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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?
I believe Nick was responding (at least memetically, if not directly) at the barrage of Harris ads around reproductive which all ended with a sinister (of course old white) GOP politician saying "I got the most votes, it's my decision". Of course, those ads could have been crisper, they could have actually said "it's my choice" rather than "my decision" which would have been an appropriate anaphora.
And FWIW, pro-choice referendums ran >10 points better than Trump! So they were absolutely right that voters want reproductive freedom much more than they wanted Trump. Floridians voted 57% for abortion even though Trump won 56-43. Trump carried NV and AZ but they both passed abortion rights measures too.
So while Fuentes trolls the folks for whom reproductive freedom was a central plank of a losing battle, it's a double troll that he gets to claim that voters support him on the issue when ISTM that the issue wasn't as salient. Hence the split-ticket Trump+abortion voters.
The clever thing is, it's not a Harris ad. There's a nice little disclaimer at the end that it's not authorized by her campaign. So, of course, when anyone complains, it's not the Democratic Party or their politicians behind these ads, it's just totally unaffiliated randos!
There has to be a term for that (other than implausible deniability). I feel like I see it a lot with IdPol stuff: "Well, most Democratic politicians don't use LatinX, so you can't blame them for your workplace's employee group!"
It's a legal thing, spending on "issue ads" is treated differently in campaign finance law from explicitly endorsing a candidate.
I meant more that I often can't point to a specific politician endorsing a specific view, but that view is so promoted culturally that it just feels associated with them regardless.
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