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Nick Fuentes's "your body, my choice" is now apparently on the lips of middle school boys everywhere, if reddit / news sources are to be believed (I'm not around children much). By merely writing this I run the risk of already paying too much attention to a throwaway piece of internet trolling, forgotten by everyone by the time you finish reading this. But given that this taunt has penetrated even my own hitherto groyper-free feeds, and in fact stayed in my mind for a day or two, I wonder if it has some memetic staying power. And I confess that some part of me finds it hilarious. The anti-vaxxers couldn't ruin "my body, my choice", but I feel like this might.
Is this a display of a certain kind of genius for provocation? In rhetoric, we are told not to accept the opponent's framing of a question. And yet here he accepts the opponent's framing of bodily autonomy wholeheartedly, and simply inverts it, ridiculously. Therefore at first it appears the phrase can be dismissed as having no authenticity - a pure troll. No pro-life person would begin their argument by asserting control over of a woman's body. To take the statement at face value and be triggered would surely be to model the opponent incorrectly, to fail the ideological Turning test. Or would it? Ross Douthat isn't about to repeat this slogan, but in the world he wants, doesn't the symbolism of the father walking the bride down the aisle to hand her over have to regain some power? So cue the articles on "MAGA misogyny" and the despair and anger and discussions on how to protect oneself from rape in /r/TwoXChromosomes.
I guess I don't have anything particularly interesting to say about this, but I'm curious what people here think. First, why does it seem that the trolling and triggering in gender discourse is so asymmetric? "No means yes, yes means anal" comes to mind. Are there good examples of the manosphere being successfully provoked in such a manner? You could point to the 4B movement, for instance, but if I'm not mistaken the women declaring celibacy were being earnest, not trolling. Second, is the mainstreaming of 4chan culture, and its exposure to children, important? Or is this just standard fare for schoolyards and male group chats, and no more insidious than, say, the spread of woke ideas in schools?
The boys are gloating to the liberal girls that their team won. They are doing this by inverting the liberal catch phrase (“my body my choice”) to indicate ownership and victory. Ownership, or dominance, is such a mainstay of young male speech that I don’t think it needs an example, but “you got own’d” is the most hilariously explicit version. “Sonning” or “been adopted” is what the teens are using to indicate that you’ve become the loser’s father, at least last I’ve checked. In the gaming days of old, players would simulate raping the dead enemy’s body and talk about the other team “getting raped”.
Kamala’s loss has given young boys the ultimate opportunity to boast. Her own catchphrase can be expertly inverted to indicate that the boys’ team won using a clear, in vogue signal of dominance (“I own you” + “get bodied” = “I own your body”). When I first saw Nick’s tweet I literally laughed, and I still can’t read the controversy without smiling, because it’s so decidedly non-serious. There’s no serious policy prescription to attach to the tweet. There’s no actual interest in controlling a woman’s body. It’s simple, childish making fun of the other gender’s party. The fact that it has 80 million views on Twitter and teachers are talking about their kids saying it is… sorry, it is very funny. It is infinitely more childish than whatever the news is saying about it to instill a moral panic.
Note that Nick’s audience is separate from the groups that actually successfully control women’s bodies, which are all the conservative religious groups, especially Muslims. Nick is not a cleric in charge of your local Salafi mosque (a group that no liberal will ever consider protesting), he’s a dude making edgy commentary to teenagers. He is against abortion because he wants a conservative sexual culture where men and women marry early. That isn’t anti-woman as he wants virginity for both men and women.
Is it? Nick has said he supports the Taliban's gender policies. I think he probably has a significant Muslim fanbase nowadays.
Muslims have their own edgy streamers, like someone named “Sneako”. Fuentes say “Christ is King” way too much for a devout Muslim audience
Lately I've noticed a Muslim talking point that Islam appreciates Jesus more than any other religion, and that Christians are essentially slightly misguided Muslims who Allah will save anyway. I get the impression that for a lot of these gen Z trad groypers, it's the anti-degeneracy part of religion that they care about, not the specifics of the theology. Hating on Muslims also seems to have become a little uncool in the alt-right, since it would put them on the same side as Israel.
I’m intrigued; is this claim endorsed by any prominent mainstream Islamic theologians?
AFAIK, the sole requirement for conversion to Islam is sincerely believing in the Shahada, viz. that there is only one God and Muhammad is his messenger. Do Christians get partial credit for believing the first half? If so, what about Jews?
I heard that Muslims consider Jesus a genuine prophet and messenger, just not the Son of God. (Whereas Jews believe he was a maniac). So Christians are directionally correct, they just need to learn how important Mohammed is.
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