They're Not Even Hiding It Anymore

It's not hidden anymore. It's being said out loud, written into law, and defended in courts. The only question left is whether you're willing to hear it.

This isn't a think piece about misogyny existing in the abstract.

It is a dispatch from the last twelve months of actual events, real laws, real courts, real women, and real consequences.

Iraq lowered the age of consent to nine.

American conservatives tweeted "your body, my choice."

A man in France justified raping an unconscious woman by saying he thought she was dead.

Women in Sudan are choosing to end their own lives rather than survive what is being done to them by paramilitaries.

If you still think "not all men" is the appropriate response to any of the above, this article is for you.

Iraq: A Parliament Voted to Make Nine-Year-Olds Marriageable

In 2024, Iraq's parliament moved to amend the country's Personal Status Law to permit girls as young as nine years old to be married.

Nine years old.

The previous minimum age was eighteen. A coalition of Islamist lawmakers pushed the amendment through, framing it in religious terms. Critics — including Iraqi women's rights groups, United Nations agencies, and UNICEF — warned it would institutionalize child marriage, expose girls to sexual violence within marriage, end their educations, and damage or kill them through early pregnancy.

These are not fringe concerns. Child marriage is already documented as a leading cause of maternal death in adolescent girls globally. A nine-year-old's body is not built for pregnancy. That is not ideology. That is physiology.

The international community issued statements. Women's organizations in Baghdad protested.

The men who passed the law called it a matter of religious freedom.

The United States: "Your Body, My Choice"

After Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the American South and Southeast in late 2024, a viral phenomenon emerged on social media.

Men — identifying as conservative, many with visible political affiliations — began posting the phrase "your body, my choice" in response to discussions about disaster relief and government intervention.

The phrase is a deliberate inversion of the reproductive rights slogan. It had appeared before, after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But this iteration made something explicit that was previously implied.

These men were not making a complex political argument about federal overreach. They were taunting women. Publicly. Using the language of reproductive autonomy to signal its opposite — that women's bodily autonomy is a joke, a slogan to be weaponized, a concept worthy of mockery.

And they did it openly. With their names attached. In full view of employers, families, and communities.

Because there were no consequences. There never are.

France: "I Thought She Was Dead"

The Gisele Pelicot case is one of the most significant criminal trials in French history.

For nearly a decade, Gisele Pelicot's husband, Dominique Pelicot, drugged her without her knowledge and invited men — strangers recruited online — to come to their home and rape her while she was unconscious. He filmed it. He organized it. He treated his wife's unconscious body as a resource he was sharing.

In 2024, fifty-one men stood trial. They came from all walks of life — retired workers, nurses, civil servants, a prison guard, a local politician. Not a profile of marginal, disturbed outsiders. A cross-section of ordinary French men.

The defenses offered in court were extraordinary.

Some said they didn't know she hadn't consented. Some said Dominique had told them she was a "consenting" participant in a fantasy. And one — one defendant stood in a French courtroom in 2024 and said he thought she might have been dead, and that this had not stopped him.

Read that again.

He believed she could be dead. He proceeded anyway. And he offered this as a defense — not as a confession of something monstrous, but as an explanation. A context. A reason, perhaps, to understand.

Sudan: Women Are Choosing Death

Since the Sudanese civil war escalated in April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces — a paramilitary group — have been documented using mass rape as a weapon of war in Darfur and Khartoum.

Human rights organizations and journalists have documented women and girls throwing themselves from buildings, consuming poison, or otherwise ending their lives when RSF fighters approached.

They made a calculation.

Death was preferable to what would happen to them if they survived the encounter.

These women have no names in most Western media. They appear in UN reports as statistics, in advocacy briefings as examples, in congressional testimonies as evidence. The number of women who have chosen to die rather than be raped in Sudan is not even reliably known, because the conflict zones are inaccessible and because no one in power has decided that counting them is urgent.

They died. The world was busy with other things.

What Most People Don't Know About This

The comfortable instinct is to treat each of these stories as separate.

Iraq is a religious extremism story. The tweets are a culture war story. France is a criminal case. Sudan is a conflict story.

Separate them and none of them feel systemic. They become isolated outrages, each one terrible in its specific context, each one requiring a specific response.

But here is what connects them: in every single one of these cases, the harm done to women was treated — by the men doing it, by the institutions watching it, by the societies surrounding it — as something other than harm.

In Iraq, it was framed as tradition.

In the United States, it was framed as humor.

In France, it was framed as misunderstanding.

In Sudan, it was not framed at all — because there was no frame large enough to make the world look.

The framing is not accidental. The framing is the mechanism. When you can reframe harm as custom, joke, confusion, or inconvenient geography, you do not have to stop it. The framing is what allows it to continue.

The Pattern Is Global. The Excuses Are Local.

Every culture has its version of the same logic.

In some places, it is religion. In others, it is tradition, military necessity, legal ambiguity, or irony. The logic always arrives at the same destination: the harm done to women is either justified, minimized, or invisible.

The man in France who thought Gisele Pelicot might be dead and proceeded anyway is not a monster from another world. He is a man who absorbed the message — available everywhere, in varying degrees of explicitness — that women's consent is not the essential thing. That the absence of resistance is sufficient. That a body without a voice is a body that can be used.

The lawmakers in Iraq who lowered the age of consent did not do so in isolation. They operate in a global environment in which reducing girls to their reproductive and sexual utility has ancient precedent and continuing institutional support.

The men tweeting "your body, my choice" learned that mockery of women's autonomy carries no cost. They were taught that by watching it go unpunished every time it happened before them.

None of this is exceptional. All of it is ordinary. That is the argument.

Why This Still Matters Today

Because the response is almost always the same, and the response is almost always wrong.

The response is: not all men.

Nobody said all men. What is being said is that enough men — enough to pass legislation, enough to fill fifty-one seats in a courtroom, enough to post a slogan designed to demean, enough to carry out mass sexual violence in a civil war — hate women with sufficient depth and consistency that it constitutes a pattern, a structure, a system.

The "not all men" response does not engage with the pattern. It removes the speaker from the conversation. It does not ask why this keeps happening. It asks only that the person raising the issue be more careful about feelings while raising it.

That is not a response to misogyny. That is misogyny's maintenance crew.

Gisele Pelicot asked that her trial be held publicly so that shame would be redistributed. She said — in one of the most quietly devastating statements of the year — that shame must change sides.

She was right. It hasn't yet. But she said it loudly enough that it cannot be unsaid. And that is where this starts — not with a policy paper, not with an international summit, but with someone in a courtroom refusing to be silent about what was done to her and insisting the world sit with the discomfort of what was revealed.