Author: Stephanie Bacquet Mathews

I was four years old the first time I was told I would burn in hell.

Not metaphorically. Not as a vague spiritual warning. I was four years old, standing in my hallway, with my mom kneeling in front of me, and told me that if I did not invite Jesus into my heart, I would be separated from my family and burn in eternal fire forever.

I was four. And my own mother is telling me that I will burn in a burning fire forever separated from everyone I love.

I spent the next twenty years inside that cult. Believing it. Fearing it. Organizing my entire inner world around it. And it took me years after leaving to understand what had actually been done to me. Not by Satan. Not by demons. By human beings who found a book, built a machine around it, and used it to control other human beings.

That is what this article is about.

I am not writing this to attack faith. I am writing this because people are connecting the Epstein network to Satanic rituals, and I need you to understand something: these men do not need Satan. They never did. They had something far more powerful. They had a theology that was built, brick by brick, to normalize exactly what they did.

Let me start with the thing that broke my own conditioning the hardest.

Hell does not exist in the original scriptures. The word itself was inserted by translators. What the original texts actually say is this:

The Hebrew word is Sheol. It appears 65 times in the Old Testament. It means the grave. The place of the dead. A neutral underworld where everyone goes. There is no fire. There is no punishment. There is no devil waiting with a pitchfork. Just death.

The Greek word is Hades. Borrowed directly from Greek mythology. Also just the realm of the dead. Not a torture chamber.

The word most often translated as “hell” in the New Testament is Gehenna. This was a real place. The Valley of Hinnom, just outside Jerusalem. A literal trash dump where garbage was burned. A place where, historically, child sacrifice had occurred. When Jesus used this word, he was referencing a physical location his audience walked past. He was using it as a metaphor for waste and destruction. Not as a description of the afterlife.

The word Tartarus appears exactly once in the entire New Testament, in 2 Peter 2:4. It is lifted directly from Greek mythology, where the Titans were imprisoned. One verse, borrowed from a completely different religion.

The doctrine of eternal conscious torment in a lake of fire was not assembled from scripture. It was built from mistranslations, borrowed mythology, and medieval literature. Specifically, Dante’s Inferno, written in the 14th century, gave Western Christianity its definitive image of hell. Dante was a poet. His Inferno was a poem. And millions of people today believe that poem is scripture.

I was four years old and I was threatened with a poet’s imagination.

Satan Was Never in the Bible Either. The original Hebrew is Ha-satan. It means the adversary. The accuser. It is a role, not a name. Not a being.

In the Book of Job, the satan is a member of God’s divine council. He has access to God. He makes wagers with God. He functions as a prosecuting attorney, not a cosmic enemy of creation.

In 1 Chronicles 21, it is Satan who incites David to take a census. In the parallel account in 2 Samuel 24:1, the exact same story is told, but it is God who does it. The same event. Two different authors. One blames God, one blames Satan. The texts directly contradict each other on this.

The fully formed Satan, the rebellious fallen angel, the cosmic enemy, the red horned creature with a pitchfork, does not exist in the Old Testament. That character was developed during the intertestamental period, between the writing of the Old and New Testaments, heavily influenced by Persian Zoroastrian dualism. The idea of a good god and an evil god locked in eternal battle is a Persian theological framework that entered Judaism and then Christianity from the outside.

The verse everyone points to for Lucifer is Isaiah 14:12. “How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn.” This verse is not about Satan. Read it in context. It is a taunt against the King of Babylon. The word Lucifer is a Latin translation of the Hebrew word “helel,” meaning shining one. Jerome put it in the Latin Vulgate in the 4th century. It was applied to Satan centuries later, by humans, not by the text.

The word Armageddon appears exactly once in the entire Bible.

Revelation 16:16. “Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.”

That is it. One verse. No description of a battle. No timeline. No global catastrophe. Just a place name, likely referring to Megiddo, a historic battlefield in Israel.

The entire End Times architecture that millions of people believe today, the Rapture, the Tribulation, the Antichrist, the seven-year timeline, the mark of the beast, none of that exists in the Bible as a cohesive system.

The Rapture does not exist in scripture. It was invented by John Nelson Darby in the 1830s. It is a 200-year-old theological invention that has been taught to children as ancient divine truth.

The Left Behind framework, the one so many American evangelicals treat as prophecy, was popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. One man’s study Bible became the interpretive lens for an entire movement.

The Antichrist as a singular end-times figure does not exist in the original texts either. The word antichrist appears only in the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John. In those letters it is plural and present tense. People, not a person. Already here, not coming.

Here is what gets buried under all of this construction.

Jesus was explicit about the Old Testament law. Christian Nationalists love to invoke Deuteronomy, Numbers, Leviticus. They use these books to justify the treatment of women, the punishment of outsiders, the destruction of enemies. But their own New Testament tells them they are not supposed to be reading it that way.

Hebrews 8:13 is direct: “By calling this covenant new, he has made the first one obsolete.”

2 Corinthians 5:17: “The old has gone, the new is here.”

John 13:34: Jesus says, “A new commandment I give you: Love one another.”

Matthew 22:37-40: The entire law and the prophets hang on two commandments. Love God. Love your neighbor.

This is what Jesus taught. Not the eradication of unbelievers. Not the taking of women as spoils. Not the beheading of those who worship differently. Love one another.

Christian Nationalists who invoke Old Testament law to justify their politics are not following Jesus. They are not even following a coherent reading of their own scripture.

Then There Is Paul. This is the part most people miss, and it is the most important part of this conversation.

Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus, was a man who literally murdered Christians before his conversion. Acts 8:1-3 describes him consenting to the stoning of Stephen and going house to house dragging Christians off to prison. Acts 9 describes his conversion on the road to Damascus.

Paul never met Jesus in person. Not once.

And yet Paul’s letters make up the majority of the New Testament. His theology, not Jesus’s direct teachings, became the doctrinal backbone of organized Christianity.

Look at what Paul reintroduced.

Ephesians 5:22: “Wives, submit to your husbands.”

1 Timothy 2:12: “I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man.”

Romans 13:1: “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.”

That last verse has been used for centuries to tell enslaved people to comply. To tell abused people to submit. To tell oppressed populations that resisting power is resisting God.

Jesus said almost none of this. Jesus ate with outcasts. Jesus touched the untouchable. Jesus told the wealthy they could not enter the kingdom of God. Jesus’s own mission statement, in Luke 4:18, was to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, and liberation for the oppressed.

The drift from Jesus to Paul is the drift from liberation to control. And the entire Christian Nationalist project is built on Paul, on the Old Testament, and on theological inventions from the 19th century. Not on the words of Jesus.

The Most Dangerous Projection is the thing that I keep coming back to, the thing that unsettled me once I saw it.

Satan is always depicted as the one who collects souls. The deal-maker. The one who wants your eternal self in exchange for earthly power or pleasure.

But Christianity is the only religion I know of that requires you to give your soul to a spirit to be saved. You are told, as a child, that you must invite Jesus into your heart. You must surrender your soul. You must sign over your spiritual self to be protected from eternal torment.

Think about the structure of that.

You are told there is a threat. That threat is eternal suffering. The only protection from that threat is surrendering your innermost self to an entity you cannot see, cannot verify, and cannot question. And the people delivering this message are human beings with institutional power who benefit from your compliance.

I was four years old when this was done to me.

The projection here is not subtle. Everything Christianity attributes to Satan, the soul collection, the spiritual contract, the demand for surrender under threat of suffering, is precisely what the institution of Christianity has practiced on its members for centuries.

Back to Epstein, these men did not need Satan. They had something far more durable.

They had thousands of years of written, institutionally sanctified theology that said women and girls are property and spoils of war. That powerful men answer to no one but their own covenant. That outsiders can be destroyed. That obedience to authority is holy.

Numbers 31:17-18 instructs the keeping of virgin girls as spoils after killing their families.

Deuteronomy 21:10-14 gives explicit instructions for taking captive women from defeated enemies.

Deuteronomy 7:1-2 commands the utter destruction of other peoples with no mercy shown.

1 Samuel 15:3 commands killing every living thing, including children and animals, in an enemy population.

This was not hidden. This was written down, taught in Sunday schools, read from pulpits, treated as the word of God.

Epstein’s operation was not occult worship. It was a blackmail operation. An intelligence operation. It used the sexual exploitation of children to control powerful men worldwide. The men involved had connections to Mossad, to the Mega Group, to extremist religious networks. They weaponized every structure available to them, financial, political, religious, intelligence, to build protection around their crimes.

The redactions in the Epstein files that protect powerful men while exposing the names of survivors mirror exactly what these theological texts do. Protect the patriarch. Erase the victim. Name the powerful as untouchable. Render the harmed as nameless.

That is not Satan’s work. That is the work of human systems built by human men to serve human power.

The Supernatural explanation protects them. I understand why people reach for the Satanic ritual explanation. I genuinely do.

It is psychologically easier to believe in a supernatural enemy than to believe that human beings, people who look like us, live near us, hold positions of authority over us, could systematically choose to abuse and exploit children for pleasure, control, and blackmail.

It is easier to create a devil than to face the ordinary human face of institutional evil.

But that psychological comfort comes at a direct cost. Every time we say these men were performing Satanic rituals, we hand them a shield. We make their evil into something foreign, something other, something that requires supernatural explanation rather than human accountability.

They are men who chose this. Men who built systems to enable and protect this choosing. Men who used every institution available to them, including religious ones, to make themselves untouchable.

Eros and Thanatos: The Drives Behind the Network. People hear Eros and think love. That is not what Eros is.

Eros is compulsive desire. It is the drive that wants beyond what it needs. It does not seek connection. It seeks consumption. Eros is the energy that turns bodies into objects, that requires degradation to feel anything, that cannot experience pleasure without control over another person. Eros is porn built on belittlement. Eros is appetite with no floor and no conscience.

Thanatos is the death drive. The pull toward destruction, domination, and annihilation of whatever stands in the way of its own power.

The Epstein network was the place where both converged.

Eros provided the appetite. Insatiable, compulsive, requiring younger bodies, more vulnerable bodies, more controlled circumstances to satisfy a desire that can never actually be satisfied because it is not seeking pleasure. It is seeking power over another person’s body. That is what pornography built on degradation is. That is what the trafficking of children is. Not sexuality. The weaponization of sexuality against people who cannot consent or cannot refuse.

Thanatos provided the willingness to destroy. To take a child’s life, future and body and treat it as expendable material in service of that appetite. To build an entire intelligence operation around the systematic destruction of the powerless to control the powerful.

Neither of these drives requires a devil. They are human. They live in human institutions. They are fed by human theology that has spent millennia telling powerful men that their appetites are sanctioned and their victims are nameless.

What stands against this is not the opposite of Eros. It is something Eros cannot comprehend.

Embodied, mutual, relational sexuality that does not require a victim. Pleasure that comes from genuine presence with another person rather than control over them. The matriarchal understanding of sexuality as something that moves between equals rather than something one person takes from another.

That understanding has been systematically destroyed by the same institutions that produced the Epstein network. That is not an accident. A population that understands embodied mutual pleasure is a population that recognizes violation immediately. You cannot traffic that population easily. You cannot shame them into silence. You cannot use pornography built on degradation to normalize what these men did.

The destruction of that understanding was part of the design. The Epstein network is not an aberration of the system. It is the system expressing itself without its usual disguise.

If you have women in your life, that are choosing patriarchy, I hope this article can help create some better understanding of their behavior right now.

I keep finding myself surprised and honestly troubled by the number of women who continue to support Trump. Many of them are deeply religious, self-identifying as Christian, but what strikes me more is a pattern I’ve noticed: these women often love their narcissistic men. They want undocumented immigrants gone. They want someone, anyone, to make the world feel safe for them, even if that means destroying it for everyone else’s comfort.

The women I know personally who support Trump share common traits: they tend to be controlling, highly judgmental, and disconnected from their feminine energy. They’ve leaned so far into toxic masculinity that they’ve lost touch with nurturing, empathy, and intuition, and beneath all of it, they’re desperately seeking love and validation.

Women perpetuate the patriarchy just as men do, though often in different ways. Men tend to perpetuate it through physical violence, sexual assault, and the normalization of exploitation through media like pornography. Women who uphold the patriarchy do so differently, through invalidation, willful ignorance, judgment, snobbery, and contempt.

Pam Bondi’s congressional hearing was a perfect example. When survivors in the room raised their hands, she looked away. By refusing to acknowledge them, she rendered them invisible. This is the role some women play within patriarchal systems: they ignore the harm being done, including to themselves, and redirect blame elsewhere. They know they aren’t safe in a patriarchy, yet they blame immigrants rather than the system harming them.

In their personal relationships, many of these women are with men they know, on some level, are deeply problematic. Yet they stay, until they are so worn down financially, physically through abuse or stress-related illness especially autoimmune conditions, mentally, or emotionally, that leaving feels impossible. These women often seek control in the relationship but simultaneously allow themselves to be gaslit, confused, and exploited. Both people are contributing to the dysfunction. It becomes a victim-narcissist cycle, constantly flipping back and forth.

So what does this have to do with Trump? He is a masterful gaslighter and manipulator. He says what people want to hear, consistently denies wrongdoing, breaks laws while projecting strength and righteousness, and has crafted a powerful public image that bears little resemblance to reality. People who see through Trump are often baffled, not just by him, but by the fact that so many still believe him. It mirrors exactly what outsiders feel watching someone stay in a narcissistic relationship. The pattern is visible to everyone except the person inside it.

The Root: Patriarchy as a Trauma System

Most people think of patriarchy as simply men having power over women, but it runs much deeper than that. Patriarchy is a trauma organization system, a hierarchy built on disconnection from the body, from emotion, from the Earth, and from the feminine principle itself. It doesn’t just oppress women. It distorts everyone inside it, men and women alike, teaching all of us to abandon our instincts, numb our feelings, and seek safety through control rather than connection.

This is why women can be some of its most loyal enforcers. When you’ve been conditioned to survive within a system, you defend the system. It feels like safety, even when it’s a cage.

The Body Knows: Sacred Embodiment

One of the most important teachings here is that the body holds the truth that the mind has been trained to deny. Autoimmune disease, chronic pain, anxiety, numbness, these are not random. They are the body screaming what the conditioned mind refuses to say: this is not okay. I am not safe. I have abandoned myself.

Women in narcissistic relationships, and women supporting narcissistic leaders, are often living in a state of chronic nervous system dysregulation, stuck in fawn or freeze responses. They have learned that their survival depends on managing, appeasing, and controlling their environment rather than trusting themselves.

This is not weakness. This is a deeply intelligent survival adaptation to an unsafe world. But it is also a wound that needs tending.

The Hierarchy Wound

Hierarchy, the belief that some lives matter more than others, is the operating system of patriarchy. It requires someone to be on the bottom. And here is the painful irony: people who feel most threatened by the other, immigrants, the poor, the different, are usually people who have internalized their own unworthiness and are desperately trying to stay above someone, anyone, on the ladder.

Blaming immigrants isn’t really about immigrants. It’s about people who have never been given permission to feel safe in their own bodies, in their own lives, without someone beneath them to compare themselves to.

What Reclaiming the Feminine Actually Means

The feminine principle, in all people regardless of gender, is not weakness. It is receptivity, intuition, cyclical wisdom, the capacity to feel without being destroyed by feeling, and deep attunement to life. Patriarchy has pathologized all of these qualities.

Reclaiming the feminine is not about being soft or passive. It’s about trusting the body’s intelligence. It’s about feeling grief, rage, and tenderness without needing to shut them down or project them outward. It’s about recognizing that the Earth herself operates on feminine principles, cycles, interdependence, regeneration, and that our disconnection from Her is the same disconnection that allows us to vote for leaders who poison the water and cage children.

What Are Narcissistic Behaviors?

Narcissistic Personality Disorder exists on a spectrum, but common behaviors include manipulation and control through gaslighting, love bombing followed by withdrawal, and using guilt or fear to dominate others. There is a consistent lack of empathy, an inability or unwillingness to recognize or care about other people’s feelings and needs. Grandiosity shows up as an inflated sense of self-importance, entitlement, and a constant need for admiration. Denial and deflection mean never taking responsibility, blaming others, and rewriting history to protect their image. Exploitation involves using relationships for personal gain without genuine reciprocity. Rage and punishment appear as disproportionate anger or cold withdrawal when challenged or criticized. And finally, idealization and devaluation, placing people on a pedestal and then tearing them down, in repeating cycles.

The Teachable Moment

The real lesson here isn’t about Trump, or even narcissism. It’s about what happens to human animals when they are severed from their instincts, their bodies, their communities, and the natural world. We become easy to manipulate. We become desperate for a strong figure to tell us we are safe. We turn on each other instead of the system.

Healing begins not with political arguments but with embodiment, coming back into the body, feeling what is real, and remembering that we are, at our core, animals who belong to this Earth. That remembering is the most radical and revolutionary act available to us right now.

I did the math that most people won’t do. I looked at the research on male violence in the United States: 60 million men perpetrating physical or sexual harm, 130 million when you include exploitative pornography consumption.

And then I asked the question that makes it unbearable:

What about the rest of the world?

There are approximately 4.7 billion men on earth. If we apply the same percentages we found in US research, and there’s no reason to think the US is exceptional in this regard, if anything we might have better reporting, we’re looking at:

2.7 billion men have perpetrated or will perpetrate physical or sexual violence against women and children in their lifetime.

Two. Point. Seven. Billion.

This is not something we address with education reform or better policing or stricter laws. That’s over a third of all humans on earth.

When I sat with that number, I understood for the first time why people believe in apocalyptic floods. Why ancient peoples imagined gods who looked at humanity and said “start over.” Because what the fuck else do you do with 2.7 billion?

I’m not religious, anymore. I don’t believe in the god of the Bible. But I understand now why the flood story exists. I understand the appeal of imagining something bigger than us: a god, aliens, or some cosmic force, that would just… fix this. Wipe the slate clean. Press reset on a species that has clearly gone wrong.

When you’re staring at 2.7 billion men causing harm, you start fantasizing about solutions that match the scale of the problem. A flood that drowns the violent and spares the innocent. Alien intervention that removes the capacity for cruelty. Divine judgment that actually holds abusers accountable in ways human systems never will.

Because the alternative, that we have to somehow address 2.7 billion perpetrators with the tools we have: feels impossible. It feels like standing in front of a tsunami with a bucket.

And then I remembered: Even in the flood story, God saved Noah. And Noah was gross too. He got drunk, probably sexually abused by his son or vice versa depending on how you read it, and then cursed entire lineages. Even the divine intervention story saved a patriarch. Even the fantasy of starting over began with more of the same.

I have about 33,000 followers on all my social media platforms. I’m writing a dissertation on the Sacred Embodied Human Animal. I’m trying to help people remember we’re part of the earth, not separate from it. I’m trying to build a foundation for living differently.

And it feels fucking ridiculous when I know that 200 million Americans would rather watch their sports and drink their sodas than be inconvenienced by evolution. When I know that 2.7 billion men globally are perpetrating violence and most will never face consequences. When I know that the systems designed to protect us are actually designed to protect them.

What am I supposed to do with these numbers? Write another article? Host another workshop? Build another community? While 2.7 billion men continue harming women and children and the world keeps spinning like this is normal?

The defeat is real. The desire for something, anything, bigger than human effort to come save us is real. Because if I’m honest, I don’t believe we can fix this with human tools. Not at this scale. Not with these numbers.

But here’s what I know that’s worse than the defeat: No one is coming to save us.

No God. No Aliens. No Cavalry.

There is no god waiting to burn the world and start over. There are no aliens coming to remove our capacity for violence. There is no divine intervention that will hold 2.7 billion men accountable.

There is just us. Human animals who have forgotten what we are. Who have built civilizations on domination instead of reciprocity. Who have normalized violence on a scale that should be species-ending.

And the truth, the hard, terrible, liberating truth, is this:

If we’re going to survive this, we have to save ourselves.

Not with a movement that converts 2.7 billion men. Not with a social media campaign that reaches the masses. Not with legislation or education or therapy programs that have already proven they don’t work at scale.

Saving ourselves means something different. Something smaller and simultaneously more radical:

It means trusting our intuition. Women have been told for generations that we’re overreacting, being paranoid, seeing danger where there is none. But the numbers prove we’re not paranoid enough. When 70-80% of men globally perpetrate violence, our gut feeling that we’re not safe is ACCURATE. Our animal instinct to be wary is CORRECT. Stop apologizing for it. Stop second-guessing it. Trust it.

It means looking at the hard facts. Stop letting people convince you that the numbers are exaggerated or that you’re being dramatic. 2.7 billion men. That’s the fact. Sit with it. Let it radicalize you. Let it break you and then rebuild you into someone who refuses to raise children in a world that treats this as acceptable.

It means remembering we are human animals. We are part of the earth, not separate from it. We have animal instincts that tell us when we’re in danger, when a system is unsustainable, when something is fundamentally wrong. We’ve been trained to ignore those instincts, to override them with logic and politeness and social conditioning. Stop. Your body knows. Listen to it.

It means shifting consciousness, not changing minds. I will not convince the masses. I will not reach 2.7 billion men with a better argument.

We can stop participating in systems that normalize harm.

We can stop teaching our children to accommodate violence.

We can stop pretending this is fine.

It means building lifeboats, not stopping the tsunami. The system is collapsing. A civilization built on this much violence cannot sustain itself. The question is not whether it will fall but what we build in its place. Every person who wakes up to these numbers, who refuses to accept this reality, who remembers what it means to be a human animal living in reciprocity with the earth and each other, that’s one more person who can help build what comes next.

The work is still worth doing, even though I still feel the defeat. I still wish something bigger than us would intervene. I still look at 2.7 billion and think “how the fuck am I supposed to address this with a dissertation and 33,000 followers?”

But here’s what I know:

The defeat is part of the process. You can’t look at numbers like this and NOT break. You can’t sit with the scale of male violence against women and children and NOT feel the impossibility of fixing it. That breaking is important. It’s the moment when you stop trying to reform the system and start building something new.

The longing for divine intervention is understandable. But it’s also a distraction. No god is coming. No aliens are landing. No cosmic force is going to hold 2.7 billion men accountable. We are the intervention. We are the ones who have to decide this ends with us.

The work is still worth doing, not because it will save anyone, but because it might help someone. Every woman who reads these numbers and stops gaslighting herself. Every mother who trusts her instincts about who to keep away from her children. Every person who refuses to raise another generation the same way. That’s how change happens. Not top-down. Not all at once. But person by person, choice by choice, consciousness by consciousness.

You can’t save 2.7 billion men from themselves. But you can help people remember they were never meant to live like this.

But this is why we NEED the Sacred Embodied Human Animal. This is why the work of remembering what we are matters. Not because it will convert the masses. Not because it will stop 2.7 billion men from causing harm.

But because:

Human animals know when a system is killing them. We have instincts that tell us when we’re living wrong. We’ve just been trained to ignore those instincts, to override them with civilization and progress and “that’s just how things are.”

Embodied beings can’t sustain disconnection indefinitely. You can’t live in a body and pretend the earth isn’t dying. You can’t be a mammal and pretend it’s normal for 2.7 billion males to harm females and young. Your body knows this is wrong even when your mind has been convinced it’s inevitable.

Sacred living means being in right relationship. With the earth. With each other. With our own animal nature. The civilization we’ve built is fundamentally wrong relationship: domination instead of reciprocity, extraction instead of regeneration, violence instead of care. Remembering the sacred means remembering that this violence is not normal, not inevitable, not acceptable.

The Sacred Embodied Human Animal is not a nice theory. It’s survival. It’s the only way out of a civilization built on 2.7 billion men harming women and children and expecting us all to just keep going.

Their is truth in the numbers. Your intuition was right. You knew something was deeply wrong. You knew the danger was real. You knew “not all men” was gaslighting.

If you’re reading this and feeling the same defeat I feel: I am so sorry and I am grateful, maybe even glad. That means you haven’t numbed yourself. That means the numbers hit you the way they should. That means you’re still human enough to be horrified.

Sit with the defeat for as long as you need to. Grieve for the world we thought we lived in. Rage at the scale of harm that’s been normalized. Long for divine intervention if that’s what you need.

And then remember:

You are a human animal. You have instincts that tell you this is wrong. You have a body that knows how to live in reciprocity with the earth. You have the capacity to refuse to participate in systems that normalize harm.

And maybe, just maybe, when this civilization collapses under the weight of its own violence, there will be enough of us who remember what it means to be Sacred Embodied Human Animals that we can build something different.

I started this research because I was exhausted. Exhausted by the “not all men” response every single time women talk about male violence. Exhausted by being told we’re exaggerating, being dramatic, man-hating. So I decided to look at the actual numbers. What I found was worse than I expected.

As a mother, as a woman trying to build safe community, I needed to know: How many men are we actually talking about? How many men cause physical or sexual harm to women and children? And once I started pulling that thread, I couldn’t stop. Because the overlap between different types of harm, the men who hit their partners AND watch violent porn AND seek out images of children, that overlap is devastating.

Here’s what the research actually says.

In the United States, there are approximately 168.34 million men. Let’s start with the most conservative estimates for physical and sexual harm:

Sexual Violence: Research shows that 57% of American men report perpetrating at least one act of sexual violence since age 14. Nearly 99% of rape and sexual assault perpetrators are male. In child sexual abuse cases, about 90% of abuse is committed by men or male adolescents.

Domestic Violence: It is estimated that 1 in 4 men will use violence against a partner in his lifetime. Males perpetrate 95% of all serious domestic violence.

That would put the initial numbers at 60 Million MEN who cause harm to women and children.

My initial estimate when I was talking to my husband, was that if we actually needed to rid the United States of men that seek out to harm women and children, we would have to hang over 1 million men. He scoffed at this, and told me that was ridiculous, so I went scouring the internet for receipts.

I wanted to prove this wrong. I wanted the research to tell me I was being unfair, exaggerating, or too emotional. But the research didn’t prove me wrong. If anything, it suggested I was being conservative, way too conservative. And these numbers broke something inside of me.

Then I wondered: How many of those 60 million men who commit physical or sexual violence ALSO consume violent or exploitative pornography?

Here is where the math gets even more devastating, because the pornography consumption numbers aren’t a subset of the 60 million. They are a separate, larger, overlapping pool that encompasses the vast majority of ALL men:

General pornography consumption is approximately 60-70% of ALL men consume pornography regularly. That is not 60-70% of violent men. That is 60-70% of all 168.34 million men. That means 101 to 117.8 million men are regular pornography consumers.

Violent pornography makes up 88% of mainstream internet pornography features physical aggression such as slapping, gagging, and spanking. This is mainstream porn content. That means 88% of those 117.8 million, approximately 103.7 million men are regularly consuming content that depicts violence against women.

“Teen” is the #1 most searched-for keyword related to porn in 2022. We’re talking about  over 100 million men specifically seeking out young-appearing sexual content. While technically legal when depicting 18-19 year old adults, this normalizes sexual interest in youth.

This picture now depicts that  the 96 million men who perpetrate direct violence and the 103.7 million men who consume violent pornography are two overlapping circles. The combined unduplicated number of men either perpetrating direct violence OR consuming violent sexual content is approximately 120-130 million men.

We were told 1 in 4 men. The real number, when we look honestly at who is consuming violent sexual content alongside who is perpetrating direct violence, is closer to 3 in 4 men. Not 1 in 4. Not 1 in 3. Three in four.

This is where it gets unbearable. This is where I wanted to stop researching because the numbers are so horrifying:

CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) consumption is more rampant than I ever imagined. Australian research found that 0.8% of adults intentionally viewed CSAM in the past year. Applied to the US male population, that’s approximately 1.3 million men actively seeking out images of child sexual abuse.

One. Point. Three. Million. Men.

And here’s what makes it worse, when CSAM offenders are studied in treatment programs, 26% had an officially documented contact offense at sentencing, by the end of treatment 85% had disclosed a history of contact offending. That is 1.105 million men who are actively trying to make physical contact with a child to exploit them!!!

Most CSAM offenders didn’t initially seek it out but their involvement progressed over time, often starting with legal pornography. The system is built to get them to be ok with this sort of content.

As a mother, I already knew that men who are doing this, can not be rehabilitated. But I did the research anyway.

The research on treatment effectiveness is devastating, and exactly what I thought it would be. Multiple studies show treatment has minimal to no effect on recidivism rates. When comparing offenders who completed a year or more of treatment versus those who refused treatment, recidivism rates were nearly identical, around 20% for both groups.

Out of 340 million Americans, we’re looking at:

– 96 million men (57%) who self-report perpetrating physical or sexual violence

– over 100 million men who search for “teen” pornography

1. 3 Million Men actively searching or creating through Grok CSAM with 85% of 1.3 million men actively trying to make it happen in the physical is still 1,105,000 men!!!

Who by the end of treatment disclosed they had made or attempted to make physical contact with a child to sexually abuse them.

That’s not men who watched something on a screen. That’s one million, one hundred and five thousand men who have physically put their hands on a child.

And that’s only the 1.3 million we know about through the CSAM research. That’s only the ones who got caught, entered treatment, and then disclosed. The actual number of men who have made physical contact with a child is almost certainly significantly higher because:

Most CSAM consumers are never detected

Most child sexual abuse is never reported

Most reported abuse never results in conviction

Self-report in treatment still undercounts

So 1,105,000 is not the number of men who have sexually abused a child in the United States.

It is the floor.

This is still a conservative number of 120-130 million men are either perpetrating violence, consuming exploitative/violent pornography, or seeking out images depicting children or young-appearing individuals.

We are told in mainstream that it is about 1 in 4 men. But research proves that it is 3 out of 4 men that are not safe for women, children or animals.

Here is something that doesn’t make it into the research papers on male violence, but that every woman who has ever watched her dog react to a man already knows:

Animals know.

Dogs cower, growl, tremble, and back away from men at rates that have no equivalent response to women. This is so well-documented in animal behavior research that it’s considered a standard behavioral pattern. A 2008 study published in Current Biology found that human observers consistently perceived male figures as approaching and female figures as retreating, and animal behaviorists believe dogs share this same perception. Fearful animals are always most afraid of something moving toward them. Men, in their size, their gait, their energy, always appear to be approaching.

Research also shows that male pheromones, chemicals released in higher concentrations by men than women, cause measurable stress responses in animals. Studies in Nature Methods found that mice and rats exhibited significantly elevated stress and decreased pain responses in the presence of human males. Even a T-shirt worn by a man caused this stress response. Not a T-shirt worn by a woman. A T-shirt worn by a man.

Animal behaviorist Patricia McConnell, one of the most respected voices in the field, documented extensively that dogs who have never been abused by men still consistently fear strange men more than strange women. The behavior isn’t about trauma history. It’s about something the animal’s body already knows.

Dogs walk into a kennel full of women and lie down peacefully. Men walk into that same kennel and every dog goes off like a siren.

Animals haven’t been programmed to override that instinct. They haven’t been told they’re overreacting, being dramatic, or being unfair to men. They haven’t been conditioned since birth to smile at the thing their body is telling them is dangerous. They haven’t been taught that politeness matters more than their own survival instincts.

We have.

Women and girls are taught from the time they can understand language to override the exact same instincts that dogs are acting on. Be nice. Don’t be rude. Give him a chance. You’re overreacting. Not all men. He probably didn’t mean it. Don’t make a scene.

The dog that growls at the man is not being hysterical. The dog is being accurate. And the woman who feels that same instinctive wariness, whose body is sending the same signals that animal bodies have been sending for millions of years, she is also being accurate.

The research on 120-130 million men causing harm or consuming violent content doesn’t tell us anything the animal kingdom didn’t already know. It just finally gives us the numbers to say out loud what our bodies have always been telling us: the fear is not irrational. The fear is data.

Yes, technically it’s “not all men.” It’s 58-80% of men, maybe more. But here’s what women experience:

We can not tell by appearance, voice or walking by someone if they are included in 3 out of 4 men!!!!

The 1.3 million men consuming CSAM? They’re not wearing signs. They’re coaching Little League. They’re teaching Sunday school. They’re our neighbors, coworkers, and relatives. The research shows most CSAM consumers remain undetected. The men who’ve perpetrated sexual violence? Most never face consequences,  studies show only a tiny fraction of sexual assaults result in conviction.

When 3 out of 4 men are either perpetrating direct violence or consume content that normalizes and fuels that violent. It FEELS like all men because we have no way to know which men are safe. Statistically, is IS almost all men!

We can’t background-check our way out of this. We can’t trust our way out of this. The numbers are too large.

So when we say “men do this” and the response is “not all men,” what you’re really saying is “only 75-80% of men, you’re being hysterical.” But 75-80% means every woman knows multiple men who have caused harm. It means every mother is statistically likely to have her children in contact with men who pose a risk. It means the problem is pandemic-level, not isolated incidents.

I started this research wanting to know how to protect my children and build safe community. What I learned is devastating. We have been severely underestimating the scale of the problem.

Women, men who are not abusing, and children need to start figuring out how to eliminate 120+ million men from spaces.

But until then, they’re already in every space. They’re integrated into daily life. And most will never be identified, never face consequences, never be held accountable.

What we CAN do:

• Believe women and children when they disclose harm

• Stop defending men reflexively with “not all men,” the numbers say it’s enough men that we need to completely restructure how we think about safety

• Build structural prevention into spaces: multiple-adult policies, mandatory reporting, limiting unsupervised access

• Trust the animal instinct, in ourselves and our children. If your body says danger, listen to it. You were not designed to override those signals. (This is actually known to cause auto immune disorders, which are higher in women, for this reason.)

• Teach children comprehensive sex education, bodily autonomy, and consent

• Support survivors and prevention programs

• NO longer accept that we have to keep living like this!!!

• Most importantly: Stop acting like women are hysterical for being afraid. The numbers justify the fear.

For the men who are offended by this, if your first response to reading this is “I would never.” It doesn’t matter. Your defensiveness is not more important than women’s safety or children’s safety.

If you’re actually one of the good ones, here’s what I need from you:

• Stop defending other men reflexively

• Believe women when they tell you about their experiences

• Hold other men accountable: that rape joke isn’t funny, that comment about a teenager’s body isn’t harmless

• Understand that women’s wariness is statistical

• Accept that we can’t tell the difference between you and the 3 out of 4, so we have to be cautious with everyone

Your feelings about being grouped with violent men are valid. But they’re not more important than the actual violence women and children face from those 130 million men, just in the United States. (I will share an article about the world impacts of this in my next article.)

I did this research hoping to be proven wrong. Hoping the numbers would show that women’s fear was overblown, that we were being unfair, that “not all men” was actually a reasonable response.

Instead, I found that the scale of male violence against women and children is even worse than I feared. The overlap between physical violence, sexual violence, violent pornography consumption, and CSAM is staggering. The lack of effective treatment is devastating. The number of men who will never face consequences is overwhelming.

This isn’t a comfortable truth. It’s a horrifying truth. But it IS the truth, backed by research from multiple sources across multiple countries over multiple decades.

When women say “men are doing this,” we’re not being dramatic. We’re being accurate. The numbers say so.

And it’s time we all started acting like it.

If you want to do your own research, here are some prompts you can use to find more information.

• Studies on sexual violence perpetration showing 25-57% of men report at least one act since age 14

• Research showing 1 in 4 men use violence against a partner in their lifetime

• Australian research finding 0.8% of adults intentionally viewed CSAM in the past year

• Studies showing 88% of mainstream pornography contains physical aggression

• Research on CSAM offenders showing 85% disclosed contact offending by end of treatment

• Meta-analyses showing minimal effect of treatment on sex offender recidivism

• Data showing “teen” as the most-searched pornography term in 2022

They say she started off licking up every drop of blood spilled from defeating demons, then she became intoxicated with bloodlust. Causing her consort, Shiva, to lay at her feet to stop her rampage. Causing her to calm down.

Kali Ma – the Dark Mother, the destroyer of evil, wearing a garland of skulls. She who dances on the corpses of demons. She who will not stop until every drop of poisoned blood is consumed so that no new demon can rise from it. Her tongue out, wild-eyed, unstoppable.

She doesn’t calm down because she’s asked nicely. She calms down when the work is done. When evil has been devoured. When her consort remembers to lay at her feet in reverence.

Yes. So many of us are ready to defeat the demons that are willing and hungry to exploit not just children but women, the vulnerable.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee) said it plainly when asked about those involved in Epstein’s crimes: “I just find them guilty and hang them publicly.”

And I agree. It should be all men who look up CSAM. All men who don’t believe in consent. All men found to roofie or drug women to try to get something from them. All men who are in the Discord, Telegram, Facebook, or Twitter platforms that feed off of the exploitation of anyone, regardless of age.

And just like Kali Ma, I will not stop until every one of them has been spilled. Devouring them, in a rampage of bloodlust. Then when men remember they are to lay at our feet for being the life bringers. Honoring the children as the future. Stopping the hoarding of resources. And to stop following greed, wealth and exploitation as a way of life.

Then women can “calm down.”

Not a moment before that though.

I will rage. I will demand justice, and public hangings sound like a good start. I will speak my truth. I will rally other women who are ready to shift this Earth into a space of home.

Where women walk without fear. Where our children are placed in the center, not in the outskirts. Where our elders, our vulnerable are placed in the center with the children, to share their stories and their wisdom. For there to be collaboration, peace and joy.

But that will come.

I have left behind this system, and all I can hope is that others will too.

I shared with my husband that if they did do a public hanging, there would be more than 1 million men that would be hung. Who would be guilty of the crimes I just shared. And that is a light estimate.

What do you do with the women who would protect their exploitive, harmful men at all cost? Do they go too? How many bodies get devoured before we’re clean?

Here’s what’s interesting: When a male congressman calls for public hangings, it’s political discourse. It gets quoted in news articles. But when women express this same rage, when we channel Kali Ma’s refusal to stop until the demons are defeated, we’re told we’re being hysterical, violent, calling for “widespread violence.”

Let me be clear: widespread violence is what’s happening to women EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF EVERY SINGLE DAY, BY MEN.

Every second. Rape. Trafficking. Exploitation. Roofies slipped into drinks. Children abused. Women’s bodies treated as resources to extract from. Our “no” ignored. Our intuition pathologized. Our rage managed.

A man in Congress can say “hang them publicly” and that’s acceptable political speech.

But a woman channeling the divine feminine destroyer? That needs to be softened. Redirected. Calmed down.

No.

Kali Ma doesn’t calm down because you’re uncomfortable with her bloodlust. She calms down when Shiva remembers his place – at her feet, honoring the life-bringer, the mother, the one who destroys so that new life can emerge.

I will not calm down. Not while this continues. Not until the foundation falls and we rebuild from sacred embodied knowing instead of predatory hierarchy.

The demons are being named. The files are being released. The truth is spilling out.

And I’m here for every drop of it.

By Stephanie Bacquet Mathews

The Feral Rage is rising.

Reading that the most powerful men, who burned for control, choose to do so over innocent children. Over and over and over.

The starting of this country was born, with control over bodies. Bodies of slaves, women, children.

All for power.

And my feral, sacred, embodied, human animal, is seething.

I can feel myself unhinging. Unraveling.

I am allowing myself to spiral.

Being a predator to the most innocent, weakest, and most easily manipulated population of society, children, is not worthy of spending a life in prison.

This is not rehabiltation-able. This is a distortion of reality that allowed them to justify, purchase and laugh about harm.

We the middle aged women, who are filled with feral rage, are in a position to rise up.

I will not have these predators, these men, think they can control my body.

Think they can have my daughter.

I will not allow their poison to infect another human.

I see a visual of a mother bear, tearing the throat out of a predator that has come to close to her cubs.

I will not choose life.

I will choose my peace, my joy, and my loves.

While I watch everyone of these predators hanging from a lamp post, or their heads rolled from a guillotine.

I choose my feral human animal rage.

I choose to end the era of men as predators.

I will rise up against this brutality.

As a crone, this is why we have been silenced.

I will not be silenced.

I will find my feral raging sisters, and we will defeat this plague of humans that have preyed for too long on our innocent.

We are many. They are few. Yet, they have used their manipulation and control to pit us against each other.

When the women rage, we will not be contained.

My feral rage, has spilled over my cup.

I can not put it back into place. It overflows, and will not be contained.

My feral rage, is not scary, it is justified.

My feral rage, will not be used against the innocent, it will be used to protect what needed to be held in the center, surrounded by all, this whole time.

How did we allow the children to pulled to the outskirts, to be hidden in the shadows, buried in bureaucracy, and eaten alive?

How did we allow these men, who are never satiated, to gain this much control, power and money, just to have them spit in our faces, lies, and show that it is never enough?

It will never be enough for them, they hunger for more, so much more.

And my feral rage, begins to lap at their hunger. I will devour them.

I will allow my cup to spillith over.

I will not stop this onslaught.

I will not stop, until I am no longer prey. Until my children are no longer prey. Until the innocent are no longer prey.

I will not stop until the predators are all hanging.

Where are my feral raging sisters?