Most of us probably imagine someone obviously dangerous: a violent stranger, someone unsettling or antisocial, someone who looks like the sort of person we should avoid.

We rarely imagine the charming colleague, the popular university student, the successful professional or the person everyone describes as a “good guy”.

And that is part of the problem.

The idea that rapists are monsters is comforting. It gives sexual violence a recognisable face and allows us to believe that dangerous people are fundamentally different from everyone else. If we could just identify the monsters, perhaps we could protect ourselves from them.

But sexual violence does not work like that.

Feminist philosopher Kate Manne explores this problem in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. One of her most unsettling observations is that perpetrators of sexual violence do not necessarily have any obvious identifying features. As she writes, “rapists are human, all too human, and they are very much among us” (Manne, 2019, p. 199).

If we expect rapists to look like monsters, what happens when they don’t?

The ‘golden boy’ problem

Manne’s idea of the ‘golden boy’ is useful here. The golden boy is someone whose reputation, status or perceived character makes it difficult for people to imagine him as capable of sexual violence.

He might be successful, charming, popular or simply well-liked. When accusations are made against him, the accusation conflicts with the version of him that everyone already knows.

He doesn’t seem like someone who would do that.

And when we cannot reconcile the accusation with our image of the man, we can start questioning the accusation instead.

This is where Manne’s concept of ‘himpathy’ becomes important. She defines it as the “inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy” in cases involving sexual assault, intimate partner violence and other misogynistic behaviour (Manne, 2019).

The problem is not sympathy itself. The problem is when sympathy becomes so focused on the accused that the victim disappears from the conversation.

We worry about his career, reputation, family and future. We talk about how an accusation could ruin his life. The accused man can become the person we feel sorry for.

As Manne puts it, “we sympathize with him first, effectively making him into the victim of his own crimes” (Manne, 2019, p. 201).

The ‘good guy’ can become his own defence

One of the most damaging consequences of the monster narrative is that it turns character into evidence.

He’s always been kind.

Everyone loves him.

He would never do that.

But someone does not have to be entirely evil to commit an act of sexual violence. People are complicated. Someone can be generous to their friends and abusive towards their partner; successful at work and violent at home; charming in public and controlling in private.

Being a “good person” in other areas of life does not tell us what happened in a particular situation.

Yet we often treat it as though it does.

This is particularly dangerous because our assumptions about perpetrators can influence who we believe. Manne describes credible excess: the tendency for socially powerful or respected people to receive more credibility than they otherwise would. Historically marginalised groups, meanwhile, can experience a credibility deficit.

In sexual violence cases, this can create a troubling imbalance. The accused man’s reputation becomes evidence of his innocence, while the victim’s behaviour becomes evidence against her.

Why do we interrogate the victim?

If the accused doesn’t fit our image of a rapist, we often start examining the victim instead.

Why was she drinking? Why did she go home with him? Why didn’t she leave? Why did she continue speaking to him afterwards?

These questions can shift attention away from the behaviour of the accused and towards whether the victim behaved like a “perfect” victim.

The standard can become impossibly high: she must remember everything perfectly, report immediately, behave consistently and have no complicated relationship with the perpetrator.

Meanwhile, the accused can benefit from something much simpler: he doesn’t look like a rapist.

This is why the monster narrative is more than an inaccurate stereotype. It can actively shape how we interpret accusations.

The Brock Turner case

The Brock Turner case demonstrates this tension particularly clearly.

Turner was convicted of sexual assault after attacking an unconscious woman. Yet discussion surrounding his punishment placed significant emphasis on his status as a promising young man and the impact that punishment might have on his future.

The language of a “promising young man” encourages us to imagine everything he might become: his career, opportunities and future.

But what about the future of the person he assaulted?

This is the kind of exonerating narrative Manne is interested in. Sympathy for the accused’s potential can become more emotionally compelling than concern for the harm already experienced by the victim.

The same pattern has appeared repeatedly in public discussions of allegations against powerful men. Manne argues that the reputation and perceived goodness of the accused can become central to the story, sometimes overshadowing the experiences of those making the accusations (Manne, 2019; Washington, 2019).

We need to stop looking for monsters

The uncomfortable conclusion is that there is no useful answer to the question, “What does a rapist look like?”

There is no particular face, personality or social background that reliably identifies a perpetrator.

They can be strangers, partners, friends, colleagues or people we deeply admire. They can be socially respected and genuinely loved by the people around them.

Recognising this does not mean abandoning due process or believing every accusation automatically. An accused person deserves a fair process, and allegations should be assessed carefully.

But fairness should not require us to treat respectability as evidence of innocence.

Perhaps the better question is not “Does this person look like a rapist?” but “Why do I find it so difficult to believe that this person could have done this?”

That question forces us to confront our own assumptions.

Because if we only recognise rapists when they look like monsters, we are not protecting people from sexual violence. We are simply protecting ourselves from the uncomfortable truth that perpetrators can look completely ordinary.

And perhaps that is the most frightening thing about them.

They don’t have to look like monsters.

Leave a comment

Sources & further reading

Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Penguin, 2019) — the central text behind the concepts of the “golden boy”, “himpathy”, credible excess and the idea that rapists are “human, all too human”.

Lara Washington, ‘Feminism 101: What is Himpathy?’ (FEM Newsmagazine, 2019) — a useful introduction to Manne’s concept of himpathy.

Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Stanford sexual assault: records show judge’s logic behind light sentence’ (The Guardian, 2016) — contemporary reporting on the Brock Turner case and the role of character references in his sentencing.

For decades, cultural critics (mostly men) sneered at rom-coms as “chick flicks”, that shallow, mindless escapism for women who couldn’t handle serious cinema.

But thanks to films like ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, we’ve rightfully reclaimed them as comfort food. However, that doesn’t negate the fact that rom-coms are rotting our brains. Not because they’re silly, but because they have secretly functioned as the ultimate propaganda machine for some of the most toxic, anti-feminist relationship behaviours in modern history.

We’ve been conditioned to view stalking, emotional unavailability, and the total erasure of female identity as the height of romance. And honestly? It’s ruining how we love in real life.

The Fixer-Upper Myth

There’s the character archetype we all know too well: The Emotionally Stunted Man and the Woman Who Heals Him. As a persistent reader of the ‘sad cowboy meets outrageous girl who fixes him’ Wattpad-style books I know this trope too well.

In the rom-com universe, men are allowed to be deeply cynical, emotionally unavailable, or outright rude (looking at you, Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice). But the narrative arc always demands that the woman be patient enough, beautiful enough, and accommodating enough to unlock his hidden, tender heart.

This trope has done absolute numbers on our collective psyche. It teaches women that emotional labour is a form of currency. We think, “If I can just endure his coldness, if I can be the one who finally understands him, he will change for me.” But in real life, men who are emotionally unavailable at the beginning of the movie are usually just... emotionally unavailable at the end of it. Except you’ve wasted three years of your life acting as a free therapist.

Even Our Subversive Feminist Shows are Obsessed

In response to the classic rom-com we turned to modern, edgy, cynical television for our salvation. We created the “anti-rom-com.”

Except, if you look closely, the trap is still there.

Take Fleabag; specifically Season 2. It is widely hailed as a feminist masterpiece about grief, sisterhood, and self-actualisation. It’s sharp, it’s dirty, it subverts every cliché in the book. And yet, what is the emotional engine of that entire second season? A forbidden romance with the Hot Priest.

The climax of this deeply existential, brilliant show still boils down to a classic romantic tragedy at a bus stop. We wept when she said “I love you” and he replied “It’ll pass.” But why did Fleabag’s ultimate moment of healing have to be catalysed by a man finally seeing her? Why does her spiritual and emotional redemption still have to pass through the crucible of a romantic connection, even an unfulfilled one?

We have gotten so good at dressing up romance in a leather jacket and giving it a cynical wit, but the underlying message remains unchanged: Your story doesn’t truly begin, and your healing isn’t truly complete, until you are romantically perceived. Even our most progressive television can’t seem to imagine a woman finding her center without a love interest acting as the anchor.

The Extinction of the Female Subplot

The biggest crime of the romantic narrative, whether it’s a cheesy 90s flick or a prestigious streaming show, is what it does to the woman’s actual life.

In order for the romantic climax to happen, the heroine almost always has to sacrifice her career, her location, or her autonomy. Rachel Green gets off the plane to Paris in the Friends finale to be with Ross, a man who spent a decade disrespecting her and her career.

The underlying message is incredibly insidious: A woman’s personal ambition, her geographical desires, and her independence are just obstacles to be cleared before the real prize, a man, can be claimed. The movie ends the moment she shrinks herself down to fit into his life.

The bitter truth is that this brain rot didn't start with the note book; its been forced down our throats from birth. We were raised on fairy tales that treat finding a man as the ultimate happy ever after. By the time we grew up, the conditioning was already complete. We became the ultimate architectural flaw in our own liberation: modern, independent women who can dismantle the patriarchy by day, but still crave the rain-soaked third-act confession by night. We are trapped in a cultural paradox, fully aware that these narratives are ruining how we love in real life, yet still sitting in the dark, waiting for the music to swell. We know the fairy tale is toxic propaganda—but God help us, we still want to watch her get off the plane.

So I have made a promise to myself, no rom-coms until I have de-centred men from my own fairy-tale, and if I do fall into the trap, I have to genuinely reflect on how I don’t actually want a man I’ve never really had a conversation with to fly to my town and propose to me.

Upstairs in my dorm, my own reality looked entirely different. Before leaving the bar, I had mentally mapped the brief walk back to my bed. I checked the lock on my door three times. My phone’s battery was meticulously managed, my live location was continuously broadcasting to two friends across the globe, and a heavy, unspoken survival guide dictated every interaction, every wardrobe choice, and every route I took. For years, I had told myself I would never travel alone. The narrative had been drilled into me since childhood: the world outside is a predatory machine, and if a woman ventures into it unchaperoned, she is actively inviting disaster.

The stark contrast between our experiences made me realize that solo travel is not a universal human milestone. It is a profound privilege, and the currency required to buy into it depends entirely on who you are. For the men I encountered on the road, travel was an act of reckless freedom. It was all a big, loud party where safety was an afterthought. For me, and for countless women like me, it was an exercise in calculated courage.

“Men travel with a backpack and an itinerary; women travel with a backpack and a lifelong, exhausting survival manual.”

The psychological barrier that keeps women from exploring the world solo isn’t just a simple fear of the dark; it is the terrifying structure of internalised blame. Society has conditioned us to accept responsibility for crimes that haven’t even been committed against us yet. If a man is mugged in an unfamiliar city, he is viewed as a victim of unfortunate circumstance. If a woman faces assault or harassment while travelling alone, the line of questioning shifts instantly from the perpetrator to her own judgment: Why was she there? Why was she walking alone at night? What was she wearing? Why did she put herself in a dangerous situation?

This invisible framework turns the map of the world into a minefield of potential self-blame. It tells us that our autonomy is a liability, and that by choosing to experience the world on our own terms, we forfeit our right to safety and sympathy. For a long time, that fear functioned as a flawless, self-imposed cage. It was easier to stay home than to risk becoming a cautionary tale.

Stepping across that threshold and booking my first solo trip was not a sudden burst of fearlessness. It was a conscious, trembling choice to claim a piece of that privilege for myself. I realized that waiting for the world to become perfectly safe meant waiting forever, effectively giving away my youth and my autonomy to an invisible threat.

The truth of women’s solo travel is that we do not get to experience the effortless carelessness of our male peers. We still look over our shoulders. We still fake phone calls to imaginary boyfriends when a stranger asks too many questions. We still pay an expensive “safety tax”; spending extra money on well-lit hotels instead of cheap, secluded hostels, and booking daytime flights rather than cheaper, midnight arrivals. Our caution is the tax we pay to buy our freedom.

Yet, discovering this truth didn’t ruin travel for me; it transformed it. There is an entirely different, deeper kind of beauty in a journey born out of calculated courage rather than thoughtless privilege. When a woman travels solo, her journey is inherently intentional. She has defied a cultural script that told her to stay small, stay protected, and stay home.

We may never get to view the world as one big, carefree party, and perhaps we will always have to navigate the weight of the “what ifs.” But every step we take alone on foreign soil is a quiet, radical act of defiance. We are proving to the world (and more importantly, to ourselves) that the earth belongs to us just as much as it belongs to those who move through it without a second thought.

I would like to add that, independent of gender, global leisure travel is an immense luxury dependent on a strong passport and disposable income, freedoms unavailable to the vast majority of the world, including the local women working in the very destinations we visit. Acknowledging this global imbalance doesn’t minimize the unique anxieties women face on the road, but it humbles them. It reframes solo travel not just as a struggle against gender inequality, but as a profound socioeconomic privilege that grants us the ultimate freedom: the freedom of choice.

Do you know that specific, awful quiet that happens right after you leave a social gathering? You’re walking to your car, or you’re staring at the ceiling, and your brain immediately starts running a post-mortem of everything you just did.

I laughed way too loudly at that joke. I took up the whole conversation. I was way too intense about that political point. I showed too much skin, or too much emotion, or just… too much.

The verdict is always the same, handed down by that mean little voice in your head: You were too much.

We’ve all been conditioned to treat “too much” like a personal character flaw. We treat it like an emotional spill we need to rush to mop up before anyone slips. But if we actually look at it, “too much” isn’t a real measurement. It’s just a boundary line drawn by people who need you to shrink so they can stay comfortable.

The Cheat Code of the “Chill Girl”

Let’s talk about the cultural obsession with the “low-maintenance” woman. She’s the ultimate romantic and social ideal, right? The girl next door. The one who needs nothing, asks for nothing, and takes up no emotional real estate. She’s totally fine with whatever plans you make, she’s never dramatic, and she’s effortlessly content with absolute crumbs of attention.

But the “Cool Girl” is a scam.

Human beings are inherently maximalist. We are loud, complicated, messy, and we have big, inconvenient feelings. Being “low-maintenance” usually just means you are doing the exhausting, agonizing labor of maintaining yourself entirely in secret, just so nobody else has to deal with the reality of your humanity.

We’ve been taught that our value goes up the less space we occupy. And it’s exhausting. Here is the thing I wish we could all tattoo on our brains: “Too much” is never actually about your volume. It’s about their capacity. The people who think you are too much are simply not your people. Shrinking yourself to fit into a room that is too small for you will only leave you suffocated.

I laugh too loudly at jokes in public spaces,

Catching the side-eye from strangers’ faces.

I talk too fast when I get excited,

Over-explaining things no one invited.

I drink too much on a random night out,

Drowning the quiet, replacing the doubt.

I care too deeply, I hold on too tight,

Lying awake, overthinking the night.

A heavy downpour, a runaway train,

Too much to handle, too hard to contain.

But then the room shifts, the shadows unbend,

I laugh too loud because I love my friends,

And they are so funny, the joy is so real,

Why should I stifle the magic I feel?

I talk too fast because passion takes hold,

There are too many stories that need to be told.

I drink too much because the music is loud,

And for once I am dancing, lost in the crowd.

I care too deeply because my heart is wide,

With nothing to cover and nothing to hide.

Let the world say I overflow at the brim,

If I am “too much,” then they are too dim.

But we rarely talk about the architecture of that visibility. We rarely ask what happens when the gaze we invited in becomes a guard tower.

If to be loved is to be seen, then love, by its own definition, requires a witness. And when we construct a life around the necessity of that witness, we inadvertently build a panopticon of our own making.

The Architecture of the Gaze

Originally designed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham and later popularized by Michel Foucault, the panopticon is a circular prison with a central watchtower. The inmates, housed in cells along the perimeter, can be seen at all times by the guard in the tower, but they can never see into the tower. Because they never know exactly when they are being watched, they must assume they are always being watched. Eventually, they police themselves.

In romance, we don’t need a prison warden. We willingly hand the keys to our partners.

When we buy into the hyper-surveillance of modern romance, the central tower is occupied by the beloved. We begin to view ourselves through their eyes.

• Do I look beautiful when I sleep?

• Am I existing correctly?

• Is my anger justified, or will it make them love me less?

The tragedy of the romantic panopticon is that it alters our behaviour under the guise of connection. We perform authenticity. We curate our vulnerability so that it is palatable, safe, and easily consumable by the person watching.

The desire to be seen transforms into the agonising pressure to be watchable.

The Gendered Warden

As feminists, we have to acknowledge that the panopticon of love is not a gender-neutral space. Women and marginalised genders have long been conditioned to exist as objects of the gaze rather than subjects of their own lives. John Berger famously wrote in Ways of Seeing: “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”

When we bring this conditioning into intimate relationships, the panopticon becomes a trap. We are taught that our value lies in our utility and our aesthetic harmony within the relationship.

We become the ultimate self-regulating inmates. We shrink our anger so we aren’t “too much.” We perform the labour of emotional regulation, domestic perfection, and effortless beauty. We do it voluntarily because we are told that this is how we maintain the love, the gaze that validates our existence. We misinterpret the prison of constant scrutiny as the warm glow of devotion.

The paradox is brutal: We seek love to escape the crushing loneliness of the world, only to find that the price of admission is the total surrender of our privacy.

Why Do We Only Want Lovers to Look?

Why is it that when we hear “to be loved is to be seen,” our minds immediately drift to a romantic partner? Why don’t we picture a best friend of twenty years, a sibling, or a community?

We have culturally assigned romantic love the impossible task of being our ultimate mirror. This is a byproduct of the societal assumption that a monogamous, romantic relationship is the highest, most valuable, and most defining achievement of an adult’s life.

Historically, as traditional structures like tightly knit villages, religious communities, and extended families collapsed under Western individualism, we didn’t lose our human craving to be known. Instead, we concentrate all of that longing onto a single person: The Romantic Partner. We turned romance into a secular religion, and the partner into its deity. We expect them to be our best friend, our passionate lover, our co-parent, our intellectual equal, and our spiritual anchor. Therefore, when we think of “being seen,” we assume it must happen within this all-consuming crucible. We have been conditioned to believe that visibility from a friend is comforting, but visibility from a romantic partner is validation of our existence.

By associating this quote exclusively with romance, we set a trap. We tell ourselves that if we are single, or if our romantic relationship is struggling, we are fundamentally invisible. We turn a beautiful truth about human connection into a romantic monopoly, making the panopticon that much harder to escape, because to step out of its gaze feels like stepping into total non-existence.

Leave a comment

Growing up, people always told me I was going to grow up to be a ‘heartbreaker’.

It was usually said by well-meaning adults or teenage peers with a knowing smirk. Ignoring the alarming undertones of adults (often men) imagining your romantic conquests, it was meant as a compliment, a prophecy of power. It painted a picture of a future where I would be the one holding all the cards. I envisioned myself as a beautiful, fiercely autonomous woman moving through the world with a trail of captivated, mildly devastated suitors in my wake. It implied absolute control.

I didn’t expect it to be my own heart breaking, over and over again.

There is a distinct, agonizing comedy to being a modern single woman who is deeply well-read in feminist theory. Intellectually, I know that my value is entirely sovereign. I can deconstruct the patriarchal structures of validation at a dinner party, and I genuinely believe that a woman’s life does not require a partner to be considered a success story.

But intellect doesn’t protect you when you’re staring at a blank phone screen at 2:00 AM.

Last week, I found myself smirking at a flirty message from a man on my phone, a man I am not remotely interested in romantically. Something about that message sparked a momentary hit of external approval that society has taught me to seek out in every situation I can. I switched off my phone, caught my reflection in the dark screen, and thought: Is this what liberation feels like?

This is the quiet trap of modern womanhood. We successfully fought for our independence, our bank accounts, and our freedom from traditional domestic scripts. But while society handed us the keys to our autonomy, nobody gave us a map on how to handle the silence that comes with it.

We were told we didn’t need a man to validate us. Excellent. But we were never actually taught how to generate that validation from within. So instead, we find ourselves highly educated, fiercely independent, and profoundly lonely, with the quick fix being to outsource our self-worth to strangers and emotionally unavailable ghosts, all while feeling an immense layer of feminist guilt for wanting that external comfort in the first place.

The contradiction: We are expected to be strong, self-actualised icons by day, but we are still human beings who crave to be chosen, seen, and held by night.

We’ve replaced the old societal expectation to be a perfect wife with a new, equally exhausting mandate: we must now be perfectly healed, bulletproof goddesses who never feel a pang of longing or lack. If you confess to feeling lonely, you’re told you “haven’t done the inner work.” If you want romance, you’re labeled “codependent.”

I unfortunately also don’t have the answer to what this mystical, life-altering inner work is that everyone alludes to is. Presumably, it involves buying a journal with gold foil lettering, meditating until your ego dissolves, and looking into a mirror every morning to tell yourself “I am enough” until you actually believe it. I’ve tried versions of it. But funny enough, chanting affirmations in an empty room doesn’t actually change the fact that humans are fundamentally wired for connection.

Self-love consumerism weaponises feminist autonomy to make us feel guilty for simply being human. So, we perform. We pretend we are perfectly content in our absolute solitude. We post the solo travel photos, we toast to our independence with our girlfriends, and we use the vocabulary of empowerment to mask the heavy, quiet ache that hits when the restaurant table is only set for one.

I don’t know how to perfectly bridge the gap between my feminist ideals and my human longings yet. I don’t have a ten-step blueprint for how to stop searching for validation in the wrong places, and I am officially resigning from the performance of the bulletproof woman.

This Substack is my white flag.

Feel free to follow along to see if I figure this out.