sports-team participation.

FW: The presidential election accelerated that backlash. Immediately after the election, we had a proliferation — both online and in middle schools and high schools — of boys and men saying, “Your body, my choice.” I heard from a woman in Chicago who said her colleague had been accosted by a young man on public transit who told her, “It took your mother 9 months to make you, it’ll take me 30 seconds to take you.”

CMI: Even elementary school boys. I got a flurry of messages from moms telling me what their daughters had been experiencing. The election absolutely cemented for some boys and young men a celebratory surge of reclaiming power and ownership over women and girls and their bodies — men are back on top.

Nick Fuentes, who’s a white supremacist, issued a tweet on election night that said, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” It has been viewed nearly 100 million times. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue tracked a 4,600% increase in the use of “Your body, my choice” and “Go back to the kitchen” on X in the 24 hours following the election. A 13-year-old girl in Maryland was in the hallway of a school and a boy said to her, “Go put on your Handmaid’s dress.” A college student was physically grabbed on her butt at a coffee shop and when she turned around, the guy said, “We can do that now.”

There are a lot of things I’m worried about with this. Normalization is one, potential violence is another.

FW: How does sexual aggression relate to political violence?

CMI: There’s a connection between misogynistic or hostile sexism beliefs and support for, or willingness to engage in, political violence. In several surveys across multiple countries, hostile sexism, misogyny, and beliefs about the subordination of women are substantial and significant predictors of support for political violence or willingness to engage in it.

You can’t help but notice that almost every perpetrator of a mass shooting has a history of harassment, stalking or rape threats, or domestic or intimate-partner violence. The Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooter, for example, had been making rape, kidnapping and murder threats against teen girls online. The man who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007 had two prior reports of stalking against women students. The examples seem endless.

FW: At the same time, only part of America wants to go backward. A roughly equal part has proved comfortable with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris. Is the country in for a long trench war?

CMI: I think we are. You have this online world, and this normalization happening from political leaders like Trump, but you also have root causes that have to be addressed. I think humiliating boys or men or telling them they’re bad actors is not the solution. Because then these misogynistic messages become attractive. Gen Z men are less likely than millennial men to support feminism or women’s rights. And that’s incredible to me. That a lot of this anger is situated in younger men is really important to understand and to think about. How do we reach those men differently?

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.

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