Women need to be kept safe from the ‘your body, my choice’ peddlers. Here’s how | Van Badham

Does self-protection have to mean rejecting men and sex and joining the 4B movement? Of course not - but it does mean recognising the power of cultural persuasion

Your body, my choice," wrote the troll on a post about my mother dying. It was meant to intimidate me. Instead, it's launched me into strategy mode, thinking through how women and their friends may build the cultural resilience to survive this neo-Trumpian era.

The slogan was coined by the white supremacist, antisemitic, misogynist Nick Fuentes. It's everywhere online. Hateful extremists of his calibre once struggled to find an audience among leprous worms. Fuentes dined with the new president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, as recently as November 2022. This is the reality we live in now - US women directly, the rest of us by association.

Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist