I want to start by saying something plainly: if you’ve been sitting with a low-grade dread, a heaviness you can’t quite name, a tendency to look at these numbers and feel your chest tighten, that makes sense. That is not catastrophizing. That is paying attention.
In February, a network described by researchers and journalists as an “online rape academy” was exposed. This network consists of spaces where men shared videos of sexual assaults, exchanged tips on drugging and incapacitating women, and provided what can only be described as how-to guides for committing sexual violence. The various chats are connected to a porn site called ‘Motherless’, which hosts more than 20,000 videos of ‘sleep’ content uploaded by users. These videos include men lifting the eyelids of women to ensure they are sleeping or sedated, and users in the comments claimed to be shipping ‘sleeping liquids’ across the world for men to use on their wives. The Motherless website had 62 million visits in February alone, with its core audience being in the United States.
Sixty-two million.
I’ve been thinking about that number for days, trying to find a way to write about it that doesn’t feel like either catastrophizing or minimizing. I’m not sure I’ve found it. But I know I have to try.
The network, which consists of different channels, forums, and encrypted chats, operates under the guise of being a private community for “men who take what they want.” It was eventually reported on by investigative journalists and researchers monitoring extremist and misogynist content online. It wasn’t a dark corner that required sophisticated access. It was accessible. Shareable. Not that hard to find, and building on the findings from the Dominique Pelicot Trial in France – you can read more about that here.
The content ranged from videos of real assaults to tactical discussion threads about which substances were “undetectable,” how to avoid leaving digital evidence, and how to identify vulnerable targets. Members encouraged each other. They celebrated each other. They called it a community.
Platforms are facing pressure to remove these channels. Some content has been taken down. But the reality of what that number represents doesn’t disappear with a moderation decision. 62 million views means 62 million moments of engagement. It means that content was recommended, that algorithms rewarded it, that people clicked, shared, came back.
I don’t want to skip past this part to get to the hopeful section. I don’t think you should have to.
If you’re a survivor reading this, that number might land in your body in a way that is very specific and very hard. It might confirm something you’ve suspected — that what happened to you wasn’t some isolated incident, some random aberration, some case of one bad person. It might make the world feel less safe in a way that is exhausting, because you’ve already been doing so much work to feel safe in it.
If you’re an educator, an advocate, a researcher, someone who has spent years trying to shift culture — this might feel like evidence that it isn’t working. Like you’ve been pouring water into sand.
If you’re someone who loves people who have been harmed, this might activate a protectiveness that has nowhere to go.
All of that is legitimate. All of it deserves space before we do anything else with it.
There is something particularly cruel about this kind of harm — the way it is organized, the way it is communal, the way it inverts the language of belonging and brotherhood to mean something violent and predatory. It is not just the assault. It is the celebration of assault. The instruction manual. The 62 million people who were, at minimum, curious enough to look.
Every time something like this surfaces, there is a predictable deflection: but not all men are like this. And look, that is true. The majority of men will never be in an encrypted online channel swapping assault tactics. This is not a piece arguing otherwise.
But here’s what that argument does: it centers the feelings of men who are not doing this, at the expense of the people who are being harmed by men who are. It asks survivors and advocates to pause their disbelief, their grief, their rage, to reassure men who want to distance themselves from something they find uncomfortable.
The “not all men” framing misunderstands how harm works in a culture. You don’t need all men, or all of anyone, to create rape culture. You need enough men who cause harm, enough who look away, and systems — institutional and algorithmic — that let it continue.
That is not a thought experiment. That is what we are watching in real time.
When we say “not all men,” we’re often trying to say “I am not like that” or “but he’s not like that” — and that impulse is understandable. But the more useful question is: what am I doing about the men who are?
What conversation have you had with your friend who makes that kind of joke? What did you say when someone in your group chat forwarded something? What happened the last time you heard someone talk about a woman in a way that sounded a lot like dehumanization, dressed up as humor? “Not all men” asks for an exemption. What we actually need is participation in the slow, unglamorous work of norm-shifting.
Here is what I keep coming back to: the 62 million people who engaged with that channel are not the whole world. They are not even the whole internet. They are a concentration of something real and dangerous, but they exist within a much larger landscape that includes people doing something different.
There are researchers who spent months tracking that channel so it could be exposed. There are journalists who reported it at personal and professional risk. There are moderators and advocates pushing — imperfectly, slowly — for platform accountability. There are men who saw that kind of content and chose not to engage, not to share, and to understand it as something that required a response. There are young people in school programs who are asking sharper questions about consent than any generation before them.
None of this cancels the 62 million. But it does mean that the 62 million is not the final answer.
Hope, in this context, is not a feeling. It’s not the warm certainty that things will be fine. It’s a practice. A discipline of keeping your eyes on what is also true, so that harm doesn’t become the only data point you’re working with. It’s a refusal to let the worst of what people are capable of crowd out evidence of what else they’re capable of.
And practically, for most of us, hope lives in small actions. Not because small actions are always enough, but because small actions are what build cultures, slowly, from the inside out.
Most of the work of cultural change happens in moments that are invisible to everyone except the people present for them.
It happens when you name something you witnessed instead of pretending it’s normal. When you tell a friend you’re concerned about how he talked about that woman. When you ask a young person in your life what they think consent actually means, and you listen to what they say. When you support organizations doing this work with your attention, your money, your word-of-mouth. When you don’t look away from the hard thing, even when looking away would be so much easier.
It happens when survivors are believed. Not performatively, but actually, in the specific moments when it costs something to believe them.
It happens when the men in our lives who are not in that network decide that “not being like that” is not enough, and start being actually, actively, inconveniently different.
That is what hope looks like when you’re holding it alongside 62 million views. Not the absence of the harm. Not the pretense that we’re not in something serious. But the insistence that we are also in something worth fighting for, and that the fighting matters, even when the numbers are crushing.
This situation deserves our grief. The devastation is real, but so are the reasons to keep going.
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