On Modern-Day Misogyny Part 3: Why Aren’t We Looking?

by Asante Haughton for The 44 North, Emotional Health Editor, Contributing Writer, and Host of Life Outside the Box

This essay is the third in a three-part project on modern-day misogyny. You can read our introduction and the other two essays by Jeff Perera and Cole Martin in our October-November 2026 issue, or follow our newsletter to receive them directly in your inbox.

Artwork by Paweł Kuczyński

When I first heard about the “rape academy” web networks, I was shocked that such a thing could exist. Surely, as a society, we couldn’t—wouldn’t—allow something like this to fester. However, not only did it exist, but as I learned after a quick Google search, it was an extensive community that had proliferated for years before being ‘exposed.’ I put ‘exposed’ in quotations because this community of men, who traded strategies on how to incapacitate women without their knowledge to perform sex acts or other acts of humiliation, operated openly. This wasn’t happening in the shadowed back alleys of the internet, but right under its streetlights, roots above ground and unmasked. All we had to do to find it was look. So why, as a society, weren’t we looking?

When it comes to child protection, the watchful eye of society is perpetually alert. As such, the networks of individuals that seek to harm children operate underground, carefully concealed from the gaze of bystanders and the law. Even when we look, it’s hard to find them.

By contrast, as reported by CNN, the “rape academy” and other similar networks branched out rather publicly on the Telegram messaging app, as well as multiple popular porn sites (that I have made the decision not to mention here). Why weren’t they hiding? There is a reason they didn’t even bother.

The most obvious answer is sobering: They didn’t need to. Nobody was looking. And it’s not because the need to look wasn’t there. 

According to a 2025 Statistics Canada report, 49% of women aged 25 to 34 have experienced at least one sexual assault. In 91% of these cases, the perpetrator was a man. 

We should have been looking.

That we weren’t, or that we were too slow,  says something about whose safety society deems urgent: We didn’t find it important enough to look; we don’t value women enough in our society to look. This is a pervasive cultural problem.

And it leaves us with two issues to tackle.

In the immediate term, we must do everything we can to prevent online communities housing men who harm women from operating. One idea is to expand the breadth of Canada’s Mandatory Reporting Act. Currently, this act requires internet service providers to report to law enforcement any IP addresses or web domains where child sexual abuse and exploitation material is suspected to be available. This act needs to adopt similar mandates obligating internet service providers to report when cyber spaces depicting or facilitating harm toward women are found. To ensure these mandates are followed, government officials and policymakers should levy painful fines upon internet service providers who neglect to comprehensively regulate user activities, particularly if such neglect leads to harm or could feasibly lead to harm against women via their networks. Actions such as these could catalyze further prevention approaches,  halting online communities promoting violence against women from taking root.

In the longer term, we as a society must address the seed that threatens to take root in the first place. It’s vital that we eviscerate patriarchal pedagogies that position a devastating normalization: That women are vessels whose most important function is to serve men—instrumentally, sexually, or otherwise. We must then replace these deeply embedded societal beliefs with notions that consider women to have inherent worth equal to all other human beings. In simpler terms, we need to enact a complete cultural overhaul to address misogyny—the kind that teaches scores of men that exploiting women physically and emotionally is acceptable, as well as the kind that doesn’t value them enough to write measures that would protect them from exploitation online (or elsewhere) into law.

Platform design, regulation, recommendation systems, and legal profit incentives can all be interrogated, excavated, and revised as such to better reflect what we value—once we commit, decisively, to valuing it out in the open. That’s where men who harm women are circulating violence and expressing what they don’t value. We need to confront them there with what we do. 

If we say protect all women, our values and actions as a society need to demonstrate that we mean it. 

Braiding a Ladder: Three Writers on Modern-Day Misogyny & How to Climb Out of It

by Mikaela Brewer & Gillian Smith-Clark for The 44 North, Senior Editor & Editor-in-Chief

This introductory essay is the opening to a three-part project on modern-day misogyny. You can read three essays by Jeff Perera, Cole Martin, and Asante Haughton in our October-November 2026 issue, or follow our newsletter to receive them directly in your inbox.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

CNN’s reporting, its precedent, and its aftermath

In March 2026, CNN reported findings after a months-long investigation into a website and chat space that instructed men on how to drug and secretly sexually assault their wives and partners (Fact Check, Yahoo News, and MSN). It quickly became dubbed the “online rape academy.” Since then, the internet has erupted in backlash, outrage, and defensiveness regarding the exact number of men involved—thousands, regardless of debate. “The risk of sensationalization” as an argument has saturated online responses to the investigation, evading the pervasive truth in CNN’s reporting: The scale and seriousness of a culture that normalizes, rehearses, and facilitates violence against women.

Here in Canada, this news eerily echoes the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal, where 5 players were acquitted. And although much of CNN’s investigation occurred outside of Canada, its genesis is an international conversation. The rape of a spouse has not long been illegal here, first criminalized in Canada in 1983 following a long-time exemption for ‘marital rape’ and strict definitions in Canada’s 1892 criminal code (it has since been removed and replaced with a tiered ‘sexual assault’ framework). Rape remains legal in several countries where cultural norms differ around consent and the ‘ownership’ of women. In the same vein, language(s) matter beyond national borders and news reporting. Arguably, it matters more on the ground.

On the language we use and why we need multiple voices to reframe

When The 44 North team was deciding how to write on this topic, one of the first ideas that surfaced was: We need men’s voices. Rather than responding narrowly or singularly to one story or trend, we were interested in a broader project that flipped the topsoil of misogyny.  

Many men don’t see themselves as “having the capacity for violence,” and in that belief, it’s easy to dismiss accountability with: “It’s not all men, and I’m not part of the problem.” 

As a team, we spoke about how frequently phrases like “kill count” are ignored at the bar when wives and partners aren’t around. We discussed the way many men are taught to feel like a “less masculine failure” if they don’t “get the girl” by the end of the night, breeding the brand of vulnerability that catalyzes violence. Then, there’s the labelling and normalization of sexual assault as past-tense, only proliferated in “old” R&B and rock music. Ultimately, we talked about how what might seem nostalgic or harmless at first—“boys will be boys”—can become the building block for something much more sinister.  

The reality is, women can’t simply “tell” who the “good guy” is, nor who to trust. Men can’t claim to be feminists the same way white folks can’t claim to be anti-racist. These are earned not only by shifting internal feeling or belief (which no one else can see), but in action, community, and conflict. 

Erotics of Liberation says this brilliantly in their post, Conflict is the smallest unit of abolition: 

“I have seen this over and over, conflict is where we practice our values, instead of just talking about them. [...] I know it in every cell in my body: every difficult conversation is rehearsal for the world we’re trying to build.”

So, how can men approach other men in their lives?

We know that certain behaviours are internalized. But what if we focused less on what men are doing, and expanded the conversation: What have we come to expect and encourage men to do? This varies across age groups, language, and cultural backgrounds; different approaches to illumination rather than vilification will be needed. In other words, if our language matters most, we must ground it in reality, canvassing the spectrum of violence and allyship. This way, we can prioritize consent, lead with communication, and shift which people men aspire to be. Imagine a world where men change their role models, shattering narratives that centre the acquisition of worth, wealth, and status at the expense of women.

The succeeding essays do this vital work of re-imagination, foraying deeper into several topics. Jeff Perera writes on the root of assumed familiarity and entitlement, offering extensive examples and anecdotes. Cole Martin loops in the philosophical and artistic roots of humanity’s tendency toward both violence and kindness, discussing how to hold what coexists within us—by choice or not. To close, Asante Haughton directs our gaze to something vital and oft-missed in CNN’s coverage: How can we ‘expose’ something happening in plain sight, on websites that aren’t regulated by laws crafted to protect women from exploitation on the internet with the same fervour that we enact for children? In other words, as Haughton says, “Why, as a society, weren’t we looking?”

This series is an invitation to move beyond outrage alone and focus on systems, responsibility, and possible solutions. It explores how violence against women has so often been treated as unfortunate but inevitable, rather than as a serious governance and public-safety issue. It addresses why violence against women isn’t just a series of scandals, and how platform design, recommendation systems, anonymity, moderation failures, and profit incentives contribute to the spread and normalization of misogynistic harm. Regulatory, legal, and policy responses can make a difference, which we discuss alongside how governments have been slow to respond, revealing whose safety is treated as urgent. Ultimately, this series shows how men can lift not only the burden of awareness in community, but the emotional labour women are so often asked to do and carry in media and advocacy.

These essays are thoughtful, rigorous, and grounded. They connect cultural analysis with the practical questions of accountability and change. Importantly, this project isn’t a summary of recent headlines; we’re offering a deeper argument about systems, power, and what meaningful intervention looks like. Together, these essays offer a tapestry for one of the core aches of our world. They’re not an answer or even a map. But they are an invitation to think critically, which our team hopes you’ll accept with us.

Poet’s Corner: Two Poems from “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets” curated by Laura Kraftowitz & Edward Salem for Poetry Magazine

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

“In the Bathroom” by Raafat Hekmat, translated by Zyad Altaghlbi, and “A Timeline of Exile” by Maryam Ala Amjadi appear in “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets,” curated by Laura Kraftowitz & Edward Salem. Read the whole folio in the July/August 2026 issue of Poetry.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: These poems are not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read them. 

A few months ago, I came across Maryam Ala Amjadi’s poem, “A Timeline of Exile,” and Raafat Hekmat’s poem, “In the Bathroom” (translated by Zyad Altaghlbi), via Poetry Magazine’s folio featuring exiled poets. As Iranian and Syrian writers, respectively, their words have a particular heft now. 

Laura Kraftowitz and Edward Salem, who curated this folio, wrote in their introduction that each of the ten contemporary poets has “faced persecution, war, or genocide, as well as threats to their safety because of their writing.” In both poems, we visit the private places that these experiences burrow into the body and soul.

The lines in “A Timeline of Exile” wind and spill as the bloodline does. That first stanza brings everything in it to a “a single trembling point”—a question mark, line break, and stanza break simultaneously. How much more could a line tremble with what it holds and holds up? Later, we face that question, at least in part: What is the difference between red versus black and white lines? The poem posits this by noting both, but doesn’t quite ask or answer it. The ‘point’ is where everything starts: The red lines are crossed, whereas the words ‘border,’ ‘black,’ and ‘white’ imply impervious binaries and blockages. A border “can’t” be transgressed without moving from one ‘state’ to the other, irreversibly in time. The vulnerability of the assured readiness, addressed to a ‘you,’ is stark and frightening, but steadfast. It trembles, but it doesn’t hesitate, which threads through Hekmat’s poem. 

“In the Bathroom” shows us the preciousness of privacy and a longing to escape surveillance. There’s desperation, too, in the employment of bits of cotton or chewing gum to plug holes. And still that trembling, reverberating from Iran to Syria. Hekmat can’t guarantee privacy in this bathroom, and even if he could, would the body believe it enough to process it as such? This is trauma: The em dash points like a sniper gun with a zoomed-in visual from somewhere he can’t distinctly identify. In other words, the threat is everywhere. 

Ovid in Exile. 9.46 x 12.50 cm oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner

This poem also tethers nakedness—literally and metaphorically—to threat. To move within the range of hatred, control, and continued colonial violence is terrifying as the reach of eyes, weapons, and surveillance only seems to expand. The poem itself seems to be fighting to move within the range of anything else, to believe that it can one day live outside the range of the sniper, shell, or nearby explosion. And by the poem’s existence alone, it both does and doesn’t.

Together, these poems consider: Can we cross any line, whether through sacrifice, bravery, or safety, that’s far enough away or a sturdy enough door? Will that crossing ever feel far or safe enough in this world? How are these questions different for Maryam Ala Amjadi, Raafat Hekmat, me, and you?

And how does reading poetry help?

The trauma always lingers, forever the remainder in war’s cruel long division. “Broken Lines,” as the folio is titled, can refer to everything from lineages/ancestry, those crossed in protest, borders crossed in escape, taboos and the perseverance of derogatory names/stereotypes, tethers to worlds/lives, bones, healthy attachments to body/place, and ultimately, the line breaks of poems as poets write through real-life enjambment.

By reading these poets, we bear witness. We see language, craft, choices, and reality. We feel the draw of hope rather than despair, and how everyone has lines to break—lines that will allow us to build something like a poem in real life. That crossing, perhaps.

In tandem, I’d love to recommend Transient Worlds (Copper Canyon Press, 2026) by the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze, and Poem-a-Day’s translation-focused curation, woven together by Maya C. Popa—a dear mentor—for September. Translation, of course, is in conversation with exile, war, borders and the way language can face them. My favourite is Nikola Madzirov’s “Silence Comes Somewhere Else,” about which he writes what feels like a perfect closing to this short essay:

 “Absence is not silent. Poetry is the archaeology of unburied memories. Often, in my dreams, I see my dead mother coming home with bags full of fruit, while I run towards the apricot orchards. The scars of the unsaid appear on our faces while we sleep. My father still uses [my mother’s] old toothbrush to clean the edges of her picture frame on the gravestone and the letters of his own name engraved beside hers. This is his way of feeling more alive … like a poet trying to revise his already published poems, to create a new history.”