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Who Really Profits When Misogyny Goes Viral?
It’s certainly not women or most men
In an anonymous letter to The Guardian sent by a high school student in the US following Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, she writes:
It genuinely felt as though they [boys] viewed us as unintelligent or even inferior. During science lab our male lab partners read the directions aloud to us, and we had to remind them that we could actually read.
Of course, it should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that the victory of Trump, whose presidential campaign was centred around a very specific brand of masculinity — loud, obnoxious, and domineering — would embolden and intensify misogynistic attitudes.
In fact, researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) tracked narratives targeting women in the aftermath of the election and found that the use of derogatory and misogynistic language has increased exponentially. On the platform formerly known as Twitter, mentions of terms like ‘your body, my choice’ and ‘get back in the kitchen’ surged by 4,600%. A subset of posts went even further, explicitly threatening women with sexual assault and calling for the formation of ‘rape squads.’ The ISD noted that this rising tide of online hate has also translated into offline harassment.
