Toxic Masculinity and the System Behind the Crime: Unmasking Rape Culture
Updated: 11 hours ago
Women deserve to live in a world where they are free to experience joy, free to go out at night and have fun without worrying about who might be lurking in the shadows, free to dress and present themselves however they choose to without being policed, body-shamed or receive cat calls and unwanted stares, free to go out dancing and on dates with the men they are attracted to, without worrying for their safety, and even to engage in safe and consensual intimacy without any shame, guilt or fear attached to it.
By Laasya Nandula in Ahmedabad
Sexual Violence is often spoken about as isolated, individual acts, committed by a few extremist individuals or ‘monsters’ who exist outside the boundaries of civilized society. This article challenges that framework and argues that those singular acts of violence are perpetrated and sustained by a broader cultural and structural system. It argues that individual punishment or precautionary advice often targeted towards women, only provides temporary relief as it does not address the root cause and the underlying conditions that constantly reproduce such violence.
Drawing upon recent global cases and empirical studies, it presents a cultural pyramid model to showcase how invisible gender roles and stereotypes, casual sexism, victim-blaming and microaggressions, all form the foundation upon which the more visible forms of violence rest. It further goes on to explore the psychology of a rapist and how distorted ideas of consent, entitlement, toxic masculinity shape both individual behaviour and collective silence.
Finally, the article situates these dynamics within emerging gendered ideological divides among the newer generations. It reflects on how increasing female autonomy and shifting social roles are reshaping gender relations, developing anxieties such as the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ among men socialised within the rigid frameworks of patriarchal toxic masculinity. It argues that meaningful change requires confronting these structural conditions, and calls for active male engagement in dismantling the systems that both enable violence and constrain their own emotional and social lives.
The number is 62 million. That is how many visits a website where men upload videos of drugging and assaulting their wives received, during the month of February, 2026 alone.
Based on an investigation conducted by CNN (Vandoorn et al, 2026), the men who visited or uploaded content on this website had group chats where they would discuss and teach each other how to drug and rape their partners without them finding out, including which drugs to use in what dosage, almost finding a grotesque sense of community in this online ‘rape academy’.
But this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In 2024, a similar incident occurred in France where Dominque Pelicot had been secretly drugging and raping his wife, Gisele Pelicot, for 10 years, along with inviting 51 other men into their house to do the same. (Pelicot, 2026)
One may think these are incidents relevant to the West or isolated to the online sphere, but in India, sexual assault continues to permeate everyday life. In September alone, at least 13 rape cases were reported across Delhi NCR, one of which included a 17-year-old girl getting gang raped by three men who approached her claiming to be cops and morally policed her for hanging out with her 17-year-old old male friend in a park at night.
And yet, instead of blaming the perpetrator, most people are questioning why the girl was hanging out with her male friend at night, blaming the parents for not imposing stricter curfews on the girl, all of this even leading to the nearby Lady Shree Ram College switching to online classes for the ‘safety’ of its female students.
In most situations, there are two reactions that people tend to generally have; either they blame the victim like in the Delhi incident, or in more extreme cases like the Online Rape Academy and the Pelicot case, people rally and demand the rapists be hanged, castrated, call them ‘monsters’ and talk about how it’s hard to believe that cases like these still occur in the 21st century.
However, rage is not sustainable when justice is rarely served, and even when it is, punishing one individual does not change the system as a whole that perpetuates the rape culture. So, eventually, the talk dies down, people loose hope, accept defeat that things can’t be changed and give up.
But, it’s the women who are left to carry the fear.
They diminish themselves, take precautions to not grab unwanted attention, carry self defence tools, and pray they don’t become the next victim. That’s what patriarchy and rape culture does. It’s a system designed to make one live in constant fear and scepticism of who to trust, so we don’t fight back.
Figure 1: Pyramid of Sexual Violence
Rape is not a singular act of violence.
It’s a cultural pyramid (see Figure 1), where the physical act of violence is only the visible tip of the iceberg, held up by invisible layers of attitudes, beliefs and microaggressions that get normalized by society. Phrases like ‘boys will be boys’, objectifying and slut-shaming women, blaming and questioning the victim instead of believing them, gender roles, stereotypes and jokes that trivialize the issue, all may seem like minor things, but they are the foundation that hold the pyramid up.
The second level is the microaggressions, the small acts of violence that normalize and desensitize you, so the next time you see a major act of violence, you just sigh in defeat instead of feeling shocked or enraged. The third level is the removal of autonomy, where your consent is violated and you’re seen not as a human being but as an object to be used, controlled and dominated by the perpetrator for his own pleasure. Only then at the top of the pyramid comes the physical abuse like rape, murder and mass acts of violence such as war rape and genocide.
This is why individual punishment, temporary outrage and labelling these predators as ‘monsters’ who are mentally ill and not part of society, does nothing but perpetuates the system. Because it spreads the myth that rape occurs in dark, lonely streets by unknown men who lurk in the shadows. Whereas in reality, statistics show that it’s the opposite.
In a research conducted by Glasgow University with 1000 sexual assault victims, less than 10 percent of victims reported that their attacker was unknown; 23 percent of women were assaulted by a partner or ex-partner, 24 percent were assaulted by a family member, 44 percent were assaulted by another known person. (qtd in Adams, 2018)
This is also why it’s often times harder for victims to open up and report the assault because most would not want to see a person they once knew, loved and maybe even looked up to, imprisoned behind bars, or worse, given capital punishment. Sometimes, even if they do gather the courage to report, they aren’t always believed by those around them because predators could be successful people with reputable careers who present themselves to the rest of the society as kind, good natured people.
Although most rapists have narcissistic tendencies and a lack of empathy towards others, it does not necessarily mean they have psychological disorders. Thus, the more we keep othering them and pretending as if they are a small minority of extremists, we keep ignoring the fact that they roam among us in society and may look and act just like us.
This takes away accountability not just from the predators but from the so called ‘good men’ who are often aware of the attitudes and beliefs their fellow men hold, but are complicit in their silence. ‘Not all men’ they are quick to say, but not being a part of the problem isn’t the same as helping to fix it. Not being a misogynist is the bare minimum; it is basic human decency and does not automatically grant one the title of being a good man.
So, unless and until men hold each other accountable and change the system, it is all men until it is no men.
In order to change the system, it is also necessary to understand the psychology of why do men rape?
The popular myth is that it’s due to lust, an inability to control themselves, an excuse that is often used to shift the blame towards the victim for provoking the man by dressing or behaving a certain way. “She was asking for it,” they say.
Was she really?
The definition of what is considered as consensual is also often misunderstood due to lack of awareness and proper sex education. By definition, consent is only considered valid if it is freely given, informed, enthusiastic and most importantly, reversible. Situations where someone is incapacitated due to drugs or where coercion and unequal power dynamics are involved, do not count as valid consent. But for most men who view women as property, they believe consent is unequivocally granted to them if the woman in question is their partner or wife, the main reason why marital rape is still not legalized in India.
Other men believe consent is something they can persuade out of a woman, they take a ‘no’ as a challenge, as a sign to pursue more. Or they take anything vaguely resembling a yes as a binding consent and don’t believe it’s reversible. And that is only in the situations where consent is even taken into account.
In more extreme cases, where men are driven by hatred and hostility towards women, they go out of their way to commit acts of violence against women, either by being opportunistic and taking advantage of victims who may be incapacitated, or by being vindictive because they believe they have been wronged by the victim or women as a whole, or for purely sadistic reasons of wanting to dehumanize and humiliate the victim. In all of these cases, the common theme is power, dominance and asserting control. (Welle, 2024) Understanding that, is the first step to shifting the blame from the victims back to the perpetrators and holding such men accountable, and as a result destigmatize the shame, guilt and fear victims often have to live with.
It’s also important to look at why these ideas of power become so deeply embedded in the way men relate to women, where this power structure comes from, and how it is reproduced. This brings us back to patriarchy.
Patriarchy is not an inevitable consequence of biological differences between men and women, but a social system that has been constructed by men for themselves and reinforced over centuries. It was a cage meant to keep women oppressed and men at the top. But now, with more and more women fighting for their rights and escaping from that cage, it is men who are getting left behind, trapped in their own system of rigid gender roles that told them they had to be aggressive and dominant to be leaders, to maintain power and control.
Most grew up lacking the freedom to express any emotion except for anger, and end up with an inability to regulate their emotions, channelling all their trauma, rejection and hurt into anger and revenge that manifests as physical violence towards the most vulnerable: women and other minorities.
Going back to the case of Dominique Pelicot, during his trial, it was discovered that he had experienced a traumatic childhood, witnessed a gang rape at age 14, domestic violence at his home and was also a victim of sexual assault at age 9. (Harding, 2024) While women are four times more likely to experience some form of sexual harassment throughout their lives, young boys and teenagers can also fall victim to abuse.
In almost 96 percent of the cases, the perpetrators are other adult men in their family. And these statistics are only based on cases that are reported, in reality the numbers may be even higher as young boys are much less likely to speak up about their trauma or even admit to themselves that what they experienced is assault, long after growing up. (Wicky, 2025)
This cycle of silence and masculine conditioning can have consequences far beyond childhood. In a culture of toxic masculinity that dictates men to be aggressive and dominant and views sexual experiences as conquests, where the more experience you have the more you are rewarded and placed higher up in the social pyramid, it’s no wonder that young boys don’t speak up, and in turn can get sucked down the incel pipeline and become perpetrators themselves in their attempts to seek validation. They end up developing false beliefs that women are responsible for their problems and that they must prove their masculinity by dominating and controlling women as they see that as the only way to gain approval among other men.
If these beliefs are learned and reinforced within male communities, then changing them cannot be left to women alone. The call is coming from inside the house.
And while men are the problem, they are also the solution, the only antidote for any real change to take place. Women have been fighting for decades, and we are tired of having to scream and shout for our voices to be heard, to be taken seriously.
It’s time for men to step up, to listen to the women in their lives and actively educate themselves, to break gender roles and toxic masculinity, to speak up and hold other men accountable for their misogynistic views against women, to also create healthy and safe communities amongst themselves which are not built on seeking validation but on mutual support, empathy and understanding, and finally to teach their sons about the importance of consent and give their daughters the freedom to live in this world without fear.
And when I talk about freedom I do not only mean freedom from sexual violence, that is the bare minimum and only the beginning. Women deserve to live in a world where they are free to experience joy, free to go out at night and have fun without worrying about who might be lurking in the shadows, free to dress and present themselves however they choose to without being policed, body-shamed or receive cat calls and unwanted stares, free to go out dancing and on dates with the men they are attracted to, without worrying for their safety, and always doubting the man’s intentions or questioning what ulterior motives they might be holding, and even to engage in safe and consensual intimacy without any shame, guilt or fear attached to it.
That is what dismantling rape culture ultimately means: not simply punishing individual ‘monsters’ after the violence has already happened, but creating a society where women no longer have to organise their lives around the possibility of becoming victims. The goal is not merely survival, but freedom.
Laasya Nandula is an undergraduate Student, CEPT University, Ahmedabad
References
Vandoorne, Fox, Kennedy, Stubbs, Chacon (2026): “Exposing a Global ‘Rape Academy’”, CNN, 26 March, https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-assault-online-vis-intl/index.html
Pelicot (2026): “Gisele Pelicot vs. a Pack of Rapists: 50 Strangers and my Former Husband”, National Post, 16 April, https://nationalpost.com/feature/gisele-pelicot-vs-a-pack-of-rapists
Adams (2018): “Sex Attack Victims Usually Know Attacker, Says New Study”, BBC, 1 March, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-43128350
Welle (2024): “The Pelicot Case: The Psychology of a Rapist”, Frontline, 19 December, https://frontline.thehindu.com/news/giselle-pelicot-dominique-pelicot-france-public-rape-trial-toxic-masculinity-feminism/article69004906.ece
Harding (2024): “Dominique Pelicot’s Double Life: Who is the Man Who Plotted his Wife’s Mass Rape?”, BBC, 20 December, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clynx2q93q1o
Wicky (2025): “Sexual Violence Against Men is Committed By Other Males, Mainly During Childhood”, Population & Societies, Number 633, https://doi.org/10.3917/popsoc.633.0001
“Gen Z Men and Women Most Divided on Gender Equality, Global Study Shows” (2025): King’s College London, 5 March, https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/gen-z-men-and-women-most-divided-on-gender-equality-global-study-shows
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