CNN recently exposed a website that hosted over 20,000 videos of women who had been drugged and filmed by their partners while they were unconscious. The site had recorded around 62 million visits. Imagine millions of men visiting a website that was built entirely on drugging and sexually violating women.
Now, when you place that number beside the global population of billions, it becomes easy to reduce it to saying, “it is not all men.” But 62 million is not a small number, and it does not just exist at the margins.
If women are told to be careful around men outside, to always watch their surroundings, and to protect themselves, then what happens when the danger is not external? What happens when it is in their homes, beds, and lives built with someone they trusted?
Maybe this is where the conversation about “all men” actually begins, because when we say “all men”, it is about numbers like this and how often they are ignored and dismissed.
When men respond to the “all men” rhetoric by calling it a wrong generalisation, I begin to wonder whether they really do not understand or are being intentionally obtuse about why women would say this in the first place.
To be fair, I lean towards the latter because men understand everything about how the world works, except when it comes to women.
They know how to run from or attack a snake when they see one, even if not all snakes are venomous. Due to the police brutality most of them have faced or heard about, they know how to avoid policemen and distrust them despite knowing fully well that not all of them are the same. They hesitate to board a night bus that is filled only with men. They understand what risk is when it affects them. But when women are cautious around them, they suddenly do not get it. Unless, of course, the woman is their daughter or their sister. Then they understand the danger, because even they themselves are the ones issuing the warning.
Yes, some of the men might not be abusers, but that does not automatically remove them from what women mean when they say “all men”. And I will explain why.
Every day, we come online and see men joking about rape, femicide, abuse, misogyny, and sexism. You rarely see their friends or other men calling them out; instead, they like the post, quote or comment with another joke, or scroll past. If a so-called good man is part of that audience, and if he finds nothing wrong with those jokes, he is part of the “all men”.
If he is around friends who talk about harassing or abusing women and says nothing, does nothing, calls no one out, laughs along, or quietly agrees, he is part of “all men”.
If he knowingly stays friends with someone who has been accused of abuse and sees no reason to distance himself, he is part of “all men”.
If those same friends had spoken about his girlfriend or sister that way, he would have been the first to react or fight, but when it comes to other women, he does not care. He is part of “all men”.
I recently came across some videos online where men posted clips of themselves “training”, with captions like “training in case she says no” referring to attacking women who reject them. This incident came right after a man stabbed a woman for rejecting him, one out of many similar cases.
The men who liked those videos, commented on them, shared them, and laughed at them, no matter where they were, are all part of the group referred to as “all men”. And there are too many, far too many of them, for the generalisation to be unreasonable.
We see on social media how men would go the extra mile to defend a friend or even a stranger when it comes to abuse against women. Sometimes I find myself asking, “what is it about men that would make them stand in solidarity like that?” Is it because they are also abusers, making it dishonest to call out a friend for something he might also be guilty of? Do they hate women so much? Is it about this bro code, which lets them defend other men shamelessly no matter how heinous the crime?
When people ask, “Who are the good men?”, I find myself asking the same question. If enablers and perpetrators exist in such large numbers, then where exactly are the good men?
Now imagine something different from the current reality.
Imagine a man makes misogynistic jokes, and other men immediately shut him down to the extent that he deletes them. The chances of him repeating it become slim; he would think twice before making another one. Another man would see that reaction and decide not to joke at all, because he wouldn’t want the same response.
Imagine a man is accused of rape or physical abuse and his friends cut him off completely without excuses. Or a man sees a woman being harassed and he steps in to speak up for her instead of ignoring or staying silent. This is how one becomes two, two becomes four, and four becomes more. We gradually start to shift our behaviour and change society at large.
Until we live in a world where abuse jokes are not normalised, where music does not casually promote coercion, where women are not mocked or dismissed, and where men hold each other accountable, the “all men” conversation will continue to sound less like an accusation and more like a reality that women live with.
