By Adreanna

What Women Have Always Known

There is a certain kind of exhaustion that comes from being told, over and over again, that what you are experiencing isn’t real only to watch the world “discover” it decades later and call it breaking news.

So when the CNN exposé dropped about a website where men were sharing strategies on how to drug and sexually assault their wives and girlfriends, I didn’t feel shock.

I felt recognition.

And then, almost immediately, I felt something else, anger. Not just at what was exposed, but at the fact that it took this for people to listen. That it took numbers. That it took documentation. That it took men saying it out loud to other men before the rest of the world leaned in and said, wait… is this real?

Women have been saying this.

We have been saying it in whispers, in group chats, in therapy sessions, in comment sections, in late-night phone calls, in half-jokes that aren’t really jokes at all. We have been saying it to each other in ways that don’t always make it into headlines.

Men can be dangerous. And not always in the ways people want them to be. Not always loudly. Not always obviously. Not always in ways you can see coming.

I didn’t learn that from the internet. I learned it at home.

My education on men didn’t begin with fear. It began with food.

My mom used to take me out on what I now understand were training exercises disguised as mother-daughter dates. We didn’t have a lot of money, but every now and then she would take me somewhere that felt expensive to us. I remember being about thirteen the first time she took me to Saltgrass Steakhouse and told me to order the ribeye, the most expensive thing on the menu.

I hesitated. She didn’t.

“Don’t ever be the woman who goes out with a man and orders a salad,” she told me. “If he can’t afford to feed you the way you’re used to being fed, he’s not worth your time.”

At the grocery store, it was the same philosophy. Name brands, even when they stretched the budget. Quality over compromise. The lesson was simple, repeated often, and deeply ingrained:

You do not make yourself smaller for someone else’s comfort. You do not accept less when you deserve more. At the time, it felt like empowerment. Looking back, I can see it was also preparation. Because the lessons didn’t stay soft. They escalated.

At some point, learning what I deserved turned into learning how to survive.

My stepfather was ex-military, and together, he and my mother decided that I needed to know how to protect myself. So they created scenarios, ambushes, really. I would be grabbed unexpectedly, forced into holds, made to fight my way out. It was disorienting at first, then frustrating, then eventually familiar.

I got good at it.

Good enough that even now, I know my body could hold its own if it had to.

That was the goal. Or at least, that’s what I was told the goal was. But there was another lesson. One that didn’t feel like training. One that didn’t feel like protection. One that crossed a line so completely that there is no clean way to explain it, only the truth of it.

I was fifteen.

I was walking into my mother’s room to bring her a glass of ice water she had asked for. My stepfather was behind the door. I didn’t know that. Not until his arm was already around my neck, locking in place, applying pressure.

I fought, because that’s what I had been trained to do.

It didn’t matter.

I blacked out.

When I came to, I was cold. Disoriented. Naked. Lying on the floor on his side of the bed.

My mother was right there.

And this is the part that still sits in my chest in a way I can’t fully explain:

Because she was there, my brain tried to make it okay.

Because if she allowed it, if she witnessed it and didn’t stop it, then what was I supposed to do with that? At fifteen, you don’t have the language for betrayal like that. You just have confusion. You have fear. You have a body that knows something is wrong and a mind that is trying to survive the moment anyway.

I wish I could say that was the only time something like that happened.

It wasn’t.

This, sadly, was not my first encounter with men and boys that taught me that my body was not safe.

After that chokehold incident, things shifted in my house.

Doors came off hinges, my bedroom door, my bathroom door. Privacy became something I was no longer allowed to have. Locked doors were treated like defiance, even though they were the only thing that made me feel remotely safe.

Then came the comments.

About what I wore.
About wearing shorts in the house.
About being “provocative” in my own space.

And then came the conversation that was supposed to be the talk.

Instead, it was something else entirely.

I was told to undress down to my underwear. To take off my bra. He stripped down to his boxers. He laid on top of me and simulated sex.

I froze.

Not because I didn’t know how to fight, but because I didn’t know how to fight that.

Because this wasn’t an attack from a stranger in a dark alley. This was happening in my home. Under instruction. With the weight of authority behind it. With the quiet, suffocating understanding that saying no might not change anything.

When I told my mother later, she didn’t believe me.

By then, he had already done the work of discrediting me, painting me as manipulative, fast, dishonest. He didn’t just violate me. He built a narrative that would protect him if I ever tried to tell the truth.

That’s part of the pattern too.

So when people ask why women would choose the bear, I don’t have to think about it.

I already know my answer.

The bear.

Because a bear is a known quantity:

A bear does not pretend to be safe.
A bear does not build trust as a strategy.
A bear does not integrate into your life just to harm you later.

Men can.

And some do.

That’s what makes this moment, the exposé, the conversations, the outrage, feel both validating and deeply unsettling.

Because the most dangerous men are not always the ones you can spot.

They are the ones who can pass every test.

They are charming.
They are respected.
They are vouched for.
They are loved by their friends, their coworkers, even their exes.

Until they aren’t.

Until something shifts behind closed doors.

Until the mask comes off in a space where no one else can see it.

I read a story recently about a woman who did everything “right.” She met a man, a doctor, accomplished, admired. She met his ex-wife, who spoke well of him. His family loved him. His friends respected him. She took her time. She vetted him. She married him.

And then he changed.

Or maybe he didn’t.

Maybe he just stopped pretending.

He became controlling. Abusive. Someone she barely recognized. Someone she had no roadmap for, because the man she thought she knew had never really existed in the first place.

So what does “choose better” even mean in a world where some men are skilled enough to build entire lives as cover stories?

We’ve been given rules.

So many rules.

Hold your keys between your fingers.
Don’t walk alone at night.
Don’t wear headphones.
Watch your drink.
Share your location.
Travel in groups.

And still…

None of those rules protect you from the man you already trust.

None of those rules protect you from the man you love.

None of those rules protect you from the man who studied how to appear safe.

That’s what sits heavy.

That’s what lingers after the headlines fade.

And this is where the conversation gets uncomfortable.

Because at some point, the question stops being just about what men are doing and starts being about what women are going to do in response.

Not in theory.

In practice.

I read about a case, Brazil, I believe, where a woman woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of her daughter screaming. She found her partner sexually assaulting her child.

What she did next was not polite.

She drugged him.
She killed him.
She burned his body in a field.
And then she turned herself in.

When the case went to trial, the jury found her not guilty.

Sit with that for a second.

Because whether you agree with what she did or not, what that case represents is something women don’t often allow themselves to fully consider:

What does it look like when women stop waiting to be protected and start acting?

We are very comfortable naming the problem.

Men are violent.
Men are oppressive.
Men are dangerous.

We say it. We share it. We warn each other.

And then…

We go to the polls.
We vote many of those same men into office.
We support systems that elevate them into positions of power.
We participate in structures that consistently fail us.

And then we act surprised when they don’t save us.

That’s the part we don’t talk about enough.

Not because it isn’t true but because it forces us to confront something harder than fear:

Complicity.

Not individual blame. Not self-blame for what is done to us.

But collective participation in systems that do not serve us.

How long are we going to keep asking for protection from the very structures that have shown us, repeatedly, that they are not designed to protect us?

How long are we going to keep waiting for someone else to advocate for us, to fight for us, to save us, instead of organizing, voting, building, and acting in ways that reflect the reality we say we believe?

Because you cannot say “Men are dangerous”, and then continue to hand them unchecked power and expect a different outcome.

This is not a call to violence.

It is a call to awareness.
To accountability.
To alignment between what we know and what we do.

Because right now, there is a gap.

A gap between our lived experiences and our collective actions.

A gap between our fear and our follow-through.

A gap that keeps us stuck in a loop where we name the harm, survive the harm, and then return to the same systems that allowed it.

And then there’s the larger question, the one that stretches beyond gender and into power itself.

What do we do about a world that feels increasingly hostile to the people living in it?

What do we do about governments that fail to protect the vulnerable?
About systems that reward exploitation?
About leaders who look the other way or worse, participate?

What do we do about a reality where it feels like the masks are coming off everywhere, all at once?

Not just in relationships.
But in institutions.
In leadership.
In the very structure of the society we’re told is civilized.

Because when I look around, I don’t see a civilized society.

I see violence dressed up as order.
I see exploitation dressed up as opportunity.
I see harm dressed up as normal.

An uncivilized society in a Gucci belt.

So I’ll ask it plainly.

What are we going to do?

How much more do we need to see?
How much more do we need to know?
How many more stories need to be told before something actually changes?

Because awareness is not the same thing as action.

And if all we do is acknowledge what’s happening, if all we do is nod along and say this is terrible, then nothing actually shifts.

Women have always known.

The question now is whether we are finally ready to act like it.