Opinion How a neo-Nazi helped me cope with the shock of Trump’s victory

Thanks, Nick Fuentes! Thanks for the anger!

For those who don’t know him, Nicholas Fuentes is an American white supremacist, Holocaust denier – and fun fact – dinner guest at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. In short – he is the true horror in the body of a 26-year-old who litters social networks every day with his right-wing extremist world views.

Why do I thank someone like that? Because Nick Fuentes snapped me out of my state of shock about the outcome of the US election with four words. Even before it was officially announced that Trump had won, Fuentes wrote a comment on X that has since gone viral: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Based on the “My body, my choice” slogan of the women’s rights movement.

When I first read these words, they hit me like a blow. The second time I felt sick. And the third time I considered doing things that would have made me a convicted felon. (Not that that’s a problem now that we have a convicted felon in the White House.)

However, as disgusting as this comment is, as blatantly as it invites rape, it was exactly the resounding slap in the face that I needed.

Because the reality is – that is exactly what Trump’s America is. An America in which men like Fuentes feel empowered to openly broadcast their misogynistic hatred to the world, online and offline. Less than 24 hours after the election, men showed up at Texas State University with signs that read, “Women are property.” A call to revoke the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was trending on Tiktok. It guarantees women’s right to vote. And even the Taliban congratulated American men for “not leaving the leadership of their great country to a woman.” Reminder: When the Taliban praise you, something is going very wrong.

Americans didn’t just learn from the worst possible example. They made it president.

Donald Trump has never made a secret of what he thinks of women. From his “grab them by the pussy” comments to insulting female politicians as “bitches” to one of his recent campaign speeches where he threatened to “protect women whether they want to or not.” Not to mention, he has been convicted by a jury of sexual abuse and has been accused of sexual harassment by more than 25 women.

Trump simply focused his campaign on one group of people: men. He has promised young men in particular to bring back an America in which the male gender has power. As important as the economy and immigration were to many voters, Trump actually offered few concrete solutions to these issues. Instead, he campaigned with male strength, dominance and the promise that soon a man would soon be in charge not just in the White House, but in every house in America.

But what men like Trump and Fuentes forget when they threaten women to keep us down is that we didn’t just start fighting for our rights yesterday. It was just over 100 years ago that women in the USA got the right to vote. 60 years ago that women were allowed to have their own credit card. And just since 1993, marital rape has been a crime in all 50 states. (In Germany, by the way, only since 1997.)

Women are painfully aware that sexism still exists at all levels of society and there is still a lot of work to do. We experience it when comparing salaries in the office, when we are perplexed about unexplored women’s diseases in the doctor’s office and when we look at the Forbes 500 list, on which we only make up ten percent. But we also know that generations of women before us have overcome unthinkable hurdles. And that every step backwards is followed by two steps forward.

The day after Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, millions of women around the world took to the streets for the Women’s March. To date, the largest single-day protest the US has ever seen. After the Supreme Court overturned abortion rights in 2022, women across the country organized to consolidate the right at the state level. To date, they have had success in 29 American states.

I know that many women are still shocked about Trump’s renewed victory. That they are worried, not only about his radical politics, but also about the social consequences of his election. But I also know that a lot of women are damn angry. And perhaps our greatest advantage is that angry women have always been underestimated.

This anger led to thousands of people taking to the streets to protest in New York over the weekend. At the front, a group of women walked with a “We’re not going back” banner. Abortion organizations nationwide are seeing many new donations. And some women even go so far as to join the “4B movement,” which operates on the simple but radical principle: no dating, no sex, no marriage, no children (read more about it here).

You can think what you want about the movement, but I think it’s great that it infuriates misogynists like Fuentes. If you change the rules of the game, don’t complain when we take the ball away, darling.

Speaking of Nick Fuentes. After his tweet went viral, he couldn’t help but share his “Your body, my choice” hate speech again as a video. With a MAGA cap on his head, he goes from “the men have won” to “the glass ceiling is a stone wall” to “you will never ever have a female president.”

Well, let me tell you a little secret, dear Nick: Nothing motivates us women more than being told we can’t do something.