First, if you are new to Come As You Are, I am so glad you’re here. Once in a while, an essay hits the right chord at the right moment, and I get to meet a whole bunch of new readers which is incredibly gratifying. Of course, it’s also devastating that the thing that brought us together is our horror over the news that there are men all over the world who have such little regard for the humanity of their own wives, they are drugging them, raping them, filming it — and uploading this content to websites where other men are happy to pay $20 in cryptocurrency to watch. Nonetheless, I am grateful to be in this conversation with such an empathetic group of people.
In this episode, I read the essay — a thing I don’t always do — and then talked about some of the issues we are all grappling with — what has happened that we’ve gotten to a place where something like this could occur? Why is it that such an alarming percentage of men is dehumanizing women this way? How do we get more of the good men to be part of this conversation in an active way? Ultimately, how do we change things — because this is not sustainable or okay.
If you want to skip the essay part because you’ve read it, you can jump to minute 36. If you haven’t read the comments under the essay, I would really encourage you to do that — there are so many women sharing their own stories and perspectives, and so many men who genuinely want to help. In almost 200 comments, there is only one mansplainer, and I feel pretty certain he used AI to help him write his response —which is so on-brand if you wrote it into a TV script, you’d get a note back that it was too “on the nose.”
There are a lot of stories right now that are difficult to process. My heart is absolutely shattered for the Elkins/Pugh families in Shreveport, Louisiana. My heart is also broken for the children of Cerina and Justin Fairfax, who now have to live without both of their parents, because their father killed their mother and then himself, while the kids were in the house. Their sixteen-year-old son made the 911 call. In both cases, the wives had asked for a divorce. It is worth noting the most dangerous time for women in domestic violence situations is the time period right after they try to leave.
There were some who misread the CNN report about the Rape Academy and the 62 million views, and thought that meant there were 62 million men who watched. It could be there were 31 million men who visited twice a day. It could be they went to the site to watch other content, and only some percentage watched the unconscious wives who had no idea they were being raped and filmed.
However many men, it was is too many. If there were 70 men in the South of France in the Pelicot case, and there are women in the U.K. and Canada and Poland and the U.S. whose husbands are doing this, I think we need to assume it’s happening everywhere. There are multiple sites hosting this content, not just the one. There is a chat room for men who want to learn how to do this to their own wives. Trying to make this conversation about math right now is not the move — unless you want to out yourself as a man who genuinely doesn’t care, and likes things the way they are. I am happy and thankful to say there aren’t any men like that in the comments section, or anywhere in my life. Nor will there be.
I am hopeful that men who have been saying “not all men” will take this opportunity to start having conversations with the boys and men in their own lives, and to reflect on how they feel about women, genuinely. We have a systemic problem. If you aren’t clear on that, please educate yourself about rape cases in the U.S. generally. Please educate yourself about custody rulings when there has been abuse and a mother asks for supervised visitation. Please educate yourself about marital rape laws, because while marital rape is illegal in all 50 states, in 30 of those states, there are loopholes. As in today, right now.
When more than half the population in a society is being devalued, disrespected, demeaned, degraded or abused, that society is in jeopardy. There is no “male loneliness epidemic” but there is a male violence epidemic that needs to be talked about, understood, and rooted out — and we definitely need the good men in this conversation, talking to the men and boys in their sphere of influence.
We don’t need you to save us, we aren’t damsels and I think every one of us can look around and see this isn’t a fairytale. Even a Grimm fairytale is less dark and twisted than whatever this is. But we do need and want you to get involved. We all deserve a better story.
Sending love to all, old friends and new.
