COWARDS

The War on Women Is the War on Democracy. Pick Up a Weapon.

by Lawrence Winnerman

I was eight years old the first time a man decided my body was his to use.

He was a stranger. Some old man in a JCPenney dressing room at a shopping mall. My mother didn’t know him. Nobody knew him. We never caught him. I was a child, and I learned something that afternoon that no child should have to learn: that there are men in the world who see a smaller body and feel entitled to it, and there is an entire civilization prepared to look the other way.

I’m fifty-six now. Five-ten, two-sixty, built like a lumberjack. Nobody looks at me and thinks victim. And yet. I’m an openly gay man. I bottom—and if that word makes you uncomfortable, good, stay with me, because your discomfort is a fraction of what I’m about to talk about. I know what toxic masculinity sounds like from the inside, because it pervades the gay community too—the hierarchy of tops over bottoms, the sorting of men into who penetrates and who receives, the quiet assumption that receiving makes you less. I’ve lived in that hierarchy my entire adult life. I know exactly how the gears turn. The same machinery that sorts men in a bedroom is the machinery that sorts women in a legislature, that sorts bodies in a culture, that produces—reliably, generationally—the system I’m about to describe.

I have standing to make this case. And I mean that in a way that goes deeper than opinion.

Eric Swalwell was arrested by no one. Four women came forward—one of them a twenty-year-old intern who says he raped her—and within a week he resigned from Congress, abandoned his campaign for governor of California, and vanished into the fog of the next news cycle. By May it will be a footnote.

I read the allegations and I didn’t feel outrage. I’m past outrage. What I felt was recognition. The machine that produced what happened to me in that dressing room is the same machine that produced Eric Swalwell, the same machine that protected Jeffrey Epstein for decades, the same machine that right now—today, this week, while you’re reading this—is grinding through legislatures and courtrooms and algorithm-fed rabbit holes to ensure that women, half the human species, remain controllable, available, and silent.

So let me make a case.

• • •

Count 1: The Predator Class

Every few months, another name surfaces. We perform the ritual—shock, denial, investigation, consequences for some, impunity for most—and then we move on, and we never once talk about the ecosystem that keeps producing the names.

Eric Swalwell. Four women. Sexual misconduct including rape, sexual assault of intoxicated women, unsolicited explicit messages sent via Snapchat. One accuser started interning for him in 2019 when she was twenty years old—hadn’t even graduated from college. The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation; approximately forty-five minutes later, Swalwell announced his resignation. He was a Democrat. He sat on the Intelligence Committee. He went on cable news and talked about accountability.

And here’s the thing about Swalwell that nobody wants to say out loud: Democrats forced him out in a week. As they should have. Al Franken was gone in days. Anthony Weiner, gone. Katie Hill, gone. The left holds its own to account because that’s what accountability looks like. But Matt Gaetz faced a sex trafficking investigation involving a seventeen-year-old and was nominated for Attorney General. Jim Jordan was accused of ignoring sexual abuse of wrestlers when he was an assistant coach at Ohio State and went on to chair the House Judiciary Committee. Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse by a civil jury and was elected president. Again. The right doesn’t hold its people to account—not because it can’t, but because it won’t. And the result is a perverse optical illusion: Democratic names dominate the headlines about sexual misconduct because Democrats are the only ones generating consequences. Republican predators stay in office, stay quiet, and stay powerful. In the court of public opinion, it starts to look like the problem belongs to one party—when what’s actually happening is that only one party treats it as a problem at all. The asymmetry isn’t a bug. It’s the strategy. Hold no one accountable, and you never have to explain anything. Let the other side do the right thing, and weaponize their integrity against them.

Jeffrey Epstein. Three million pages of files released in January 2026—two thousand videos, one hundred eighty thousand images. The Department of Justice acknowledged that six million pages may ultimately qualify for release. Communications between Epstein and a vast web of figures in politics, academia, and business continued after he registered as a sex offender. Both parties. All industries. A December 2025 poll found that 91 percent of Democrats, 78 percent of independents, and 74 percent of Republicans wanted the files released. The only people who didn’t want sunlight were the people in the files.

And then there’s the one that should have stopped the world and didn’t. In March 2026, CNN published the results of a months-long investigation into what they called a global “online rape academy”—a pornographic website called Motherless.com hosting more than twenty thousand videos of “sleep content,” which is the sanitized term for footage of men drugging and raping their unconscious partners. A linked Telegram group called “Zzz” had nearly a thousand members actively teaching each other the craft of it. How to select the drug. How to dose it. How to avoid detection. A man in Poland was arrested as a direct result of the reporting.

A thousand men in a chat room, workshopping rape. Twenty thousand videos. Hundreds of thousands of views.

Swalwell, Epstein, the men in that Telegram group—they are the visible tips of something that goes all the way down. A system that produces predators reliably, at scale, and then provides them with legal, cultural, and technological infrastructure to operate. The predator class isn’t a conspiracy. It’s an output.

• • •

Count 2: The Pipeline

If you have a son under twenty-five, he is one algorithm away from the top of this funnel. I’m not being dramatic. That is what the research says.

It starts with looksmaxxing—a trend in which young men use apps to score their facial attractiveness on the PSL scale, a rating system invented in incel communities that ranks faces using terms like “low-tier normie” and “chadlite.” One looksmaxxing influencer alone racked up more than a hundred million views in 2025. The apps are in the App Store right now. Your kid can download one during lunch. And in case you think this is just vanity with a weird name: looksmaxxing communities actively encourage boys to strike themselves in the face with hammers—to fracture their own facial bones so the bones will, supposedly, grow back stronger and more masculine. Boys are hitting themselves in the face with hammers to meet a beauty standard invented by incels. That’s where the pipeline starts.

The Alan Turing Institute’s Centre for Emerging Technology and Security published a study titled “From Looksmaxxing to Mass Shootings: Radicalisation and Online Misogyny.” The title tells you everything. The pipeline works like this: a boy downloads an app that scores his face. The app uses language and frameworks created by incels. The algorithm feeds him more content. The content gets darker. He moves from TikTok to Discord to Telegram. The communities he finds there are actively directing young men toward incel ideology, neo-Nazi content, and material that glorifies mass shooters and suicide.

All of this is documented. OFCOM—the UK’s communications regulator—published a sixty-five-page report on young people’s engagement with the manosphere. Research in Wiley’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health journal found the manosphere encouraging sexist attitudes in schools, deepening existing inequalities, spreading dangerous messages about mental health. The University of Alabama’s Institute for Human Rights mapped what they call “modern sexism” from its digital roots to its violent endpoints.

The pipeline is designed. It has an architecture. It has an on-ramp that looks like self-help and an off-ramp that looks like a manifesto. And every man who built it is counting on you—personally, specifically you—to assume your son is too smart to fall for it.

• • •

Count 3: The Legislative Assault

In August 2025, Doug Wilson—pastor of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a growing denomination with approximately a hundred and fifty congregations—told CNN that the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote “was a bad idea.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends a CREC church. His Pentagon spokesman confirmed the affiliation and said Hegseth “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.” Democratic congresswomen, several of them military veterans, demanded his resignation.

That’s the Secretary of Defense of the United States, aligned with a church whose leader wants to repeal women’s suffrage. And here’s the part that should keep you up at night: another CREC pastor admitted the quiet part out loud. “I don’t think Christians should make repealing the Nineteenth Amendment their main issue right now,” he said, “because it’s not a winning issue yet.”

Yet.

The word “yet” is doing all the work in that sentence. The strategy is to make fringe ideas seem plausible enough that less extreme shifts toward theocracy and patriarchy seem reasonable by comparison. Move the Overton window so far that taking away a woman’s right to vote sounds radical, but taking away her right to control her own body sounds like a compromise.

Meanwhile, in state legislatures across the country, a study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that 11.85 percent of state legislators belonged to far-right Facebook groups. That small minority sponsored 66 percent of all anti-abortion bills and 62 percent of all anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in their legislative sessions. A fraction of the political class is driving the overwhelming majority of the legislative assault on bodily autonomy—and they’re doing it in gerrymandered districts where their positions are wildly out of step with public opinion.

And the economic data is unambiguous. Women in states with robust reproductive health care access—contraceptive coverage, expanded Medicaid, public funding for medically necessary procedures—have higher earnings, face less occupational segregation, and are less likely to be trapped in part-time work. Every dollar spent on contraceptive services saves three dollars in pregnancy-related care. Reproductive access is the economic foundation on which women build independent lives. Strip it away and you strip away the independence. That’s the point. That has always been the point.

And then there’s Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s nine-hundred-page blueprint for the next Republican administration—which proposes treating gender education as a sex offense and makes zero reference to the rates of violence targeting LGBTQ people. Nine hundred pages. They had room. They chose silence.

• • •

Count 4: The Structural Failure

In April 2024, the New York Court of Appeals overturned Harvey Weinstein’s landmark sexual assault conviction on a 4–3 vote. The technicality: testimony from “prior bad acts” witnesses shouldn’t have been admitted because it served “only to establish defendant’s propensity to commit the crimes charged.”

Sit with that for a second. A court ruled that evidence showing a rapist had a pattern of raping was too prejudicial to the rapist.

Judge Madeline Singas wrote in dissent that the decision continued “a disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence” and perpetuated “outdated notions of sexual violence” that “allow predators to escape accountability.” In the retrial, Weinstein was convicted on one count, acquitted on another. Partial justice for a man dozens of women accused over decades. The system working exactly as it was designed to work.

And look—between 2016 and 2022, state legislatures across the country introduced more than three thousand bills aimed at gender equity and workplace safety. They passed 382 of them. Pay equity, harassment training, reporting procedures, leave policies, elimination of the nondisclosure agreements that protect predators. Real progress, passed by real legislators who fought for every vote.

The legal system still cannot reliably convict a rapist.

Me Too changed the culture. It changed who we believe, how quickly we respond, what we’re willing to say out loud. But it did not change the machine. The machine still runs. The courtrooms still fail. The statutes of limitations still expire. The burden of proof still falls on the body that was violated, not the body that did the violating. And every time a conviction gets overturned on a technicality, every man in that Telegram group, every lobbyist drafting an abortion ban, every influencer teaching boys to score women’s faces on a numerical scale receives the same message: the system is yours.

• • •

Count 5: The Global Playbook

Everything I’ve described so far has been American. The dysfunction, the polarization, the broken institutions. But the playbook is global, and if you don’t see that, you’re looking at the trees and missing the forest that’s on fire.

In November 2024, RAND published a study concluding that “regressive ideas on gender and gender equality can be a useful proxy metric for democratic backsliding and authoritarian rise.” The United States government’s own Women, Peace, and Security strategy recommends treating misogyny—online or codified in policy—as an early indicator of authoritarian consolidation.

Read that again. Our own government’s own framework says: when misogyny shows up in law, authoritarianism is coming. Every time. Without exception.

Russia: Vladimir Putin positioned himself as the guardian of “traditional Christian values,” told women their place was at home raising children, and systematically rolled back domestic violence protections. Turkey: Erdoğan withdrew from the Istanbul Convention on gender-based violence, reversed secular marriage requirements, and opened the legal door to underage marriages and polygamy. Hungary: Orbán moved to ban abortion and restrict LGBTQ rights as cornerstones of his “illiberal democracy.” Poland: the Law and Justice party packed courts with political allies, then used those compromised judges to eliminate abortion rights—against the clear will of the Polish majority. Brazil: Bolsonaro wasn’t even particularly religious before his campaign, but evangelical churches powered his 2018 victory. Once in office, six of his twenty-four cabinet members were evangelical Protestants who restricted LGBTQ rights, banned gender discussions in classrooms, and cast doubt on the need for gender equality policies altogether.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published the definitive analysis in November 2024: patriarchy and authoritarianism are “mutually reinforcing political projects.” Their research demonstrated that voters with sexist attitudes are significantly more likely to support authoritarian leaders—even after controlling for political ideology. A 2017 European study found that traditional gender views predicted support for radical-right parties across twenty-three countries.

Harvard Kennedy School researchers put it plainly: authoritarian leaders seek to “displace democracy with hierarchies controlled by male elites and to re-confine women in traditional roles.” They minimize women’s equal rights, frame equality as niche identity politics, and they do this because patriarchy is the structural foundation on which authoritarian power is built. The hierarchy of men over women is the load-bearing wall. Pull it out and the authoritarian project collapses.

Which is why every one of these regimes came for women’s rights first. Or simultaneously with the power grab. Never after. The sequence is the tell.

• • •

Count 6: The Foundation

Now the data. And I need you to stay with me here, because this is where the floor drops out.

Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security studied the relationship between women’s status and democratic health—free elections, free association, checks on government power—across dozens of countries and found them strongly correlated. The Varieties of Democracy project, spanning a hundred countries over four decades, demonstrated that women’s political empowerment directly strengthens democratic participation. When women lead, cooperative governance increases, peacemaking improves, social welfare expands, economies grow. This is not ideology. This is the data set.

The economics alone should end every argument anyone has ever had about this. McKinsey projected a one-trillion-dollar gain for the global economy from closing gaps in women’s health care, including reproductive health. One trillion. The UNFPA documented that every one-percentage-point increase in gender-based violence in sub-Saharan Africa correlates with up to an 8 percent decline in economic activity, driven primarily by drops in female employment. Intimate partner violence costs the global economy an estimated 5 percent of GDP—five trillion dollars, every year, hemorrhaging out of civilization like an open wound that we just keep walking past.

The Brennan Center for Justice found that more than 40 percent of state legislators have experienced threats. Women legislators are three to four times more likely to face explicitly sexualized abuse. Women are being threatened out of public life. And the threats are working. And the men making the threats know the threats are working. And the rest of us are watching it happen.

Women’s freedom is the foundation on which democratic societies are built. Every piece of data confirms it. Every country that has tried to build democracy while constraining women has failed. Every authoritarian who has consolidated power has done so by attacking women’s autonomy first. The correlation is so strong, so consistent, so thoroughly documented across decades of research and dozens of countries that to deny it at this point is to deny gravity.

If women are not equally free—equally free, with the same control over their bodies and their futures and their participation in civic life—then this whole experiment in self-governance is bullshit. I mean that word precisely. I mean it as a factual assessment of the evidence I have just laid in front of you. Democracy that does not include the full freedom of women is a word with nothing behind it—a promise made to half the species and broken every single day.

• • •

The Verdict

Six counts. Predators at the top. A radicalization pipeline feeding boys into the machine from the bottom. A legislative apparatus stripping rights in the middle. A legal system that fails to convict. A global playbook that repeats the same pattern on every continent. And a mountain of data proving that when you attack women’s freedom, you are attacking democracy itself—at the foundation, at the load-bearing wall, at the thing without which the whole structure is a lie.

I’ve made my case. Now I’m talking to men.

Women already know all of this. They’ve been living it. They’ve been screaming it. They are exhausted from explaining it to men who nod sympathetically and go back to their lives. I am done watching that happen.

I’m talking to you. The man reading this right now. The husband, the father, the brother, the son, the friend, the colleague, the guy who considers himself one of the good ones.

Are you fighting for the women in your life? I don’t mean performing allyship on social media. I don’t mean the pin on your jacket or the post you shared that one time. Are you intervening when the joke gets told at dinner? Are you calling your state legislator when an abortion ban hits committee? Are you monitoring what your son is watching, who he’s following, what pipeline is pulling him toward a chat room full of men who think consent is optional? Are you showing up at school board meetings? Are you voting in every single election—every one, including the ones that bore you—like your daughter’s freedom depends on it?

Because it does.

Are you risking something? Losing something? Spending social capital, burning a friendship, making yourself uncomfortable in a room full of men who expect your silence? Because if you aren’t doing those things, you aren’t fighting. You’re watching. And watching is a choice.

I know what the machine does. I learned it when I was eight years old, in a dressing room in a JCPenney, from a man no one ever caught. I’ve lived inside the toxic masculinity that sorts men into hierarchies of dominance and submission and calls it natural order. And I am telling you—from inside the experience, from inside the evidence, from inside the cold fury that comes from knowing both at once—that the time for choosing sides is practically over.

The forces arrayed against women’s freedom are organized. They are funded. They are global, patient, and strategic. They have a legislative agenda and a judicial strategy. They have a radicalization pipeline that starts with a face-scoring app and ends with men in a chat room teaching each other how to rape. They have a Secretary of Defense who attends a church whose pastor wants to repeal women’s suffrage. They have Project 2025. They have three million pages of Epstein files proving that the most powerful men in the world operated a sexual abuse network for decades with functional impunity. They have momentum.

What do you have?

If the answer is good intentions and a vague sense that things will work out—then I need you to hear me very clearly.

You are a coward. You are a stupid, selfish, ugly, mean, small, weak, cowardly coward.

You are watching a war—a real war, fought every single day on the bodies of women and girls and queer people—and you are choosing comfort over duty, passivity over action, your own ease over someone else’s survival. History will judge you. Your daughters will judge you. And they will be right.

Every generation plants the seeds of the fights the next generation will have to wage. The fights we will be having for the next hundred years are being seeded right now. In legislatures. In courtrooms. In algorithms. In churches. In chat rooms. In the silence of men who know better and do nothing.

Pick up a weapon. It doesn’t have to be a literal one—make it your voice, your vote, your time, your money, your willingness to be uncomfortable, your refusal to let one more joke slide, one more policy pass, one more boy disappear into the pipeline while you tell yourself it won’t happen to your kid.

The war is already here. It has been here. Women have been fighting it alone for long enough.

What side are you on?