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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?
A right-wing female friend sent me a screenshot of this yesterday and said she was embarrassed to be associated with the idiots who wrote it. For my part, I think it's counterproductive memetics. While I've personally chuckled at some similar memes - e.g., "They're milking AOC on the White House lawn and you're laughing?" for its sheer absurdity - I reckon this kind of extreme edgelord humour is alienating and mysterious for the vast majority of women.
Male friends can absolutely drag the shit out of each other and it's still pretty good-natured, or even an active form of bonding, but nothing as overt happens in female circles. Similarly, young men on voicechat on videogames have been talking about fucking each others' moms in various depraved ways for decades, while lots of women experience this as traumatising aggression. It's clearly a gendered phenomenon, potentially even a biological one - it wouldn't surprise me if we found that isolated tribes in Papua New Guinea where men bond with "your momma" jokes. But I think it codes as grossly and pointlessly inoffensive to most women and genuinely scary to some. While I think that's large because they just "don't get it", that doesn't change the fact that it's probably bad politics.
This is such a weirdly off-base comparison, though. The proper analog would be men joking about raping each other "in various depraved ways," not each other's moms (as the saying goes, tragedy is me getting a paper cut, comedy is anyone else besides me getting raped). Do locker-room lads generally respond with twinkling eyes and good-humored grins when their bros graphically describe how they will bend them over, force them to the ground and ravage their assholes as they scream, because their bodies are somebody else's choice? Maybe so, I don't hang out in men's locker rooms. Sounds fun!
A sincere question: if sexual-assault jokes are an essential and universal part of male bonding, do gay dudes joke about raping each other's dads?
Yeah, making another guy's dad your bottom is a common joke.
The thought that, in ${CurrentYear}, there is likely a non-zero number of grade school kids who taunt each other not by saying “my dad would beat up your dad,” but rather “my dad would TOP your dad,” warms my icy heart.
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