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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.
It can be a form of bonding, but it's also something a lot of men just tolerate because that's just how the spaces are and you have to tolerate it if you want to play certain games. Im not sure what the ratio would be (curious now that I've thought up the hypothetical) but if male gamers were given a choice to move over to identical platforms minus 'i had sex with your mom' edgelords, I think the Exodus would be pretty sizable.
All that to say I agree it is more of a male phenomenon, but it does code as gross and offensive to even a lot of them who are found in those spaces
Like everything else unpleasant in society, this is downstream of modern gaming matchmaking.
When you're spending hours in a specific server going back and forth with someone, or playing with your own friends, the behavior isn't bad because you've built up a relationship. It's not a big deal to insult someone because somewhere in the next hour they'll land a good shot on you and can have any bad feeling erased with catharsis at your outraged stream of profanity. And both of you can be honest with your feelings rather than bottling them up.
When you're in a skill-based zero-player-choice matchmaking world where you interact with any given person for 20 minutes tops before they disappear into the endless sea of players, there's no time to develop that relationship and it's just a stream of unrelated people yelling awful things at you.
Never believed this nugget of folk psychology. If emotions were truly something that are better dealt with outbursts of profanity rather than "bottled up", it would imply people most eager to use profanity and insults would be the most emotionally balanced. After all, if the folk theory is right, they should have nothing bottled up because they regularly let it all out? In my experience, it is rather the other way around. It is the constantly decently mannered, outwardly respectful people who are most likely to show good quality of character, are more likely to do genuinely nice things and avoid gossip, rude comments and dominance plays. More constant the decent behavior, more honest the character. More profanity-prone person, less likely you want to stay around them.
It is an observation that plays nicely with CBT that I've been exposed to: emotions are more like habits or a muscle than pressure cylinders you can't control: the purpose of the therapy is to build habit of not entering the destructive or unproductive mental states. Not far-fetched that embracing a behavior playfully makes it easier to habitually access associated mental space in other context.
It wouldn't, because "not bottling up" doesn't mean you have to take the entire bottom of the bottle away.
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