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The Pocket Guide to the Patriarchy – From trad wives to body counts: Misogyny is a gateway drug to the far right
While in the eyes of the Britannica Dictionary, body count means the number of people killed in a conflict or disaster, in modern-day language the phrase refers to the number of people you have had sex with in your life so far. This sudden preoccupation with body count – evidenced by the many TikTok videos where strangers are interrogated about their body counts – may appear to be a new phenomenon but it reeks of the same misogynistic gendered double standards that women have long wrestled with. But while there is nothing new about misogyny, the rise of the far right – within politics and in online movements – in recent years means belligerent, unapologetic misogyny is propelling itself into mainstream discourse. The rise of the trad wife movement, which has clear links to the far right, is another clear instance of the growth of retrograde misogynistic views.