Why the “It’s Not All Men” Argument Is a Big Fat Fail

This is a short, simple, post for men

This post is meant for men. A post like this always results in the dreaded “Email disabled” emails from Substack, but that’s fine. It’s part of the culling process. I received about ten “email disabled” alerts from Substack after my weekend request to report Andrew Tate. Needless to say, guys, I won’t miss you if that kind of thing sets you off. In fact, here’s some help:

Photo by Cleopas Monbest on Unsplash

Okay, now to the topic of my ire for today.

Trigger warning: Discussion of rape and sexual violence

Last week, I learned that Bill Cosby wasn’t a lone ranger in the world of drugging, assaulting, and/or raping women.

I learned of a viral news story about “sleep rape” and a website called Motherless. As I understand it, Motherless is sort of a PornHub for incels and other woman haters. It’s one of those things I can’t research, because visiting the site will send my browser tracking into a cesspool frenzy of epic proportions.¹

One Reddit description I found by someone who is mostly illiterate says this:²

It's a hardcore fetish site that includes tons of hardcore fetish videos, while it does include staged videos depicting those kind of videos [sleep rape] it holds bdsm, somnophilia or other niche hardcore fetishes.

You can’t pay me enough to look up “somnophilia.” Possible exception: Drop a million dollars into my Ko-Fi account, and I’ll reconsider, but that’s a hard number. One million.

If you’re a man, you need to read the CNN article. If you’re a woman, you probably have. The article is here:

Exposing a global ‘online rape academy’ that is teaching men how to abuse women and evade detection

The article describes Motherless, plus a Telegram chat room called Zzz that attracted rapists and, before it was shut down, taught men how to rape their wives while sleeping. Yeah, you may want to read that again. No typos on this one. Their own wives.

The Telegram chat room, from what I can tell, seemed to have been mostly based in Europe, but that’s mostly because Telegram has traditionally been more popular outside the United States.

The Telegram part of the story reminded me of the recent horrific French rape case in which a husband, Dominique Pelicot, was convicted for not only drugging and raping his wife, but also inviting at least 72 others to join in.

This wasn’t some big city thing. It was a small town in Southern France.

Quoting Wikipedia here:

Over a period of nine years, from July 2011 to October 2020, Dominique Pelicot, a man from Mazan in south-eastern France, repeatedly drugged and raped his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and invited male strangers through the internet to rape her while she was unconscious.

Gisèle, who was unaware of the abuse being perpetrated against her, was raped at least 92 times by 72 different men while her husband filmed and photographed them. The crimes were discovered in September 2020 after Dominique was arrested for taking upskirt photographs of women in a supermarket; the ensuing police investigation uncovered hundreds of images on his computer equipment of men raping his wife.

When I first saw that story, I was freaked out. This wasn’t some big metro area. It all took place in a small village in the South of France called Mazan. These men were mostly local. Still, I wanted to believe it was a one-off.

Mazan, after all, is where the family of the Marquis de Sade maintained a châteaux for years before it became a museum (not the kind of museum I’m interested in visiting, thank you very much).

So, maybe, I hoped, it was a one-off, and it all boiled down to that area of France being the birthplace of sadism.

Oh, Charles, you sweet summer child.

Last week, I saw a number.

62 million.

62 million visitors in one month for Motherless, a website that bills itself as a “morals-free zone,” according to that CNN article I linked to earlier in this post. Most of the web views come from the United States.

CNN reports that one of the sections on the website includes 20,000 videos of so-called sleep rape content uploaded by users, with hundreds of thousands of views.

Keep in mind that this is just one small section of a site that has a reputation as a site for “hardcore” fetishes. I sort of don’t want to know what a hardcore fetish is, but instinct tells me that not much of it is legal. A foot fetish, for example, surely isn’t considered hardcore.

The “Pretty Elbows” website in your Uncle Malcolm’s browser history, though odd, isn’t going to fire off too many alarms aside from whatever else someone who looks at fetish sites will trigger. You may look at him questioningly during breakfast, but you’re not about to call the police.

No, hardcore fetish means that there are probably dozens of other sections on Motherless with deplorable, gross content that I still must, for sanity’s sake, believe most of us would find abhorrent. Or, maybe I’m just getting old.

When someone on Reddit, whose answer implies that he doesn’t seem to disapprove, describes an entire website as full of “hardcore” fetish videos, it’s safe to say that sleep videos are only one component in a wide-ranging spectacle of rape and rape culture on the site involving a host of other disturbing sexual proclivities and violence.

62 million visitors.

In one month.

62 million visits in February alone

The “Not all men” crowd will usually blurt out something like, “62 million views isn’t the same as 62 million men.” I’ve read the interwebs. I’ve seen this “argument.”

And this is where the argument must end.

Because number counting misses the point, especially at these ludicrous numbers.

Remember how we all thought the Bill Cosby thing was gross? Well, Motherless contains 20,000 Bill Cosbys. How many men aren’t taping their rapes and posting them on the internet?

This, my fellow dudes, is a self-policing issue. We men will tell our locker room jokes, talking about how funny things that aren’t funny are funny, while women we care about can’t wear two earbuds when they’re running a trail on a midday run.³

This grand tradition of instilling fear in women is not new.

Consider this Bible passage, which describes Ruth’s relationship with Boaz, a landowner trusted by Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi, for Boaz’s rare gift of treating women with respect. In this passage, Naomi tells Ruth that hanging with Boaz will keep her safe from the other barbarians nearby:⁴

And Naomi said to Ruth, her daughter-in-law, “It is good, my daughter, that you go out with his young women, lest in another field you be assaulted.”

Think about that for a moment. You don’t need to be a Bible believer to understand that its stories represented the culture of its day. The rape culture of the day was such that a woman could not pick grapes in a field without worrying about being raped.

Not much has changed since then.

The “Not all men” argument will continue to fail until that day when women can walk to their car without holding the edge side of a key between their fingers or freaking out when they hear footsteps behind them when there are less than fifty people nearby.

It’s all men until we men self-police rape culture out of existence. It is not women’s responsibility to do this.

We don’t get to blame MAGA for this. We don’t get to blame Trump. Rape culture is bipartisan. Epstein has proven this, Eric Swalwell has proven this, as has the choice women have made that they’d rather spend time in a forest with a bear than you.

I don’t know how I’d cope with this if I were young. I don’t know how I’d feel if I knew most women were on the verge of hating us, if not already there. When I was young, rape culture wasn’t a topic of frequent conversation. At the same time, out of every woman who has trusted me well enough over the years to tell me, I can think of only one who wasn’t assaulted.

So the bear, he was always there. And he offered more comfort than you or me, even when his claws were out and even when he wanted all the food in her backpack.

These days, the anger of women is mounting. Statistics bear it out. More women are choosing not to get married, and they’re marrying later when they do.

If men want to regain women’s trust, they’ve got 2,000 years of mistrust to wipe out. That’s a lot. Crying, “it’s not all men,” isn’t going to do the trick, because to women, it sure feels like it’s most men.

Believe it or not, rape culture isn’t defined exclusively by rape. We need to teach our sons respect towards women that includes, among many other things, no catcalls, and rejects the concept of “hitting on women.”

Many men think it’s a game. They’ll “hit” on fifty women, and “score” on one like it’s a sport. Then, they’ll take a victory lap and run through a crowd of their peers, who shoulder clap them while cheering them on to keep up the good work.

Those forty-nine other women, the ones who scoffed at their advances, chose the bear.

We don’t teach our sons the most basic fact of romantic life: That a woman will almost always let you know when she’s interested in you. Instead of learning the art of the subtle hint, we’re taught to hunt. We’re taught that it’s a numbers game. We’re taught that women are objects instead of the ballast of human dignity and grace and life itself.

I suppose you can argue with me about these finer points of male/female relationships, but what we men must not allow to continue is the pervasive rape culture that accepts violence against women.

Whether it’s 62 million men visiting that website, or 62 men a million times, it’s 62 to 62 million too many.

Women have to learn how to survive in a rape culture. We men don’t. Not really. Yes, men rape men. But that’s still male sexual violence. And it doesn’t haunt our every move.

When I was accosted many years ago by a small gang of young punks while walking down Fullerton Avenue one fine Chicago spring day, I wasn’t worried about getting raped by them. I was worried about getting my ass kicked. That’s not good, not fun, but it’s also very different than how I would have felt if I had been a woman in that spot.

Luckily for me, I was walking home from a weight-lifting session, so my adrenaline was still crazy, and I threw one of them against a chain link fence, which surprisingly prompted another to stick his arm out to shake my hand.

If I had been a woman, I probably would not have escaped so easily. The chain link fence guy had grabbed my wrist as they were walking past me from the opposite direction. Even if I had pepper spray, it would have been hard to get to it. I was able to flip my hand over, grab his forearm, and push him (hard) into the fence.

Maybe they thought I was a cop. After they walked past, I heard them hassle a young woman who had been walking on the sidewalk not far behind me. I knew it was a woman because of the way they were harassing her. I turned around and yelled, “Hey!”

The guy who shook my hand yelled out, “It’s cool, bro,” and they walked past her. I wanted to yell out, “No, it’s not,” but I felt like I had pressed my luck enough. I didn’t want to enact Plan B, which would have been to run into the moderately busy street in front of traffic to get away from them.

This story is one of my few “I was in danger” stories. Most women encounter dangerous encounters with men almost every day.

Men need to realize that war stories like the one I just told are nothing compared to what women exeprience. And now, they’re reading about how their own husbands are drugging and raping them. While we men swivel our heads around like birds and say, “Wasn’t me!”

It was us. It is us. It is us until women feel safe. And if women are never going to feel safe, if men can’t reverse our 3,000+ year old history, then it will always be we men, every one of us, that are the reasons why.

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Footnotes

1. I know, I know, use Duck Duck Go or something that doesn’t track browser activity, but I actually find browser tracking somewhat helpful because it keeps my internet ads, which are at a minimum anyway because of ad blocking software, targeted to stuff I might actually be interested in. I’d rather see ads for cookie sheets or books or software than ads for diapers and guns.

Besides, I find all this stuff so disheartening that a rabbit hole like this would just confirm to me that not only is a Malthusian event moments away, but that we probably need one, which isn’t a healthy place to be.

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/questions/comments/1ifqntq/comment/mzgzyo2/

3. If you’re asking why it isn’t safe for a woman to wear two earbuds while running on a quiet trail, ask the woman next to you right now.

4. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ruth%202%3A22&version=ESV