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By Jodi Bondi Norgaard
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Last month, CNN published an investigation exposing a global online ‘rape academy’ where men gather to swap advice and encourage one another to drug and assault their wives, film them while unconscious, and evade detection.
I follow women’s issues closely and I almost missed this story. That alone should tell us something about how little attention it’s receiving.
According to CNN’s reporting, one porn site, Motherless.com, hosts 20,000 videos of so-called “sleep content,” with descriptive tags such as #passedout and #eyecheck, with hundreds of thousands of views. In February of this year alone, the site received around 62 million visits.
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Let that sink in—62 million clicks in just one month.
Men logging on to learn how to drug and violate their wives, their partners, the women sleeping beside them, the people who trust them most. This is not a niche crime or a fringe corner of the internet. This is a global network that teaches men how to drug and rape women, and it is met with near silence.
Where is the outrage?
“Shame must change sides.” That was the demand made by Gisèle Pelicot during the 2024 trial in France that exposed what happened to her for almost a decade. Her husband, Dominique Pelicot drugged and raped her, along with 70 other men, more than 200 times. They knew she was unconscious, and they chose to take part anyway.
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We teach women and girls how to stay safe: watch your drinks, don’t walk alone at night, run with your phone, text when you get home, stay with a group, drop a pin on a date, have a code word if you are in trouble and so on.
To live this way is exhausting.
We spend far more time teaching women and girls how not to be harmed than we do teaching men and boys not to harm. We should be asking why so many men feel entitled to harm and how systems continue to enable them.
One in five women and a quarter of men in the United States will experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetime, and the overwhelming majority, 93.6 percent, of perpetrators are men. We have a male violence problem and it’s time to change the side of shame.
We live in a culture that allows men who have been credibly accused of sexual violence, or legally found liable for it, to hold the highest offices, win industry awards, and exercise enormous power. We permit it and make excuses that send a message about whose safety matters and whose does not.
This message travels into workplaces, schools, politics, relationships, online spaces where men reassure one another that they can get away with it because so many already have.
To the men who hear conversations like this and feel defensive: this is not about your feelings, it’s about responsibility. You have wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, women you love, and this is how they live. It’s time to be uncomfortable enough to act. Your discomfort is not the point, our safety is.
Saying “I’m not like that” is the bare minimum, the floor, not the ceiling. Women are being raped by their partners, and a website is teaching men how to do it. Tens of millions of men are engaging with that content. Silence is not neutral; it is part of the problem.
Women are not overreacting; we have never been overreacting. If anything, we have been under-reacting, because we have been taught to make our fear small and our outrage smaller. Conditioned to not make others uncomfortable and not complain. I am done with that, and you should be too.
We should all be outraged. “Shame must change sides.”
Jodi Bondi Norgaard is an entrepreneur, author, and gender-equity advocate. She is the creator of the award-winning Go! Go! Sports Girls brand and the author of More Than a Doll: How Creating a Sports Doll Turned into a Fight to End Gender Stereotypes. She has worked with the White House Gender Policy Council under the Biden administration and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
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