The global assault on women is an assault on all of us

When the global patriarchy seems hellbent on a path toward ultimate abuse and control, the rest of us must stand together in solidarity.

As reported by CNN, men are gathering in open digital spaces to teach one another how to rape their wives and girlfriends more effectively, how to efficiently drug them to bypass any form of resistance, and how to claim this violence as entitlement. An even more frightening prospect: Gisèle Pelicot was just the tip of the iceberg. A quick refresh: Pelicot is a French woman who became an international feminist figure after waiving her anonymity in a landmark rape case. She revealed that her husband had drugged her and orchestrated her abuse by dozens of men over nearly a decade.

Her decision to speak publicly galvanized global attention on sexual violence, earning her widespread recognition, honors, and a published memoir, while simultaneously exposing how organized, normalized, and quietly enabled this kind of violence already is beneath the surface.

For queer people, especially those of us who grew up being seen as insufficiently masculine, these crimes feel especially like a personal attack. Women have always been our strongest allies—the ones who understood without explanation what it means to be seen as weak, to be treated as less than, and to navigate the world knowing your body is not entirely your own. This reality exists at an even more visceral level for the trans community. Women understand the need to be protected against an out-of-control patriarchy.

Through constant action, they have shown up for us when we needed them most, stepping in and refusing to let us be flattened into something disposable. Women have been navigating that terrain for as long as any of us have been alive, and it’s our turn now to show up and protect women, especially as legislation continues to narrow their autonomy, regulate their bodies, and reframe their independence as something illegal.

It can’t be overstated that, for many of us, women made survival possible. When I was bullied growing up, it was very rarely the boys who had the guts to risk breaking the social order of the brotherhood and stand up to other boys on my behalf. It was always the girls: the quirky English teacher, the sharp art teacher, your friend’s cool mom, your mom, your sister. The real ones didn't hesitate to disrupt the hierarchy that kept everyone else in line. And I’m still friends with all of those girls from back in the day because we have a deeper understanding than just friendship. We’re a family who has been through everything together, who learned early how to recognize danger and protect one another in the face of any and every abusive man who crossed our paths.

Now imagine your best girls stuck in marriages where they lose large chunks of time, are always fatigued, don’t seem too aware of last night or the night before, where the gaps in memory start to feel less like stress and more like something resembling a slow death. Imagine your best friend growing up, now stuck in a marriage where her husband routinely drugs and rapes her, offering her to other men who share the belief that her body exists for their use, her autonomy erased. Imagine knowing something is wrong but being unable to prove it. Imagine the slow, creeping realization that what is happening to her is not an isolated horror but part of a broader system teaching men how to do this more effectively, more discreetly, and more often.

What CNN uncovered is not a series of one-off cases or fringe behaviors hiding at the murky edges of the internet. It is a network of men gathering in open forums and encrypted channels, trading tactics on how to drug their partners without detection, sharing videos of assaults carried out on unconscious women, refining methods, comparing outcomes, and turning violence into something communal. One site alone pulls tens of millions of views, much of it traced back to the United States.

The predictable response from too many men is not horror but deflection, reducing it to numbers, to “not all men,” as if scale somehow softens impact, as if the difference between millions of views and millions of perpetrators changes the lived reality for the women who wake up not knowing what can be done to them. And now imagine their young sons being raised in this context, learning what manhood looks like through exposure to a culture that rewards domination and treats sexual violation as some new form of sport. Young boys are absorbing this as normal and as something to aspire to rather than reject. By inheriting this behavior, they will be robbed of their youth and grow into men who are never asked to question the patriarchy.

None of this is happening in isolation. It is unfolding at the same time that women’s rights are being stripped back across the globe in ways that would have felt unthinkable even a decade ago. Governments are moving to control reproductive autonomy, to criminalize health care, and to reframe bodily independence as something revocable.

Mainstream political voices openly question whether women should have ever been granted the right to vote in the first place, while trans people are being legislated out of public life, their existence treated as a problem to be solved rather than respected. LGBTQ rights more broadly are being chipped away, challenged, and positioned once again as negotiable depending on who holds power. It is the same underlying system tightening its grip in multiple directions at once, testing how far it can go and how openly it can operate before anyone stops it. What we are watching now is not a series of separate issues but a single pattern becoming more coordinated and more emboldened by the day.

The women who protected us, who stood between us and a world that was more than willing to break us down, are now being targeted in ways that are more explicit and more terrifying than anything we’ve seen before, and the idea that we can observe that from a distance without understanding what it demands of us is a luxury we should not aspire to have.

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