They Had Access. They Removed Consent.
Why the "online rape academy" story reveals something far more disturbing about men, contempt, and complicity
Listen to the podcast about this essay:
“Always start low… then up the dose.”
Last week, CNN published a months-long investigation into what they called an “Online Rape Academy.”
They uncovered a community of men who drug their partners — wives, long-term girlfriends, women who chose them and trusted them — and rape them while they’re unconscious. They film it, then share the videos with a network of like-minded men who watch, celebrate, rank, and sometimes monetize what they’ve done.
They call it “sleep” content and use hashtags like #passedout and #eyecheck to make their videos more discoverable.
The women have no idea.
And these aren’t women who withheld consent. They had already said yes — to the relationship, to sex, to building a life together. These men had access. They had intimacy. They had everything they ostensibly could want.
They chose to take something else entirely.
When we talk about rape, we tend to center on access.
The typical narrative goes like this: a man wants a woman’s body, and she won’t grant it. He takes it anyway — by force, by weapon, by coercion, by drugs slipped into a drink at a bar. We’ve been trained for that threat our whole lives. Watch your drink. Don’t walk alone. Share your location. Move through the world as if danger is always just outside your door.
But the framework of rape as forced access doesn’t explain what’s happening here.
Because these men already have access. They're in relationships, in beds, in homes with these women. They take women they allegedly love and render them inert — and choose that version of her over the conscious woman who already said yes to them.
An unconscious woman cannot react or judge or refuse; she cannot be a full human being in the room with her own responses and desires intact.
And that’s the point.
It’s no longer about access. It’s about the stripping away of her presence, her agency, her ability to exist as anything other than an object.
And it doesn’t stop there. It’s filmed, shared, passed around — each step extending the transgression beyond the room.
That’s not a sex crime that looks like the rapes we were warned about.
These rapes don’t just violate women.
They target the spaces where we’re supposed to be most powerful and safe — our relationships, our homes, our own minds — and desecrate all three.
So why “sleep” porn? Why now?
We can’t ignore the broader gender narrative when assessing this horror. Women don’t need men the way we once did — not economically, not socially, not even, increasingly, reproductively. The social norms have shifted. We’ve identified violations that previous generations were trained to absorb, excuse, or simply not see.
But more than that, we have an ever-increasing awareness and vocabulary around sexual and emotional violence. We’re getting more precise about consent — where it begins, where it ends, and what happens in between.
That precision removes something men have long relied on: ambiguity.
And what you’re seeing here isn’t confusion. It’s escalation.
As these men who already have access, intimacy, and partnership choose to strip their partners of consciousness, they extend that violation beyond the room, and share it with other men — they don’t need it explained. These men recognize it immediately; they revel in it.
Because this isn’t about desire.
It’s about dominion — and the rage of men who feel it slipping.
This isn’t random. It’s targeted. It lands in the home, inside a relationship that was supposed to be safe — and without her awareness, without her even being present for what’s being done to her. This is how these men want her, want women.
Inert. Desecrated. Unaware.
That’s the violation.
I have not been raped.
I want to be precise about that.
What I have is this: a collection of smaller violations, each one deniable on its own, that have left me in a chronic state of low-grade vigilance — something I’ve simply accepted as the cost of being a woman who dates men.
There’s the man who made a one-night stand of me by lying about his intent. The one who blueprinted a future he never planned to build. The one who bruised me even as I told him to stop being so rough. The ones who mysteriously managed to lose the condom somewhere mid-act and acted like it was an accident. I didn’t have the word for that last one, then. Without the word, the experience just sat there, unclassified.
It took me more than a year to understand that I had not consented to unprotected sex — that it wasn’t an accident, but a decision someone made about my body without asking me. It took even longer to start acknowledging what that was.
The facts arrived after the fact.
I know the word now: it’s stealthing — and only three U.S. states criminalize it. My state of Washington? Since 2024 it’s been recognized as a crime, with statutory damages of up to $5,000.
Too late for me. But knowing this now helps me reckon with what happened then.
And even still, I’m uncomfortable calling any of these incidents assault. GenX women did not come to that word easily. Instead we got “well, you did go home with him,” or “but you were both drunk so no one’s to blame.” We learned to file incidents under bad night, or my fault, or nowhere at all — just a confusing miasma of self-doubt, regret, and disappointment.
None of this is rape.
And yet.
Every one of these experiences echoes in every rape story I read: a man making a decision about my body, my safety, my reality — without my full knowledge or consent — and counting on me to absorb it quietly.
But something has shifted. Gen X women and those behind us, younger women with sharper vocabulary and less patience for the old bargains, have started calling things what they are. The bad night is a violation. The missing condom is assault. The black and blue bruises are not a gray area. We’re changing the rules, finally, after decades of absorbing what was done to us in silence.
And I think that’s exactly what terrifies a certain kind of man. He watches in impotent rage as women find the language, refuse the old arrangements, and work to change the rules of a world he thought he understood. He can’t reach all of them.
So what do you do, if you are that kind of man, with that kind of rage, at a world where women are no longer playing by the old rules?
You reach for the one closest to you.
You make sure she can’t remember.
You knock her out. You use her body. You film it and share it with men who understand — men who are also furious, also threatened, also hunting for supremacy in a world that keeps insisting women are equal. You build community around it. You make it a joke, a competition, a genre.
And she never knows.
Except, now she does. We all do.
There’s a specific kind of not-listening that presents itself as rigor.
Women turned online this week to find community, to share our outrage, to process something that felt genuinely unconscionable. And we found some of that. Good men showed up. But we also found something else — indignation, indifference, and a hyper-focus on data that had nothing to do with the data and everything to do with us.
Two such men landed in my comments. Samuel deflected by citing data points that framed women as the real abusers. Paul constructed something more sophisticated — a methodological critique of the traffic numbers, delivered with the measured cadence of a man who considers himself reasonable. “Accessed” is an imprecise metric, he explained. Hits don’t equal men. Once you abandon precision, you’re amplifying fear rather than diagnosing a problem.
It reads like media literacy.
It functions like a door slammed in a women’s faces.
Because here’s what the data argument is actually doing: it’s importing a very old idea into a very new conversation. Women are emotional. Men are logical. Emotion is suspect. Data is authority. And therefore , you can’t be trusted with your own outrage.
But that framing is a fallacy, and it always has been. Data isn’t masculine. Reason isn’t masculine. What’s masculine, apparently, is the decision to reach for a spreadsheet when women describe horror — to make precision the price of being believed.
The numbers in the CNN investigation aren’t in dispute. More than 20,000 videos of “sleep” porn. One website. One month, and it was February — the shortest month of the year. The data is fine. Men like Samuel and Paul aren’t fact-checking. They’re constructing a straw man — an attempt to make women defend our methodology instead of our point.
And the point is rape.
Here’s what neither of these men did: express a single word of horror. Ask a single question about the women. Demand a single thing from the men.
That’s the tell. That has always been the tell.
The spreadsheet is never really about the numbers. It’s about who gets to be the subject of the sentence — and who gets moved to a footnote while we argue about methodology.
Not today.
Not anymore.
Samuel and Paul aren’t the men in those videos. Let’s be clear about that.
But predatory behavior doesn’t start at its worst. It starts low. It starts with indifference dressed as reason, with deflection dressed as data, with a thousand small refusals to look directly at what’s being done to women. It starts with men who won’t say the word horror when horror is the only appropriate response.
And then it finds community.
And then it ups the dose.
We want these websites torn down. We want the owners prosecuted. We want consequences for every man who filmed, shared, watched, and profited. We want the women in those videos to have justice they don’t even know they need yet.
And we want men beside us. Not in our comments correcting our math, but beside us — demanding the same justice we’re demanding, with the same fury we’re feeling.
We’re done absorbing this quietly.
And we have the numbers to prove it.
Greetings!
I’m Dana DuBois, a memoirist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show. I write across a variety of topics but parenting, music and pop culture, relationships, and feminism are my favorites. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.
If this story resonated with you, why not buy me a coffee? ☕
What does a woman do differently when she walks into a courtroom already owning her dignity — legally, constitutionally, before she speaks a single word?
I live in Germany. I watched Gisèle Pelicot answer that question from a French courtroom last year. Same violation you describe here. She went in with her face open and said she wanted shame to change sides. And the law — the architecture around her — held her weight.
Something in me stirs every time I sit with what she did. She claimed the frame. She arrived as the subject of her own story, and the system recognised her as such.
I wonder what American women might build if they started demanding exactly that — dignity as the premise, the first word, the foundation lawmakers touch before they draft anything else. Your legislators respond to constituent vision. History proves it.
Your anger here already carries the blueprint. You name the violation precisely. You hold the men who deflect accountable. You call the community around the crime what it is.
That clarity? That's the raw material of changed law.
What would it feel like to walk into any room — relationship, courtroom, comment section — with the legal ground already affirming your full humanity?
You're already asking that question. The asking always comes first.
Ugh. You really clarify so much that was once ambiguity, Dana. Thank you. I needed to hear it. When I was raped, there was a controversial book that came out in the mid 1980s written by a woman (sorry, I’d have to google for the title) that basically put all the onus on women if they got drunk… “she was asking to be raped.” Such was my case and I carried shame for the longest time. But those consent lines were super blurry. Your assessment of why now is right on. And, I love the way you weave back to “up the dose.” So well written.