The Tweet that Launched a Thousand Quips

Nick Fuentes trolls women with “Your body, my choice,” and predictable hysteria ensues

Having said for months that a Trump victory would usher in a reign of misogynistic terror, feminists have seized on Fuentes’ words in a motherlode of humorlessness and self-pity

Many feminist news and opinion-makers have commented on the young man, Nick Fuentes, who tweeted on the night of the US election, as returns showed Trump developing an insurmountable lead, “Your body, my choice. Forever.”

It was obviously a tasteless joke, as Fuentes’ accompanying livestream, full of jeers, made clear. Not a joke like the MATGA movement, in which women fantasize about poisoning their husbands—sympathetically dubbed a “satirical expression of [women’s] frustration”—but a simple play on words. It evoked pro-abortion advocates’ favorite slogan, “My body, my choice.”

According to many pundits, however, it was a menacing warning of male control,  even of imminent mass rape. The tweet went viral (as of this writing, it has had 96.9 million views), causing women across the country to weep in fear and fury (on camera, of course) and to make threats of murder against the tweet’s author. It was reported that schoolboys were taunting their female classmates with the slogan. Ultimately, at least one woman confronted Fuentes, after which she was allegedly pepper-sprayed and pushed down some stairs.

The instigator of the “woman-hating rallying cry” was, we’ve been told, a well-known internet provocateur, “far right streamer,” “white nationalist,” “neo-Nazi,” and “Holocaust denier.” The middle-aged woman menaced by him was Marla Rose, a “57-year-old writer and co-founder of a vegan lifestyle website.”  

What the headlines downplayed and the stories often minimized was that the alleged attack on Rose took place on the steps of Fuentes’ own home, where Rose had gone to harass him. Fuentes had been doxxed and targeted for violence by an internet mob after his jokes about the brick ceiling and how there would never be a female president (“Good old Nick Fuentes is not fucking safe. We have his docs”).

Just days before she turned up on his doorstep to film and take pictures, Rose had posted approvingly of punching Nazis in the face. She made it clear in a Vice interview after the incident that, knowing little about Fuentes, she knew him to be “an actual, proud Nazi” and that in addition to sharing his address in a (now deleted) Facebook post (illegal in her home state of Illinois), she wanted to let him know “that there’s not a place for him to feel comfortable and safe around me.” 

Rose has a history of violence, having admitted in a past interview to assaulting a man who wore a fur coat to a vegan Thanksgiving party. In the interview, somewhat ironically titled “Vegan Marla Rose Will Punch You in the Face,” Rose related with glee how she shoved a man who mocked veganism, and how her husband then repeatedly pushed and screamed at the man until he had ejected him from the hall where the dinner was being held. Like many feminists, Rose was unapologetic—actually, she was delighted—about the violence.

It need hardly be said that if a male activist with a history of threatening posts and violence against women had doxxed and then stalked a woman at her home merely because she tweeted a joke he didn’t like, there would be no question as to who was in the wrong: no supportive police would be ready to act on the man’s behalf (Rose is considering whether to have Fuentes charged), no sympathetic Vice interview, no vocal supporters vowing to kill or maim the woman. Fuentes made a bad decision, and was in the wrong, if he indeed pepper-sprayed and shoved Rose, but Rose had no business sharing his address and being at his house. In a sane world, the police would have given her and Nick a scolding, and she would have gone away chastened, not boastful.  

But we don’t live in a sane world, and across America and beyond, feminists are playing up Fuentes’ (and by extension the Trump regime’s) alleged threat to women. An unknown number of women (and a few men) have recorded themselves crying and raging over a soundtrack of Fuentes’ words. Many women and men have expressed a desire to see him dead or have claimed they are coming for him.  It is impossible to see their tears and rage as anything more than narcissistic, and in some cases criminal, self-indulgence. They fulfill every stereotype of women (and feminist men) as irrational and dangerous.

More pertinent, perhaps, are the bizarre claims being made by so-called feminist journalists, the elite opinion-makers who allegedly represent the educated class. They have written about Fuentes’ tweet in articles notable for their sustained exaggeration, incoherence, and outright fabrication.

Angela Yang at NBC News quoted from a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue to allege that “misogynistic voices online” were “exploit[ing] Donald Trump’s election as a rebuke of both reproductive rights and women’s rights.” Which rights of women are threatened under a Trump administration, and how? Yang didn’t say, omitting to mention that Trump said he would veto a nation-wide abortion ban and that his wife is firmly pro-abortion. Instead, Yang claims, citing the report, that the impact of resurgent misogyny “could extend into the next presidential election and beyond.” The article is filled with such vague speculations and maudlin non-sequiturs.

Gender columnist Monica Hesse at the Washington Post was more dramatic, stating that “’Your body, my choice. Forever’ is the tagline of a serial-killer movie, what the bad guy says to the coed before he handcuffs her to a drainpipe.” In case that sounded fantastical, Hesse stressed that Fuentes’ tweet was not fiction: “It’s an introduction to a hideous new reality, designed to menace, objectify and remove all sense of hope.” (We suggest that Hesse not give up her day job for a screenwriting career.)

Columnist Van Badham at The Guardian was drawn to doomsday rhetoric, asserting that even in far-away Australia, she found it “hard not to feel an encroaching global darkness.” “They’re hunting us on the internet, these men,” she stated histrionically in relation to Fuentes’ tweet. “They always did, but Trump’s victory has encouraged more flagrant woman-hating behaviors.” She expressed approval for Korean feminists’ 4B movement, which declares universal anti-male hatred.

All the writing about “Your body, my choice” was notable for its dishonesty. Though Hesse advised against doxxing, she couldn’t even pretend to condemn the threats against Fuentes. She wrote with elaborate nonchalance that “It’s unclear whether all of the addresses circulating online belonged to him” and fantasized approvingly about the unexpected retribution that could come to Fuentes and Trump voters in general:

“The point isn’t about where Fuentes does or doesn’t live,” she evaded. “The point is that if you voted in this election in support of reactionary policies, there are a lot of things you might have expected to come your way. A national abortion ban, perhaps. Or a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, or documented ones. Or the implementation of whatever pet project most spoke to you in the back pages of the Project 2025 plan. But one thing you did not expect, not for a hot second, is that Trump would win, and what would come your way would be, hypothetically, bags and bags of dildos [dildos were one of the ‘gifts’ irate women imagined sending to Fuentes].”

That’s a lot to conclude about millions of American voters from one tweet. Hesse, of course, has no idea whether Fuentes actually voted for Trump at all (just days before the election, he had criticized Trump supporters as cult-like and refused to endorse the former president). And she must realize that many Trump voters were concerned with issues other than women’s bodies—like jobs or inflation, energy or war—and that the vast majority have never even heard of Project 2025 or Fuentes himself. Hesse is unembarrassed to damn as reactionary the millions of men and women who hoped a Trump administration might bring down home prices or prevent illegal immigration. The notion that Trump voters support the deportation of legal immigrants is a disgusting smear.

Deliberately omitted by Hesse and her feminist compatriots is any serious engagement with the reality of abortion, which most Americans find a complicated issue, and which 44% say is morally wrong most or all of the time. “My body, my choice” was always dishonest and manipulative, evading the fact that an unborn child’s body is distinct from the mother’s, having its own DNA and unique biological makeup. Objection to abortion is most often based on ethical principles and empathy for the unborn child, not hatred of women. As some commentators have pointed out, “Your body, my choice” IS the pro-abortion position.

As for Fuentes himself, he is a thoroughly marginalized figure, banned from nearly all social media platforms and disavowed by every Republican of note, including Trump himself. His tweet was, quite simply, a yelp of angry delight, a middle finger held up to feminists’ nauseating false pieties.

Young men like Fuentes have grown up in a culture that has consistently forbidden many aspects of their identities and beliefs, not least the reasonable preference of some to live in a majority-white country. They’ve been subjected to punitive campaigns against manspreading or mansplaining that stigmatize how they sit or speak. They’ve been told by the American Psychological Association that their masculinity is potentially damaging to themselves and others. They’ve been told they may suffer from pathological masculinity or sadism. They’ve seen that feminist authorities can, with complete impunity, express outright hatred for them as men.

They are not allowed to say, even as private individuals, and certainly not in positions of authority, that they hate women or any other protected group. Even their entirely non-hateful speech, if it contradicts social orthodoxies, can get them banned from social media platforms or disciplined at college (while feminist hatred of men in itself never results in a woman’s being banned). They’ve been told that it is hateful to object to DEI programs, which overtly discriminate against them as male and white. They know that in all social situations, including work settings, sports, dating, marriage, and raising children, their society protects and solely “believes” women, and that as men, they can be accused and socially destroyed—even imprisoned—by a woman who seeks to harm them. They’ve been told that thinking for themselves and acting in their own best interests are anti-social and unacceptable. They can be fired from their jobs if a woman complains about anything they have allegedly said or done.

In the midst of so much censorship and punitive legislation, irony is one of the few tools dissident young men have left. Now even that, of course, is too much. In a convoluted post in The New Yorker, staff writer Jia Tolentino referred to such irony as “poisonous,” and tried to make the argument that “the fact that [Fuentes’] phrase is a meme, and thus nominally a joke, makes it more alarming.” She stated as if it proved something that “A therapist at a university in the Upper Midwest told me that a student she works with had gone to a frat party where one man had yelled it [“Your body, my choice”] and that the people around him hadn’t called him out.” According to Tolentino, the meme conjures “forced sex, forced pregnancy, forced motherhood, forced marriage.” There is almost nothing in her essay that is not a bizarre caricature or outright untruth, as when she claims that “Some Americans think that the government should force women to carry children [sic] but that mandating the eradication of polio through vaccination is immoral.” Left-wing threats of actual violence against Fuentes are more palatable, in her mind, than the symbolic violence purportedly enacted by pro-life wordplay.

Here we come to the nub of feminist politics, which is increasingly uncomfortable with verbal sparring or mockery of any sort. Having taken over mainstream media and political culture, feminist pundits thought their politically correct stronghold would eventually become impregnable. Inch by inch, they would feminize the worlds of family law, public education, policing, academia, social media, and political culture until there was nothing left for men but compliance and quiet desperation. Men who wished to work in any white-collar sphere—men who wished to have families or an intact marriage—would have to conform.

That’s why MGTOW and voluntary celibacy (Fuentes’ position) bother them so. They also hate the idea (see Tolentino’s disgust at the meme “Hot girls voted Trump”) that coalitions are forming between counter-culture young women and dissident male youth, as is happening around abortion, where an increasing number of young women have become vocal pro-life advocates. The inability of feminists to participate in reasoned discussion about the morality of abortion, to recognize ethical limits and shared responsibilities, has made rude trolling and increased polarization inevitable and well-justified. In the end, all the fear-mongering before the election about Trump the misogynist did not lead a tsunami of young women to vote for Kamala Harris; on the contrary, Trump gained significantly with this demographic.

The point is: Fuentes’ tweet was rude but apt. Anyone looking for intelligent insight in the sources I consulted will be sorely disappointed: all is hyperventilating over-simplification and grotesque misrepresentation. The Guardian’s Badham ends her screed by demanding that “In this tense and fragile time for women, it’s on those who still see women and girls as human beings to consider just what we all did to push her into danger in the first place.” What we did was see unborn babies as human beings. No surprise: reality cannot be suppressed forever, and eventually young people begin to question the orthodoxies they’ve been taught. If feminists wish to compete on the battleground of ideas, they will need to proceed with greater integrity and wit than they have shown thus far. Fuentes’ tweet exposed them for the liars they are.