Artifact 16 - "Your body, my choice:" Hate and harassment towards women spreads online - ISD

Gender intimidation, as defined in Gendered Lives page 240, is the vulnerability and fear felt when harassment occurs on the basis of gender. I often subconsciously think of this fear as a byproduct of the immoral act being committed, thinking of the trauma to the victim as a side effect of harassment that may otherwise exist. However, I believe this is a misguided instinct—for very often, the infliction of fear, pain, and trauma is the entire point of the harassment in the first place. This artifact, to me, makes that entirely clear: after Donald Trump won the election, many men such as popular conservative commentator Nicholas Fuentes took to twitter to maximize fear and hoped to see the frightened reactions of pain from women scared about losing many of the rights feminists have fought for.

The infliction of this pain is seen as self-evidently justified, and the spreading of which is seen as defeating the supposedly ‘anti-man feminists’—enemy combatants of some type, who they can take their anger out on without moral repercussion. As the ISD report details, Fuentes’ post quickly became influential, leading many of his followers to take to other social media sites to harass any women they found. It is a distinct “reclaiming” of power by antifeminist movements, and one where inciting fear is the clear purpose.