Women are furious, and this last week gave them plenty of reasons. Not abstract reasons, not academic reasons, but the same ugly lesson delivered over and over again: women get violently harmed, men look away, and institutions immediately start negotiating down the consequences to in some cases nearly nothing.
Let’s get into it.
Last week a man masturbated beside a woman on a United flight while looking at her. She reported it, and instead of removing him from her space or making sure police met the plane, United eventually made her return to the seat next to him for landing and later offered her a travel credit.
At Cornell, it was reported that seven fraternity members drugged and gang-raped a student for hours while someone advertised “free pussy” to the fraternity. No frat member tried to stop this. According to her lawsuit, some of the university discipline imposed involved writing essays, which is an astonishingly tidy academic response to organized gang rape. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. This is how we ended up with Trumps, Kavanaughs and Epsteins.
At LSU, the university’s own Title IX process found a football player responsible for rape. His original punishment was a one-year suspension, he appealed, the finding remained, and the punishment got lighter. That tells women something very clear about whose future institutions instinctively protect: the woman gets the trauma, while the athlete gets another round of procedural concern about what consequences might do to his life.
Then there is the teenage girl who rejected a boy, was stalked by him and later stabbed by him 10 times. Again, the girl gets the terror and the lifelong memory, while everyone else gets to calmly discuss what level of punishment would be ok here. Guess what. There was no real punishment but she was granted a restraining order.
There is another detail running through these stories that deserves far more attention: in the reporting, not a single man who was present is described as stepping in and stopping the abuse while it was happening. That matters because violence against women does not survive on perpetrators alone; it survives on bystanders, silence, male loyalty, cowardice and the endless social instinct to avoid making things uncomfortable for another man. How is it that every woman knows another who has been abused but most men don’t know male abuser? Weird huh?
Women are taught the rules almost from childhood. Watch your drink, share your location, park under a light, text when you get home, do not walk alone after dark, do not make him angry, do not reject him too harshly, do not trust the guy who seems off, and always have an escape route.
Reporting this week also revisited FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s years inside a cult-like AA offshoot where former members described sexual exploitation of children, girls. Carr himself has not been accused of sexually abusing those girls, but the story still raises uncomfortable questions about how thoroughly the environments surrounding powerful men are examined and how easily disturbing histories can be treated as irrelevant until someone finally forces them into public view.
Women have spent years being told they are overreacting when they talk about the culture that protects abusive men. Then a week like this comes along and gives them an airline making a woman sit beside the man who masturbated at her, a university responding to gang rape with essays, another university reducing punishment after its own finding of rape, and another case in which a girl is stalked and stabbed.
We know exactly how fast female rage gets policed. Distill Social called Donald Trump a pedophile on live Fox 2 News earlier this year, and we have not been invited back. The host’s objection was that he had not been adjudicated (like he was for E Jean Carrolls rape) as if women need a judge’s permission slip before they are allowed to read the Epstein files, listen to survivors, connect the dots and say what they believe.
That is the scam. Men get the benefit of euphemism. Women get lectured about tone.
Women are expected to watch powerful men skate through scandal after scandal, watch institutions protect them, watch survivors beg for accountability, and then somehow choose words soft enough not to upset the men in the room.
Fuck that.
They do not need permission to be furious. They do not need a television host, a dean, a lawyer or a political consultant telling them which words are acceptable.
Women need justice.
And if your first instinct is to police the language of angry women instead of the men who keep harming them, congratulations: you are part of the fucking problem.
Last week the Epstein Files Bookmobile came to Michigan and we visited it. It’s a traveling bookmobile carrying 3.5 million printed and bound pages of public Epstein files across the United States.
Watch our video and see curated gallery inside the Epstein Bookmobile below:
💥 Like this kind of content? Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and check out our Facebook group: Michiganders for Freedom, Not Fascism — we’d love to have you join in the conversation!
I’m male, the father of two daughters and grandfather to four girls. A friend of mine years ago who also had two daughters, said to me that he considered “all men pigs until proven otherwise”. Seems a pretty apt description of the current state of things. When women are in charge we might see a change, but not before.
And don’t forget we learned awhile back that a website with 62,000 men subscribers taught men how to drug and rape their wives and girlfriends.