> It's just hard to wrap my head around what this trend would be, or why teens started picking up on it in 2012.
One reason could be they started talking to each other more. Women and girls who had similar life experience shared them on the internet. This is how the whole Me Too movement started; the experiences shared during the Me Too movement were old, but it was the internet and social media which acted as a catalyst to dislodge them from the past and bring them into the present.
> I am not conscious of any major modern debates around women's rights except abortion/birth control
Don't you recall the 2016 Presidential election? There was a huge debate about whether or not a woman was ready to be President of the United States. I don't know about your family, but in my family people thought it very clever to say that a woman could never become president, because her period would make her too volatile. This kind of rhetoric may have flowed right past you, but it wasn't lost on women (especially the very cogent point that men have in fact started most wars in all of human history).
The outcome of that election was that America chose a serial sexual predator who has admitted to spying on women in changing rooms, has raped women, and who has admitted to using his power and prestige to assault women. It wasn't lost on women that this man, with a famously volatile temper, was chosen over a women because he was viewed as more trustworthy and more stable than her.
That man ended his term by waging a violent coup against the United States government with his supporters, who themselves made an effort assassinate the vice president. Yet it was the female candidate that America considered a priori too "volatile".
> I thought only ~8% of women had abortions, but in looking it up while writing this comment apparently it's more like 25% (so abortion & related issues affect way more women/girls than I expected).
As with rape, the number of women who have abortions and the number of women who report abortions are quite different. That number is going to diverge even more now that it's illegal and criminalized in many jurisdictions.
I could definitely see something like MeToo being a cause, but I still would put that as a "social media" effect and not a "women's/girl's irl day-to-day lives get worse" effect.
Most of my family voted for Trump, but mostly for immigration & military reasons. I don't remember anyone I knew in real life saying anything negative about Hillary on the basis of her gender -- though, as always, there was plenty of it online. Pretty much all of the negative talk I heard about her (irl) was about her emails, her policies, or her party.
(My mother is still angry about Hillary's "there's a cold place in hell for women who don't vote for a woman" thing, but that wasn't the main reason for her vote.)
The presidents bracketing Trump (Obama & Biden) seem generally feminist, so I'd be surprised that the trend started during Obama and continued to accelerate during Biden if something like Trump / related to Trumpism was a big cause. Maybe the SCOTUS justices he left behind could be pointed to as a continuing political pain point now?
I agree that our abortion statistics will become less indicative of the actual rate now that we're post-Dobbs; this'll be a very interesting time to look back on.
There was definitely also a lot of misogyny in the 2008 primaries as well, even coming from liberals and especially the media:
Previous research has suggested that news and commentary concerning political candidates can vary based on a candidate's gender or race. Race and gender were especially salient in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. A content analysis of editorial cartoons was conducted to examine patterns in content or imagery related to race and gender. Editorial cartoons that featured Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and/or John McCain and were published during the primary season were analyzed. Cartoons featuring Obama were more likely to be favorable than those featuring the other candidates; those featuring Clinton were more likely to be unfavorable. Clinton was more often presented as ugly and small in size than was Obama. Clinton was shown perpetrating violence more often than the male candidates; she was also portrayed as the recipient of particularly gruesome violence. Some cartoons featured imagery or content that relied on racial or gender stereotypes; a qualitative analysis of these cartoons is provided. Overall, findings support previous research showing the continued relevance of race and gender in media coverage of political campaigns.
One reason could be they started talking to each other more. Women and girls who had similar life experience shared them on the internet. This is how the whole Me Too movement started; the experiences shared during the Me Too movement were old, but it was the internet and social media which acted as a catalyst to dislodge them from the past and bring them into the present.
> I am not conscious of any major modern debates around women's rights except abortion/birth control
Don't you recall the 2016 Presidential election? There was a huge debate about whether or not a woman was ready to be President of the United States. I don't know about your family, but in my family people thought it very clever to say that a woman could never become president, because her period would make her too volatile. This kind of rhetoric may have flowed right past you, but it wasn't lost on women (especially the very cogent point that men have in fact started most wars in all of human history).
The outcome of that election was that America chose a serial sexual predator who has admitted to spying on women in changing rooms, has raped women, and who has admitted to using his power and prestige to assault women. It wasn't lost on women that this man, with a famously volatile temper, was chosen over a women because he was viewed as more trustworthy and more stable than her.
That man ended his term by waging a violent coup against the United States government with his supporters, who themselves made an effort assassinate the vice president. Yet it was the female candidate that America considered a priori too "volatile".
> I thought only ~8% of women had abortions, but in looking it up while writing this comment apparently it's more like 25% (so abortion & related issues affect way more women/girls than I expected).
As with rape, the number of women who have abortions and the number of women who report abortions are quite different. That number is going to diverge even more now that it's illegal and criminalized in many jurisdictions.