Hello, happy Thursday. There are 67 days left until the new president is inaugurated, but aren’t we talking today about how weird it is to threaten women?

Late in the election, President-elect Donald Trump promised to protect women whether they like it or not.

It was a strange cultural moment, as it is for many these days. For some women, the commitment to ensuring safe communities was welcome. It is a community where propaganda and lies have led many to believe that it is overrun with violent immigrants.

For other women, Trump’s comments demonstrate that this man, at best, has no connection with American women and, at worst, continues to erode women’s abilities (as in his role in the Roe v. Wade reversal). This was further proof that he was a real person. To participate equally in society.

Without rehashing the story, stormy daniels, E. Jean Carroll and 20 other women While some have privately accused the president-elect of sexual misconduct, ranging from rape to general brawling, it’s safe to say Trump comes with baggage. I have a lot of luggage.

Yes, he has appointed women to his inner circle as he prepares to return to the White House. But President Trump’s election also destroyed the pretext that MAGA’s attacks on women’s autonomy were limited to rolling back reproductive rights. This is not about pregnancy, whether you want it or not. It’s about the role of women in public life and the growing pressure to give up the hard-won spaces of previous generations.

This came as a shock to me and many others when far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes posted this compelling message on social media after the election: Your body is my choice. Forever.

are you kidding? Threat? Maybe a little bit of both. But it’s definitely an indicator of what’s to come.

“In any election, the winning candidate gathers crowds at rallies and shouts things like: “Daddy’s back.” We know we are taking a step back,” Juliette Williams told me. She is a professor of gender studies at UCLA, an area of ​​research that President Trump has already vowed to attack.

“The role of women is very important in this election,” she said. “This is a rebellion against the social model that says men and women are treated equally.”

Joke, “sort of.”

For those of you who are fortunate enough to not know who Fuentes is, he has made a name for himself in the so-called manosphere, where any pretense of equality for non-white men is a ridiculous concept. Fuentes has millions of followers on various social media platforms, where he has abused women, Jews and many other people. Although Fuentes now claims he doesn’t support Trump (apparently Trump isn’t extreme enough for him anymore), he did say he dined with him at Mar-a-Lago. There is.

Fuentes’ “Your Body, My Choice” post has been viewed 94 million times and reposted 36,000 times on Elon Musk’s social media platform X since Musk became his first buddy. , the bias is becoming even more intense.

Fuentes said in a video on social media site Rumble that his post was “sort of” a joke, but he also said there was “a very serious point” underlying it, adding: “My body… “My Choice” slogan in the fight for reproductive rights:

“In fact, women deserve to be ridiculed for this. Not all women. Obviously not women who are mothers, women who are married, women who support Trump, etc. But what we’re talking about is women. is about a very toxic group of women who may be the majority, skew young, radical, shriek, shriek, whine.—and they are ruining this country, and everyone knows it. They scream about rape. They scream about sexual assault. They hate men, and they will say they don’t hate men, but they hate manly men. ”

By the way, I don’t hate men. I hate a world where women who stand up to rape culture and casual misogyny are vilified. I do not agree that only women who are married and become mothers deserve respect.

But since Fuentes’ statement, the words have taken on a life of their own. Institute for Strategic DialogueA study tracking internet-related information found that usage of “Your body, my choice” and “Go back to the kitchen” in X increased by 4,600% immediately after the election.

It trended on TikTok and Facebook, with 52,000 posts immediately after the election. And don’t lull yourself into thinking that this kind of hate is limited to the internet. Female students in schools across the country have reported being yelled at by their male classmates with this phrase.

1 in 3 American women has experienced sexual violence. Imagine how women and girls who survived attacks would feel when they saw this phrase, this threat, become part of our popular culture.

But after the election, our anger has become acceptable or numb. For now, anyway.

Normalization of inequality

That may be why there was almost a momentary shift in our consciousness this week when President Trump announced Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz as the new attorney general, Florida’s top law enforcement agency.

As some of you may recall, Gaetz was being investigated by the Justice Department, which he now heads, in a sex trafficking investigation that ended without charges last year. That incident was related suspicion He denies any relationship between the lawmaker and the underage girl.

The House Ethics Committee said in June that he “engaged in sexual misconduct and illegal drug use, accepted inappropriate gifts, provided special privileges and benefits to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and They announced that they are investigating whether they tried to obstruct the investigation. act. “This situation ended on Wednesday with Mr. Gaetz’s resignation from Congress.

Gaetz is not the only appointee whose ideas about women could raise concerns.

Shortly before that selection, President Trump announced his choice of Army veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense.

Hegseth said she is opposed to recognizing equality for women in the military.

“I want to be very frank and say that women should not be put in combat roles,” he said in a recent podcast interview.

No more female fighter pilots or female special forces. Women rising to the top of the ranks. The military has long been plagued by inequalities against women, including disproportionate incidents of sexual assault. What’s on the table right now is 10 years of achievements will be ruined.

Williams, the gender studies professor, expects similar headwinds to occur in other professions, especially in female-dominated fields like teaching. And, most unfortunately, this means that over the next four years there will be even more pressure on women in all aspects of public life to accept what we have rather than fight for what should be. She sees this as an indication that things are to be expected.

“There’s now a whole new generation of women who aren’t just going to hear backlash from their mothers,” she says. “They themselves are going to be affected by it.”

reality check

Of course, being ruled is not the same as being conquered.

Like many people for whom equality in all areas is a priority, I feel a little overwhelmed by the force and speed with which Trump 2.0 is reshaping society.

So let me close with the wisdom of Alice Walker, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and a reminder that the only limits that hold us back are the ones we place on ourselves. I would like to.

Walker famously said, “The most common way people give up their power is to think they don’t have it.” And that is the biggest problem facing the new Trump administration.

Women have power. And we won’t go back.

What else to read:

Must read: Even Republicans are stunned by Trump’s Cabinet picks: ‘Absolute gut punch’
It’s too painful to be funny: President Trump selects Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence
LA Times Feature: California Governor Kamala Harris? New poll finds her with a clear advantage

Stay golden,
Anita Chhabria

PS: Among President Trump’s flurry of announcements, he has appointed two of his friends to head the Department of Government Efficiency, an agency that doesn’t actually exist. This, of course, was the brainchild of Elon Musk, who used hundreds of millions of dollars and equal amounts of flattery to infiltrate Trump’s inner circle. His reward will be co-heading the fictitious agency with fellow Trump associate Vivek Ramaswamy.

The two are responsible for figuring out how to lay off thousands of federal employees and possibly cut regulations (and budgets) from the federal budget, but they have no choice but to implement any half-baked ideas they come up with. There is no direct authority. But of course, Musk has wasted his time posting hundreds of millions of self-aggrandizing memes on right-wing social media sites and creating fabricated job profiles. But if I have to watch this, you’ll have to watch it too.

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