In March 2026, CNN published the findings of a months-long investigation. Journalists uncovered a hidden ecosystem — websites, forums, and encrypted groups where sexual violence against women is documented, sold, and rewarded with social validation. One pornographic platform hosts over 20,000 videos in the so-called „sleep” category — recordings of women filmed without their knowledge while unconscious or drugged. In February 2026, the site recorded over 62 million visits. One platform. One month.
A related Telegram group brought together nearly a thousand men who openly exchanged tips: how to drug a partner, how to leave no traces, where to buy substances, how to film in the dark. CNN journalists entered the group under a cover identity. They were contacted by men who shared links to recordings of their sleeping wives. CNN called it a „global rape academy.” Not metaphorically.
According to the World Health Organization, one in three women worldwide — an estimated 840 million — has experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner or other perpetrator over the course of their lifetime. This figure has not changed significantly since 2000. In 2023 alone, 316 million women and girls experienced such violence. Progress in reducing these numbers stands at a mere 0.2% per year.
The scale of violence against women is so vast that statistically, every one of us has a perpetrator somewhere in her social circle. What makes a man — not a fairy-tale monster, but a man with a profile photo, a job, often children too — join a group where he learns to rape a sleeping woman? That question is not rhetorical. That question is foundational.
Part I: Why „boys” and not men
Before we get to causes, it’s worth pausing on the word itself. I use it deliberately. A boy — in the psychological sense — is someone who has not gone through emotional maturation. He has not integrated his vulnerability with his strength. He has not worked through his relationship with his mother. He has not learned to identify or regulate his emotions. He lives in a world where his worth depends on how much he is seen, admired, tolerated, and serviced by others — especially women.
A man — in the same sense — is someone who has done the work. Who has faced his shadow and not run from it. Who has access to his full emotional spectrum, not just the feelings permitted by masculine codes. Who can offer a partner a healthy, symmetrical partnership — not because he’s flawless, but because he doesn’t need her to manage him. Not because he doesn’t make mistakes, but because he can take responsibility for them.
A boy looks for a mother in every woman he’s with. And when a woman fails to give him what he expects — when she sets a limit, refuses, leaves, doesn’t fill the role he assigned her — a boy feels betrayed. Abandoned. And angry to his core. Often so deeply angry that he can’t even see it in himself. That anger has a name: the unhealed mother wound.
Part II: Where hatred of women comes from
The mother wound
Depth psychology has been saying this for decades. Carl Jung wrote about the „inner mother” — a built-in template of femininity that forms in childhood and shapes how a man perceives women for the rest of his life. If the mother was cold, emotionally unavailable, controlling, or — paradoxically — too idealized — the man enters adulthood carrying a wound he often can’t even name.
That wound turns into an unconscious project: find a woman who will fill what the mother didn’t give. A woman who will offer unconditional love, fix any situation, endure everything, always be available, never leave, never disappoint, never tire. A mother-woman. When a real woman — with her own needs, limits, moods, and life — fails to fulfill that fantasy, the man builds within himself a sense of betrayal far deeper than any surface-level conflict. And it is there, in that gap between fantasy and reality, that hidden anger is born.
Hidden, because the boy learned not to show it. Because his mother, his father, school, culture all taught him that certain emotions are not to be had. So the anger seeps inward. It becomes resentment. It becomes contempt. It becomes violence — sometimes emotional, sometimes financial, sometimes sexual and physical.
Toxic masculinity and the unintegrated feminine
Every human being — regardless of gender — carries within them both what culture calls „masculine” and what it calls „feminine”: strength and vulnerability, agency and receptivity, rationality and emotion. Jung called the feminine aspect in a man’s psyche the Anima.
When a man is raised in a system that tells him vulnerability is weakness, that crying is shameful, that asking for help is failure — he suppresses his Anima. Pushed into the unconscious, it doesn’t disappear. It takes on a life of its own. It projects onto real women — they become carriers of everything the man cannot accept in himself. Carriers of the „virus of femininity.”
This is where that specific pattern comes from: a man who desperately desires and needs women while simultaneously despising them. Who needs her validation but punishes her for that need. Who wants to possess and control her, because he cannot accept that she — the embodiment of his Anima — is free and independent.
Toxic masculinity is the system that sustains and rewards this mechanism. It tells men that domination is dignity. That woman is a resource, a trophy, or a threat. That female sexuality is something to be controlled — and if a man fails to do so, he is weak. Online „academies” don’t create this belief from scratch. They amplify it, give it structure, and build community around it.
Social proof and algorithmic radicalization
Men who hate women rarely live in isolation. They live in ecosystems — groups, forums, channels — where hatred is the language of community. Where every video, every joke, every comment builds the sense that „this is just how it is” — that women are enemies, that they deserve what happens to them, that violence is a form of justice, or at minimum a normal part of life.
Algorithms amplify what engages. Anger engages more than calm. Contempt engages more than respect. Content that presents women as objects, threats, or victims generates reach — because that’s how the optimization system is built.
Dominique P. — a French man sentenced in 2024 for the serial rape of his own wife, to which he recruited other men via the internet — used a platform where men sought each other out, and it was not a criminal environment in any traditional sense. There were teachers, drivers, nurses. Men with profile photos and everyday lives.
Part III: What we as women can do
Violence against women is the perpetrator’s choice. Always. Without exception.
At the same time: we live in this world, not another. And our internal patterns — how we were raised, what we were taught about love, sacrifice, the value of being chosen — can lead us to unconsciously enter dynamics that destroy us. Not because we are weak. Because the patterns are old and deeply rooted. Working on yourself is not an admission of guilt. It is the reclaiming of agency.
Stop wanting to be chosen. Start choosing
The „pick me” culture — of a woman who does everything to be chosen by a man, to prove she is enough — is one of the most destructive patterns I know. It rests on the deep belief that a woman’s worth is assigned from the outside. That without male approval, you are incomplete.
Conscious choosing looks different. You ask not „does he want me?” but „do I want him?” Not „am I enough for him?” but „is he enough for me?” Not „how do I keep from losing him?” but „do I even want to keep him?” That’s not arrogance. That’s subjectivity.
There is one pattern that illustrates the trap of „wanting to be chosen” particularly painfully — and that is the role of the other woman. Being a mistress is often experienced as proof of one’s own exceptionalism. After all, he’s risking something for me. He’s choosing me. His wife isn’t giving him something I can. I’m more attractive, more exciting, more free. I’m the one who matters more. Bullshit.
First: the other woman has no idea what version of this man his wife is dealing with. She only sees him in the context of the affair — where he always has time, is always charming, always says yes. She doesn’t see him tired, frustrated, fixated on his own problems, incapable of intimacy when it stops being convenient for him. The wife has the full picture. The other woman has a carefully curated fragment.
Second — and this is the most important part: he doesn’t choose the other woman. He almost always stays with his wife. The decision about who you build a life with, who you share daily existence with, who you introduce to your family, whose name is on the joint account — that is a choice. The other woman is entertainment. A moment of escape. A source of his own validation — proof that he is still attractive and desired.
The rivalry between wife and other woman is a fight over the resources of a man who benefits from that fight. Instead of competing, it’s worth stopping and soberly assessing the value of the person in question. Not through the lens of how much he desires you, but through the lens of how he behaves. What his patterns are. What his actions say, not his words. This is where references become invaluable — conversations with other women who know him, were with him, experienced him. Women have information about men. Instead of hiding that knowledge, we can share it. That’s not gossip. That’s mutual protection.
Don’t take on the role of mother, healer, savior
Women are socialized to care. To fix. To see potential where others see red flags. „He’s like this because he had a difficult childhood.” „He needs someone who believes in him.” „I’ll change him.”
You won’t. Not because you’re not enough — because it’s not your job. Your love is not therapy. Your body is not a reward for someone’s conversion. Your presence is not a cure for someone else’s unhealed mother wound.
A man who needs you to play the role of his mother is not ready for partnership. You can miss him. You can understand his pain. You can feel compassion for him. And you can choose not to choose him.
Trust what you see — not what you’ve imagined
Red flags are not tests to pass. They are information. When someone shows contempt during the first conflict — that’s information. When they minimize your emotions — that’s information. When they don’t respect a refusal — that’s information. When they make sexist „jokes” — that’s information.
Illusion, imagination, potential — that is not the person in front of you. That is a projection. And falling in love with a projection instead of a person is one of the most direct routes to trauma bonding. Trauma bonding — the attachment that forms in the cycle of idealization, devaluation, and return — is purely a neurochemical mechanism, not evidence of love. Intensity is not depth. Pain is not proof of commitment. Chaos is not passion.
Don’t accept any form of violence — starting from the smallest
A sexist joke is not „just a joke.” It is a probing of limits. A check to see how much you’ll tolerate. A normalization. When you ignore it, laugh along, tell yourself you’re overreacting — you’re communicating that this limit does not exist.
Speaking up about what is not okay is uncomfortable. Especially in a group. Especially when he’s smiling and everyone is laughing. But momentary discomfort is a smaller cost than normalizing symbolic violence.
Build sisterhood instead of competing
One of the most effective strategies of patriarchy is making women compete against each other for resources — male attention, social approval, status. A woman fighting other women has no time or space to build alliances with them.
Sisterhood is not a slogan. It’s a practice. It’s choosing trust over jealousy. Telling a friend the truth when you can see she’s in a destructive relationship — even when she doesn’t want to hear it. Believing women who speak about the violence they’ve experienced. Not judging their choices when they leave. Not judging their choices when they stay.
It also means talking. About what we see. About how we were socialized. About what hurts us. Naming things together, out loud, is one of the most powerful forms of resistance.
Take care of your safety — concretely, every day
Trust your intuition — evolution has been refining it for millions of years. When you feel something — discomfort, unease, a sudden sense of threat — that’s information, not an overreaction. Women are socialized to ignore that information, to rationalize: „he’s a nice guy,” „I’m probably overreacting,” „I don’t want to be rude.”
Tell people where you are. Set up signals with your friends. Don’t be ashamed to cut a date short, leave a party, block someone without explanation. Your safety matters more than someone else’s comfort.
Instead of a conclusion
The CNN investigation made visible what many of us felt but couldn’t see this clearly: that there exists an organized, networked, global infrastructure of violence against women. That this is not the pathology of isolated individuals. That it is a scalable phenomenon, algorithmically amplified, financially profitable.
Boys who hate women exist. But you don’t have to fix them. You don’t have to save them. You don’t have to prove your worth in the face of their contempt. You have the right to choose. You have the right to say no. You have the right to leave. You have the right to be angry. Hell, you have the right to be furious. You have the right to expect more.
And a mature man — one who has done the work — won’t argue with any of that. He’ll be grateful for it.
If this article mattered to you — share it with a woman who might need it. That, too, is building sisterhood.
