How Trump used organised misogyny to end the right to safe, legal abortion in the US

Before Roe v Wade was over­ruled, there was Trump. This was a Pres­i­dent cat­a­pult­ed to pow­er in part by the votes of men who hate women and whose misog­y­ny has been a gate­way to white suprema­cy. They form the Red Pill community.

For the men in Red Pill and relat­ed sub­cul­tures, the sex­u­al and repro­duc­tive free­doms that allow women access to the pub­lic sphere, to work out­side the home en masse, to enjoy polit­i­cal pow­er and to make their own deci­sions about sex and fer­til­i­ty dis­rupts their fascis­tic notion of nat­ur­al order. These are men who believe they are bio­log­i­cal­ly supe­ri­or to women and also that they have a right to sex. The fact that fem­i­nism denies these men unfet­tered sex­u­al access to, and con­trol over, women, means they feel, at best, hard done by. They believe that men are being oppressed or pun­ished by feminism’s gains, and that their patri­ar­chal pow­er and author­i­ty is depen­dent on women’s sub­or­di­na­tion and infe­ri­or­i­ty. At worst, these are men who want to reassert that pow­er and author­i­ty via vio­lence and repro­duc­tive control. 

These online com­mu­ni­ties offer men a solu­tion to their woman prob­lem via organ­ised misog­y­ny. In 2016, that organ­ised misog­y­ny got polit­i­cal­ly organised. 

The elec­tion cam­paign of Don­ald Trump gave these men a focus and pro­vid­ed a vital tool for the far-right to push their racial­ly-charged, anti-abor­tion agen­da into the main­stream. This was an unprece­dent­ed chance for their anti-women, anti-abor­tion, far-right views to influ­ence both nation­al and inter­na­tion­al pol­i­cy. Like them, Trump appeared to believe that there was a war on men, and he was will­ing to deploy racist misog­y­ny to win that war. 

With Trump’s arrival on the scene, men who pop­u­late these online sub­cul­tures start­ed to recog­nise that ​‘if they iden­ti­fy and act col­lec­tive­ly as men, they can effect polit­i­cal change,’ accord­ing to soci­ol­o­gists Pierce Dig­nam and Deana A Rohlinger, aca­d­e­mics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da. ​‘The elec­tion of a man who brags about sex­u­al­ly assault­ing women illus­trates the effi­ca­cy of this conviction’. 

In 2019, Dig­nam and Rohlinger pub­lished a paper that revealed how the far-right rad­i­calised the forum in order to ral­ly sup­port for Don­ald Trump. Influ­en­tial Red Pillers start­ed to pro­mote Trump as the ​‘ulti­mate alpha’. The accu­sa­tions of sex­u­al harass­ment made against Trump fur­ther gal­vanised his Red Pill sup­port­ers. They got behind a leader who, they believed, would restore women to their ​‘nat­ur­al’ and infe­ri­or posi­tion. Trump would reverse the ​‘decline’ brought on by women’s lib­er­a­tion and entrench white male suprema­cy – think back to the fas­cist thought archi­tec­ture of a far-right that wants to undo progress and turn back the clock. When Trump talked to the Red Pillers about mak­ing Amer­i­ca great again, they heard a promise of a myth­ic past based on patri­ar­chal author­i­ty and women’s sub­or­di­na­tion. He became the weapon with which to fight for men’s polit­i­cal for­tunes. The fact that it was Clin­ton – a pro-abor­tion woman – run­ning against Trump gave the move­ment a sense of urgency. This was, they felt, the last chance for men. 

Dig­nam and Rohlinger found exam­ples of Red Pillers becom­ing more sup­port­ive of Trump when it was revealed that he was not only accused of sex­u­al assault, but had boast­ed of it. One Red Pill mem­ber set up a forum thread titled Sex­u­al Assault Is Why I’m Endors­ing Don­ald Trump for Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, before post­ing ​‘when some­body accus­es a pow­er­ful or famous fig­ure like Trump of ​“sex­u­al assault,” I don’t look the oth­er way. I don’t denounce them or their behav­iour. Instead I run towards them, because there is no truer sig­nal which side some­body is on, than when they’re giv­en a bogus accu­sa­tion by the estab­lish­ment. This is our bea­con to find allies in the war’.

Rohlinger and Dig­nam con­clud­ed that while the politi­ci­sa­tion of the Red Pill forum was short-lived, it was effec­tive. Forum lead­ers such as red­pillschool ​‘were able to quell dis­sent and link the Red Pill iden­ti­ty with vot­ing for Trump. This clear­ly demon­strates that these extreme online enclaves can be dom­i­nat­ed by a few pow­er­ful voic­es, which can help can­di­dates hold­ing dis­taste­ful views to get elect­ed’. Trump wast­ed no time in putting those views into action – deliv­er­ing to his white male suprema­cist base a pol­i­cy plat­form that deliv­ered the ​“war on men” vic­to­ry they had demand­ed. That meant a raft of anti-fem­i­nist poli­cies, and includ­ing the ground­work for end­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al right to safe, legal abor­tion in the Unit­ed States. 

First there was the appoint­ment of anti-abor­tion judges to the Supreme Court. Trump began by appoint­ing anti-abor­tion judge Neil Gor­such, fol­lowed by Brett Kavanaugh – a man who was not only anti-abor­tion, but was pub­licly accused of sex­u­al assault dur­ing his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings. When he was nonethe­less ele­vat­ed to a life­time appoint­ment in the Supreme Court, it sent a bold mes­sage to Trump’s male suprema­cist fol­low­ing: that women’s bod­i­ly and sex­u­al auton­o­my was out, male dom­i­nance was in. Kavanaugh’s appoint­ment was met with glee on extrem­ist misog­y­nis­tic forums, where the alleged abuser was praised as a ​‘supreme rep­re­sen­ta­tive’ of their com­mu­ni­ty. This was a man, misog­y­nists wrote online, who ​‘fought the fem­i­nists and won’. His appoint­ment was fol­lowed by that of Amy Comey-Bar­rett, an anti-abor­tion law­mak­er and con­ser­v­a­tive Con­sti­tu­tion­al ​“orig­i­nal­ist” whose approval was rushed through after the death of pro-choice Supreme Court judge Ruth Bad­er-Gins­burg in Sep­tem­ber 2020.

The four years of Trump rule were char­ac­terised by wave after wave of anti-abor­tion mea­sures, led by the appoint­ments of white, male con­ser­v­a­tive judges and rep­re­sen­ta­tives. These law­mak­ers intro­duced so-called ​‘heart­beat bills’ that sought to ban abor­tion after six weeks; forced the clo­sures of abor­tion clin­ics across the US; imple­ment­ed a bar­rage of unnec­es­sar­i­ly ardu­ous health and safe­ty reg­u­la­tions known as TRAP laws; and designed state laws requir­ing funer­als for abort­ed foe­tus­es, cre­at­ing addi­tion­al logis­ti­cal, mon­e­tary, and emo­tion­al hur­dles for abor­tion providers and peo­ple seek­ing care. Out­side the US, poli­cies such as the rein­state­ment of the ​‘glob­al gag rule’ with­drew fund­ing for sex­u­al and repro­duc­tive health­care providers around the world. Accord­ing to repro­duc­tive health char­i­ty MSI Repro­duc­tive Choic­es, the fund­ing cut that denied fed­er­al funds to inter­na­tion­al NGOs that offer abor­tions or abor­tion advice led to at least 1.8 mil­lion addi­tion­al unsafe abor­tions and 20,000 mater­nal deaths. 

Trump lost in 2020, but the dam­age had already been done. The rush­ing through of Comey-Barrett’s appoint­ment, along with the judi­cial appoint­ments across the nation, had cre­at­ed a con­ser­v­a­tive and anti-abor­tion judi­cia­ry. This meant that in 2021, a con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty on the Supreme Court allowed Texas to ignore Roe vs Wade and ban abor­tion after six weeks, with a vig­i­lante law put in place that crim­i­nalised any­one help­ing a woman to access abor­tion. As the deci­sion by the Supreme Court not to inter­vene was pub­lished, one woman on Twit­ter wrote, ​‘what­ev­er you are doing now is what you were doing when Roe vs Wade end­ed’. With­in the year, the Supreme Court had over­turned the 1973 rul­ing and returned abor­tion laws to state lev­el. The deci­sion was made on a Fri­day and by Mon­day, nine states had already banned ter­mi­na­tions. In one week­end six­teen mil­lion US women and girls had their human rights stripped away from them. 

The attack on abor­tion rights through main­stream gov­ern­ment and judi­cial pol­i­cy was fun­da­men­tal to deliv­er­ing Red Pill and far-right misog­y­nis­tic aims. This is because hav­ing con­trol over our own repro­duc­tion is absolute­ly fun­da­men­tal to women’s lib­er­a­tion: with­out bod­i­ly auton­o­my, women can­not be free. These men see women’s free­doms as unnat­ur­al – a sub­ver­sion of the fascis­tic nat­ur­al order where men are supe­ri­or and women are infe­ri­or. Male suprema­cy is there­fore depen­dent on remov­ing women’s right to their own sex­u­al­i­ty and fer­til­i­ty. The so-called war on men can­not be won when women can access abor­tion. The nat­ur­al order and the return to the myth­ic past can only be achieved by strip­ping women of the rights won in the last fifty or six­ty years – from the right to abor­tion to the right not be viewed as rape­able property.

The Red Pill movement’s great­est suc­cess in their sup­port of Trump, though, was the main­stream­ing and nor­mal­i­sa­tion of a hyper-misog­y­nis­tic, extrem­ist view of women. Their mobil­i­sa­tion took the sub­cul­ture offline and turned the White House red. It was an exam­ple of how these online extrem­ist groups, so often ignored and derid­ed, could suc­cess­ful­ly organ­ise polit­i­cal­ly to effect main­stream pol­i­tics and win what they des­per­ate­ly desired: a roll­back of women’s free­doms and an asser­tion of white male suprema­cy.

Bod­ies Under Siege is out now on Ver­so Books.

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