it's fucked that more women than men uphold rapists and rape culture

If you’d like to read this essay and more, support this cause, and help me spread the word on feminist theory, dangerous people and the dynamics of sexual assault (knowledge I’ve gained through years of unpaid, mostly uncredited work), $7/monthly or $68/annually (a 20% discount) gets you access, and helps you support anti-rape, feminist writing and work.

I paywall my best essays (the ones with new material and research), for reasons I’ve explained in this essay, this one especially, also this one, and last but not least this one.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38)

About six years ago, my mentor told me that 95% of sexual assault survivor advocates quit within their first year.

Here’s what will get me cancelled: I hold women just as responsible for this as I do men. Actually, after a near-decade of working against rape in real life but especially, after seventeen months of writing about that online, I’ve only grown more frustrated with women.

Let me describe why: from what I’ve experienced, women (as a class) are more entitled and emotionally abusive. Too many of them use feminism as an excuse to gain power to abuse while holding themselves out to be the real victims. And if you’re wondering why I’m writing that, after years of hearing stories of men raping, that’s what this piece hopes to explain.

My mentor (an indigenous woman who worked against rape and supported survivors for thirty-three-plus years) agreed that women are less likely to believe other women and more likely to traumatize them further. We excitedly bonded over this, feeling sane and seen in someone else observing how women contribute more heavily to the trauma that rape victims endure. Since then, I’ve spoken to dozens of other advocates who have confirmed the same patterns.

“A male who has divested of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a worthy comrade in struggle, in no way a threat to feminism, whereas a female who remains wedded to sexist thinking and behavior infiltrating feminist movement is a dangerous threat.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

It’s women who are the strongest upholders of the patriarchy, the most virulent supporters of rapists, and the biggest impediment in stopping rape.

There was one woman who I met with that consults on stopping rape. She told me that there is a study that confirms that women are worse to survivors of rape. I’ve searched for months and haven’t been able to find it.

Here’s what frustrating: many women will fully disregard the experience I’m bringing to this topic. They’ll yell at me because it contradicts what feminist thought has has taught them, which is that women = good, men = evil. I’m adding that because I’m already in the defensive position writing about a topic that most so-called feminists avoid.

Here is some of what I have found on women supporting rapists:

The majority of rapists, by an enormous margin, are men. They are the rapists of women, men, and children. But you know, if it was as simple as getting them to stop, well, by screaming at them or consent education…they’ve have stopped already. We’ve had consent education for nearly forty years, and it’s failed.

Consider these two facts about the leaders of feminism. The godmother of first wave feminism, Susan B, Anthony, went out of her way to exclude Black folks, to say that white women needed the vote and needed it before Black people received it. She thought of Black men could vote, it would somehow diminish and detract from white women gaining the vote. This has shaped feminism since; that the most privileged women, the oppressors of women of less privilege, still operate under the belief that if someone else gains rights or is heard, it will take from them. It’s a strange scarcity mindset I’ve never understood.

Then, the godmother of second wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir, lost her teaching license for abusing and grooming teenage girl students. She further supported and advocated for the release of literal child sex abusers imprisoned in France. Guess it’s cause they had so much in common (can you hear the sarcasm?”.

Think of this: the woman who kicked off the most influential wave of feminism was herself an abuser who supported other abusers.

Consider this, also: in Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center, bell hooks wrote of how the middle class feminist movement hurts Black families (including Black mothers and children) by taking jobs from Black men and giving them to white women. Today, we can see that in the way that DEI initiatives benefited white women, desegregation took jobs from Black educators (with 38,000+ Black educators losing their jobs) so that even today we have fewer Black educators than we did pre Brown versus the Board of Education, and how white women casually pick out Black men as rapists only to have those Black men released in the era of DNA exonerations — something Angela Davis warned of in 1983, decades ago, in her book Women, Class & Race.

“Feminism” has falsely told us to #believewomen (rather than listen to all women), allowing for men to be falsely convicted. Look: most women tell the truth, but a small margin (2 - 4%) do not.

If the answer to solving rape was “feminism”, a popular movement for more than a hundred and fifty years (with a small break between world wars), rape would have also decreased. Certainly it’s benefited middle class women in gaining the vote, board seats, formal educations, and other largely financial, political concerns. It’s left non-privileged women far behind, allowing privileged ones to steal and use our labor sometimes to get ahead. Who do you think is watching the kids of middle class women while they climb the corporate ladder, while those middle class women complain that they work harder than their husbands because of “inequitable households”?

The failure of feminism to uplift all women is evident in the fact that rape is at best happening as frequently, and at worst, increasing. I’ve cited the stats dozens of times, so do the work and look it up on my substack. That means even as feminists too often back themselves on the back for making life better for women, they haven’t made the world more safe for women. They haven’t successfully addressed that which holds us back the most: the gender-based threat of violence.

One of my colleagues (a man who works on rape prevention), was surprised that I was tying anti-rape work to feminism. What feminism is doing is complaining about rape, without telling anyone how to materially change a world in which it flourishes. That’s how bad things are: that people in the anti-rape movement do not affiliate themselves with “feminism”.

Still, I have idiots, always women, who angrily tell me that the answer is feminism and misandry. That the answer is just to get mad at men, or to throw them in jail or whatever. That they won’t support a survivor advocate ‘cause that’s someone else’s job. The government, maybe, or some non profit.

Throwing rapists in jail? If you’ve read over what I posted above — it’s women on juries in criminal trials that are siding with rapists. And bear in mind: I’m talking about fucking California, and a part of California that is famous for being one of the most politically progressive parts of the world.

It’s liberal and leftist women who are doing this, too.

This is rank hypocrisy from women.

It’s always the same story: anything but women taking personal responsibility.

The law isn’t set up to throw every rapist in jail. “The law” is not the band-aid to all social problems that lay people think it to be. The ignorance around what it can and can’t do is appalling, and especially when opinions on it are touted out as fact.

In the U.S., our legal system already accepts that one out ten convicted criminals is been falsely convicted. That includes rapists being falsely convicted. I shared several stories of that in the linked essay, and this is especially true because white women in the U.S. misidentify Black men as their rapists.

It is near-impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Cases take years to make it through the system. Many, many survivors do not want to give those years and potentially increase their trauma ‘cause of that. There are changes we can make to the law; the one I’d advocate for is changing defamation law so that women can come forward (there have been some changes in California already).

But creating carve-outs in defamation law still puts the onus on us to take action in dealing with the accused rapists once they are outed.

Look, I have far, far more experience in thinking, reading, supporting survivors, working with communities and organizations to noticeably reduce rape/sexual misconduct, and taking action against rape than 99.9% of “women”.

Yet, so many completely ignorant women will come into comments to scream at me about how they, magically, know exactly what needs to be done without any experience of dealing with rape beyond their own. I’m telling you that as someone who studied the law, has an advanced degree in it, has helped people with it for near a decade.

I hate being in this defensive position. I hate the fact that I broadly have men respect my intelligence and knowledge. I hate the fact that the people who refuse to respect it, the ones I have to defend it to are always women. I hate that it’s women who always, each and every time, are the ones who never fail to tell me I’m stupider than them.

Woman-splaining, that should be a term we all use, too.

A few years ago, I asked a few friends why people who supported rapists were making a profit. There’s a whole industry of coaches, restorative justice practitioners, and the like that profit from rapists. There are women doing this work, too. And why I, as a survivor advocate, struggled.

The answer was that was the way it is. Middle class folks will not pay for survivor advocacy. They will not support someone who supports survivors, some of the most vulnerable people in society. Thus, you cannot make a living off of helping survivors. Even non-profits that do so often ask for volunteers with minimal training to do this work.

So people will continue to support rapists, because you can make more than a living off of it. And so, rapists are heard over rape victims. And so, rape continues.

It frustrates me that women will not put money into changing this. That they expect people to do the work for them but not make a living. So now, do you understand why survivor advocate quit? Especially given that it’s emotionally taxing, triggering work and it’s often unpaid?

And until women put their dollars and energy behind those of us who work to change it, there will be more people supporting rapists than survivors. The law, the non-profit industrial complex, none of these things can do as much as activists and advocates with their boots on the ground, in the trenches, helping people with unsullied motives.

This is life; people cannot continue working for a cause if they are starving and homeless while doing so.

One of the patterns I see here is this: that something like 90% of white women feminists only support white feminists. They only pay for subscribers to white women. They’ll pay someone who plagiarizes me before they’ll ever pay me. When I call this out, I see white women who only pay and restack and support other white women liking my essay. I guess they think they’ve above it, that I’m talking about other white women, not them, that they are the exception.

So I’ve started blocking women when I catch this. When they are only paying Celeste Davis, and the other plagiarizers and the women who support them. I see most so-called feminists contributing to these problems of elitism in feminist thought.

I find it fascinating: most of my supporters are outside of the feminist circles, don’t particularly read about feminism outside of my writing.

When I first began to write about feminism, I was excited about the possibility of connecting with other feminist writers. I’d read, restack, pay for subscriptions, all the things that a good community member should do. All the feminists, no matter which color, ignored me. They’d never restack my essays, they rarely said thank you. I gave up after months of this. And I’ve seen them support, do substack lives, etc., with newbies without real life feminist experience (which I have) or fewer subscribers — so it’s not a matter of proving myself worthy. I’ve emailed other people, even after warm introductions. It’s always the same.

It’s just mean girl, you are not cool enough to sit with us behavior.

Feminism reminds me of high school. Well, except unlike them, the people at the high school I went to were pretty nice and were not racist.

I know arguing or pointing it out to these women will do no good. I know the chances of these women become abusive to me in retaliation are higher than that of a man doing the same. I’ve seen it too many times not to believe this.

I know that while these women demands men change, they refuse to acknowledge responsibility or culpability for their bad behaviors. I know that women are usually more defensive when asked to change than men, because of societal messaging around women’s moral goodness.

I know internet feminism empowers this behavior by telling women they do no wrong but are wronged and are oppressed by men. Internet feminism is making women toxic. Just as the manosphere expands toxic masculinity. Internet feminism is spiraling into the sort of victim-mindset misandry that makes it the counterpoint to the manosphere.

That they will refuse to see that they are the problem. And white women are particularly frustrating to me. Far more so than white men…because so many lean into the stereotype that they are oppressed, that it’s only men who perpetuate white supremacy (it’s not), that gender oppression matters over other types (class, xenophobia, trans/homophobia, race, et al).

I do not understand how anyone who calls themselves a feminist cannot equally see and prioritize other types of oppression.

It’s some white women in particular who are racist. There are those white women who have bought into the patriarchal white supremacist idea that they’re in more danger than other women because they’re the most desirable and attractive and so they expect women like to bend over backwards without reciprocity to make the world safer for them. There are those white women who believe that women of color are competition for them, the ones who are particularly hateful when a woman of color gets more male attention (something Zuri Stevens, ayan artan, and Matunda Nishobora have all written about).

And there are those women (of all races) who gatekeep because they want to remain the only woman in a room, they see women unlike themselves as the greatest threat.

And the same much smaller group of white women who do support my writing also equally support other feminists of color. I could count those women on my fingers and toes. It’s a tiny percentage, though, of the total number of white women who are feminists. 5%? 10%?

It’s been a real disappointment.

It’s a really sad ratio. It’s a very bitter pill to swallow. Humans, we don’t like injustice. We are hardwired to hate unfairness. It’s that very tendency that makes us hate rape, the injustice of it.

And yet, I’m expected to cope with abuse personally by women when it’s perpetuated by them, and continue to help women. They scream at me when I do, and they scream at me if I want to quit. When I want to quit, it’s that I’m not a real feminist, that I need to do more, that they are becoming emotionally abusive, pushing boundaries, and the like so that they can gaslight me into having the exact approach they do, and they want me to put that into the world so they can do nothing but benefit from my work.

If you asked me to chose between a man, woman, and a bear — I’d pick the bear and the man over the woman. It’s been my experience that women are the most constantly abusive gender. Sure, a man’s abuse is more severe (rape, physical violence), but a woman’s is more constant, more psychological warfare, more gaslighting that makes you (me) feel like I’m going crazy.

I’d pick getting stabbed a single time with a butcher knife by a man than the death by a thousand infected paper cuts that femininity choses. I’d prefer for the suffering to be over quicker.

I sort of disagree with that Charles Blow statement. Women are far more racist toward women for the reasons I stated above.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a dozen-plus times I’ve experienced racism from white women but I struggle to think of similar from white men.

This is no small part of why women hate rape victims. They treat rape as a signal of attractiveness, and hold victims of rape in contempt as a way to denigrate their attractiveness. It’s the sickest sort of intrasexual competition for male attention that contributes to this behavior.

It’s why so many mothers (aging, insecure) do not believe their daughters are being molested, abused, raped. Their ego gets in the way. It’s a oft-told story I’ve heard dozens of times in real life, and now from my readers again.

And it’s why white women so often do not believe women of color when we are raped. It’s why white slave-owning women would further disrespect Black slave women when those slaves were raped by their white husbands. And before and after slavery, that was applied to colonized women the world over. Its echoes remain with us today.

I don’t have the power to change this, to make women less racist and more fair. I have a greater chance of stopping men from raping than I do stopping women from being emotionally abusive. I focus on what I can change.

It’s the nature of emotional abuse, the incurability of narcissism and the underlying causes of emotional abuse. While Nathalie Martinek PhD and I do not agree on all the things either writes or advocates for, I do agree with her on the toxicity and narcissism of women. I do agree that we need to talk about this. I think it’s important for feminists to recognize and call out what women are doing that’s harming women (men, children, everyone!) as part of feminist thought.

And Nathalie’s been far kinder to me than 98% of so-called feminists on this platform.

We don’t have to be in agreement to be respectful. Yet, feminism increasingly demands that by disrespecting, trolling, and bullying those women who don’t feed the internet feminist’s egotistical self-aggrandizement.

I’ve never seriously considering quitting advocacy work in the 8+ years before I joined Substack. It’s been so disheartening to deal with women on this platform that I have this year.

And think about that. I’m someone who does the work.

Actually works to make women’s lives better. Actually has received a lot of positive feedback from survivors I’ve helped. Actually can, unlike all the internet feminist self-aggrandizement, point to examples of times when I helped a woman narrowly escape being assaulted by a serial rapist who was setting her up. Actually has gotten a serial rapist kicked out of a community or organization where he would have easily targeted more women.

Why am I considering stopping all this? Because women refuse to pay me for the work so I go hungry and sleep on park benches. Because that’s no condition for working under. Because I have in my lifetime made excellent money but chose to help women instead. I’m tired of feeling under-appreciated. I read women complaining about feeling bad about their weight online. I’ve continued to work even when I was underweight and eating barely a meal a day. Try that for “oppression”.

And also, quit because some women who like to abuse me online but do jack shit in real life? Some women who equate screaming and complaining as more powerful and impactful than the type of real life activism and advocacy I’ve done?

I hate begging for paid subscriptions. I hate that at least once a week, some woman will show up in my comments to tell me how I changed her life, how I changed her views on feminism or my writing has helped her cope with her own assault…all while she cannot pay for a subscription, all while I was sleeping on park benches in cold foggy weather. I still bounce around and live out of two bags: a backpack and a duffle bag.

Most of my life, my (male) friends have scolded me for putting the needs of others above my own. I always thought kindness would bring back kindness. It doesn’t. It just means an escalation of entitlement when it comes to self-identified “feminists”.

Amazing, isn’t it? I mean, if I’ve actually changed your mind or life, then fucking pay me, bitch. Show me a fraction of the respect I’ve earned. Your words mean nothing to me, they do nothing for me.

Feminists online complain about men’s entitlement to feminine labor. All the while not realizing that women are entitled to mine. It’s wild to think of how not a single of the 100+ survivors I’ve helped nor all of those readers whose lives I’ve apparently changed bothers to actually fucking pay me so I can merely survive.

Learned helplessness? Entitlement? Comforting through pleasant fictions and fake spirituality to avoid difficult topics, and so never seeing the reality of the world. All of the above, I think.

I suspect it’s because women have options to make money off of men (marriage, sex work, protective birth families), still have the option of becoming dependent, that some that that personal irresponsibility and head-in-the-sand behavior comes in. The majority of women really do not care about other women, that “feminism” is just a ploy so they can gain power over men.

This is evidenced by the current trending of “matriarchy”. Literally, the opposite of patriarchy. And no, I don’t care how you redefined it, that is what it means, and it’s a lie when “matriarches” say it’s for equality instead of an attempt to gain power. That lie lies in the literal translation of the word. It is an attempt to privilege women over men. It’s a power grab by the women who push, who present it as a pleasant, idealized fiction to the ones who buy into it, pay for their self-published books (since no real publisher would).

I disbelieve the so-called matriarch’s lies of harkening back to idealized agricultural societies. We cannot replicate those conditions in modern, post-industrial societies. Unless, of course, one gives up their creature comforts and go back to living in a less technologically “advanced” society, because that’s the reality of real-life modern-day matriarchal societies.

This is to me the most maddening, infuriating thing about women, broadly and generally speaking, as a class: the idea that someone else is coming to save them, that they do not have to do the work, the constant leaning on someone else (eg., a husband’s wallet and “protection”, a survivor advocate who they will not provide reciprocally to), the dishonesty about craving power and oppressing others.

I mean, at least men are honest when they want power. It’s the lie, the manipulation, and fakeness that women who crave power that adds a layer of harm. It’s a form of gaslighting and psychological warfare, of weaponized innocence to cover devious intention.

And even when they try, as I have tried, as a class, more women are mean to them and get their way than support them. Too many of you won’t even support or allow someone else, because too many of you would rather be right and rather pump up and inflate your own ego with your rightness. You’d rather spend your time trying to get a sexual assault survivor advocate to argue with you so you can be right than simply allowing her to continue to work in silence.

Even women’s compliments are often double-edged, with an insult tempered by a praise. They complain about men gaslighting them, then turn around and gaslight women.

That is called negging. It is a technique made famous by “pick up artists”, those predecessor to the incels and manosphere — men who are trying to seduce insecure women with low esteem.

And here’s another thing. Remember that Louis Theroux documentary from a few months ago? Inside the Manosphere. In it, at least one manosphere influencer said he was in it for the money.

So men will be pay to be defended. But women? They’re not willing to fund feminism. I remember reading Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating, one of second wave feminism’s earliest texts. She wished that middle class women would. I think it’s sad that over fifty years later, all we’ve done is continued and worsen things.

In The Will to Change, bell hooks wrote that

“By claiming that they wanted the power men had, man-hating feminists…covertly proclaimed that they too wanted to be rewarded for being out of touch with their feelings, for being unable to love.”

Originally, bell hooks added a parenthetical to that quote: “(who were by no means the majority)”. That book was published over twenty years ago. Things have changed. The internet and social media have allowed the most hate-filled women to take over and become the loudest voices in feminism, suppressing through silencing and bullying voices and work like mine.

What is called feminism is misandry. It’s misogyny toward any women who aren’t exactly like them, who do not conform to their vision of the abusive, aggressive version of the feminine gender. It is now about supporting and upholding women’s hatreds, women’s abusiveness, women’s contempt, egging on women in their anger and rage (which they take out on vulnerable women instead of using it to fight the patriarchy) — women claiming the right to behave like the worst of men.

I hate this direction. I do not want to be part of it.

Many, many women of that type brag about their “emotional intelligence” but then use that “intelligence” to be manipulative and gaslight other women. Just as with male narcissists, to pump up their own self-esteem by knocking down other women.

Especially a woman like me, who women see as vulnerable and someone they can bully, from their position of relative privilege.

Again, how’s that any different than what so-called feminists complain about from men?

I’m going to point out something that both readers and those who despise me frequently tell me: that it makes sense that women hate men, or people of color hate white people. That it makes sense that people hate their oppressor, the people who abuse them, the ones who extract their labor. That I’m wrong when I write that we cannot hate others.

By that logic, I should despise women. I should hate them. I should become a misogynist. After all, it’s women who oppress me, women who have emotionally abused me, women who steal my work to profit off of it, women who have used me to support them through their rape and dropped me like a burning hot potato once they’ve draining me dry, women who read and learn from my work for free, women who use me for emotional and other types of work, women who verbally abuse and curse me out here, and women who don’t support my work but will manipulate me to extract more of it.

I’m not sure why so many women think that I, who have observed, educated on, and written about the dynamics of abusers, is so stupid as to fall for their abusive patterns.

Certainly my self confidence is not ailing enough for them to be successful in their attempts to break my spirit.

Frankly, I’m insulted that so many women think I’m so stupid as to fall for their gaslighting and manipulation. Probably says more about their intelligence and emotional weakness than it does mine.

Now, when I called this out clearly, a woman showed up in my comments to tell me that I’m supposed to accept it when women are verbally and emotionally abusive. You see, women are “oppressed”. And since men aren’t (apparently, gender-based oppression is the only kind that certain women will acknowledge; because race, class, xenophobia oppression do not exist? as if men aren’t oppressed by those, too?), it is my role to hate men, to advocate against them, and to look the other way when women continue to abuse me.

You know, do the work for her, without reciprocity or support, and she freely abuses me to extract more.

You know, there are a few moments in life that break you. That one? Where a woman told me to put up with abuse and continue advocating for the benefit of the class that abuses me?

That was one of my breaking moments.

It’s something women have been telling me since I’ve been writing here, but that one time? That made it as clear as day to me that this is what feminism is becoming, that this is the majority of the movement now.

2.2 million likes for talking about condoning intimate partner violence from a woman toward a man. This is what people think feminism is, this is why they’re leaving it.

The idea that women are okay with a woman being abused should be a breaking point.

Because I don’t care who the abuser is: abuse is abuse.

I think about all the times I do what’s told: block these women.

And how, magically, they’ll pay more than a month’s subscription on Kofi to send me messages demanding I unblock them. Sometimes dozens. Or sometimes, they’ll set up a second or third or even fourth account to keep commenting to me that I’m a liar (that they’re not bullying me because of course they’re far too good a person to do that!) and need to unblock them. They’ll play innocent, “but I’m NeW hErE”. They’ll send me paragraph after paragraph of text.

This is the same type of harassment and boundary-pushing so-called feminists would be up in arms about men doing. It’s the type of thing both the Bitchy History and the Letters from a Young Matriarchy have used to pick up hundreds of paying subscribers from, pointing out men harassing them online.

But crickets and barely any attention when a woman calls out women doing the same, of course.

This is the same pattern I’ve observed in anti-rape work. It’s the same sort of boundary pushing and psychological warfare that rapists play. The majority of people who psychologically torment survivors of the rapes by men are women. The reason women emotionally abuse survivors is so that they can protect the rapists.

I had really, truly hoped it was a phenomenon that was only true of San Francisco.

Now I see that women in the United States, in India, in Nigeria, in Australia, in France and Great Britain are all fall into the same patterns.

And I want to say something to the so-called feminist writers of Substack in India. As a class, I’ve noticed a lot of you posted straight up misinformation and lies. In two days, I caught five of you doing this. I (gently! gently!) then corrected you and cited my sources for the corrections. Only one took down the lying post.

And I see a lot of you plagiarizing material, and not citing, crediting, or paying for any real feminist’s work. All while claiming you are a “feminist”, and that men are the problem.

How is it “feminist” to steal the carefully researched, rooted in real life advocacy work of another woman?

As an Indian-American, I worry about the increase of anti-Indian racism. A lot which calls Indians “grifters”. And yet, when I see the misinformation and plagiarizing…well, I see why those people call you (and me, because of the actions of many of you) grifters, too. I don’t know how to reconcile this — it’s unfair that all of us get tarred by the same brush, but it’s also unfair that so many of you act without integrity or morals. I don’t know how to work through that it’s many individuals doing this, and now we all suffer because of that.

I remember how many ethnically Indian people came out in support of Malavika, who was accused of plagiarism.

I read a social media post in which a Mexican person asked how it would be if they took a job working remotely for an Indian company with Indians. The response universally was no if it was Indians in India, who would be racist and not promote him, and yes if it was Indian-Americans (or other Westerns) because we’re better-mannered and nicer to all people. I mean, I get why these generalizations are harmful…and I also get why the stereotypes exist. I grew up in a family that didn’t teach me about caste until I was twelve, and that was only because I asked when I was twelve (I read about it first). My dad would tell people he was the lowest caste (he’s not) just to figure out if they were casteist. I didn’t grow up with class, ethnic, and caste privilege in the way that most of the women in India did. Yet, you’d think those women, writing in English, were suffering more than, say, the lower caste women who they/their parents employ as underpaid, overworked servants. It’s why they, like white feminists, fight to keep feminism a strict gender binary, so that it only serves them. It’s called savarna feminism. As with white feminism in the U.S., it’s by far the majority of feminism on the internet from India (though, I’d like to believe that there are real feminists in real life doing good work in India that are not these grifters).

And so, if you wonder why I don’t support “feminists” in India, there you go. I’m not going to support a class who (1) steals my work, (2) lies, (3) doesn’t support me back, (4) isn’t intersectional. Of my paid subscribers, less than 3% are of Indian ethnicity (two women, two men). I did have one pay for one month so I’d give her a free interview. I mean, I don’t mind giving an interview to help a student…I do mind feeling lied to for her to have gotten it out of me.

This is also why I see “feminism” as a power-grab. Indian women supported an Indian-American woman who plagiarized. And look at the post I linked: even more people will support a white woman calling out a plagiarist but will ignore when a woman of color calls out her plagiarists. Numerous times. Still, I see women pay for subscriptions to plagiarizers and uplift their “work” while reading mine for free.

In this essay, I wrote about the woman who set up a long-term plan to convince me to commit suicide because she was friends with the man who raped me. She messaged my friends that they should unfriend me because I was a liar and couldn’t be trusted. It was three male friends who sent me screenshots of her messages.

It was a woman who said that I was a “piece of meat”.

It was a woman who said that “as a survivor, you’re not worth the trouble”.

It was a woman who was raped by the same man who wrote a Facebook post calling me “destructive and vengeful”, since she had “resolved” the rape by staying friends with him and not publicly calling him as I did.

I’m faced with this reality all the time. As a sexual assault survivor advocate who did not quit, the single universal pattern I’ve observed in rape is that survivors are confused and hurt by the women who are hurting them post-assault. I emphasis this (again) to serve as a warning to women who have not learned the dynamics of rape.

So now, imagine this: you are a survivor advocate. You’re trying to help women. And you keep hearing, over and over, about women being emotionally abusive those survivors. Imagine what a head trip it becomes to continue to try to help women, to have to constantly compartmentalize the women you are helping versus the women who are hurting them. Imagine how crazy-making that split is.

Now let’s add another layer to that: imagine that it’s women who are meanest to you as a survivor advocate writing about the dynamics of rape. I get trolled by women on a weekly basis. Right now “weekly” because I’ve stopped doing the things that allowed my Substack to pick up free subscribers at the rapid clip I used to. I blocked free subscribers who were reading everything I wrote while supporting white feminists. I stopped posting notes. I paywalled essays. Because before, when I was picking up 500 to 600 new subscribers per day, I was getting trolled daily.

There’s a lot of discourse amongst the feminists who, like bell hooks, want to bring up how men and boys are raised. We want to reform that as an actually more effective way to stop rape. Of course, there are those women who hate on us for this, hating not being the center of attention and the perpetual “oppressed” victim..but I digress.

Yes, there are problems with the way men and boys are raised, but there are also some things that better about the way men are brought up than women (broadly speaking). For one, men are taught that no one is coming to save them. Men are taught that they have to be self-sufficient, and to take financial personal responsibility. This is why men understand the importance of material support. Men form “old boys clubs” to support one another, while too many women tear each other apart, or gatekeep other women out once their the sole woman at the table with a group of powerful men.

It’s why, disproportionately, it’s men who support my work. It’s why I suspect women just feel entitled to taking from it without paying.

Men taught to be cold (broadly), rational, logical beings. Now, being “cold” hurts men. But let’s me delve a little deeper into the “rational, logical being”.

When I would begin dating someone new, I’d run stories about them passed both male and female friends. It was always my male friends who called out things as “lines”, as gaslighting, love-bombing, and the like. My female (and trans and non-binary friends) would all think those things were so sweet, so romantic! It was my male friends who saved me from long-term emotionally abusive relationships. It was my female (and more) friends that would have head-long allowed me to enter such a relationship, blinded by that powerful chemical concoction that hits us in early dating.

This is a really frustrating reality: that women broadly accept boundary pushing and love-bombing, then become abusive themselves because those patterns are normalized to them. Someone like me, calling attention to this pattern, you’re labelled a misogynist or victim-blamer. That I cannot point out the pattern so it can be worked through without being “cancelled”. I cannot realistically tell women to do more to avoid rapists without being “cancelled” for “victim-blaming”.

It’s ridiculous, really. I mean, yes rapists are 100% to blame and responsible for rape. And it’s also true we can do more to spot and stop them. We’re not as helpless to rapists as feminism acts like we are.

Now, perhaps you’ve noticed something: that if you are not one of a handful of people is paying for a subscription and I’ve developed a sort of online relationship with, I ignore you when you compliment me. This is why: people who pay compliments without material support and developing a relationship…I don’t trust it or them. Someone ignoring what you’ve asked for and trying to force onto you something you’ve explicitly said you do not want (I’ve locked comments for a reason) — that’s a red flag.

This week, I read and rewrote an old post of mine. It was from before I began to write about feminism, back from when I wrote about literature. I started that post by talking about how much I loved women, as a lesbian, as a class, as someone who has spent near a decade helping them.

I’ve been writing about feminism online for seventeen months. And it made me nearly cry to think of how I do no longer love women. That because of the way women have treated me. I’m afraid of them now. I don’t trust women any longer.

When I wrote about abusive women, I received more messages from lesbians abused by past partners and daughters abused by mothers than I had received before (and I’d received several before). Remember: the data shows that the abuser of a child is most likely to be that child’s mother. Remember: lesbian relationships have a horrifically high rate of abuse.

And I received more angry comments from heteronormative misandrists explaining why women who are abusive don’t “count”, that it’s only men who count as abusers. I received about six of these comments/notes in twelve hours — even though my comments section are locked (so imagine how many more I’d have received if they were open).

I knew this already; that later commenter simply solidified what women were already telling me: that women will support other women who abuse. Stop screaming about men doing this until you ask women to stop.

And every rapist who I’ve ever known about that has a girlfriend/wife: that girlfriend/wife will defend him to the death, defend him while he sits back in silence, will go after his victims ‘cause they both know that he will look worse if he does it but she won’t. And she seems to feel so special for being chosen by him.

The irony of this doesn’t escape me. It’s ridiculous that “feminism” means only male abusers are called out while condoning abuse by women.

I can see why younger men are supporting the manosphere, which calls this pattern out. I can see why they do not want to be “feminists” under this new double-standard, where it’s only men’s abuses that count as abuse. I get why if a young man, a teenager, sees women proudly proclaiming misandry, man-hating, and the like, and seeks refuge in a movement that’s the opposite. It’s time feminists realized how they’re pumping up younger women to lean into this, and driving people of all genders away from “feminism”. I can understand their frustration because as a rape survivor advocate, it frustrates me too.

It makes me want to disavow the feminist label, because I want no part of any movement that makes any excuses for any abusers, too. I write about the abuses of men because men are more likely to be abusers, statistically, and because the victims I’ve helped are abused by men. This relates to systemic privilege and power, not to something intrinsically and innately wrong with men, as immature women who want to justify their own hatred make it out to be. I am not doing this work so women can manipulate it into saying they are better than men.

When I write about my ambivalence about the label, hoards of white women love to show up in my comments to tell me how “feminists” have done so much for me. That I should grateful.

I’ve done more for women than they ever will in their entire lives. They ought to be fucking grateful to me.

Here’s what I’ve observed, offline and online. That when I tell a man what I do, that sort of personal responsibility, real action oriented way that men are raised goes further in helping take practical action. It’s men who ask how they can help stop rape. It’s men who listen to me when I speak. It’s men who will significantly take action. I’ve had far more women tell me warning other women of known serial rapists is too hard for them to do, because they don’t like thinking/talking about rape, because they want to ignore rape. Far more men who will not only do that, but will check in about doing it right.

It’s (broadly) women who think they don’t need to, or that they’re experts because they’ve been assaulted or have tHoUgHtS on it. It’s mostly women who are the meanest to me about my education and experience, either making up for a lack of confidence on lacking those or believing that thoughts and feelings outweigh knowledge. It’s women who disrespect me for being a logical, rational-type person.

You know how women complain about being called “too emotional”? Well, I’ve had more than one tell me I’m too rational. One of the reasons I don’t have much of an issue with men respecting my intelligence and do with women is that I tend toward logic and rationality. This makes those women who hate me hate me more.

To be clear, there are many women who are experts on rape. There are many who dedicate their lives to fighting it, as advocates, in non-profits, in communities. These are the not those women. And yes, this is outside of a handful of women I’ve met here. There are a handful that are quite nice.

And still, when shit hits the fan, such as following my own rape…it wasn’t women who supported me.

As I wrote earlier, it was women who left me crippled with the worse anxiety I’ve ever had in my life…so bad that my only escape was to flee to a foreign country on a super-budget airline and unfriend people on social media, while I crawled under a twin-sized bed in an artist residency and cried. That is the lowest point I’ve ever hit in my life.

I will never allow anyone to get me that low again.

It was my male friends who called out the women.

It was only a single male friend of mine who joined me in unfriending people who supported my rapist. He also moved out of town because of it. We’re both bay area natives, by the way…driven out of our hometown by awful expat rape apologists.

All of my life, I’ve helped girls then women. I’ve cooked for them. I’ve hosted bridal showers. I’m always the one who has planned dinners and social events in my friend groups. I gave my law school best friend gifts and dinners when her father was dying. I’ve supported literally hundreds of survivors who have told me that my help was better than anyone else’s. I’ve been told I’m too empathetic too many times to count, by people of all genders.

All to watch all of these women treat me worse than men ever do. I mean, I guess…it’s sort of like, they treat women who help them badly, because in helping them…it’s sort of like…I’ve made myself appear submissive or a pushover to them. Since they’d never help anyone but themselves.

These tendencies of women are why that type of woman also ends up in abusive relationships (attraction to controlling, dominating personalities; disrespect and abuse of kind, giving ones so as to pump up their own egos), “mental load”, and “inequitable households”. It’s as if these women are attracted to men who are like themselves, but then blame all men and patriarchy for this.

It’s telling, if you ask me, that men who subscribe are far, far more likely to do what I ask in exchange for writing: pay for a subscription. Less than 20% of my total readers are men, but close to 50% of my paid subscribers are. From June 2025 through January 2026 — a whooping six months — I only had male founding subscribers. Three of men; zero women. Over 80% of my readers are women, but they’re probably less than 50% of my paying subscribers (the gap is made up of agender, trans, non-binary readers, who, like men, are far more supportive).

Men would be a lot more supportive of other feminist writers if they didn’t lean into the gender binary of men = evil, women = angelic, does no harm. I think they also would if those writers do what I do, which is use statements like “some white women” and “rapists” instead of making generalizations about all men and all women. Lastly and most of all, men would would if women didn’t use feminism as an excuse for airing personal grievances, petty, middle class concerns, and issues that really only matter on social media and pop culture , but instead centered it on big, global issues that affect almost all women.

And damn straight I’m proud of this. Because if we “feminists” are to make a difference in the material conditions of women and girls, then we have to appeal to men. We have to get them to work with us to stop rape, domestic violence, poverty, and the like.

So for all those who plagiarize and those who mocked me for calling it out: since my writing is original, I will go further than you. I can and do work offline, and you plagiarizers are stuck in the virtual world and whatever scraps you can pull from internet fame.

bell hooks wrote that her books barely sold for decades in the introduction to Feminism is for Everybody. It was near the end of her life that she became famous and respected. It was a decade after her death before her books became best-sellers; as Communion made it to the NYT bestseller’s list this year.

And it seems that what Andrea Dworkin thought of herself is coming true. She’s much more accepted, rediscovered, and vindicated today, just as she apparently thought would happen.

But still, how sad that these brilliant women weren’t more widely supported by women during their lifetimes.

There’s the problem: women will make billionaires of influencers, but they’re not spending even 5% or 10% of what they do (as a class) on make up (the Kardashians, the Jenners, Justin Bieber’s wife, some other Instagram and TikTok influencers) and shapewear (Kardashians again) on supporting feminism. Women complain that feminism is falling behind, but their material support goes elsewhere. So of course it’ll fall. And it’s not because women do not have the funds. Women control the majority of spending in the U.S. — over 80% of consumer spending is at the discretion of women.

I find it even more ironic that writing about feminism and stopping rape has restored my faith in men, and made me trust men more than women over the past seventeen months. My instinctive reaction to women, especially online is fear these days.

I haven’t had a single male troll in a year now; since September 2025. About a year ago, I shared a single quote that attracted male trolls. That’s it. Just that once thing (and it was a lot of them).

Compare that to what I’ve said earlier about women trolls and tormentors.

Who apparently justify this — I now know — as “it’s okay when women do it because patriarchy! We’re allowed to violate your boundaries and abuse you because we’re women! It’s only abuse when it’s men. It really doesn’t count when I do it. I’m a victim-perfect snowflake of an angel.” 🙄

Do these women not realize that this is the very mindset of a rapist? That they’re different, that it doesn’t count as rape when they force a women to have “non consensual sex”? That they’re the exception, too?

The abuse simply manifests differently when it’s women versus men, mostly for systemic reasons. Emotional for women.

So, I started this essay by writing that most survivor advocates quit.

Given my experiences as one, I understand why. If I ever quit, I blame the entitlement and abusiveness of women for driving me to that point.

It never fails to amaze me: that women will happily support women who write literal lies about rape to the point where they will attempt to silence one who writes carefully researched truths of it. That women buy into the lies about rape if you slap on the label “feminist”.

Like women who write that rapists are incredibly rare (they’re not), that immigrant or Black men are dangerous (not more so than white ones), that women aren’t abusive. I see these notes and posts get thousands of likes, and I never correct them, I simply write a piece to correct it — and it will not get nearly as much traction as a flattering lie.

And this: for every feminist asking men to change or declaring men hopelessly evil, I suggest you ask and consider what you think of women, too. No gender has a monopoly on good or evil. I suggest you start thinking about how women have perpetuated just as much harm as men. It’s only that men have the systemic privilege to get away with it. It’s also that feminism ignores abuse when it’s by women.

And if you don’t? Then you are a self-aggrandizing hypocrite who has no right to call herself a feminist.