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. 

On Modern-Day Misogyny Part 2: Blood and Tears

by Cole Martin for The 44 North, Contributing Writer - Politics

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

"Tears of Blood" by Oswaldo Guayasamín

There’s a quote from the late French philosopher Simone Weil that’s been reverberating in my head ever since reading the harrowing CNN article: 

“To exclude human beings […] thrusting them down to the state of social outcasts […] this is to sever every bond of poetry and love between human beings and the universe. […] We all have a share by our complicity in an almost innumerable quantity of such crimes. If only we could understand, it should wring tears of blood from us.” (Weil, pg. 116.)

Though written almost a century ago, this quote unfortunately remains relevant. For me, it distills division, the damage that ensues when arbitrary partitions are erected, and the ways—consciously and unconsciously—that we participate in such partitions daily. It denotes the same trodden bond that Perera refers to in his piece: “When women become disposable property—possessions to toy with like a doll—we’ve crossed a line and left our humanity behind.”

Still, most of us know we’re letting one another down. Twenty-four-seven, we’re bombarded with our failures on the news, on social media, and on the street. Yet, instead of driving us to course-correct, we seem intent on siloing and perpetuating the same harmful paradigms that have plagued humanity for millennia. Why is that? 

Some would invoke “human nature” to explain our shortcomings, taking it as self-evident that humans are designed to dominate one another. For others, typically “manosphere” types, domination is justified via syllogism: Humans are animals; the animal kingdom is hierarchical; therefore humans are hierarchical.

Supplementing their argument is the fact that the logic of domination and its systemic forms (patriarchy, capitalism, fascism, etc.) pervade human history. In one of her essays, the aforementioned Weil turned to Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War to provide an archaic example of this logic in action. “Athenians,” she recounted, “wanted to force the inhabitants of the little island of Melos […] to join with them. The men of Melos, faced with the ultimatum of the Athenians, invoked justice, imploring pity for the antiquity of their town.” The Athenians then “razed [Melos] to the ground, put all their men to death, and sold all their women and children as slaves.” 

According to Thucydides, the Athenians justified their barbarism thusly: “We have the belief […] that always, by a necessity of nature, each one commands wherever he has the power. We did not establish this law […] we found it already established, we abide by it as something likely to endure forever.” (Weil, pg. 86.)

Weil used this analogy to argue for a dualism between what she called “natural justice” (that of the natural world and, in her example, the Athenians) and “supernatural justice” (humanity’s ability to transcend or negate nature; i.e., the appeal of the Melians). Her commitment to Christianity meant that Weil believed the latter was possible thanks to divinity; however, the duality holds even with religion removed from the picture: Humans can be competitive, cruel, and dominant, yes, but we can also be compassionate, loving, and communal. We eat, sleep, and reproduce, but we also love, grieve, make music, paint, write, etc.

In his 2021 book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, Historian Rutger Bregman presented a similar reassessment of human nature. Analyzing various anthropological and historical sources, Bregman theorized that humanity’s cooperative instinct was chiefly responsible for its early flourishing in the natural world, troubling the long-standing, cynical narrative that humans are innately egotistical and brutal (the hugely influential view espoused by seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes). “Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.” (Bregman, pg. 112.)

The complicated truth is that human nature encompasses all of these facets, the positive and the negative, simultaneously; it’s not a monolith. We’re contradictory, incongruous, and, as Walt Whitman tokenized, “[We] are large, [We] contain multitudes.” 

There is undoubtedly freedom to this fluidity, but also danger, for if there is no fixed human nature, then one is constantly subject to influence. The question is: How do we encourage the compassionate, empathetic capacity of humanity rather than the base, animalistic one? 

It’s a quagmire—most people are just trying to survive late capitalism, let alone reserve time and energy for others or endeavour to educate themselves on complex politics/socio-economics. Patriarchal capitalism relies on this fatigue to propagate itself, disseminating reductive beliefs about the way the world is or ought to be to sow division and maintain exploitative power dynamics. For most, it’s comforting to believe the world adheres to the rules of the jungle, because it means they don’t need to exert much effort to understand or change it; all it takes is an appeal to history or a nod to the television to reduce all of humanity to dog-eat-dog. If unchallenged, these beliefs calcify into dogma to be passed on to younger generations. 

So, how do we challenge these ideologies? I won’t purport to have all the answers, but I believe that combating an ideology—especially one as resilient and entrenched as patriarchy—necessitates paying attention to the symptoms, the ostensibly benign ways that it infiltrates everyday life. The primary inheritors and perpetrators of patriarchy—men—need to learn to identify these patterns if they are to properly challenge its programming (see Jeff’s piece!)

One of these symptoms, and one that disproportionately affects boys and men, is literacy—lack thereof, rather. While reading in general has consistently declined over the years, there is an ever-widening gender and genre disparity. The reasons for this are undoubtedly varied, but I feel confident claiming this phenomenon is deeply linked to the ongoing attacks against arts and humanities in Canada and other parts of the world. 

It’s easy to understand why a system of domination wouldn’t want its subjects to be well-read: A population that doesn’t read is easier to control, as they are less likely to think critically about a government, institution, or individual’s role in society, making organizing difficult (which is why governments love to ban books!) Further, having men engage solely in the types of books that produce productive workers (e.g. self-improvement and “mindset” books) is clearly beneficial to an exploitative system. 

"Tears Of Blood" by Marina Petro

Illiteracy is programmed in more covert ways than book bans and library closures, however. A recent example is the “performative male” trend that consumed social media a few months ago, which involved satirizing a specific archetype of “bro”—one who posts candid pictures of themselves reading Infinite Jest or Bell Hooks on a cafe terrace, typically sipping a matcha latte and languidly smoking a cigarette. 

While this trend was admittedly funny (it’s always nice to get some barbs in on this mode of pretension), and I'm by no means conflating it with the daily harms experienced by women, or with the severity of the CNN article, I think the underlying patriarchal notions within this phenomenon warrant examination. 

For example, the trend (explicitly or implicitly, depending on the case) derided men for reading fiction and/or feminist theory, two things already deemed emasculating and a waste of time by popular masculinity. But what’s of most concern are the knock-on effects: One can imagine the plethora of young people scrolling TikTok at the height of the trend who have now internalized the message that they should never read such books… certainly not in public, lest they be labelled “performative” or “cringe” by the social media masses. 

This form of conditioning is exemplary of how patriarchal capitalism exerts control not only through overt economic and political means, but on an interpersonal, psycho-social level, such that society restricts, represses, and polices itself. 

A more productive critique of masculinity, in my opinion, is to demonstrate to boys and men the breadth of masculine expression possible, to widen our collective conception of what a “man” is by challenging the prevailing myths of masculinity (while being cautious not to enforce them obliquely).

Fiction is incredibly instructive to this end (which explains its deterrence). Absorbing narrative through literature, film, TV, video games, etc. can be a fantastic way to broaden our concepts and survey our societal and individual values, as it allows us to inhabit the other in ways our day-to-day experiences don’t permit (I consider this the genesis of empathy). And the more tools in your toolkit, the better equipped you’ll be to understand yourself and your surroundings, and the sharper your image of the world becomes. “The work of writers […] They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real.” (Weil, pg. 15.) 

It’s clear that our collective attitude towards learning needs to change as well. Under capitalism, learning is essentially utilitarian; many people consider their learning complete when they finish school and enter the workforce. However, I’m in the camp that considers learning a lifelong project. We live in a dynamic world, and we ourselves need to be dynamic to keep up with it. One of the things that makes humans so special is our capacity for change, to absorb new information and integrate it. Our goal should be to embrace this aspect of ourselves, embrace our curiosity about the world and the possibilities it could encompass—embrace difference, and the multitudes we can hold within. “What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.” (Ursula K. Le Guin.) 

So, as obvious as it sounds: boys and men need to read more, and be more curious! 

***

Oscar Wilde once asked, “Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.” The subtext, in Wilde’s case, was his queerness—yielding to his sexual “temptation” towards men ultimately led to his conviction, exile, and death. But his statement holds a universal truth: People are, I think (and Bregman/Weil argue), largely tempted to do good; most people have an intuitive sense of the right thing to do, and seldom do they set out with the explicit intention to harm. Yet to actually reify that desire, to act on it, sometimes requires—as Wilde said—strength and courage, especially when contemporary society so heavily incentivizes individualism.

Our way forward is to help each other do the homework. This means those who have bandwidth must step up to bridge the gap for others. Towards this goal, I think everyone would benefit from simply pausing and asking ourselves, ‘Day to day, where is my attention going? How can I better treat the people I interface with as ends in themselves, instead of means to an end?’ “The good the truly good do has no end in view.” (Lao Tzu.) 

That minute, seemingly insignificant interval between thought and action can be utterly transformative. The more you navigate your life with intention, the more you will notice the myriad ways we’ve been trained to reduce the world to simple statements, and other people to single characteristics. As Weil said, “Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence […] That halt, that interval of hesitation, wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity.” (Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, pg. 14-15.) 

If we can work to undo the individualist, agonistic ideologies instilled in us by our institutions, media, and politics, and shift towards a sense of responsibility for one another, I think we have a real chance at dispelling the many myths espoused by patriarchal capitalism, and perhaps even oppression itself. We must resist the urge to strip the world of nuance in order to falsely simplify it. Instead, we must strive to widen our concepts so that they better reflect the whole of humanity. “We are living in times that have no precedent, and in our present situation universality […] has to be fully explicit. It has to permeate our language and the whole of our way of life.” (Weil, pg. 51.) 

It is crucial that we demonstrate to boys and men that true strength stems from the courage to care for the other, not their subordination. As Leslie Fielder writes in the introduction to Weil’s Waiting for God, “The most terrible of crimes is to collaborate in the uprooting of others in an already alienated world; but the greatest of virtues is to uproot oneself for the sake of one’s neighbors.” (Weil, pg. x.)

Part of that uprooting is choosing to look. The next article in this triad, by Asante Haughton, asks directly why we—particularly at a federal law policy level—haven’t been looking. In terms of internet regulation and safety, he wonders why we’ve so long turned away, seemingly deeming women unworthy of our collective protection. To me, this is another symptom of a society lacking the depth of attention, witness, and care. I believe we can change that.

The further one’s humanity deepens, the more imperative it becomes to “people” others by recognizing and acknowledging that same depth in them. Once that intersubjective connection blossoms, seeing the mistreatment of others, whether in person, on the other side of the world, or even behind a screen, should, as Weil said, “wring tears of blood from us.” 

Bibliography

• Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd, HarperCollins Publishers, 2009.

• Bregman, Rutger. Humankind: A Hopeful History. Back Bay Books, 2019.

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Cole Martin is a writer from Atlantic Canada. He can be found on Bluesky @coleboy.bsky.social 

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On Modern-Day Misogyny Part 1: It Starts with ‘Assumed Familiarity’

by Jeff Perera for The 44 North, Guest Writer

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

Via Scooter National Baltimore

A man makes his way through a crowded bar. He sees a small space and a two-second window to squeeze through it. He places a hand on a man’s shoulder to pass behind him, and soon after, a hand on the small of a woman’s back to pass by her.

An intimate act, taken quietly in front of many, he assumed a familiarity that was never earned. This is where it starts. Moments like these are where it starts to show its face. 

You may have witnessed this exact moment, or moments like it, and assumed it wasn’t a big deal—dismissed it as just another of many awkward ‘inconveniences’ that women should learn to accept in everyday interactions. 

At a social gathering or networking event, a photographer might approach a group and ask to take a publicity picture. The group, let’s say, is composed of five people who just met: Three men and two women. 

One man poses for the photo, placing his arm casually around the other man’s shoulder. The other man drops an arm to his side and gives a warm thumbs-up with the other hand.

The third man, vaguely familiar with the woman next to him, places an arm and hand around her side and hip, pulling her closer. This is the norm, though it’s an intimate gesture one might do with a loved one or romantic partner, mutually agreed on because familiarity is established. 

Safety is assumed. “I know her like that.” 

An intimate act, taken quietly in front of many, he assumed a familiarity that was never earned.  

This gesture is often sprung on women or non-binary people in public settings where the burden of pushing through awkwardness is forced onto them. They’re expected to respond with graceful words or a subtle gesture—moving a hand off, away, or onto her shoulder—which, whether gently or firmly, says: “You don’t know me like that. You don’t have that level of safety or familiarity established with me.”

The assumption of familiarity, mostly by men, can be seen openly in daily life. It seems to say: “I can do this, you know I’m a good guy, this gesture is harmless.”

Simultaneously, if a man (a stranger, let’s say) were to suddenly hold them in a similarly intimate way, their reaction might be defensive or defiant. A physical act might unfold, where a hand is aggressively removed or a whole body is pushed back to establish boundaries and protect a heteronormative persona. Somehow, in this instance, these aren’t neutral gestures. 

What we’re really talking about here, of course, are forms of entitlement. 

The quick leap from boyhood into manhood can transpire at an early age. A part of this passage usually includes some form of indoctrination into the idea that men are entitled to status, power, and control—even if unintentional. It begins in early childhood, as soon as you’re your parents’ ‘little man.’ How many boys of single mothers have either been told they’re ‘the man of the house’—or heard themselves referred to as such—before they understand or have even seen examples of what that can look like?

Artwork by Max Letek

Unfortunately, part of the trajectory into manhood often includes absorbing the perspective that they’re entitled to not only status, but that power and control come at the expense of women, over their voices, bodies, and lives. As a result, too many men enter adult life assuming or expecting access to women’s bodies and lives before stepping into the lifelong process of developing trust, safety and familiarity. 

It takes immense work to build a connection to the point where complete safety and trust feel found and assured. Imagine someone assuming they’ve earned that trust, or are owed it without earning it. And imagine them violating it—violently. 

Sadly, the truth is, well after the most intimate levels of trust and familiarity are offered or established, they can be horrifically violated. 

That’s where it starts. Here’s where it can go…

***

For many of us, our escape from the challenges of our day, the struggles in our lives, and the hardships and potential harm we face in the outside world, is the familiar soft fortress of our bed: The one place where we can exhale and feel safe.

But a warm space and refuge for many can too easily be the place where women are actually the least safe. 

***

In 2010, a man in France felt allowed, enabled, and entitled to record footage—using a camera hidden in a pen—up women’s skirts. The incidents were initially dismissed as ‘just another naughty older man.’ It was then discovered that the same man had attempted to assault a real estate agent in 1999, a decade prior. But the police let him go.

Another decade passed, and that same man was caught once again recording footage up women’s skirts. This time, the police uncovered details more thoroughly, piecing together what had occurred during the decade that passed. 

This time, they looked at his computer. 

This time, they told his wife, a woman named Gisele Pelicot. 

What they soon discovered, and eventually shared with Gisele, was that her husband, Dominique Pelicot, had not only been drugging and sexually assaulting his wife. 

He was recording it. Many, many times. 

Not only had Dominique felt entitled to record it non-consensually. He also invited men to sexually assault his wife as he recorded. 

And not only did he invite men to join him and sexually assault his wife, he also initiated the process of grooming them to continue the horror on their own. 

This wasn’t unique or uncommon: Online, communities in the dingy, dark sewers of the internet share notes on how to commit unspeakable horror. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QREGD8APM4

The above video is of the W5 investigation that Avery Haines undertook, where she infiltrated an “[O]rganized online community of rapists who share and sell videos of their crimes” by sexually assaulting their wives and partners through drugging. 

This includes men right here in Canada.

“I’ve spent months infiltrating their global network, pretending to be one of them, learning how they buy drugs, how they carry out their crimes, and how they work together to get away with it. I created a fake profile on two porn sites, set up an account on the messaging app Telegram, and just like that, I’m in. This isn’t the dark web. It’s public porn sites, forums, messaging apps, all of it hiding in plain sight.”

Via interactions with an online alias that Haines used to establish trust with other men in the virtual space, she bore witness to arrestingly horrific conversations. She describes brutal details of unspeakable acts shared back and forth, the way colleagues might exchange work tips. 

At one point, Haines describes a Telegram discussion where: 

“[D]ifferent men give advice on the best drugs to use. I was sent an entire menu with prices. Anesthetic gases with masks, portable anesthesia liquid vaporizers, drugs to knock women out, drugs to erase their memory in liquid and pills. They share how products on Amazon can be turned into homemade date rape drugs. They mention this website in Malaysia that sells obedience and coma drugs.”

“The obedience drug promises that they won’t know how to resist, cannot think, will have no memory, can act but no power. They say it’s discreetly packaged as hair serum.”

Artwork by Walid Hamadeh

Forced ‘obedience’ while unconscious. Assumed familiarity that became full access, unearned and forced. This is the most extreme violation of a relationship by men who were entrusted with the most intimate and private moments a woman can share, including who they sleep beside and who they trust to bring them a cup of tea night after night. 

Haines further describes an ongoing conversation with one man who “[G]ives disturbing and painstaking details about how he knocks his wife out. He calls her his doll, his toy.”

His wife. His Doll. His Toy. His property.

When women become disposable property—possessions to toy with like a doll—we’ve crossed a line and left our humanity behind. 

That line, however—as available to cross in the first place—starts long before the acts of violence and harm. It starts with the belief that men are entitled to status, power, and control, at the expense of others; particularly women, girls, and gender-expansive people. 

On July 10th, Haines updated us on Bryan Hayward, who faces 60 charges for drugging more than a dozen women. His 11-year-old daughter was returned to her Mom, drugged. 

This violence continues worldwide within online spaces and networks where men assume the freedom to conspire together—to commit the most haunting violations of trust and familiarity. 

This story is far too familiar. What are we, as men, going to do about it? How can we redirect and rewrite what happens now?

We can begin by understanding ourselves—who we are, what world we live in, and what pressures and behaviours those foster. There are deeper layers at play here, and sometimes, our homework is to take a few steps back to step forward. I invite you to read the next essay in this series, by Cole Martin, diving into the philosophical side of this discussion. Martin spotlights the words of artists, poets, essayists, and philosophers on men’s entitlement and assumption of familiarity and domination. 

Where the story goes from here will depend on our continued silence and indifference, or, I hope, what we as men collectively work to understand and change.

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Jeff Perera builds bridges between people of all genders and has spoken to tens of thousands of people across North America since 2008 about gender, masculinity, empathy-building, and men helping end gender-based violence. Whether in the boardroom, on campus, or the locker room, we need more positive and mindful examples of ways to be a man today. Jeff is a storyteller inspiring new models of possibility for men and young men, as well as healthier versus harmful ideas of manhood where we work, live, play, worship or study. He has delivered two TEDx talks: ‘Words Speak Louder Than Actions,’ looking at the power of gendered words, and ‘The Ladder of Manhood, ’ which explores the male pursuit of identity and how too many men are fluent in a language of violence.

As a man of colour having helped audiences get comfortable unpacking uncomfortable issues in an engaging, inviting space with an upbeat presentation style, Jeff regularly contributes thought leadership through writing and appearances on podcasts and interviews exploring how limiting ideas of gender impact us all in everyday life. A way forward starts with us, within us. 

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