not all men?

you're worried about the wrong thing

i need you to sit down and read this carefully because i am not okay and i refuse to pretend that i am. i am so angry that i could not stick to my initial plan of not writing about this, how am i supposed to stay silent about this?

let me break down exactly what happened because some of you are clearly confused about what we’re dealing with here.

he met this girl twice, twice, and she refused to talk to him, so what did he do? this “normal reasonable human being”, he paid boys on her street to block bikes from entering her side of the road, just so she would be stranded, just so she would have no choice but to stand there and he would have the opportunity to force himself into her space, she still refused to give him her number.

now at this point any person with a functional brain and basic human decency walks away, accepts rejection, moves on, because that’s what normal people do when someone doesn’t want them, innit?

but this piece of sh!t, this predator, what did he do?

he tracked down her address, found out exactly where she lived, and when she opened her door he attacked her, tied her down, gagged her mouth, used a sharp object on her to make her bleed so it would look like her first time, raped her, and then had the audacity, the absolute nerve, to send her a long disgusting message to her tiktok account afterwards and you want to tell me that this is evil? i am sure the devil himself is surprised.

and now he’s walking around saying nothing will happen to him because his father has money, really?

let that sink in, let that actually sit in your chest for a moment, he planned this, this was not a moment of weakness or confusion or misunderstanding, this was premeditated, calculated, step by step assault on a woman who simply did not want to talk to him, and he feels untouchable.

and you know what’s driving me crazy right now, the fact that somewhere, right now, as you’re reading this, some idiot is preparing to open their mouth or type some nonsense to explain why this was actually the girl’s fault, why she should have been more careful, why she shouldn’t have opened her door, why something she did or didn’t do led to this.

if that is you, if that is genuinely where your brain went when you read this, may the same thing happen to you or someone you love and let’s see how quickly you find something to blame them for.

i am so tired. i am so tired of this conversation, so tired of explaining why rape is wrong, so tired of watching women get torn apart by the same society that failed to protect them, so tired of men who have never had to think twice about opening their own front door acting like this is a complicated issue with multiple sides.

because while you’re standing there “not all men-ing” up and down, acting like pointing out male violence is somehow an attack on your character, women are out here building entire systems just to survive contact with men.

they’re walking around with tasers and pepper sprays and switch blades, sending live locations to friends before getting into ubers, wearing fake engagement rings because a ring gets more respect than a simple no, making fake phone calls so they look occupied, avoiding visiting men they know, giving fake phone numbers to men they don’t want to encourage, not staying home alone when artisans come to fix things, covering up to avoid being seen as an invitation, giving fake addresses to people they just met, never going anywhere alone at night, learning self defense, doing double and triple background checks before entering relationships, being careful not to be too assertive or too cold or too anything because any reaction could be the wrong one.

all of this, every single item on that list, is something women are doing right now, today, not because they read it in a safety manual but because life taught them they had to, because they know someone it happened to or it happened to them.

and what are you doing while all of this is happening?

making excuses, being an apologist, finding the technicality that lets you stay comfortable, protecting your image as a good man instead of actually doing anything to address the problem.

there is this tweet i saw that stopped me immediately, oluwatoyin ọmọ ńlá @oluwatoyinTis wrote on x:

“Yesterday we literally had to reassure this woman that she was safe before she could enter the bus cos we were all men. The craziest thing is a woman refused to enter before her too because of the same reason. Do you people know how crazy and sad that is?”

do you understand what that means? do you actually understand what it takes for a woman to stand at a bus stop and look at a vehicle full of men and feel like she cannot get in, the kind of experiences, the kind of accumulated fear, the kind of world you have to live in for that to be your reality, and then another woman, watching the same scene, having the same hesitation, because she knows, she just knows.

that is not paranoia or anything like that, that is pure pattern recognition, that is women processing information they have been given over and over and over again by a world that keeps showing them what men are capable of.

and here is something i need parents specifically to hear:

you understand that your daughter can be a victim of sexual assault, you lock her in at night, you track her phone, you interrogate her male friends, you lecture her about what to wear and where to go and who to trust, you raise her with the constant awareness that the world wants to harm her

but your son? somehow your son is exempt from suspicion, somehow you have decided without evidence that he will never be a predator, you assume goodness in him that you don’t even assume in yourself, you skip every hard conversation, avoid every uncomfortable question, never once sit him down and say there are things you must never do to a woman.

and then you act shocked, genuinely shocked, when he becomes the exact thing you never prepared him not to be.

the predator has a mother, the rapist has a father, the man sending disgusting messages after assaulting a woman was somebody’s child who was never taught that a woman’s no is a complete sentence, that her disinterest is not a challenge to overcome, that her body does not belong to him because he wants it to.

left to me, we are somehow raising boys to become dangers and then acting confused about where the danger is coming from.

and the last thing i want to say is this,

you are so quick, embarrassingly quick, to call out feminists for turning everything into a gender war, you share those posts, you roll your eyes, you write your paragraphs about how not everything is about gender and women need to stop making it us versus them.

but when something like this happens, when a woman is stalked and attacked and violated in her own home by a man who couldn’t handle rejection, you are silent, completely silent, no posts, no paragraphs, no energy whatsoever.

what do you call that? what do you call the selective outrage that shows up for everything except the actual violence? what do you call caring more about the reputation of men as a group than about the woman who had to be tied down in her own house?

you are not neutral, silence in moments like this is not neutrality, it is a choice, it is a decision to protect your comfort over her dignity and if that is the choice you’re making then own it, because we see it.

i am angry and i don’t want to calm down, i don’t want to be measured or balanced or fair to all sides because there are no sides here, there is a woman who was hunted and violated and a man who thinks money will save him and a society that will find a way to make it her fault anyway.

i am angry and you should be too, and if you’re not, if you read all of this and you still feel nothing, if you’re already preparing your “but” and your “not all men” and your “we need more information”, then you are part of the problem. and i need you to sit with that.

and while you’re sitting with it, i need you to know that this is not one isolated incident, this is not one bad man who got out of hand, this is a pattern and it is happening everywhere and it happened again and i need you to hear about it too.

two young women in lagos were told there was a modeling opportunity, a legitimate job, the kind of thing you’d be excited about, the kind of thing you’d tell your friends, they showed up because why wouldn’t they, why should showing up to a job opportunity be a death sentence.

what was waiting for them instead was a man named shawny wright who locked them inside, tied them up, threatened them with a knife, sexually assaulted them repeatedly, seized their phones, accessed their private accounts, stole intimate images, got their family contact details, and then threatened to expose them publicly if they spoke out, think about that.

do you understand what that is, do you understand the layers of violation in that, the physical assault, the digital exploitation, the blackmail, the threat hanging over them that if they dared to speak, if they dared to report, their most private moments would be weaponized against them.

he didn’t just assault them, he built a cage around them after, made sure that even after he was gone they would still be trapped, still be afraid, still be deciding between their dignity and their safety.

this is what we’re dealing with, this is the world women are navigating every single day, where a job opportunity is a trap, where asking for help afterwards comes with the threat of further humiliation, where the assault is just the beginning of the harm.

these women reported it, they were brave enough to report it despite everything he threatened them with, and now there is a petition demanding that the nigerian police force, the lagos state commissioner of police, the lagos state ministry of justice, and international human rights organizations take this seriously, investigate properly, protect the survivors from retaliation, preserve the digital evidence, and prosecute everyone responsible.

the petition is here

sign it, share it, send it to everyone you know, post it everywhere, make noise about it because the only thing that protects abusers is silence and i refuse to be silent and i need you to refuse too

sign the petition, share this post, say their names, demand justice, because silence protects abusers and we are done being silent.