We Raised Boys to Be Served. Now We're Paying for It.
What 62 million views and 250 leisure hours have in common.
Last month, CNN exposed what investigators are calling a “rape academy” — a sprawling network of online communities where men gather to encourage and celebrate the drugging and sexual assault of their sleeping wives and partners. One website alone received 62 million views in a single month. Let that number settle in your body for a moment. Sixty-two million.
My first reaction was grief. My second was recognition. Because I have spent years studying the entire framework of how women are harmed, and I know this: men did not stumble into this depravity. They were given the time, the permission, and the cultural scaffolding to get there.
I am the founder of Mother Honestly and The Care Gap, and the data I work with every day tells a story most people are not ready to hear. Women in America perform two to three times more unpaid caregiving than men. In dual-income households, women still carry 65 percent of childcare and 70 percent of household labor. Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, men enjoy on average 42 more minutes of leisure per day than women. Across a year, that is more than 250 hours, more than six full work weeks, of additional free time that men accumulate simply by not doing what women do without applause, without compensation, and without end. Another study by Gender Equity Policy Institute found 434 hours of free time among men between the ages of 18-24 spent on video games, sports, and socializing. These data are U.S alone, and potentially higher in other regions such as Nigeria, where I grew up and currently reside.
We built a society that excused men from care. We told boys that cooking was women’s work, that emotions were weakness, that their job was to earn and to lead, and that everything else, the feeding, the soothing, the sitting with a sick child at 3 a.m., the remembering, the worrying, the holding, was someone else’s responsibility. And then we handed them smartphones and unlimited bandwidth and acted shocked when some of them filled those hours with the consumption and production of violence against the very women keeping their lives intact.
I am not saying leisure causes rape. I am saying that a man who has never been asked to be responsible for another person’s wellbeing, who has never been required to see a woman as fully human in the daily negotiations of a shared life, is a man who has been primed for entitlement. And entitlement, left unchecked and handed an internet connection, has a well-documented destination.
The research on intimate partner violence confirms what women have always known in their bones. Separation, the moment a woman asserts her independence, her right to leave, to earn, to decide, is statistically the most dangerous time in a relationship. Men kill their intimate partners at three times the rate women do. And the trigger, again and again, is not rage born from nowhere. It is rage born from the loss of control over a woman who was never theirs to control.
We are watching this play out at scale. Women are entering the workforce, demanding equity in caregiving, investing in their own health and ambitions. And a segment of men, raised never to share, never to serve, never to see a woman’s autonomy as anything other than a threat, are responding with violence. Online. In divorce proceedings. In beds where their partners sleep trusting them.
So I want to ask a question that our culture has been too polite to ask directly: What did we do to our boys?
We raised them to be served, not to serve. We taught them to suppress every emotion except anger. We gave them heroes who dominated and conquerers who took. We excused them from the kitchen, from the carpool, from the pediatrician’s waiting room, from the invisible labor that constitutes the connective tissue of human life. And then we wondered why, when that connective tissue began demanding to be seen, some men came apart.
Dr. Michael Kimmel, one of the foremost researchers on masculinity, describes the animating emotion of male radicalization as “aggrieved entitlement” the fury of men who feel robbed of a world that was promised to them. A world where women were grateful, available, and quiet. The manosphere, the rape academies, the men who kill their wives rather than let them leave, they are all expressions of the same wound, inflicted not by women’s progress but by a model of manhood so brittle it cannot survive equality.
The answer is not to manage men’s danger more carefully. The answer is to change what we build.
We must raise boys who know how to care for a sick parent, who can sit with grief without flinching, who understand that a woman’s independence is not a subtraction from their worth. We must build schools and faith communities and workplaces that hold men accountable for the full weight of human life, not just the profitable and visible parts. We must make caregiving mandatory, not aspirational, not celebrated as exceptional when men do it, but expected, always, as the baseline of what it means to be a person in relationship with other people.
And we must stop treating women’s fear as irrational.
In 2024, an interviewer asked eight women whether they would rather be alone in a forest with a man or a bear. Seven chose the bear. The video went viral because it was funny and because it was true. Women laughed so they would not cry. Because the forest is everywhere. It is the parking garage and the office and the running trail. And now we know, thanks to CNN, that it is also the bed.
Sixty-two million views. In one month. On one website. Those are not monsters hiding at the fringes. Those are men in the middle of ordinary lives, with ordinary jobs and ordinary families and extraordinary amounts of unsupervised time, who have been never taught that a woman’s body, a woman’s sleep, a woman’s existence, belongs to her.
That is the care gap no one wants to name. Not the gap in who does the dishes. The gap in who sees women as human. We built it. We can unbuild it. But only if we stop looking away.
Blessing Adesiyan is a chemical engineer, climate and care economist, Editor-In-Chief of The Care Gap and the Founder and Chief Care Officer of Caring Africa, advancing care as essential economic infrastructure through systems change, policy, and investment.