In the aftermath of the 2024 election, explanations for Donald Trump’s decisive victory abounded. One narrative that quickly took hold was Trump’s popularity with online “manosphere” influencers — Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, Adin Ross, the NELK Boys, Theo Von — and their massive audiences of young men, many of whom are reeled in to their content by seemingly apolitical interests, then radicalized over time by these creators’ takes on feminism and “wokeness.”
But we’ve seen far less attention paid to how young women are also being radicalized in digital spaces, similarly lured by seemingly apolitical content — about celebrity gossip, “natural” birth control, “clean girl” aesthetics, and dating — only to eventually be persuaded that our rights to abortion, contraception, even to vote or own bank accounts, were all a mistake. Billionaire-backed, anti-feminist women’s media outlets and viral female lifestyle influencers are increasingly shaping young women’s politics, too.
As a reporter at Jezebel and now at the newsletter Abortion, Every Day, I’ve watched TikTok and other social platforms become hotbeds for birth control disinformation. For years now, conservative outlets like the National Review have baselessly characterized birth control pills as “carcinogenic,” and anti-abortion organizations frequently lie that hormonal contraception can cause infertility and a range of other adverse health outcomes. But it wasn’t until the last several years, with the rise of women’s lifestyle influencers who don’t outwardly identify as right-wing, that anti-birth control content reached mainstream audiences.
