According to this AP story, a lot of women are having to carry around pepper spray on campus these days for fear of being assaulted:
It’s a response to an emboldened fringe of right-wing “manosphere” influencers who have seized on Republican Donald Trump ’s presidential win to justify and amplify misogynistic derision and threats online. Many have appropriated a 1960s abortion rights rallying cry, declaring “Your body, my choice” at women online and on college campuses.
For many women, the words represent a worrying harbinger of what might lie ahead as some men perceive the election results as a rebuke of reproductive rights and women’s rights.
[…]
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.”
There was a local story of a Trump parade here in LA with the big blue flags and young guys screaming this “your body my choice” out the windows. Very nice.
The phrase was used right afte the election by the Neo Nazi Nick Fuentes and apparently it got 35 million views on X within 24 hours. The bros really like it. It’s all over women’s comment sections on Tik Tok, and young kids are hurling it in girls faces in middle school.
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. […]
Anonymous rape threats have been left on the TikTok videos of women denouncing the election results. And on the far-flung reaches of the web, 4chan forums have called for “rape squads” and the adoption of policies in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a dystopian book and TV series depicting the dehumanization and brutalization of women.
The article points out that a number of mass shootings were inspired by 4Chan threats.
Apparently, all these young men feel they’ve been discriminated against by women (I guess they got turned down for dates?) and are fearful of losing their place at the top of society’s hierarchy. Donald Trump and his “bro” campaign made them feel vindicated. They’re lashing out at women because it makes them feel powerful again. Great.