Hey Substack! Meet Samuel.

If you search “complicit” in the dictionary, it reads, “See Samuel.”

If you flip the page to “ally,” it reads: “Antonym: Samuel.”

Like many men on Substack this week, Samuel read the “Online Rape Academy” CNN story, which details the online community of men who practice and consume “sleep porn.”

These men drug women—usually their wives or girlfriends— then rape them, film it, and share the videos online with a community of like-minded friends. And it’s typically perpetrated by the husbands and boyfriends of the victims.

It’s a fucking horror.

Rape is always a horror. But this violation—of having one’s inert, naked body distributed across the internet for fun and profit by a trusted partner—is a new level of desecration.

Women are reeling.

Some men are too, good men like Qasim Rashid, Esq., Nick Paro, Dr. Eric Lullove, The Opinionated Ogre, Yanni Hamburger, and of course, my best friend Lawrence Winnerman, who have spoken out forcefully against these perpetrators and unequivocally in support of women. I’m grateful to know them.

But then there are men like Samuel.

Men who read this story and instead of speaking out, got defensive…

“You’re mistaken about the numbers,” they proclaim.

There are 20k+ “sleep porn” videos hosted on the website referenced in the CNN story. TWENTY THOUSAND VIDEOS of unconscious women being raped.

Forgive me if IDGAF whether it's 62M page views or 62M visits to the site with only a subset watching sleep porn.

These numbers are astronomical. And even one is too many.

Also, these numbers are for February only. One month—and it’s the shortest month!

If you read this story and your hot take is to focus on the data points instead of the rapes—your priorities are whacked.

“That is far less than the number of women in America, who are physically and sexually abusing children.”

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?

You’re coming at me—a woman, responding to the horrors of this story—with the audacity to claim that women are the abusers here??

SIT DOWN, Samuel.

“And it is time for women to set the record straight”

Oh, trust me Samuel, we will.

But I don’t think that phrase means what you seem to think it means.

“They are not all men. They are not me.”

Yes, they are.

They are 100% you, Samuel.

Men who rape women are the problem.

Men who apologize for them, who equivocate, who get defensive and blame women and demand accountability from us—even in the face of these horrors—are the problem, too.

Good men recognize this. They don't waste a single word on data points. They call for justice—for the women whose bodies were violated and distributed without consent, for accountability from the tech companies who hosted and profited from these videos, and for consequences for every man who participated.

We are counting on you. Not just the good men I named above, who have already shown up—but every man reading this.

Call it out. Name it. Demand it.

The women in those videos couldn't speak. They were unconscious.

We're speaking now. And we need you loud beside us.