There have been many ugly developments following the election victory of Trump. It seems like all the worst elements in society who harbor abhorrent views have been emboldened to think that they are in control.

Christine Fernando writes about one particular area, and that is the rise of what is known as the ‘manosphere’, where men think that they now have even more power over women than they had before and are willing to say so openly.

Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focusing on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large uptick in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some “extremely violent misogyny.”

“I think many progressive women have been shocked by how quickly and aggressively this rhetoric has gained traction,” she said.

The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to a post on the social platform X from Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and far-right internet personality who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida two years ago. In statements responding to criticism of that event, Trump said he had “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before he arrived.

Mary Ruth Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said the phrase transforms the iconic abortion rights slogan into an attack on women’s right to autonomy and a personal threat.

“The implication is that men should have control over or access to sex with women,” said Ziegler, a reproductive rights expert.

Fuentes’ post had 35 million views on X within 24 hours, according to a report by Frances-Wright’s think tank, and the phrase spread rapidly to other social media platforms.

Women on TikTok have reported seeing it inundate their comment sections. The slogan also has made its way offline with boys chanting it in middle schools or men directing it at women on college campuses, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue report and social media reports. One mother said her daughter heard the phrase on her college campus three times, the report said.

School districts in Wisconsin and Minnesota have sent notices about the language to parents. T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase were pulled off Amazon.

Perez said she has seen men respond to shared Snapchat stories for their college class with “Your body, my choice.”

“It makes me feel disgusted and infringed upon,” she said. “… It feels like going backwards.”

Misogynistic attacks have been part of the social media landscape for years. But Frances-Wright and others who track online extremism and disinformation said language glorifying violence against women or celebrating the possibility of their rights being stripped away has spiked since the election.

Online declarations for women to “Get back in the kitchen” or to “Repeal the 19th,” a reference to the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote, have spread rapidly. In the days surrounding the election, the extremism think tank found that the top 10 posts on X calling for repeal of the 19th Amendment received more than 4 million views collectively.

There has always been this yearning in rightwing circles for ‘the good old days’. The slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ tapped into that desire. When exactly those days were so great was never specified but it clearly refers to a time when white men called the shots and women and minorities knew their proper places in society and were not so uppity, demanding to have equal rights and be treated with dignity.

But we are not going back to those days, however loudly some elements of the manosphere may shout. Once people have enjoyed the rights that were won with such great difficulty and against huge odds, they are not going to yield them easily. The manosphere may think, in the first flush of Trump’s victory, that they are riding high right now. But if they try to tangibly reverse the progress that has been made, they are likely to encounter stiff opposition.