I.
Let’s talk about what happens to women in a culture built on male grievance.
Not theoretically. Not abstractly. Not in the language of policy papers or academic analysis.
Let’s talk about what it actually feels like.
II. The Digital Gauntlet
On November 6, 2024—the day after Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump—a woman I know logged onto Twitter to check the election results.
Within minutes, her notifications were flooded.
“Your body, my choice.”
“Get back in the kitchen.”
“This is what you get for thinking you could win.”
“Hope you’re ready to lose your rights, bitch.”
She hadn’t posted anything political. She hadn’t said a word about the election. Her crime was having a profile that indicated she was a woman. That was enough.
She wasn’t alone.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue documented what happened in the 24 hours after the election: a 4,600% spike in misogynistic posts on X. Women—particularly women who had been visible in their support for Harris—were targeted with rape threats, doxxing attempts, and variations of the “your body, my choice” taunt that Nick Fuentes had made viral.
Some of these women were journalists. Some were activists. Some were just regular people who had the audacity to have an opinion while female.
One TikTok creator reported receiving over 300 comments in a single hour, all variations of “your body, my choice” and explicit descriptions of sexual violence. When she tried to report the comments, the platform told her they didn’t violate community guidelines.
Another woman—a teacher—posted a video expressing disappointment about the election results. Within days, her school address was posted online, along with calls for people to “pay her a visit” and “teach her a lesson.”
This is what the grievance economy produces: a permission structure for cruelty.
Because it’s not just trolling. It’s not “just the internet.” These are women’s real lives. Their real inboxes. Their real sense of safety.
And when they log off, the harassment doesn’t stop. It just follows them.
III. The Schoolyard
The harassment jumped offline almost immediately.
Within 48 hours of the election, girls in high schools across the country reported boys chanting “your body, my choice” in hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms.
In one school, a group of boys surrounded a female classmate and chanted the phrase while laughing. When she reported it to a teacher, she was told: “Boys will be boys. They’re just excited about the election.”
In another school, a girl posted on social media that a group of boys had told her to “sleep with one eye open tonight.” When her mother contacted the school, administrators said they couldn’t do anything unless there was a “specific, credible threat.”
These aren’t isolated incidents. Parents, teachers, and students reported similar stories from schools across the country—public and private, urban and rural, blue states and red states.
The phrase had become a weapon. A way for boys to assert dominance, test boundaries, and see what they could get away with.
And the lesson they learned was: pretty much anything.
Because most of the boys faced no consequences. Some were given warnings. A few were suspended. But the overall message was clear: This is just talk. This is just politics. This is just boys being boys.
Meanwhile, the girls who reported the harassment were told to “ignore it” or “not take it so seriously” or “understand that emotions are running high right now.”
In other words: endure it. It’s not that bad. Don’t make a scene.
IV. The Mental Health Toll
By early 2025, surveys and studies started documenting what many women already knew viscerally: the culture had become hostile in ways that were measurably harming women’s mental health.
A poll conducted in early 2025 found that 44% of Gen Z women reported that online misogyny had negatively impacted their mental health. Twenty percent said they had reduced their use of social media platforms or left them entirely because of harassment and abuse.
Hotlines for domestic violence, sexual assault, and LGBTQ+ support reported spikes in calls in the weeks following the election. Women described feeling unsafe, anxious, and unsure whether the harassment would escalate into physical violence.
Therapists reported an increase in clients—particularly younger women—describing symptoms of hypervigilance, panic attacks, and trauma responses triggered by the post-election climate.
One therapist told NPR: “My young female clients are terrified. They’re seeing boys at school parroting these slogans, they’re seeing men in positions of power who’ve been accused of assault, and they’re internalizing the message that their bodies are not their own. It’s not an abstract political fear. It’s visceral.”
This is what collateral damage looks like. Not bombs and bullets, but slow erosion. The constant low-grade stress of navigating a world that tells you, in a thousand small ways, that you are not safe. That your body is up for debate. That your autonomy is negotiable.
And when you try to name it, you’re told you’re overreacting.
V. The Policy Assault
But the damage wasn’t just cultural. It was structural.
By early 2025, Republican-controlled state legislatures and the incoming Trump administration were advancing policies that directly targeted women’s autonomy and reproductive rights.
Abortion Bans:
In the two years following the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, 14 states enacted near-total abortion bans. By 2025, several more states were pushing legislation that would:
Ban abortion at 6 weeks (before many women know they’re pregnant)
Criminalize traveling out of state to obtain an abortion
Allow private citizens to sue anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion
Ban medication abortion (pills that account for over half of all abortions in the U.S.)
Project 2025—a policy blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation for a potential Trump administration—explicitly called for:
A national ban on mifepristone (the abortion pill)
Federal recognition of fetal personhood (which would effectively ban abortion nationwide)
Defunding Planned Parenthood and all organizations that provide abortion services
Restricting access to contraception under the guise of “religious freedom”
By January 2025, when Trump was inaugurated, reproductive rights advocates were bracing for an all-out assault on abortion access.
Healthcare Restrictions:
Beyond abortion, the policy threats extended to other aspects of women’s healthcare:
Several states introduced bills that would allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or emergency contraception based on “moral objections”
Medicaid funding for reproductive healthcare was targeted for cuts
Sex education programs that included information about contraception were defunded in favor of abstinence-only programs
Workplace and Economic Policies:
The Trump administration signaled plans to roll back Obama-era protections against pregnancy discrimination in the workplace
Paid family leave proposals were shelved
Proposals to address the gender wage gap were dismissed as “woke” priorities
The message was clear: Women’s bodies, women’s healthcare, and women’s economic security were all secondary to a broader ideological agenda.
And the women who would be most harmed by these policies? Poor women. Women of color. Rural women. Women in states that had already gutted social services.
The women with the least power to fight back.
VI. The Incel Threat
There’s a darker layer to all of this. One that most people don’t want to talk about because it sounds extreme. Until it isn’t.
In the years leading up to 2025, researchers and law enforcement agencies had been tracking a disturbing trend: violence committed by men radicalized in online incel (involuntary celibate) communities.
Incels are men who believe they are entitled to sex and are being denied it by women—and by society’s refusal to enforce traditional gender hierarchies that would give them access to women.
In 2018, a man drove a van into a crowd in Toronto, killing 10 people. He had posted online praising Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista shooter who killed six people in what he framed as revenge against women for rejecting him.
In 2021, a Plymouth, UK attacker killed five people in an incel-motivated shooting. British authorities classified it as the first incel terrorism case in the UK.
By 2025, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security had quietly begun treating incel ideology as a domestic terrorism threat.
Why? Because forums where incels congregate are filled with:
Rape fantasies and detailed discussions of how to “punish” women
Glorification of past attackers (Elliot Rodger is referred to as “Saint Elliot” and the “Supreme Gentleman”)
Calls for violence against women and “Chads” (attractive men)
A nihilistic worldview (”blackpill” ideology) that frames violence as inevitable
A 2025 study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that “even on incel forums which claim to reject violence, rape fantasies against women and girls are common. Calls for violence against men (’Chads’) are also not uncommon.”
And here’s what makes this relevant to 2025: the manosphere influencers, the podcast bros, the “alpha male” gurus—they’re all feeding the same pipeline.
They’re teaching young men that women are the enemy. That feminism has stolen their birthright. That they are victims of a system rigged against them.
And when those beliefs marinate long enough, in isolated enough spaces, with no countervailing voices, some men radicalize.
Not all. Not most. But enough.
Enough that women have to consider, when they reject a man, whether he’s the kind of guy who will take it personally. Or violently.
Enough that women have to calculate, when they speak up at work or online, whether the backlash will be professional—or physical.
Enough that the threat is real.
VII. The Response: Withdrawal
So what do women do when the culture becomes hostile?
Some fight. Some organize. Some run for office or start nonprofits or write essays like this one.
But many others withdraw.
In the weeks following the 2024 election, a movement emerged on social media—particularly TikTok—inspired by South Korea’s 4B Movement.
4B stands for four “no’s”:
No dating men
No sex with men
No marriage to men
No childbearing
The idea is simple: if society is going to treat women as second-class citizens, if men are going to celebrate rolling back women’s rights, then women will opt out.
Viral posts in November 2024 urged women to “close off your wombs to men” and “stop dating and having sex with men immediately.” One post got 436,000 likes.
By December, the hashtag #4B was trending, and women were debating whether the movement was empowering or defeatist, practical or performative.
The reality is probably more nuanced. Most women didn’t actually join a formal “sex strike.” But many did recalibrate.
They deleted dating apps. They became more selective about who they spent time with. They stopped giving men the benefit of the doubt.
And they started asking themselves a question that had become impossible to ignore:
Why am I putting energy into relationships with men who see me as less than human?
VIII. The Isolation Economy
Here’s what the manosphere doesn’t want to admit: their ideology creates exactly the outcome they claim to hate.
They complain that women have become too selective, too demanding, too unwilling to settle for “average” men.
And then they build an entire content ecosystem teaching men that women are shallow, manipulative, and only interested in money and status. They teach men that being “nice” is weakness, that emotional availability is beta, that women respond only to dominance and control.
And then they’re shocked when women look at men who consume that content and say: No thanks.
This is the isolation economy.
Men learn to see women as adversaries. Women learn to see men as threats. And the distance between them grows.
Dating apps become wastelands. Marriage rates decline. Birth rates drop.
And the manosphere influencers point to all of this as evidence that they were right: women are destroying society, feminism has ruined everything, the culture is collapsing.
But they never ask: What if we’re the problem?
What if teaching millions of young men that women are inferior, that kindness is weakness, that emotional intimacy is a trap—what if that’s what’s destroying connection?
What if the collateral damage isn’t just what men do to women, but what men do to themselves?
IX. What Women Are Carrying
I want to be specific about what this year cost women.
Not in the abstract. Not in policy terms. In hours.
Hours spent blocking accounts, reporting harassment, explaining to moderators why “your body, my choice” is a threat.
Hours spent comforting teenage daughters who are being harassed at school by boys who think it’s funny.
Hours spent on the phone with insurance companies, trying to figure out how to access birth control or emergency contraception in a state that’s just passed new restrictions.
Hours spent researching which states still have abortion access, just in case.
Hours spent in therapy, trying to process the constant low-grade stress of existing in a culture that sees your body as a political battleground.
Hours spent explaining to male partners, male friends, male colleagues why this matters, why it’s not overreacting, why it’s not “just politics.”
Hours spent deciding whether to speak up or stay silent, because speaking up might cost you your job, your safety, your peace of mind—but staying silent feels like complicity.
This is the tax women pay for living in the grievance economy.
And it’s exhausting.
X. The Women Who Can’t Leave
Let’s also be clear about who bears the most collateral damage.
It’s not the women with resources, options, mobility. It’s not the women who can afford to travel out of state for an abortion, hire lawyers to fight harassment, or move to a blue state if things get bad.
It’s the women who can’t leave.
The women in rural areas where the nearest abortion clinic is 300 miles away and there’s no public transportation.
The women working minimum-wage jobs who can’t afford to take a day off, let alone travel across state lines.
The women in abusive relationships who are trapped—economically, logistically, psychologically—and who now face even more barriers to leaving because reproductive healthcare has been gutted and domestic violence resources have been defunded.
The women who are undocumented and afraid that seeking help will get them deported.
The women in conservative communities where speaking up about harassment or abuse means being ostracized from their families, their churches, their entire support systems.
These are the women who carry the most collateral damage. And they’re the women who have the fewest options.
This is what people mean when they talk about intersectionality. It’s not abstract theory. It’s the recognition that the same policies, the same culture, the same systems hurt different women differently—and that the women with the least power are hurt the most.
XI. What 2025 Took From Women
So what did 2025 take from women?
It took safety. The basic sense that you can exist in public—online or off—without being harassed, threatened, or reduced to your body.
It took autonomy. The ability to make decisions about your own healthcare, your own reproduction, your own future.
It took energy. The hours, the mental load, the constant vigilance required to navigate a culture that sees you as less than.
It took trust. The belief that systems—legal, medical, social—are designed to protect you rather than control you.
And it took hope. The sense that things were getting better, that progress was real, that the arc of history bends toward justice.
Because 2025 showed us that progress is fragile. That rights can be rolled back. That cultural shifts can reverse. That the men in power will protect other men in power, even when those men are credibly accused of harming women and children.
And that realization—that the system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as designed—is its own kind of trauma.
XII.
Here’s what I want you to understand about collateral damage:
It’s not always visible. It’s not always dramatic. It’s not always a headline.
Sometimes it’s a teenage girl who stops raising her hand in class because the boys mock her every time she speaks.
Sometimes it’s a woman who deletes her dating apps because she’s tired of men who’ve been radicalized by the manosphere.
Sometimes it’s a mother who lies awake at night worrying about what will happen to her daughter if she gets pregnant and can’t access abortion care.
Sometimes it’s a survivor of sexual assault who watches her abuser get promoted while she gets labeled “difficult” for reporting him.
Sometimes it’s a woman who just... stops. Stops fighting. Stops explaining. Stops trying to convince men that she’s human.
Because it’s easier to withdraw than to keep screaming into the void.
And that withdrawal—that quiet retreat—is exactly what the grievance economy wants.
Because women who are isolated, exhausted, and afraid are women who don’t organize. Don’t protest. Don’t run for office. Don’t fight back.
They just survive.
And survival isn’t the same as living.
Monica Craiyon
Creator, Powerhouse Novelas | Erotic Power Fiction
Powerhouse Novelas is erotic power fiction—stories of devotion, dominance, restraint, obsession, and consequence. These are intimate economies of desire where consent is deliberate, pleasure is intentional, and power is never neutral.
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