CHICAGO (AP) — In the days after the presidential election, Sadie Perez began carrying pepper spray around campus. Her mother also ordered her and her sister a self-defense kit that included key rings, a hidden knife key, and a personal alarm.

It’s a response to a brave fringe of right-wing “manosphere” influencers who have gripped Republicans Donald Trump pp presidential victory to justify and reinforce misogynistic insults and threats online. Many have appropriated an abortion-rights rallying cry from the 1960s, declaring “Your Body, My Choice” for women online and on college campuses.

For many women, the words represent an unsettling harbinger of what may lie ahead as some men see the election results as a rebuke of reproductive rights and women’s rights.

“The fact that I feel like I have to carry pepper spray like this is sad,” said Perez, a 19-year-old political science student in Wisconsin. “Women want and deserve to feel safe.”

Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that focuses on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large increase in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some ” extremely violent misogyny”.

“I think a lot of progressive women have been shocked at how quickly and aggressively this rhetoric has caught on,” she said.

The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to a post on the social platform X by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist and far-right internet personality who denies the Holocaust. who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida two years ago. In statements responding to criticism of that incident, Trump said he had “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before he arrived.

Mary Ruth Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said the phrase turns the iconic slogan of abortion rights into an attack on women’s right to self-governance and a personal threat.

“The consequence is that men should have control over or access to sex with women,” says Ziegler, an expert on reproductive rights.

Fuente’s post had 35 million views on X within 24 hours, according to a report by the Frances-Wright think tank, and the phrase quickly spread to other social media platforms.

Women on TikTok have reported seeing it flood their comments section. The slogan has also made its way offline with boys chanting it in middle schools or men directing it at women on college campuses, according to the report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and reports in social media. One mother said her daughter heard the phrase on her college campus three times, the report said.

School District i Wisconsin and Minnesota have sent messages about the language to parents. T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase were pulled from Amazon.

Perez said she’s seen men respond to shared Snapchat stories of her college class with, “Your body, my choice.”

“It makes me feel disgusted and offended,” she said. “… It feels like going backwards.”

Misogynistic attacks have been part of the social media landscape for years. But Frances-Wright and others who track extremism and misinformation online said language glorifying violence against women or celebrating the possibility of their rights being taken away has increased since the election.

Online declarations for women to “Get back in the kitchen” or “Repeal the 19th,” a reference to the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote, have spread rapidly. In the days surrounding the election, the extremism think tank found that the top 10 posts on X calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment received more than 4 million views combined.

A man holding a sign with the words “Women Are Property” sparked an outcry Texas State University. The man was not a student, faculty or staff member and was escorted off campus, according to the university’s rector. The university is “exploring potential legal responses,” he said.

Anonymous rape threats have been left on TikTok videos by women denouncing the election results. And in the far reaches of the web, the 4chan forum has called for “rape groups” and the adoption of policies in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a dystopian book and TV series that depicts the dehumanization and brutalization of women.

“What was frightening here was how quickly this also manifested itself in offline threats,” Frances-Wright said, stressing that online discourse can have real effects.

Previous violent rhetoric on 4chan has been linked to racially motivated and anti-Semitic attacks, e.g. a shooting in 2022 by a white supremacist in Buffalo that killed 10 people. Anti-Asian hate incidents also rose as a politician, including Trumpused words like “Chinese virus” to describe the covid-19 pandemic. And Trump’s language orientation Muslims and immigrants in his first campaign correlated with spikes in hate speech and attacks against those groups, Frances-Wright said.