Frankly: before being men, be human

Perhaps before anything else – before defensiveness, qualifiers or debates about wording – we need men to first be humans.

Because if you hear a phrase like rape academy and your first instinct is to challenge website visitor numbers rather than recoil at what it is, then something important is being missed.

No one accepts a term like rape academy if things are fine. Language sharpens when reality has already cut deep.

And what sits underneath that phrase is hideous: women harmed, frightened and humiliated by the people who proclaim to love them. And it’s a grizzly end product of a culture women recognise instantly because they have been navigating versions of it for years – calculating risk, reading rooms, texting friends, changing routes, laughing things off, staying polite when they do not feel safe.

This is not a conversation that asks men to carry blame for everything other men have done. It asks something both smaller and harder: to stay present long enough to feel the weight of what women are saying without immediately reaching for a defence.

Because many men do that reflexively.
Not all men.
Surely those numbers are exaggerated.
It wasn’t 62 million individuals!

But sometimes the most decent response is not rebuttal. It is simply: God, that’s awful.

Just sit there for a moment. Let it land.

Because when we move too quickly to refute what women are naming, it can feel as though protection matters more than understanding lived experience.

And yet many men do understand.

There are men who listen carefully, who hear the exhaustion beneath the anger, who know this is not an attack but a plea for honesty.

There are men who ask questions, who believe women, who do not need to centre themselves in every difficult conversation.

And there are men who quietly do one of the most important things of all: they call each other out. Not performatively, not for applause – just because they know decency is built in ordinary moments, between friends, colleagues, brothers and sons.

This is really matters because this is not women on one side and men on the other. It cannot be.

The men willing to look directly at what is ugly and still stay in the conversation get it. They understand the invitation is to stand with women not as representatives of a gender, but as fellow human beings. These are the men, the humans, who know that what is happening is unacceptable and who are prepared to help shift the culture that allows it.

That is where change begins: not in winning the argument about words, but in recognising what those words are trying to tell us.

Bel & Peita