Not sharing has now become to hard to not share. The rage we are all feeling as women.

I can not believe that just  six months ago I had written a piece on the online rape academy when it was  uncovered, and I genuinely did not think I would be sitting here this soon after feeling like I needed to write the follow up. Yet here the fuck we are. That story exposed online spaces where men were teaching other men how to drug women, assault sleeping partners, film them, share the material, and avoid getting caught. Almost immediately, part of the conversation became about language. The number 62 million had started circulating online, and people began saying 62 million men. Then came the corrections. They were viewers. They were visits to the site. Stop saying men and say viewers instead.

I understood the technical distinction then, and I understand it now. Sixty two million visits cannot be turned into sixty two million individual human beings. Website traffic does not tell us how many unique people were behind those visits. What bothered me was watching the word “viewers” become something people reached for to make the entire story sound less male. The investigation itself was about men teaching other men how to violate women. Men were exchanging instructions. Men were discussing drugs. Men were sharing sexual material involving unconscious or incapacitated women. At some point, the rush to remove gender from the conversation stopped feeling like a simple correction and started feeling like an attempt to make what happened easier to swallow.

I did not need the statistic exaggerated then because the truth was already horrifying, and I do not need what is being alleged at Cornell softened now either. A twenty year old woman says she went to a Chi Phi party because a male friend invited her. She trusted him. She believed she would be safe because she was going somewhere she knew someone. That matters because women are constantly told how to protect ourselves. Do not go somewhere alone. Know somebody there. Stay with your friends. Watch your drink. Have somebody you trust nearby. She fucking did all of those things, and according to her civil complaint, what followed was hours of sexual violence involving seven men.

A civil complaint is not the same thing as a criminal conviction, and I understand that distinction. At least one defendant has publicly denied sexually assaulting or touching her. Those facts matter, and I am not pretending otherwise. I am also telling you clearly where I stand as I write this. I believe her. The complaint describes her being coerced into consuming ketamine while already intoxicated, multiple men entering the room, sexual assaults continuing throughout the night, additional ketamine being given to her, and the final assault ending at approximately 5:45 in the morning.

Then there is the group chat, because this is the part I cannot get out of my head. According to material described in the lawsuit, while this woman was upstairs, a message was sent to Chi Phi Actives, a Snapchat group chat for active fraternity members. The message said, “Free pussy” upstairs. A woman was upstairs, according to her complaint, being sexually assaulted, and somebody reportedly advertised her body to other men like she was available inventory. The group chat material that has surfaced does not show somebody stepping in and saying this is wrong. It does not show someone asking whether she was conscious, whether she was safe, or whether she had consented. Instead, the complaint says more men came upstairs after that message was sent.

This is the part I need people to understand when every conversation about male violence gets reduced to a handful of individually terrible men. According to this complaint, there were seven men directly involved, but there was also a fraternity around them, a group chat around them, and a culture around them. That is what culture means. Culture is not some mysterious force floating above individual people. Culture is what becomes normal inside a group. It is what gets laughed at, what nobody challenges, and what somebody can say without expecting the people around him to turn on him. It is what happens when someone crosses a line and everyone else decides keeping the peace is more important than stopping him.

If a message saying “Free pussy upstairs” can appear in a fraternity group chat in the context described by this lawsuit and nobody immediately stops what is happening, then I do not want to hear that this conversation begins and ends with a few unusually bad men. This is exactly where all of those good men everyone keeps demanding credit for are supposed to show up. Being a good man cannot simply mean that you personally would never rape a woman. It has to mean something when the man standing beside you is crossing the line too.

Then came Cornell’s response, and Cornell has pushed back on the idea that essays were the only disciplinary consequence and has said expulsions and suspensions were issued. Her attorney has said two of the seven men were expelled. Cornell has not publicly disclosed every individual disciplinary outcome, while the complaint says defendants were given an opportunity to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays. I understand that there may be information the public does not have, but I still cannot get past the fucking essays. The fact that a disciplinary process involving allegations this serious included an opportunity to submit essays in mitigation is something I cannot wrap my head around. Cornell can explain that there were other consequences, and those consequences matter, but I am still allowed to be horrified that writing a fucking essay became part of this process at all.

Now the criminal investigation is being revisited, almost two years later, after the civil complaint brought information back into public view. The district attorney has said his office previously relied on the Cornell University Police investigation and did not conduct an independent investigation at the time. He has also said his office had not previously been provided the group chat image that is now part of the lawsuit. While everyone debates statements from Cornell and argues about exactly what discipline happened, there is still a woman who has had to live in the body all of this allegedly happened to for almost two years. That is the part people keep losing, and I know something about what that feels like.

I did not talk about most of what happened to me for the majority of my life. My first sexual assaults happened before I was young enough to remember but I can recall it when my feet are in wet grass, or I smell the damp mud that is made after a torrential downpour and the earth starts to heat back up . There then again at thirteen when I was walking from my middle school to the pool for swimming in the middle of the day, people still around, another time when I was eighteen,  and again at 39 with the person I once had trusted the most . That does not include everything that happened inside relationships. It does not include the times I did not want to have sex but felt like I had to, or the times when maybe I technically could have said no, but something inside the relationship made no feel unavailable. I have been drugged in social settings too. One of those stories ended differently because somebody got me home safely. One of them. I carried this shit quietly for decades.

So when I watch women talking about what is happening right now, and then I watch men tell us we are too angry, that our rage is divisive, that women hurt people too, or that talking about male violence makes good men feel blamed, something inside me is simply done. You do not get to dictate the emotional response of women who have lived in bodies that have been violated, threatened, coerced, grabbed, drugged, assaulted, or treated like access to them was owed. We are allowed to grieve, and we are allowed to be fucking angry. Some of us spent years swallowing that anger because silence felt safer. Some of us were children when we first learned that our bodies were apparently negotiable. I was one of those children, and I spent decades making what happened to me easier for everyone else because I did not talk about it. I am not going to finally speak and then make sure my anger is comfortable too.

Over the last several days, I have watched men across the internet tell women how we should respond to all of this. I made a reel saying exactly what I thought about that. Men need to talk to men. Men need to stop telling women how to feel about male violence and start having the conversations with each other that women have been begging them to have for decades. I even included the disclaimer everyone apparently requires from women before we are permitted to discuss this subject. Not all men, but always a man. Somehow, men still heard, “Every man on Earth is personally responsible for every violent act another man commits.” That is not what I said, and it is not what women are asking for.

One man brought up Lindsay Clancy and told me I should be talking to women about not strangling their children. Another man, who is himself a survivor of domestic violence, told me about his experience and about not being believed. I believe male survivors. What happened to him matters. Male victims deserve to be believed, supported, protected, and heard. That does not erase the gendered pattern of sexual violence against women. Both realities can exist at the same time. We do not have to erase male victims to talk about female victims, and women should not have to interrupt every conversation about what happens to us with an exhaustive inventory of every terrible thing a woman has ever done.

Women commit violence and men experience violence. There is also a profound gendered pattern in sexual violence against women. Acknowledging one does not erase the others. Another man told me good men were being punished for what bad men do, but nobody asked good men to be punished. I asked men to participate. I asked them to listen. I asked them to notice what other men are doing and saying. I asked them to be willing to make another man uncomfortable instead of waiting for women to carry the entire burden of confronting male behavior.

Another man wanted names so he could tell me how violently he would personally deal with rapists. He repeatedly explained how comfortable he was with extreme violence while participating in a conversation about male violence. He was so busy proving what kind of man he was that he completely missed what I was saying. That interaction stayed with me because it perfectly represents what keeps happening. Women ask men to talk to other men, and men turn around and talk to women about themselves. Women ask men to stop telling us how to feel, and men explain why our feelings are unfair to them. Women literally say “not all men,” and somebody still arrives to accuse us of saying all men.

Underneath almost every one of these conversations is the same frantic attempt to escape the thing I actually said, which is that men need to hold men accountable. That does not mean waiting until a woman has been raped and announcing that you would beat the rapist half to death. She has already been raped by then. The fucking point is to notice what is happening before it gets there. Notice the friend who keeps pushing after a woman pulls away. Notice the guy who gets weird with women every time he drinks and somehow keeps getting invited back. Notice the misogynistic joke everyone laughs at because calling him out would make the night uncomfortable. Notice the man whose exes are somehow all crazy. Notice how your friends talk about women when no women are in the room. Notice the guy treating a woman like a sexual object in the group chat.

That message, “Free pussy upstairs,” is exactly the kind of moment I am talking about. When something like that appears in your fraternity group chat, locker room, text thread, workplace, party, or group of friends, that is when all of these good men everyone keeps demanding credit for are supposed to show up. You do not need the woman upstairs to crawl out of the room and explain consent to you first. You do not need another workshop, another survivor story, or another woman to educate you about precisely how frightened she is before you decide something is wrong. You stop it, and that is why the group chat matters to me every bit as much as the room upstairs.

I am raising boys, and there is no version of this conversation where I only care about one side of it. I think constantly about the culture boys are growing into, especially now that the village raising our children includes algorithms, influencers, strangers with podcasts, and entire online ecosystems built around teaching boys that resentment toward women is masculinity. I do not want boys hearing women talk about male violence and immediately scrambling to tell everybody they personally would never rape someone. I want them to listen. I want them to recognize what is happening around them before somebody gets hurt badly enough for everyone to suddenly agree that the situation was serious. I want them to have enough integrity to make another boy uncomfortable when making him uncomfortable is the right thing to do.

Nobody deserves applause simply for not assaulting women because that is the fucking floor. What matters is becoming the person who notices when a friend is crossing a line, who does not laugh along, and who does not decide another man’s behavior is none of his business because technically he is not the one doing it. Boys are not guilty because other men hurt women, but they are responsible for the kind of men they become and for deciding what behavior they will accept from the other men around them.

Girls deserve something very different from what generations of women inherited. I do not want another generation of girls learning that being female means becoming an expert in threat assessment before they are old enough to understand why. I do not want them growing up believing that making somebody angry by saying no might be more dangerous than tolerating what he wants. I want every girl to know that her body belongs to her without a fucking asterisk. Girls are not responsible for preventing male violence through perfect vigilance. They deserve information that can help them protect themselves, but responsibility for violence belongs to the person who chooses violence. I wish none of this needed teaching, but it does.

That is also why I became so angry when I watched a man take questions a woman had asked other women about sexual assault and repost them asking women to educate him. A woman opening that conversation with other women is one thing. A man taking those questions and handing the educational labor right back to women is something completely different. There are women willing to answer those questions, and they absolutely should if they want to, but it is not our fucking job anymore.

The information already exists. Survivors have written books. Women have testified. Researchers have spent decades studying sexual violence. Entire organizations exist to teach consent and bystander intervention. Women have explained coercion, rape culture, fear, trauma, and survival until we are hoarse. Men can go learn. Listen to women who choose to speak, but stop expecting women to continually excavate the worst things that have ever happened to us so men can receive personalized lessons about how not to hurt us. Some of us already spent decades carrying those things quietly, and I am not opening every wound again because somebody decided he needs a personalized curriculum.

At the same time, we are watching the Epstein files continue to unfold. Millions of pages and enormous amounts of material have entered the public conversation, and so much of that conversation becomes about names. People want to know who knew whom, who was photographed where, who appears in which document, and what a particular record proves. Those distinctions matter because a person’s name appearing in a document is not proof that the person committed a crime. Underneath the millions of pages, the famous names, the arguments, the headlines, and everyone’s fascination with powerful people, however, there were girls and women. There were actual bodies and actual lives.

That is what I keep coming back to. We can turn violence against women into court filings, documentaries, podcasts, TikToks, statistics, and trending topics. We can argue about vocabulary until everybody forgets that underneath all of that discourse there was a human being. The survivor still has to wake up the next morning and live in the body it happened to. I know what that is like because I know what it is like to make breakfast afterward, go to school afterward, grow up afterward, have relationships afterward, become a mother, build a career, laugh with friends, have sex again, fall in love, and build an entire fucking life while carrying things you never asked to carry.

Sometimes I still get triggered during sex, but after the last flashback of what had happened to me, I completely stopped being intimate, it has been almost five years, and I honestly don't think I will ever be in a relationship again.  I could be with somebody I love and trust, inside a relationship where I am safe and consent is absolutely present, and my body can suddenly decide we are somewhere else. I do not always know what will cause it. Sometimes I understand the connection afterward, and sometimes I genuinely have no fucking idea why one particular moment brought something back. Then I have to explain what is happening while I am still trying to get myself back into the room. 

There is shame in that for me that I wish was not there. Intellectually, I know better. I understand trauma, and I understand what the body and nervous system can carry. Knowing all of that does not always stop the part of me that feels embarrassed that something done to me decades ago can still walk into my sex life today. I hate that somebody who has never violated me can touch me with love and suddenly find himself standing beside the aftermath of men who did.

It is unfair that I can do all of this work, build safety with another person, trust him with my body, genuinely want what is happening, and still have something from twenty, thirty, or forty years ago barge into the room without warning. It is unfair that somebody I love sometimes has to encounter trauma he had absolutely nothing to do with because somebody else decided my body belonged to them before I was even old enough to understand what was happening. Sexual violence does not politely stay in the year it happened. Sometimes it follows you into places that are safe, relationships that are good, and sex you actually want. It can follow you into motherhood, friendships, careers, marriages, divorces, new love, and ordinary mornings when you thought you were doing just fine.

I also know what happens when carrying all of that gets mistaken for being fine. I work with the body and nervous system, and I am deeply tired of the idea that regulation means becoming calm enough to make everybody around you comfortable. I can be regulated and fucking furious. Anger is not proof that I failed to heal. Sometimes healing is exactly why the anger finally becomes available. For years I was quiet about what happened to me, and I have had to ask myself whether that really meant I was healthier or whether I had simply learned how to survive by putting the rage somewhere I did not have to touch.

Women have been praised for swallowing anger for a very long time. We are called mature when our pain becomes quiet enough for everyone else, and we are called hysterical when it stops cooperating. I am done participating in that, and this is why I keep coming back to the bear. The bear was never really the point. Women were trying to tell men something about the way danger feels inside our bodies after everything we have lived through. Instead of becoming curious about why so many women gave the same answer, countless men spent their time trying to prove that women’s answer was irrational.

Now women are talking about our histories because watching these stories unfold dredges up things many of us spent years trying to survive quietly, and men are still showing up to tell us to calm down. They are still telling us women do terrible things too. They are still making themselves the center of conversations about what happens to us. They are still asking women to reassure them that they are one of the good ones.

In my own life, I have never become close to a woman who did not eventually have some story about being violated, frightened, coerced, followed, assaulted, or sexualized by a man. That is my lived experience, and I am not presenting it as a scientific study. Sometimes the story is rape. Sometimes she still does not know what to call what happened. Sometimes it is the grown man who sexualized her when she was a child. Sometimes it is the boyfriend who kept pushing until saying no became harder than giving in. Sometimes it is the stranger who followed her home.

Women trade these stories with each other so casually sometimes that I think people have forgotten how fucking insane that is. We text when we get home. We watch each other’s drinks. We recognize another woman’s face from across a room when something is wrong. We have created entire informal systems of protection around behavior we are simultaneously told we are exaggerating.

So yes, women are angry. Some of us are angry for ourselves, and some of us are angry for women who never got to say what happened. Some of us are angry because our daughters should not inherit this shit, and some of us are angry because we are raising sons while watching the culture waiting for them. I spent most of my life not talking about what happened to me, and there are women reading this who have never said what happened to them out loud. There are women who never will. There are women who have barely admitted it to themselves because sometimes surviving something requires putting it somewhere you do not have to touch until you are ready.

Women have been silent long enough, and I am not going to make every sentence about male violence comfortable enough that no man anywhere has to feel challenged, implicated, or even mildly uncomfortable. I am not going to derail my own anger every time somebody demands that I acknowledge women can be horrible too because we already know that. I am not going to keep producing disclaimers until the original thing I was trying to say is buried underneath them, and I am definitely not going to apologize for rage that took me decades to finally allow myself to feel. I swallowed enough of it for one lifetime, and I spent enough years making my pain easier for everybody else to digest. I am done making my anger digestible.

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