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Sunday, 4 October 2026
We’ve been Rehabilitating Women’s Rage—& It’s Time We Stop.
Share on bsky*Editor’s Note: Elephant Journal articles represent the personal views of the authors, and can not possibly reflect Elephant Journal as a whole. Disagree with an Op-Ed or opinion? We’re happy to share your experience here.
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I think we have been trying to rehabilitate women’s rage too quickly.
We keep trying to turn it into healing, advocacy, awareness campaigns, consent education, candlelight vigils, and beautifully designed infographics explaining to men, once again, that unconscious women cannot consent. We keep trying to make rage productive before we have even allowed ourselves to understand what it knows.
Sometimes rage knows that something is intolerable. Sometimes rage knows that accommodation has failed. Sometimes rage knows that there are circumstances in which survival requires violence.
I think we have spent far too long talking around the only defensible position on this topic:
Women should be taught and prepared to kill their rapists or abductors, if that is what it takes to survive.
That’s right—taught to kill. I said what I said.
Not hunt them down later. Not exact revenge. Not become indiscriminately violent. I mean in the moment when a man is attempting to rape her, abduct her, strangle her, or kill her, she should know that his life does not become more sacred than hers simply because she may have to use lethal force to stop him.
We have taught women almost everything except that.
We teach girls how to avoid male violence. Watch your drink. Stay with your friends. Text when you get home. Check the back seat. Share your location. Do not walk alone. Do not get too drunk. Do not go upstairs. Do not leave your friend. Do not make him angry. Do not embarrass him. Do not reject him too sharply.
We have built an entire female culture around anticipating the possibility that a man may hurt us and then called that safety.
It is not safety.
It is prey management.
And I am no longer interested in raising prey.
The allegations coming out of Cornell University make that impossible for me to ignore. A young woman has alleged that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by multiple fraternity members. The criminal process will determine what can be proved, who bears responsibility, and what happened.
But women are permitted another question: How many generations of girls are we going to send into the world hoping men decide not to hurt them?
I cannot stop thinking about the larger circle around the alleged violence. Not only the men accused of participating, but the fraternity culture around them. The group chat. The dozens of men connected to it. The conversation moving around the alleged violence.
We should be precise. Membership in a group chat is not proof of guilt. We cannot say every man saw every message or understood what was happening.
But some men were talking.
Some men were responding.
And that raises a question I want asked loudly:
Where was the fucking cavalry?
Where was the man who got out of bed? Where was the man who walked down the hallway? Where was the man who called for help? Where was the man who said, “What the fuck is happening?” Where was the man willing to become deeply unpopular among other men because something felt wrong?
This is one of the parts of male violence we still do not talk about enough. It is not always only the predator. There is often a perimeter around him.
The friend who laughs. The friend who looks away. The friend who decides he does not know enough. The friend who does not want to ruin anyone’s life. The friend who assumes someone else will handle it. The friend who knows exactly what kind of man his friend is and continues inviting him into rooms full of women anyway.
We keep asking women how to identify dangerous men.
Perhaps we should start asking men why dangerous men so often feel comfortable identifying themselves to other men.
Predators learn from the people around them. They learn what gets a laugh, what gets silence, what gets normalized, what gets ignored. They learn whether anyone is coming through the door.
Sometimes what they learn is that nobody is coming.
Which brings me back to our daughters.
If the cavalry is not guaranteed to come, then I want them capable of becoming the cavalry themselves.
I do not mean a cute two-hour women’s self-defense seminar where somebody demonstrates how to slip out of a wrist grab, and everyone goes home feeling empowered. I mean real competency. Strength. Conditioning. Judgment. The ability to function under terror. The ability to escape restraint. The ability to protect another woman. The ability to use lawful defensive tools. The ability to recognize the moment when politeness is over.
And I want her taught something deeper than technique.
I want her taught permission.
Permission to resist.
Permission to injure.
Permission to become dangerous when danger comes for her.
Permission to survive without carrying the moral burden of what happened to the man who chose to attack her.
If a man is attempting to rape you, abduct you, strangle you, or kill you, your job is not to protect him from the consequences of attacking you.
Your job is to make him stop.
Your job is to get free.
Your job is to survive.
And if stopping him means he is catastrophically injured or killed, then the catastrophe began when he chose to endanger your life.
That sentence should not be radical.
But centuries of female conditioning make it sound almost obscene.
Women have been taught that violence is something men possess. Men are bigger. Men are stronger. Men are dangerous. Therefore women must manage them, avoid them, placate them, anticipate them, and survive them.
I want to break that equation.
Because the capacity for dangerous resistance does not belong to men by birthright.
Women are allowed to become dangerous too.
Not cruel.
Not predatory.
Not violent for pleasure.
Dangerous in the way every living creature becomes dangerous when something attempts to destroy it.
Female dangerousness is a deterrent to predation.
We know this but historically, we like to dance around the edges of saying it out loud.
For centuries, men who prey on women have benefited from an assumption so deeply embedded in the culture that we barely notice it: women are the ones who should be afraid.
We are the ones who calculate exits. We watch drinks. We share locations. We soften refusals. We look over our shoulders. We decide whether a man seems safe enough to anger.
The predator enters the equation already believing fear belongs to us.
I want to disrupt that assumption.
I want a man with violent intentions to look at a woman and experience uncertainty.
I want the man following a woman to her car to understand that he may have chosen badly. I want the man who puts his hands around a woman’s throat to understand that she may not freeze. I want the man who thinks intoxication makes a woman easy prey to understand that the cultural assumption of female helplessness is ending.
I want him to wonder whether she is stronger than she appears. Whether she has trained. Whether she will fight. Whether the woman beside her will intervene. Whether the men nearby will come through the door. Whether trying to harm her may cost him far more than he imagined.
I want predatory men introduced to a new calculation.
She may fight.
She may know more than you think she knows.
She may be stronger than you expect.
She may have trained for this.
She may hurt you badly.
She may stop you.
You may not survive the attempt.
That knowledge should exist in the culture.
For generations, girls have been taught what men are capable of.
Perhaps it is time boys learned what women are capable of.
And on a personal level, yes, I want to move through the world with enough certainty, strength, and self-possession that a man looking for someone easy to dominate does not see me and think: safe choice.
I want him to think:
Not her.
That is not a desire to become a predator. It is a refusal to look like prey.
And alongside all of this, for the love of Goddess and all things holy, teach men some courage.
Teach men to intervene. Teach men that silence around predation is not neutrality. Teach them to get out of bed, walk down the hallway, make the call, open the door, ruin the party, lose the friendship, become unpopular, and stop another man before a woman has to save herself alone.
The world I want is not women hunting men.
It is a world in which predators face risk from every direction.
The woman may fight like hell. And the other men may come through the door.
That is a different social order.
One in which women are not the only people expected to anticipate male violence.
One in which dangerous men are no longer protected by female conditioning and male silence.
We have tried making women smaller. We have tried making women careful. We have tried making women accommodating. We have tried making women responsible for predicting male behavior. We have handed them whistles and apps and trackers and tiny defensive devices and endless lists of things they should have done differently.
No.
Teach boys consent. Teach men to intervene. Build institutions that act before women are destroyed. Prosecute violence. Take evidence seriously. Stop protecting reputations at the expense of bodies.
Do all of that.
And alongside all of it, teach the girls to become dangerous.
Give them muscle. Give them skill. Give them nerve. Give them one another. Give them the certainty that bodily autonomy does not disappear the moment enforcing it becomes impolite.
Raise the kind girl. Raise the compassionate girl. Raise the girl who loves easily and laughs loudly and moves through the world without looking for someone to harm.
And teach her how to stop the man who is trying to rape, abduct, or kill her–by any means necessary.
Those things are not contradictions.
Kindness is not helplessness.
Gentleness is not incapacity.
Peacefulness is not defenselessness.
A woman who cannot defend herself is not peaceful simply because she has never harmed anyone. She may simply be undefended.
I want girls raised knowing that gentleness is something they get to choose, not something imposed upon them because they have been trained out of every dangerous instinct they possess.
I want women to know that they are allowed to become someone a predator should be afraid to choose.
Female dangerousness is a deterrent to predation.
I want girls to know it.
I want women to embody it.
And I want predators to believe it.
We have spent centuries teaching daughters that men are dangerous.
Fine.
Now teach them the second half.
So are you.
You are not safe to hurt.
~
Why Your Younger Self Wasn’t Actually Happier.
My early 30s represented a profound shift in my life.
It was when I moved to a new town, started a new job, and got married.
My mid-30s brought a similar shift with even heavier transitions. When I became a mother, the transformation only grew deeper.
My 20-year-old self started haunting me the moment I turned 30. By the time I had my child, she found the nerve to pitch a tent in my mind and settle there for years.
She stayed around so long that my current self started to feel like a ghost—an awkward, uncomfortable stranger in my own life.
Because she occupied my mind for so long, I started grieving her. I mourned who she was, what she accomplished, and the fierce opinions she held. Her life looked nothing like my current reality, and I slowly began to envy her.
I assumed she was happier. I genuinely believed that my past self was thriving far more than I am today, even while knowing that my present life is infinitely more stable, grounded, and secure in ways she had never experienced.
Yet, could I really blame myself? I see so many people trapped in the same pattern, grieving their past selves—especially as they grow older and see obvious changes in their bodies, routines, and social connections.
The truth is, we all look back at earlier chapters with an aching heart. We view old photographs or recall past moments that seemed so peaceful at the time. We miss the freedom, the ease, and the feeling of carrying fewer obligations and emotional scars. We convince ourselves that the person we were five or 10 years ago held the secret to joy, and that we have somehow lost it along the way.
But how accurate is our memory? Nostalgia can be deceptive. It alters the context and plays back a mental movie that makes our present feel unbearable.
Honestly, if we could step back into those years, we would remember the real picture. We would recall that our younger self was far from trouble-free. Her life wasn’t the pure bliss our minds now imagine. Yes, the past contained genuine joy and fleeting moments of peace, but that younger self was also navigating her own heavy challenges.
Many of us lived with persistent anxiety, instability, self-doubt, and a haunting uncertainty about where life was headed. Our former selves lacked the clarity we possess today. They lacked the boundaries we spent many years establishing. We tolerated toxic dynamics and uncomfortable spaces simply because we had no idea how to stand our ground.
So, what we truly miss when we grieve our younger self is rarely her happiness. We miss her ignorance—the temporary comfort of not knowing how difficult certain lessons would be to learn. We miss the absence of heavy responsibilities, the innocence of not knowing what the future holds, and the freedom of limitless exploration.
If you were to ask me today, I would tell you there’s a huge difference between being truly free and simply being unaware.
Your younger self didn’t hold a secret formula for joy; she simply had not yet encountered the specific trials and errors that shaped you into who you are today. Trading your current wisdom, self-awareness, and resilience for a past version of yourself is foolish.
It took me a long time to erase the ghost of my past self and make peace with her absence. Even now, when I look at old pictures, I can barely relate to her or understand some of her choices and beliefs. She’s simply a person who once existed—someone I’m deeply grateful for because without her, I wouldn’t be standing here now.
Was she happier? Perhaps, temporarily. But she was also desperately trying to reach the exact point where I stand today, and that was the biggest truth I was missing. I’m finally living in the destination she spent years longing to find. Most importantly, I’m no longer searching for happiness; I’m reaching for wisdom. Happiness comes and goes, but wisdom is unshakeable. It stays for good and only deepens with time.
Remember that the goal of growth isn’t to preserve a past painted by illusion. It’s to build a present where we can sit comfortably in our own skin, fully aware of our scars, and choose peace anyway.
So, stop asking your past self to teach you how to be happy. She was just trying to figure out how to survive the very things you have successfully made it through.
author: Elyane Youssef
Image: Author's own
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