How Cancel Culture is Critical to Feminism

Who gets cancelled, why, and how complaints of cancel culture are used to derail feminism

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Movie still from David Lowery’s 2017 A Ghost Story

Have you heard the story of Margaret “Peggy” Eaton? Prior to her 1829 marriage to then Senator John Eaton, she worked in a bar and fraternized with men who lived in boarding houses. Quelle horreur! She also spoke French, played the piano, was known for her beauty, and for having many suitors. She married John nine months after her first husband passed, a scandal for Victorians. In other words, she was an outspoken, relatively educated, unconventional woman.

When her husband was appointed Secretary of War under Andrew Jackson, then the vice president’s wife, Floride Calhoun, a person as old-fashioned as her name, lead a group of other cabinet wives to ostracize the Calhouns because Margaret’s past and her outspoken, flirty behavior was considered amoral for the time. The vice president, John C. Calhoun, supported his wife. This was called the Petticoat Affair, and it led Andrew Jackson to withdraw support for John Calhoun, effectively ending chances for Calhoun to become president. Because Martin Van Buren supported Jackson through the affair, Jackson instead recommended him.

In a nutshell: way back in the 1830s, long before the internet, cancelling Margaret Eaton lead John Calhoun to ruining his chances at the US presidency. So Martin Van Buren became president instead, which perhaps changed the course of U.S. history.

Though if you’re any sort of scholar of U.S. history, you might be gnashing your teeth at my gross oversimplification. Which is what cries of cancel culture and online cancellation usually are: gross oversimplifications of complex situations.

Progressives often argue cancel culture isn’t real. Conservatives argue it’s illegitimate and to be feared, that too many “good men” fall victim to it. The reality lies somewhere in between. It’s real, but each side of the argument uses its excesses and failures to illustrate their point. And it’s too often used to silence legitimate abuses and concerns.

What is Cancel Culture?

In this section, I often use ‘he’ pronouns and male identity for trangressors (abusers, assaulter), and she/her/woman for victim/survivors. This is for ease of readability, and because of the situations of assault and abuse I’m familiar with, and appear in our culture and that I cite throughout follow this binary. However, women can be abusive also, men can abused, and non-binary folks can be either/or also.

When I hear “cancel culture”, what comes to my mind are survivors of sexual violence using accusations to speak up and out someone who’s dangerous. After all, this was the original use of the term, cancel, used mostly by Black women on Twitter for calling out problematic men That, combined with Taruna Burke’s coining “me too”, were the beginnings of #metoo as a movement.

That’s what cancelling someone was originally about. It was about people with less power and privilege, people who were oppressed or suffer a grievous injustice and had few options for recourse, trying to speak up and call attention and ask the world do something about the injustice, to correct it.

However, cancellation isn’t a realistic way to seek justice or ask for accountability. Without structures of enforcement, it cannot deliver those. It can serve a different purpose. But too often, it harms the very people who are seeking justice, the victims and the oppressed.

In this section, I’ll show you what I mean by breaking down the process of cancellation and use examples to illustrate how it succeeds and fails.

1. The accusation, which accusers are believed, and who believes them. Once there’s an accusation and it’s somehow published¹, some people just know that the accusation is true, and some will never believe it. This usually relates back to a few factors: to the popularity/reputation of the accused and accuser, the listener, eg, if they’re liberal or conservative), and if you’re inclined to believing/disbelieving a story because of your personal prejudices and experiences.

   For example, remember that time a radio DJ grabbed Taylor Swift’s butt? The public generally sided with Swift. At that time (2017), Swift was known well enough to still be human, not quite the mega-success that makes her unrelated today. So the DJ was fired, he sued, she countersued, she won a symbolic dollar. Calling her “silence breaker” is nice, but it’s much easier for Swift to name a complete unknown and get him cancelled (from his job) than it is most women to break the silence on their abuse.

   Now what if the accuser of ass-grabbing was an anonymous women without Swift’s fame? Then what if she was, say, a Black anonymous women, and she was accusing a white man? Each of those factors adds to the math of what Deborah Tuerkheimer calls credibility, that is, who is likely to be believed when making an accusation².

   Factors such as socio-economics/class, race, national origins, sex, gender, and sexuality all factor into who is believed and who isn’t, into what I simplified as popularity/reputation. An example of this is the Stanford rape case, between Chantel Miller and Brock Turner. Chantel is half-white, half-East Asian woman who’s family is from Palo Alto, California (aka, upper middle or upper class). Let’s be more honest, if Turner had done the exact same thing he did to Miller to a Latina janitor, none of us would have heard about it because the news wouldn’t report on it³. It’s easier for most people to care that someone like Miller was assaulted than it to care about the women who work as janitors getting raped on the job. People are more unfortunately incentivized to protest and cancel Turner than to do the same for the boss that raped the janitor.

   And the reputation of the person accused matters too. Turner was a scholarship kid, white but lower class. Now, what if the accused was Black? Things get far worse. To that, you can look to the Central Park Five: five very young Black men who were falsely accused of raping a white woman in New York’s central park, convicted, and later exonerated. You could look the other examples and evidence for this phenomenon that I cited in this essay, Why Feminists Believe the Myth of the Dangerous Black Man.

   Or if you have a history of abuse or assault, how you react will be influenced by that history. For example, remember the angry anti-Amber Heard mob of women who claimed they’d be abused so they just knew that Amber was the abuser? That’s something I’ve seen in too often: that women who are abused side with the abuser. Surprising and weird, isn’t it? It’s a coping mechanism, somewhat analogous to Stockholm syndrome but not quite that: that to cope with their own abuse, especially if it’s by someone they trusted, they blame themselves…which, in the future, turns into blaming other victims for their abuse, too. This effect, or so anecdotal evidence from a few hundred women I’ve seen it in, is stronger or more likely when the person in question was abused as a child or teenager than an adult.

   Andrea Dworkin succinctly captured this phenomenon in a sentence:

   Inevitably, this causes women to take the rage and contempt they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different⁴.

   This reminds me of people like JK Rowling. Rowling has called cancel culture “the language of a dictator”. Instead, she uses inflammatory language to cover up that she is calling for inequality for an oppressed group. It’s a theme that her essays, recent books, and tweets keep returning to: that trans women are a danger to cis women. That they want access to ciswomen, to assault them or to have sex with them.

   When JK Rowling first started airing her opinions on trans women, she defended herself by bringing up her own domestic abuse and sexual assault. So instead of asking for accountability from the people who assaulted and later abused her, she’s transferred her feelings of hurt (which, don’t get me wrong, she has every right to be hurt and deeply affected) onto a different group. She’s decided that trans women are threat to women, not men, and not specific men. Then she over-focuses on the trans women who has committed violent crimes, instead of the many, many men who commit crimes against women everyday. When people respond to her, especially activists, her old pain is triggered, she keeps doubling down on the anti-trans position - and now, that old pain and triggering is forever tied to the trans movement in her head. I believe she likely really feels that the trans liberation movement has hurt her because of this. Her feelings are genuine. Her obsessiveness isn’t healthy for her, either. The rationale behind then isn’t logical, and the way she expresses her pain is inexcusable. Hurt people using their hurt to hurt others isn’t a legitimate way to cope.

   Lastly, some people take #believewomen to heart. I personally believe “believe victims” should be something more like “listen to people”. Well, listen to them if you’re listening in good faith, and you’re not a complete and total asshole listening to poke holes in ways that are going to leave them more traumatized. Listen knowing that only 96-97% of accusations are true⁵, so with a predisposition toward belief over disbelief.

2. Essentialism, and/or inflation of the story. Somehow, the more times this story is told - or worse, tweeted, the worse it gets. The guy who grabbed a woman by her waist? That’s sexual assault. Sexual assault? Isn’t sexual assault just another word for rape?⁶ So now, this guy who grabbed a waist is a rapist. And he’s probably evil, too. Oh, no, he’s definitely evil.

   Let’s pull apart that little story. What’s happening there is what Contra Points called essentialism in her video on cancelling. A verb, an action, has become descriptor (adjective/noun). So instead of saying “he grabbed her waist”, it becomes “he’s an evil rapist” over repeated, increasingly exaggerated tellings of the story.

   If he did rape someone, the story goes from “he raped someone” to “he’s a rapist”, which, to be honest, I think is an unfortunate linguistic choice that makes it more difficult for society to deal with accusations of sexual assault. I get why we do it: rape is a heinous, life-altering thing to do someone, we want people to know how awful it is, but I don’t think we realize that it also makes it more difficult to talk about rape. People have an idea of what they think “a rapist” is, and if it doesn’t fit the person being accused, they’re dismissive of the accusation. I think the dismissal is unconscious. And that makes it especially more difficult to admit that someone we might be close has raped someone (because they’ve known the accused in a different light), or for someone who has raped someone to take accountability or accept consequences for what they’ve done⁷. By saying someone raped someone, we’re acknowledging that people who rape are everyday, normal people, that anyone could turn out to have raped people.

3. The pillory. In a paper for The Journal of Free Speech⁸, Franciska Coleman compared the next step in cancellation - the drama and gossip, and unintended and intended consequences - to the sixteenth century practice of the pillory. It’s an apt comparison.

   Pillory was a punishment for libel. The punishment consisted of the accused libelous party being restrained to a post. Concerned citizen were then allowed to pelt with them literal garage, eg, rotten eggs, mud…I don’t know, sixteenth century Europeans probably got more creative and gross. If they didn’t believe the accusation and wanted to defend the accused, they could instead throw nice things, like flowers.

   I’d imagine like today, those concerned citizens also gossiped and argued about their opinions, probably in private whereas a lot of people use Twitter, Facebook, et al today.

   There is a subset of folks who will think that the gossip - and the pillory - should be a source of justice and accountability. They’ll demand that, for example, the person they’re demanding be cancelled be fired from their job. This is what happened to a communications director who tweeted an offensive tweet with racially charged undertones. Some netizens of Twitter demanded she be fired, and she was. On the other hand, in both the article I linked and a later article on cancel culture, the New York Times focuses more on the effects of the cancellation rather than the hurt someone reading the tweet might feel (in my opinion; yours may differ). Power aligns itself with privilege, with ordinary people calling out abuses of power because they don’t have other channels of recourse. It’s a tool often utilized by those with less systemic power.

   Oddly enough, the reason I thought of her in writing this is because LinkedIn recommended her as a contact to me. She not only recovered after being cancelled online, she’s an executive at an enormous, billion-dollar-plus company now. Like the pillory, she went through some suffering, probably had people throwing flowers (defending her, or speaking of how terrible her experience was), and then it was all over and she moved on with her life.

   Why did she pop up in LinkedIn for me? Because I was looking into the company she works for while speaking to a whistleblower. That company had been accused of putting profits ahead of trying to genuinely stop people from using its services to target women for assault. Was she part of those decisions? Are the tweet and these new accusations related, indicative of her character? I…honestly don’t know.

   Was justice served? Was she held accountable in some way through a Twitter cancellation and being fired? That I would say definitely did not happen. Nor am I at all supportive of using social media to drive cancel culture campaigns. I cannot think of a single case where justice was served or accountability held through a cancel culture-style campaign. I consider the weaponization of cancel culture, and the weaponization of social justice for personal values and often personal benefit.

   I’d also argue that cancelling someone has value if done right and in the right circumstances, even if it doesn’t serve justice or do anything toward accountability. It can help keep others safe from harmful behavior, or it could be related to each individual or organization taking the best course of action for themselves.

   For example, I think if some dude has a habit of sexually assaulting his employees, then he’s a liability for the company and hurting people, and perhaps it’s best if he’s not in a situation where he’s putting other people in danger. Similarly, if that dude feels that, well, he’s apologized and now he should be invited back to the party.

   Moira Donegan
   gets into the apology tour in her essay, Moral Blackmail and Forgiveness Demand. Here, Donegan wrote:

   This is a common feature of the post-Me Too demand for restitution: the claim that careers were ruined by the movement that in fact had been ruined by the men’s own actions long before. Abusive men’s other inadequacies—their bitterness or unoriginality, their addictions or poor work ethic, their professional misbehavior or their professional bad luck—are erased from their accounting, covered over conveniently by their retroactive claims to have been martyrs to feminism’s excess.

   I don’t think we necessarily owe forgiveness, nor do I think forgiveness is what’s at stake. Forgiveness is a concept, and what these dudes are asking for is an action: to either have no consequences for their actions or to reverse earlier consequences. Putting a dude with a history of assault in a situation where he could hurt people after he’s shown he’s a risk creates unnecessary risk. Those are risks that I wouldn’t be willing to take on. It’s okay that we should prioritize the safety of the other people over his request to be “forgiven”. In fact, if the apology and demand for forgiveness is really sincere, then it seems that someone who has transgressed might accept that not everyone wants to be his friend or coworker anymore. Accept basic consequences that are for the greater good, put aside his own desires in favor of that.

   In her excellent Sexual Justice (which, honestly, might not be so interesting unless you have a deep interest or education in law), Alexandra Brodsky argued that we do not always need due process to fire or unfriend someone. Due process is for the government, because the government has the right to hold a body against a person’s will. As individuals, we do not call upon the formalized processes of the law to make personal decisions, such as to unfriend or fire. For example, if you found out that a friend cheated on her husband and have him an STI as a result, hey, well, you might not want to be that person’s friend anymore. You’ve made a judgement based on your personal moral code, because you’ve received new information about your friend. You have every right to end a friendship. You don’t need a trial and jury to make this decision. Similarly, a company or community group will often have a moral code, in bylaws, codes of conduct, whatever sort of legal or semi-legal document(s) that prohibits certain behaviors. If a person credibly has been found to have broken the moral code (and Brodsky lays out a process and consideration for that process of finding), then we don’t need a trial and jury to decide that the person isn’t a fit for the workplace or community or whatnot.

   And similarly, if a survivor decides to speak out about her, then she also risks being cancelled. I’ve been assaulted; I knew when I made the decision to speak publicly about it that I’d likely lose friends. I did. I accept being cancelled, and I accept that my speaking up about assault is an unforgivable sin to some people. There’s a risk that a survivor faces in their decision to come forward, no matter how careful they are, no matter how much support they have. There are always people who cast doubt or fling accusations of lying, who ask why a woman came forward when she did, who finds ways to cast blame on the victim, who ask us as a society to think of the accused, their future and well-being. So I wouldn’t ever blame anyone for choosing silence, if that’s the better route for healing for her. In another essay, I wrote: Some of us commend women who come forward, the Gisèle Pelicots and Chantel Millers of the world, but that we ask so much of them after they’ve been through so much is genuinely terrible.

   Why the victim get cancelled? For the sort of person who believes cancel culture to be completely illegitimate, the victim who speaks up is doing so for the wrong reasons: that is, they’re vindictive, destructive, “mean”, they’re motivated by revenge and envy. The aggressed-against is turned into the aggressive, so to speak. It’s a sort of psychological DARVO technique - deny, attack, reverse-victim-offender. The victim is the offender because to cancel someone is a sort of moral crime.

   And witnessing that, other people who want to speak up about transgressions become afraid to do so, afraid they’ll be accused of wanting to “cancel” someone. The reality is that it makes sense to cancel some people. The complaints about cancel culture thus serve to silence the oppressed and the genuinely victimized, who are too often the minorities who generally have fewer avenues for recourse.

Why Cancel Culture is a Canard

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

― John Kenneth Galbraith

Hatshepsut, an Egyptian (co) pharaoh who passed in 1458 BCE, was a sort of heroine of mine when I was about eleven. She was supposed to rule as a regent in place of her underage brother-husband’s⁹ son (with a different wife), but took the throne for herself. She declared herself pharaoh, had it written and documented, had statutes of herself made in masculine/kingly costume (come to think of it, probably not such a surprise that I looked up to her as a kid), and history considers her an inspiration and a good pharaoh.

After her death, when her brother’s kid assented to the throne, he tried to have records of her and her reign/regency destroyed. Obviously, he missed a few things, so we know of her today. His attempt to cancel her wasn’t complete, nor was it successful.

And usually, as with the examples and process I laid out above, that seems to be how cancel culture attempts go: there are some effects, but the effects are never as complete as the person(s) spearheading the cancellation campaign would hope. And the bigger issue is that usually it’s the victims that end up suffering more, and that cancel culture is used to derail equality for all.

An example: even though it’s mostly conservatives defending men who complain about cancel culture, cry that men’s lives are being ruined as they’re ostracized, the actual effects aren’t so cut and dry. Frankly, many men recover, and go a different route in their career. Cases in point include Louis CK, Aziz Ansari, Russell Brand. Currently, in the United States, we have a president that was found liable for sexual abuse, and still won the presidency after the fact. To be elected to the highest office in the land after going through a court of law and being found liable…I cannot think of any example that so sharply points the ineffectiveness of calls for cancellation on the public as a whole.

The women who were abused often suffer greater consequences. Annabella Sciorra, Mira Sorvino, and Ashley Judd had their careers derailed by Harvey Weinstein decades before he was ousted from Hollywood, and even then, his ousting was helped along by the professional failures of Miramax (Weinstein and his brother’s production company). I don’t know what will happen to Johnny Depp’s career - given that he had so much public support during the trial - but I do know that Amber Heard’s acting career isn’t so likely to recover. Weinstein went to trial for his assaults, his career and power were already on the road to being “cancelled”.

Today, the conservatives are still the party of cancellation, in my opinion. Conservatives ban more books, especially when those relate to race and LGBTQI+ folks. This week alone, nearly 400 books were purged from the (navel) Nimitz library. Books such as Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi, while others, such as Hitler’s Mein Kampt, were kept. As soon as our current president took office, he attempted to “cancel” trans women, and then teachings about racism, critical race theory, diversity and inclusion efforts and programming, et al. Mentions of trans people were removed from national monuments, mentions of Black figures of accomplishment were removed from governmental websites. Mentions of women, victim, etc. were placed on a list, so that people and organizations seeking grants could not qualify for those grants if they were doing so for those groups. And then private and non-private organizations followed. I save links related to #metoo, and use them in professional materials. Some of the articles that I previously cited, from sources as wide and disparate as RAINN and Time magazine, have been taken offline.

Why is this happening? When conservatives were hearing (and seeing online) racial minorities, LGBTQI+ people, immigrants, speaking up about oppression, what they believed they heard was a threat to the world as they knew it. It’s a threat to the powers that be, some people don’t want their power threaten, especially if they’re the ones who have more of it.

If we don’t have underclasses based on race, gender, sexuality, et al, then the power of the cis-white-hetero-male is besieged. This is what that Galbraith quote at the beginning of this section refers to: the continued oppression of minorities (in terms of systemic power) is a means to selfishly hold onto power and domination.

This isn’t a U.S. phenomenon, the will to hold onto power by those who already have it is a global phenomenon. In Enemy Feminisms¹⁰, Sophie Lewis argues that trans-exclusionary feminists existed in the US second-wave feminist movement, were “exported” to the UK, where that movement really flourished and the language around it really grew (as well, let’s not forget that Janice Raymond helped that along), and then it was imported back into the US. In the introduction to Enemy Feminisms, she argues that British transphobia in feminist circles relates back to imperialism and former British colonies, because the not-cisgendered had wider acceptance in those colonies. To assert cis-womanhood was to assert British womanhood.

In France, a group of scholars, intellectuals, and public figures signed a letter decrying #metoo, calling it a “witchhunt”, despite accomplished actresses such as Adéle Haenel leaving the industry, despite women credibly and believably speaking up. About what was supposed to be her last project, Haenel said:

it was a dark, sexist and racist world that was defended. The script was full of jokes about cancel culture and sexual violence. I tried to discuss it with Dumont, because I thought a dialogue was possible. I wanted to believe for the umpteenth time that it was not intentional. But it's intentional. [...] Just as they make fun of the victims, of people in a situation of weakness. The intention was to make a sci-fi film with an all-white cast – and therefore a racist narrative. I didn't want to support this.

In this case, Haenel wasn’t exactly “cancelled”. Instead, she was made so uncomfortable by the lack of equality and the sexual harassment by a male director she faced as an underaged actress that she quit. It’s a form of silencing, of treating someone so badly they ostracize themselves.

In Iran, following the death of Mahsa/Jina Amini, there were mass protests. Two years after the protests, Amnesty International believes that there was mass violence in the aftermath, to crackdown on the movement. Now, equality and liberation for women in Iran remain as far off and maybe further than before, because of systemic actions.

And in India, this week, there were reports of a female doctor who was raped in the hospital she works in, while she was taking a break during her shift. Her coworkers arranged a strike to protest the dangerous conditions that led to her rape. The rapes that make the news there are of higher caste/middle class women and sometimes of tourists. These women have the mean and ability to work in an office, go to university, become a doctor, to take on Western “values” and “lifestyles”…to rape them becomes of a way of reinforcing conservative values, of taking to task a rapidly modernized middle class (because they have the means to modernize) and putting them back in their place.

Thus, these rapes highlight a culture clash: that the most conservative elements/people argue that women who are out at night deserve to be raped, and if they didn’t “want it”, then they wouldn’t be out (you know, working in a hospital, or taking a bus home at 9 pm…yes, that’s sarcasm).

And that leads to think about how the threat of rape and violence is used to keep all women afraid, all women complicit. It’s a strategy that the conservatives around the world deploy. It’s something I delved into in depth this in essay, Why Right Wing Women Hate Feminists and Lesbians, which draws from Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin if you want to understand how it works in the U.S.

Rape as a cultural, mimetic phenomenon, has an element of correctiveness. Rape, by unintentional or intentional design, puts women¹¹ back closer to home and in a state of fear, and thus, delays or sets back attempts at equality.

This is somewhat analogous to what the US administration is doing to women, trans people, and Black people (and other people of color): finding ways to oppress and threaten, to remove them from seats of power and the public sphere and consciousness, and to enforce that removal with violence if need be. To complain about cancel culture an added layer that’s effective in silencing and ridiculing when they want to protest this treatment.

And so, when I hear of cancel culture, of people losing their jobs over tweets or men getting “cancelled” because of their own awful behavior, I feel that we’re focusing on the wrong part. The distractors bring up tweet-based cancellation: to delegitimize the legitimate uses of cancellation.

The legitimate uses are the numerous serial rapists that were exposed at the beginnings of #metoo, the Black women who were calling out R. Kelly’s abusive behavior on Twitter long before the rest of us started using the term cancelled, Taruna Burke using “metoo” on MySpace long before other communities adopted it…this is what cancellation was originally about. That it was appropriated, weaponized, and then that weaponization used to distract and deter from its origins is a shame. It’s not a surprise this happened, it’s happened to many movements, is an exploitable weakness in the design of decentralized movements.

We’ve lost sight of what cancel culture was designed to do: to be one of the few people who are oppressed and have little power can try to call attention to problems and effect change. And it’s especially useful as a tool that people who care feminism causes can use to call attention to those causes, even if it does not deliver justice or accountability.

1. The term “published” was used in the following paper by Franciska Coleman:

Coleman, Franciska, The Anatomy of Cancel Culture (March 3, 2023). Univ. of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1766, 2 Journal of Free Speech Law 205 (2022), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4377591

2. I’ve read Tuerkheimer’s book, but you could simply read this interview, Deborah Tuerkheimer on Credibility and Sexual Misconduct on Lithub instead. I think it sums up the underlying point of the book quite well.

3. A colleague/law school classmate recommended this documentary about that phenomenon (that female janitors are in danger of rape at their jobs): Rape on the Night Shift.

4. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025).

5. UK Home Office Study shows 4% (Kelly, Liz & Lovett, Jo & Regan, Linda. “Home Office Research Study 293 A Gap or a Chase? Attrition in Reported Rape Cases” UK Home Office. January 2005. Accessed July 22, 2022. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238713283_Home_Office_Research_Study_293_A_gap_or_a_chasm_Attrition_in_reported_rape_cases

Another study cited by the US Department of Justice shows 2.1% (Heenan, Melanie & Murray, Suellen. Study of Reported Rapes in Victoria 2000 – 2003. US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. July 2006. Accessed July 24, 2022 https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/study-reported-rapes-victoria-2000-2003-summary-research-report ).

6. An aside: this is why I use the word rape instead of softening into “sexual assault” or worse, “non-consent”. There’s too much conflation of something like touching a knee without asking (non consent) with penetrative rape without consent (paraphrase of the US legal definition) - and I think it’s important to use precise terminology to avoid dangerous conflations such as the one I explained.

7. In a famous study (famous to me; I cite it on at-minimum weekly basis) by Liask and co, rapists will admit to “non consent” or the like, but will not call it rape. In this study, the self-confessed non-consenter also will admit to doing this an average of 5.8 times.

Lisak D, Miller PM. Repeat rape and multiple offending among undetected rapists. Violence Vict. 2002 Feb;17(1):73-84. doi: 10.1891/vivi.17.1.73.33638. PMID: 11991158.

8. Coleman, Franciska, The Anatomy of Cancel Culture (March 3, 2023). Univ. of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1766, 2 Journal of Free Speech Law 205 (2022), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4377591

9. Ancient Egyptians were patriarchal but matrilineal. Meaning that power went to males, but was passed through females. To ensure that a pharaoh’s son would become the next pharaoh, pharaohs (pharaoh) were married off to their biological sisters.

10. I just bought the book the day of writing this essay. I bought the book because I read about it in the The Guardian. The citation follows:

Wong, Julie Carrie. ‘It’s a scary time’: Sophie Lewis on the ‘enemy feminisms’ that enable the far right. The Guardian. February 21, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/21/sophie-lewis-feminism-far-right

11. This shouldn’t only be cis-women, trans and non-binary folks are raped at higher rates, and Black and indigenous women at higher rates than white women. This supports the theory that the threat of rape is device for correction of behavior and non-compliance.