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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?
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?
But for the original claim to be true, that rape jokes are just fun male bonding and guys don't take it too seriously, then there should be no gay taboo at all, correct? Because the idea of being physically forced to be penetrated in ways you don't want, by a stronger person whom you don't desire, is not threatening or traumatizing to men, so why would it be less funny for a straight guy than for a gay guy?
It's telling that your bottom link is not actually a friendly moment of male banter, but a dominance chest-thump from a Gen X right-leaning guy toward his Gen-Z leftist outgroup, and even so he attempts only an extremely gentle and euphemistic joke about male-male quasi-seduction ("you'd be my concubines") happening in an explicitly counterfactual world. Is the expectation that the Gen Z boys will respond "LOL good one you magnificent bastard," because boy talk is just like that? Would O'Neill respond that way if somebody joked about his entering concubinage in turn?
What about if they did so in more explicitly rapey language like "your body is my choice," or by describing the "depraved" things they would do to him, and how much he'd like it once they got started?
What about if they did so while also casually showing that they were armed, so that while they're joking about raping him right now, it could definitely real-life happen at any future point if they encounter him? What if it were not an ex-Navy SEAL joking about doing this to high-school kids, but an established MMA champion joking about doing "depraved" things to one of the programmers on TheMotte? Would any given male Mottizen still reliably find this hilarious?
Indeed, when in mixed company, men tend to refrain from raunchy or edgy jokes, risqué locker room-adjacent topics, or offering a glimpse of their actual opinion on a potentially controversial issue, just as one might around children or the Thought Police.
In addition, on a more subtle basis, men tend to code-switch from male-only company to when one or more woman is present, catering to women’s sensibilities. A lot of times this is subconscious; men might not even realize they’re doing it.
Around women, the average man deploys softer, more euphemistic language than he would use when in the company of just other men, lest he commit the mortal sin of offending a woman or hurting her feelings. For example, “fucking” or “banging” often becomes “hooking up with” or “sleeping with.” If in just the company of other men, one of my male friends unironically used the phrase “sleeping with” as an euphemism for sex, I’d be concerned that he recently suffered a concussion, is growing a brain tumor, is developing ultra-early dementia, or got body-snatched by an alien.
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