Not all men are involved in violence against women. So, is it fair to place the blame squarely on all men? The latest episode of this never-ending debate began with a recent CNN investigation.
The report explored a global "online rape academy" where some men were not only sharing violent sexual fantasies, but discussing sexual violence in disturbing ways -- how to target women, how to avoid detection, and how to make abuse harder to report.
In those networks, violence was not treated as shocking or exceptional. It was treated as casual conversation.
Unsurprisingly, news like this tends to trigger two very different reactions across gender lines. Many women see them and think: “This is how dangerous men can be.” Many men respond with a reflex: “Not all men.”
Yes, it is indeed not all men -- statistically and experientially. Most men do not engage in or condone this behaviour.
Still, such a response, at least here, is misplaced.
Speaking as a man, I understand why that instinct comes first. Most men do not see themselves in the behaviours under discussion. The impulse, then, is to create distance -- to separate from what feels extreme and unrecognisable. To say: “This is not us.”
But the moment that distance is asserted, the conversation begins to shift.
Instead of staying with the harm being described, it turns toward defending a sense of fragile masculinity. In doing so, something important is lost. The focus moves away from those responsible -- and toward protecting the image of men in general, inadvertently conflating the defence of the broader male category with the defence of the perpetrators themselves.
At times, this also goes beyond distraction. It creates a kind of cover, however unintended -- where harmful behaviour is minimised, questioned, or treated as an exception that does not require deeper scrutiny.
It further affects something more subtle, but just as important: the possibility of trust.
When the immediate response is defensiveness, it becomes harder to help create environments where women feel safe to speak about their experiences without being challenged or second-guessed. And without that feeling of security, the distance between “some men” and “all men” blurs from the outside.
If spaces can be created where experiences are heard without reflexive push back, then distinctions become clearer, not weaker. In that kind of setting, the tendency to generalise also loses force, because it is no longer met only with denial, but with understanding.
Meanwhile, for women, this is not an abstract debate about categories or statistics. It is about experience.
It is formed by what they have encountered, what they have been warned about, and how they learn to move through everyday realities with caution.
When harassment happens, when women are subjected to unwanted advances, coercion, or their boundaries are violated and their discomfort is dismissed, men are often involved. Not every man but often enough, and repeatedly enough, to define how safety is perceived by women.
This is where phrases like “not all men, but always a man” take root. Not as a literal claim, but as an expression of exhaustion -- an attempt to describe a pattern as it is lived, not debated.
It also helps explain why questions like “Would you rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear?” resonate so widely among women.
It is not really about choosing between two dangers. It is about predictability. A bear is dangerous, but its behaviour is legible. A man, in that imagined situation, represents uncertainty, and that uncertainty itself becomes the biggest source of fear.
For many women, this is what safety, or the lack thereof, comes to resemble.
And if that dynamic is ever going to change, it will not begin with rejecting the conversation or insisting on individual innocence. It begins with staying with it long enough to understand it properly.
Not to accept blame for everything, but to accept responsibility for how we show up in the worlds we share.
Because that is what it means, as men, to engage honestly with a reality that is not only about us, but still includes us.
