Coercion: How Kylie Cheung Turns Abuse into Feminist Fan Fiction

Kylie Cheung, Coercion: Gender-Based Violence and Bodily Autonomy. Pluto Press, 2025.
Preview extract reviewed from: https://mailchi.mp/plutobooks/a-sneak-peak-of-fascist-yoga-6098756?e=2a7b5618ac

If you ever wanted to know what happens when ideology eats evidence, look no further than Coercion by Kylie Cheung. This is about to be published by Pluto Press, a firm that seems to specialise in pamphlets for angry people with sociology degrees. The book is offered as a brave exposé of “state-sanctioned gender-based violence.” What it is, in fact, is an exercise in political narcissism—one that weaponises the suffering of allegedly abused women to promote a cartoonishly false narrative in which women are never violent, men are never victims, and abortion bans are somehow responsible for everything from trauma to bus-related discomfort.

The extract provided—drawn from Chapter Four—is a marvel of bad reasoning and selective outrage. Cheung begins with the story of a Nebraska teenager sentenced to jail for the improper disposal of foetal remains. The girl, we are told, had a medication abortion to escape an abusive relationship. The judge did not accept abuse as a mitigating factor in sentencing for improper disposal of foetal remains. “You confirmed that you just didn’t want this baby,” he said, “based on the person that got you pregnant.” The horror. The sheer misogyny of quoting the defendant’s own words. One wonders what Cheung expected—legal exemption based on vibes?

This moment is presented as emblematic of a system that “retraumatises” victims and “dehumanises” pregnant women. What Cheung never bothers to establish is whether the man in question was actually violent. The abuse is simply asserted. That’s enough. If a woman says she’s been abused, then she has. No further evidence is required. This is the logic that Coercion runs on—a logic that has all the rigour of a Tweet and all the nuance of a BBC news report.

The next paragraphs bring us a series of anecdotes from abortion fund volunteers and “reproductive justice” organisers—people who, by sheer coincidence, all confirm Cheung’s thesis. We hear about Texas women taking long bus rides, about creepy old men who sit too close, about trauma, shame, fear. We are told, in solemn tones, that “just to access basic health care, someone would have to go through the unimaginable.” You’ll notice the sleight of hand. The “basic health care” in question is abortion on demand. The “unimaginable” is an unpleasant bus ride. The drama is thick enough to spread on toast.

Then come the statistics—what passes for them, anyway. “It’s estimated,” Cheung tells us, “that a tenth of people who have abortions do so to exit abusive, dangerous relationships.” Estimated by whom? She doesn’t say. Between 6% and 22% of abortion patients report recent intimate partner violence. She says calls about reproductive coercion have doubled in recent years: or so the National Domestic Violence Hotline claimed in 2023, though note the difference between calls about coercion and proven incidents. All of this is meant to prove a central claim: that abortion bans are not just legal decisions, but acts of gendered violence, that they function, in effect, as tools of patriarchal control.

This is where the mask slips. “State and interpersonal violence are inseparable,” Cheung writes. Abortion bans are a form of “state reproductive coercion.” Abusive partners, she continues, engage in coercion too—by “tampering with birth control,” “pressuring for abortion,” or “blocking access.” So if a man wants the baby, that’s coercion. If he doesn’t want the baby, that’s coercion. If he says nothing, presumably, that’s complicity. There is no configuration in which the man isn’t somehow an abuser. This isn’t just bad social science. It’s pure ideology—one that admits no possibility of female agency, male victimhood, or mutual responsibility.

It would be one thing if Coercion were simply misguided. But it’s worse than that. It’s an act of erasure. Because there is a body of research going back over many decades—peer-reviewed, statistically robust—that tells a different story. According to a 2010 study by Whitaker et al., published in the American Journal of Public Health, 50% of intimate partner violence is mutual. In non-reciprocal relationships, women are the sole aggressors in 70% of cases. You will not find this mentioned anywhere in Cheung’s book. Either she hasn’t bothered to look it out, or it doesn’t fit.

Or take the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (2010–2012). It found that 31.5% of women and 27.5% of men reported experiencing physical violence from a partner. In other words, the feminist picture of a male-aggressor/female-victim paradigm is false. But Cheung doesn’t deal in facts. She deals in narratives. If she had any intellectual rigour, she’d have acknowledged the findings of Murray Straus, founder of the Family Research Laboratory, who spent his career arguing for gender-neutral analyses of violence. He observed repeatedly that women are just as likely to hit, slap, throw, bite, and emotionally manipulate as men. The difference is in the outcomes, not the intentions. Men do more damage because men are stronger, not because men are devils and women are angels.

And if she really cared about reproductive coercion, she’d look at the full picture: women who lie about being on birth control; women who threaten to abort unless the man pays; women who use pregnancy as leverage in custody battles. But that would mean admitting that women, too, can abuse power. And the whole premise of Coercion is that they can’t.

Cheung writes of a politician who referred to pregnant women as “hosts,” and quotes him as if he were Satan himself. But what she fails to note is that this kind of rhetorical reduction—the denial of full humanity to one party—is exactly what she does throughout her book. Men are not people. They are systems. They are instruments of domination. They exist, in the Cheung worldview, as obstacles to female freedom. And when women do wrong—when they abuse, manipulate, assault—well, it’s always a reaction. Never a choice. This is not feminism. It’s a religion. And Coercion is its catechism.

If there is coercion at work here, it is not the state telling a woman she cannot have an abortion past 20 weeks. It is Kylie Cheung telling the rest of us what we’re allowed to believe. It is Pluto Press publishing yet another book that uses trauma as a blunt weapon to silence disagreement. It is the entire feminist-propaganda complex demanding that we ignore mountains of evidence, forget male victims, and shut up while reality is made into some agitprop morality pantomime.

This matters—not just because it’s fantasy, but because it’s dangerous. Policies built on fantasies do not lead to justice. They lead to injustice. They lead to failure. They lead to funding services that only serve one gender. They lead to male victims being turned away from shelters, laughed at by police, and told by therapists that they must be the problem. They lead to a culture where abuse is measured not by actions, but by anatomy.

And yes, they lead to books like Coercion, which are offered as serious contributions to public discourse, but are in fact nothing more than evidence for how we got to where we are.

Kylie Cheung’s Coercion is not a work of social science, nor even of journalism. It is a sermon. It does not argue: it asserts. It does not investigate: it accuses. It does not aim to understand violence: it aims to monopolise the moral high ground. And in doing so, it silences male victims; it erases inconvenient data; it lowers public discourse.

There is indeed a dangerous nexus between pregnancy and domestic violence. But it is not gendered in the way Cheung claims. Abuse is not an exclusively male trait. Victimhood is not an exclusively female prerogative. And the moment we start pretending otherwise—because it makes our activism feel good—we are no longer fighting violence. We are, perhaps unintentionally, perpetuating it.

Bibliography

Cheung, Kylie. Coercion: Gender-Based Violence and Bodily Autonomy. Pluto Press, 2025.
Whitaker, D. J., Haileyesus, T., Swahn, M., & Saltzman, L. S. “Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence.” American Journal of Public Health, 97(5), 941–947.
CDC. National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), 2010–2012.
Archer, J., & Coyne, S. M. “An Integrated Review of Indirect, Verbal, and Physical Aggression.” Psychological Bulletin, 131(5), 651–680.
Hoff, Philip W. “Male Victims of Domestic Violence: A Substantive and Methodological Research Review.” Journal of Family Violence, 29(8), 659–671.
Straus, M. A. “The Controversy Over Domestic Violence by Women: A Methodological, Theoretical, and Sociology of Science Analysis.” In Violence in Intimate Relationships, 1999.
Dutton, D. G., & Nicholls, T. L. “The Gender Paradigm in Domestic Violence Research and Theory.” Aggression and Violent Behavior, 10(6), 680–714.