One of the hardest things I've had to come to terms with is the realization that some men genuinely despise women.
Not merely disagree with us. Not simply misunderstand us. But believe women are inherently less intelligent, less worthy, and less deserving of autonomy, dignity, and rights.
I recently encountered a man online suggesting that men could collectively put women in cages if they wanted to.
He was responding to another man who claimed that women wouldn't even have rights if it weren't for men.
The extraordinary arrogance of such statements is difficult to comprehend. Equally disturbing was the number of likes and approving reactions from friends and acquaintances. It becomes harder to dismiss such contempt as an isolated attitude when others so readily appear to endorse it.
Underlying these statements is the presumption that women are defenseless, incapable, and entirely dependent upon male permission to remain free.
More fundamentally, they reveal a profound misunderstanding of the nature of rights.
Women's Rights Are Not Granted by Men
They are inherent, endowed by our Creator, and not legitimately subject to the arbitrary will of men or governments.
Long before the establishment of the United States, Indigenous societies on this continent maintained diverse traditions of governance, including traditions that recognized significant roles and authority for women. The historical relationship between women and authority is far more complex than the claim that men simply granted or allowed women their freedoms.
Throughout recorded history, women have been denied the legal recognition and exercise of rights that were never morally theirs to lose. Generations of women, often alongside principled men, struggled to reclaim those freedoms and establish their protection under law.
There is an extraordinary difference between possessing a right and being permitted to exercise it.
There is another assumption underlying these declarations that deserves examination: the idea that men are the natural protectors and providers, while women are inherently dependent upon them.
Women's Rights Are Not Granted by Men
Men did not bestow human dignity or natural rights upon women. Those rights do not originate in the permission of men.
They are inherent, endowed by our Creator, and not legitimately subject to the arbitrary will of men or governments.
We suffer from a remarkable degree of historical amnesia when we assume that the social arrangements familiar to us today have always existed.
Long before the establishment of the United States, Indigenous societies on this continent maintained diverse traditions of governance, including systems in which women exercised significant political and social authority.
Among the Haudenosaunee, for example, Clan Mothers held the authority to select and remove chiefs. Women's leadership was not an exception to the system. It was an established part of its structure.
Consider ancient Egypt.
Thousands of years ago, Egyptian women could own property, inherit wealth, enter contracts, initiate divorce, and represent themselves in legal proceedings.
Women also ruled.
Hatshepsut governed Egypt as pharaoh for approximately two decades. Yet after her death, her monuments were defaced, her statues destroyed, and her name deliberately erased from important historical records.
Centuries later, archaeologists recovered fragments of her monuments and reconstructed much of the history that had been obscured.
Even our understanding of religious history deserves closer examination.
Mary Magdalene, recognized in the biblical accounts as a devoted disciple and witness to the Resurrection, was for centuries portrayed in Western Christianity as a repentant prostitute.
Yet the biblical texts do not identify her as one.
That reputation developed through later interpretations that conflated her with other women.
And the rediscovery of the Gospel of Mary in 1896 revealed another early Christian tradition in which Mary is portrayed as a significant spiritual figure whose authority is challenged by male disciples.
The text does not establish every historical detail of Mary's life. But it demonstrates that the stories preserved and popularized over centuries do not represent the entirety of early Christian thought.
How much of our understanding of history has been shaped by what survived, what was destroyed, what was excluded, and whose accounts were considered worthy of preservation?
Manuscripts have been lost. Libraries have been destroyed. Historical figures have been deliberately erased. And generations of scholars have worked to reconstruct histories that were incomplete, neglected, or misunderstood.
We should be extraordinarily cautious about mistaking the history we inherited for the entirety of the history that existed.
None of this means that every ancient society honored women equally, or that women everywhere once enjoyed the same rights and authority.
History is considerably more complex than that.
But that is precisely the point.
The relationship between women, governance, property, spiritual leadership, and authority has varied enormously across civilizations and centuries.
The notion that men have always been the rightful rulers and women their natural dependents is not a universal historical truth.
Throughout recorded history, women have been denied the legal recognition and exercise of rights that were never morally theirs to lose. Generations of women, often alongside principled men, struggled to reclaim those freedoms and establish their protection under law.
There is an extraordinary difference between possessing a right and being permitted to exercise it.
And there is another assumption underlying these declarations that deserves examination: the idea that men are the natural protectors and providers, while women are inherently dependent upon them.
Women Are Protectors, Too
Protection and provision are not exclusively masculine capacities.
Women protect. Women provide. Women defend their families, sustain communities, confront danger, and make extraordinary sacrifices for the people entrusted to their care.
Throughout the natural world, we see mothers fiercely defending their young against predators and threats. The capacity for ferocious protection is hardly foreign to the female sex.
Yet women have often been socialized to be agreeable, accommodating, and nonconfrontational, even in circumstances where their boundaries and safety are threatened.
There is nothing inherently virtuous about docility when it permits exploitation.
Women are capable of extraordinary tenderness and extraordinary ferocity. These qualities are not contradictions.
Consider what happened in Nagpur, India, in August 2004.
For years, women in the community of Kasturba Nagar reported living under the terror of Akku Yadav, a man repeatedly accused of rape, intimidation, extortion, and other violent crimes.
Residents described repeated failures by authorities to protect them. Complaints were made. Arrests occurred. Yet the intimidation and alleged violence continued.
On August 13, 2004, a crowd widely reported to include approximately 200 women descended upon the courthouse where Yadav was being held.
He was killed inside the courtroom.
The circumstances were extraordinary, and the violence was horrifying.
But perhaps the most disturbing question is what had happened in the years preceding that day.
What becomes of a community when women repeatedly seek protection through lawful institutions, only to find themselves exposed to the same threats again and again?
What happens when those entrusted with maintaining order fail to preserve it?
And what does this history reveal about the assumption that women are naturally passive, defenseless, or incapable of collective resistance?
The women of Kasturba Nagar were not simply waiting for men to rescue them. They had sought protection, organized, documented complaints, and attempted to make their circumstances known.
Their experience deserves serious examination.
When lawful protection fails, the instinct to protect does not disappear. It can become desperate, collective, and devastating.
That does not make killing a substitute for justice. Nor does it diminish the importance of due process, lawful restraint, or accountability.
But neither should our condemnation of vigilante violence prevent us from examining the institutional failures and prolonged suffering that preceded it.
A functioning legal system must protect the vulnerable, investigate allegations, and hold offenders accountable through lawful processes. When those responsibilities are neglected, the consequences can extend far beyond the original wrongdoing.
The Akku Yadav case is not merely a story about women becoming violent.
It is a disturbing account of what can happen when people lose confidence that the institutions entrusted with their protection will protect them.
And it challenges the fiction that women are inherently docile.
A woman can be nurturing without being submissive. Peaceful without being defenseless. Loving without being willing to tolerate abuse.
When the safety of her children, her family, or her own life is threatened, she has every reason to develop the knowledge, courage, and means to protect them.
That does not mean seeking confrontation or responding recklessly. Genuine protection requires discernment, preparation, restraint, and the ability to act decisively when necessary and lawful.
But it does mean rejecting the fiction that women exist at the mercy of men.
Men can be wonderful protectors and providers. So can women. In healthy relationships and communities, protection is a shared responsibility, not a justification for one sex to exercise authority over the other.
The capacity to nurture life does not diminish our capacity to defend it. Sometimes it is precisely what makes us fierce.
I've always been willing to say not all men, because it is true. I've known wonderful men throughout my life.
But that truth does not diminish the extraordinary number of women who have experienced abuse, coercion, violence, and degradation at the hands of men.
Nor does it erase the proportion of negative experiences I've encountered myself.
Even now, I find myself blocking men who begin interactions politely, only to become sexually inappropriate, disrespectful, or increasingly uncomfortable to engage with. It happens with a frequency I find disturbing.
Both realities exist.
And this is where discernment becomes essential.
How Algorithms Amplify the Gender War
Discernment requires recognizing the difference between what an algorithm repeatedly shows us, what our beliefs predispose us to see, and what is actually happening in the world.
The gender war itself is a remarkably effective form of divide and conquer.
Men and women who could be building healthy relationships, families, communities, and economic stability are instead encouraged to view one another as adversaries.
The less critically we examine these narratives, the easier we are to divide.
And while we argue over which sex is the problem, the platforms promoting the hostility profit from our attention.
It takes very little discernment to participate in a gender war. It takes considerably more to recognize when you're being recruited into one.
But there is another layer to this.
Recognizing Contempt Beneath Apparent Respect
Recognizing that an algorithm rewards hostility does not mean the hostility itself is imaginary.
Some of the men expressing contempt toward women online genuinely believe what they are saying. Some carry those beliefs into their relationships, their families, and their treatment of women in everyday life.
And while the internet can distort our perception of how widespread these attitudes are, it can also expose beliefs that might otherwise remain concealed.
That is what I find particularly disturbing.
The greatest difficulty is not always recognizing overt hostility. It is recognizing contempt when it is concealed beneath friendliness, affection, or apparent respect.
A woman surrounded by honorable men, a supportive family, and a trustworthy community may experience life very differently from a woman searching for partnership, protection, or belonging.
The process of finding good people can itself expose us to danger.
Sometimes the men who harbor the greatest disrespect are not the ones we would initially suspect.
A man can send affectionate messages, offer friendship, and present himself as trustworthy while privately regarding a woman as an object for his own gratification or the approval of other men.
And that raises an uncomfortable question.
When a man seeks the approval of other men, what happens to the humanity of the woman whose trust he has gained?
For some men, respect appears to be a performance maintained only until they obtain what they want.
The degradation may begin immediately, or it may emerge slowly, once emotional, financial, or sexual vulnerability has been established.
Sometimes we recognize it early enough to remove ourselves. Sometimes we don't.
How do we distinguish the men who genuinely honor women from those who secretly despise us?
Developing Discernment Through Experience
At forty-two, I am considerably more capable of recognizing patterns than I was when I was younger.
I listen differently. I notice inconsistencies sooner. I pay closer attention to how people speak about others when those people aren't present. I observe how they respond to boundaries, disagreement, and disappointment.
But I also recognize how naive I've been.
How often have I interpreted attention as care, friendliness as respect, or familiarity as evidence of good intentions?
When I hear women in the entertainment industry describe the exploitation and degradation they've experienced, I haven't always fully resonated with their accounts.
Much of my own life has been spent among genuinely good people. I've been fortunate in that respect.
But proximity to goodness can make it difficult to comprehend the depth of another person's contempt.
And perhaps that is part of what I'm learning now.
I've experienced relatively little violence throughout my life, and I recognize how fortunate that is. But I cannot say I was always shielded from it.
Some of my experiences offer striking contrasts between protection and exploitation, and they have led me to consider something important about discernment.
We cannot always recognize what we have not yet learned to understand.
We cannot reliably identify exploitation when we lack the knowledge, experience, or context to recognize what is happening.
And being surrounded by good people does not necessarily prepare us to recognize those who are not.
Protection, awareness, and discernment are different things.
Someone may offer us protection without being able to guarantee our safety. We may possess autonomy without yet having developed the knowledge necessary to exercise it with confidence and informed judgment.
And importantly, even well-developed discernment cannot guarantee protection from someone determined to deceive or harm us.
This distinction becomes particularly important when considering children and young adults, whose vulnerability is too often mistaken for consent, compliance, or willingness.
The responsibility for exploitation belongs to the person who exploits. But the responsibility to cultivate discernment, establish protective boundaries, and safeguard the vulnerable belongs to all of us.
Protection, Intimacy, and Responsibility
At forty-two, I am considerably more capable of recognizing patterns than I was when I was younger.
I listen differently. I notice inconsistencies sooner. I pay closer attention to how people speak about others when those people aren't present. I observe how they respond to boundaries, disagreement, and disappointment.
But I also recognize how naive I've been.
How often have I interpreted attention as care, friendliness as respect, or familiarity as evidence of good intentions?
When I hear women in the entertainment industry describe the exploitation and degradation they've experienced, I haven't always fully resonated with their accounts.
Much of my own life has been spent among genuinely good people. I've been fortunate in that respect.
But proximity to goodness can make it difficult to comprehend the depth of another person's contempt.
And perhaps that is part of what I'm learning now.
We cannot always recognize what we have not yet learned to understand.
We cannot reliably identify exploitation when we lack the knowledge, experience, or context to recognize what is happening.
And being surrounded by good people does not necessarily prepare us to recognize those who are not.
Protection, awareness, and discernment are different things.
Someone may offer us protection without being able to guarantee our safety. We may possess autonomy without yet having developed the knowledge necessary to exercise it with confidence and informed judgment.
And importantly, even well-developed discernment cannot guarantee protection from someone determined to deceive or harm us.
This distinction becomes particularly important when considering children and young adults, whose vulnerability may be exploited and whose compliance or uncertainty must never be mistaken for meaningful consent.
Those who exploit others are accountable for the harm they cause. The responsibility to cultivate discernment, establish protective boundaries, and safeguard the vulnerable belongs to all of us.
