“Your body, my choice”: should we fear the radicalization of young men?

A wave of misogynistic hatred began to sweep through social media following the election of Donald Trump, a movement that may raise fears of a sort of radicalization of young men, even on the Canadian side.

“You will never have control of your own body! Your body, my choice,” Nicholas J. Fuentes, an American far-right masculinist supremacist activist and political commentator, said in a video.

This sentence makes fun of the feminist slogan “My body, my choice”, which defends women’s right to abortion.

Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election last Tuesday therefore “galvanized” a movement that has already existed for several years, according to David Morin, of the UNESCO Chair in Prevention of Radicalization and Violent Extremism.

“It’s an ecosystem that brings together both the white supremacist movement […] anti-government movements and also religious movements,” he explained in an interview with LCN on Monday.

In Quebec and Canada, this masculinist movement is far from being in the majority, according to the expert.

“On the other hand, the data shows that a certain number of young men are increasingly adhering to this type of discourse,” he nevertheless qualified.

“Often, the gateway will be the fact that young men are searching for their identity. […] We will take advantage of this gateway to talk about self-esteem, sport, good nutrition, and then say that this must be done to the detriment of women,” underlined Mr. Morin.