A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right

In 1970, a few years before Roe v. Wade, feminists agitating for abortion rights, at a Philadelphia protest, held up signs that said “My Body, My Decision”—a slogan that morphed, during the course of the next decade, into “My body, my choice.” This became the defining phrase of the pro-choice movement, a line toward which feminism moved aspirationally and asymptotically. Sexual assault was the next issue to enter the framework: in two decades, the argument that a wife had the legal right to choose when to have sex with her husband went from laughable to binding. The first spousal-rape trial occurred in 1978, and spousal rape became illegal throughout the United States in 1993. The sexual-assault reckoning of the twenty-tens attempted to give “My body, my choice” a ring of finality: it was a woman’s choice what to do with her body, even if she was drunk, even if the guy was famous, even she’d acted as if she wanted him before. At the time, I had the naïve idea that something had permanently changed. I thought we had already seen the backlash—that it was represented by Donald Trump’s first electoral victory, and that the idea that women are full people was at enough of a consensus that seismic, if messy, progress could still happen, as it did in 2017, with #MeToo. Now there is no more Roe and Trump is about to be President again, and it took less than twenty-four hours after his reëlection for young men to take up a slogan that could define the coming era of regression: “Your body, my choice.”

It’s a joke, first of all! Get a grip, you easily triggered libfems! Everything started with a tweet from Nick Fuentes, a twenty-six-year-old streamer and self-described “proud incel” who, beneath a hard veneer of something that’s supposed to seem like irony, regularly praises Hitler, and has expressed his desire for “Catholic Taliban rule” in America, as well as for a future marriage to a sixteen-year-old. (Fuentes has been considered toxic enough that Trump was denounced by Republican Party members after having dinner with him in 2022; in this mask-off moment, such posturing seems likely enough to change.) On Election Night, Fuentes tweeted, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Young men began parroting him, commenting “Your body, my choice” on young women’s social-media accounts; the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focussed on extremism, found, within a twenty-four-hour period, a “4,600% increase in mentions of the terms ‘your body, my choice’ and ‘get back in the kitchen’ on X”—the platform itself, of course, being owned and controlled by a billionaire so obsessed with impregnating women that he tweeted, at Taylor Swift, “I will give you a child.” (X’s rightward shift under Elon Musk is visible in the replies to a post by Jake Paul, himself a Trump supporter, telling the “Your body, my choice” crowd to “Shut the fuck up with that shit”—the top comments are mostly paid accounts calling him a cuck, a woman, a libtard, a bitch.) This was all online stuff, mostly—we could ignore the man holding up a “Women Are Property” sign at Texas State University if we wanted. But in a way, as Fuentes knows well, the fact that the phrase is a meme, and thus nominally a joke, makes it more alarming. “Women are fucking retarded,” Fuentes yelled in a gleeful response video. “How many TikToks have you seen in the last forty-eight hours of women crying and filming themselves crying?” Women kind of enjoy all of this, he went on; they get a “sick kick out of it,” out of understanding themselves as victims. The subtext takes the trolling a step further—why not go ahead and give them something to cry about for real?

Fuentes has succeeded in causing pandemonium. Thousands of young women, appalled at the sudden ubiquity of casual rape threats, are in fact posting tearful front-facing videos on TikTok. (In this—in this whole thing—we are experiencing the consequences of TikTok being one of the most popular mediums through which young women now take in and process the news, as well as podcasts and YouTube being a top news source for young men.) Right-wing men are compiling these tearful videos into supercuts. People on the left are posting vengeful rape fantasies involving Fuentes. The immediate theme is violence: women are encouraging one another to learn about concealed carry; one mother joked about getting an extremely late-term abortion if she found out her son was a Groyper. Some conservative women have proudly claimed the slogan, posting thirst traps or couple photos with the caption “My body, his choice.” One of them wrote, “Posting this just to watch liberal women on TikTok have mental breakdowns.” Several “Your Body, My Choice” shirts were for sale on Amazon on this past Monday but were gone by that evening; a handful of “My Body, His Choice” shirts were also pulled offline.

Before last week, if you heard the phrase “Your body, my choice” anywhere, it was probably in the context of a public policy that the speaker was opposed to. It was a neat summation of the return to abortion prohibition: in 2022, Dayna Tortorici wrote, in n+1, that, if the slogan of Roe was “My body, my choice,” the subtext of the Dobbs decision was “Your body, my choice.” In recent years, it’s also become something of a rallying cry among anti-vaxxers, meant to satirize the Biden Administration’s COVID-vaccine mandates. Even more popular among the anti-vaxxers, though, was the original phrasing: if those of us who love abortion so much get to go on about bodily autonomy, then “My body, my choice” should also apply to those who merely wish to live clean.

The possible contortions of the phrase and its meaning seem basically unlimited. One writer at the fundamentalist Christian organization Focus on the Family argued recently that “My body, my choice” is a pro-life slogan, because it applies to fetuses, too. (“Rights should never stretch so far that someone has another’s rights in their hands,” she posits—a pleasingly radical idea that, if followed to its logical conclusion, would eradicate national borders as well as the carceral system, and render the incubation of a fetus cleanly moral only when carried out by artificial womb.) A pregnant physician posted on X a few days ago, “So am I allowed to say ‘your body my choice,’ to my fetus because it seems like that’s what y’all are getting at.” A man replied, “I hate to get into semantics but your body my choice is literally how one defines an abortion.” Are they in agreement? Are people wondering whether these words are good or bad?

The particular sort of brain-breaking happening here—how can “My body, my choice” be right when it comes to abortion but wrong when it comes to vaccine mandates? Can “Your body, my choice” be wrong when it comes to rape but right when it comes to a fetus?—feels like an inversion of a tweet from the quaint year of 2017: “Oh you’re upset about a thing? Well, would you be mad if the situation were different in a way I designed in my head just for this argument?” This country, more or less locked into a two-party system, has always been full of people who think the other half of the population is out of its mind. Now the youngest generation of voters will essentially never know consensus reality on any subject again. Some Americans think that the government should force women to carry children but that mandating the eradication of polio through vaccination is immoral; some Americans think women should be allowed to end the lives of their fetuses but that people should not be allowed to have sex with women against our will. I’ll take the “VOTE RED . . . LOL” graffiti that appeared last week near my apartment in Bed-Stuy, a Brooklyn neighborhood in which more than ninety per cent of voters supported Kamala Harris, as one more reminder that we are typically closer to people who find us laughable and repulsive than we think.

On the one hand, we should be wary of reducing the world to what people are posting on social media. On the other hand, posting now creates political reality. A Minnesota school district wrote, in a letter to parents last week, that there were reports of text messages targeted at Black students referencing slavery and plantations. Another district in the state said that female students had received “your body, my choice” texts. There are parents all over social media reporting that their kids are hearing the phrase from boys at school. A therapist at a university in the Upper Midwest told me that a student she works with had gone to a frat party where one man had yelled it, and that the people around him hadn’t called him out.

Part of what feels so dismal to me about the popularization of this slogan among young people is that the ones who have adopted it—both men and women—have frankly not had enough sex to understand what they’re talking about. Among young conservatives, there is a narrative that “hot girls voted Trump” and that the woke left can’t handle masculine men, or something. There’s the suggestion here that what’s triggering about “Your body, my choice” is the mind-blowing idea that it’s hot, for both men and women, when women submit their bodies to men. In fact, this is one of the most run-of-the-mill sexual proclivities in existence. And now the eager, libidinous spirit of dominance and deference in the bedroom is the tail wagging the dog of forced sex, forced pregnancy, forced motherhood, forced marriage.

But the inexperience of the people repeating “Your body, my choice” also means that many of them, especially the very young ones, have not yet hardened into this ideology. I talked to an educator who teaches sexual education in New York City. A couple of days after the election, the educator, who is nonbinary, was teaching a class of sixth graders, aged eleven and twelve, about consent. One kid offered the slogan—“Your body, my choice”—and, before the teacher could react, another kid stood up and said, “Say it again and I’ll slap you.” The whole class started to cheer. The teacher de-escalated, they told me. They asked the first kid if he knew what “Your body, my choice” meant, and he said no; they told the kid that it meant that a boy can decide when he wants to hurt a girl, that raping another person is O.K. “After that, the kid had tears in his eyes,” they said. “Even if he might not have been entirely honest when he said he didn’t know, he was confused.” The kid had told them that the person he had heard saying “Your body, my choice” seemed very confident, and cool.

Nick Fuentes, for his part, got doxed—his address started circulating online this past weekend. A woman who lives near Fuentes’s home in Illinois went to his house on Sunday; she later told the Chicago Tribune that he opened the door and pepper-sprayed her before she could even ring the doorbell. In a statement to the Chicago Sun-Times, Fuentes said, “don’t show up at somebody’s front door looking to cause problems.” He also retweeted a post by Tristan Tate—another right-wing influencer, who is under court supervision in Romania while awaiting trial for charges including human trafficking—arguing that, if a man turned up at a woman’s house to confront her about her politics, “she could literally shoot him dead and nobody would care. I’d also totally agree with her and her right to defend her home.” Being threatened—they make it sound so serious, even as they insist that anyone getting her panties in a twist about a meme is a dumb-bitch loser, even as they insist that something about this, somewhere, is a joke. ♦