It's Not in Your Head: How Women Can Navigate Feeling Unsafe and Why Men Must Step Up

Apr 22

A woman holding a mug and looking out of a window in the early morning

*Content note: This post discusses sexual violence, trauma, rape culture, and distressing content. Please read at a pace that feels safe for you.

There is something heavy in the air right now. If you are a woman, or someone who moves through the world in a female body, and you have been feeling a creeping, persistent sense of dread, hypervigilance, or grief, you are not imagining it. You are not being dramatic. You are paying attention.

The news cycle, the court cases, the documentaries, the investigative reports: they are not just stories. They are confirmations of things women have always known but have often been told to doubt. That the world has not been safe for us, and that the systems meant to protect us have often looked the other way.

This post is for two groups of people. First, for the women trying to make sense of what they are feeling and figure out how to take care of themselves. Second, and perhaps most urgently, for the men who say they care, and who now need to decide what that care actually looks like in practice

For Women: You Are Allowed to Feel This

1. Name What You Are Experiencing

The first step in navigating any difficult emotional landscape is recognising what is actually happening inside you. Right now, many women are experiencing a complex layering of responses, and it helps to have language for them.

Triggers: are responses to present-day events that connect, consciously or not, to past experiences of harm, danger, or powerlessness. A news headline, a conversation, even a familiar smell can activate a nervous system that has learned, with good reason, to stay on alert.

Vicarious trauma: occurs when we are repeatedly exposed to the pain and trauma of others through news, social media, conversations, or advocacy, and begin to carry that weight ourselves. It is real. It is cumulative. And it does not mean you are weak; it means you are human and connected.

Invalidation trauma: happens when your reality, your experience, or your feelings are denied, minimised, or explained away by others. For many women, this kind of wounding is constant: in workplaces, relationships, institutions, and public discourse. Being told "that's not what happened" or "you're overreacting" when you know what you experienced is its own form of harm.

Post-Traumatic Stress (PTSD or trauma responses): can emerge not only from direct personal experiences but from sustained exposure to environments and information that feel threatening. Nightmares, hypervigilance, emotional numbness, difficulty concentrating, and a startle response that seems out of proportion: these are not signs of weakness. They are your nervous system doing its job in a world that has given it ample reason to stay switched on.

Grief and loss are also part of this. Grief for the safety you thought you had. For the naivety of a world that felt more trustworthy before you knew what you now know. For the women who did not survive. For the version of yourself that existed before certain doors opened.

2. Acknowledge That Feeling Unsafe Around Men Is Valid

Say it plainly: you may not feel safe around men right now. And that is okay.

This does not make you a man-hater. It does not make you irrational. It makes you someone who is processing a great deal of information, personal, collective, and historical, and responding accordingly. Trust yourself. Your nervous system is not your enemy.

It is also okay if this feeling is complicated: if it exists alongside love for the men in your life, alongside hope that things can change, alongside exhaustion. Feelings are rarely simple, and you do not have to tidy them up to make others comfortable.

3. Prioritise Self-Care, Not as a Luxury, but as a Necessity

Self-care in this context is not bubble baths (though those are fine too). It is the deliberate, daily practice of tending to your nervous system and protecting your capacity to keep going.

Regulate your media consumption. You do not have to read every article, watch every documentary, or follow every thread. Staying informed is important; drowning is not.
Move your body. Trauma lives in the body. Walking, stretching, dancing, swimming: any movement that brings you into your physical self can help discharge some of what has built up.
Protect your sleep. Sleep is foundational to emotional regulation. When things feel heavy, sleep is not a luxury. It is essential.
Connect with safe people. Community and connection are among the most powerful antidotes to collective trauma. Find your people.
Seek professional support. Therapy and trauma-informed practitioners can provide a container for what feels too large to carry alone.

4. Give Yourself Permission to Focus on Yourself

You are allowed to step back. You are allowed to stop educating, explaining, and carrying other people's discomfort. You are allowed to not be available for every conversation, every debate, every request to justify why you feel what you feel.

Right now, you get to be the priority of your own life. That is not selfishness. That is survival, and it is wisdom.

This does not mean the personal work of healing is not valuable. It absolutely is. But it does mean that healing, for many people, looks different from simply thinking more positively. It means finding communities where you are genuinely seen and affirmed. It means working with a therapist who understands the intersection of identity, systemic experience, and self-worth. And it means allowing yourself to grieve the real costs of navigating spaces that have not always been welcoming, while also building a foundation of honest self-trust from the inside out.

5. Let Yourself Feel Angry

Grief and fear often have anger underneath them, and anger, when honoured rather than suppressed, can be clarifying and even energising. You do not have to perform calmness or measured-ness. Anger at injustice is a reasonable human response to injustice.

6. Trust That Your Discomfort About Certain Things is Information

Some things that many women are naming right now, an unease about certain media, certain spaces, certain dynamics that previously went unremarked, deserve to be taken seriously, not explained away. We will return to this below.

When the Mask Slips: From Playboy to the Present

The documentary series Secrets of Playboy (A&E, 2022) dismantled the image of liberation Hugh Hefner spent decades constructing. Behind it was a pattern of grooming: young women lured by promises of fame, only to find themselves inside a controlling environment built around one man's power. Women described being drugged, coerced into sexual acts, and silenced through sex tapes used as collateral. VIP guests operated with no accountability. Some women did not survive. His empire was not built on freedom. It was built on the systematic exploitation of women and girls, enabled by powerful men and a media that chose not to look too closely.

That culture did not die with Hefner. In March 2026, CNN's As Equals investigation uncovered hidden online networks where men share tips on how to drug their own partners and carry out assaults without their knowledge. This is the same world that produced Dominique Pelicot, the man who drugged his wife Gisele over nearly a decade and invited dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious. He was sentenced to twenty years in December 2024. The networks that enabled him did not disappear. They migrated.

Dominique Pelicot. Say his name. Because the culture that enabled him lives on, in the silence of men who know this is happening and say nothing.

For Men: It Is Time to Do the Work

If you have read this far and you consider yourself a good man, a man who respects women, who is horrified by what you've read, that is the beginning, not the end, of what is being asked of you. Being a good person is the floor, not the ceiling. And right now, the floor is not enough.

1. Understand That "Not Being Part of the Problem" Is Not the Same as Being Part of the Solution

Silence is not neutrality. Comfort is not allyship. In a moment like this, passive goodness is just a more polished form of inaction. Women are not asking you to be perfect. They are asking you to be present: genuinely, actively, uncomfortably present.

2. Educate Yourself, and Stop Making Women Do It for You

Women are exhausted. They are carrying the weight of their own fear, grief, and hypervigilance while simultaneously being asked to explain, justify, and educate. This is the mental and emotional load that has been placed on women for generations, and it needs to stop.

Read. Watch. Listen. Seek out the research, the documentaries, the accounts. There is no shortage of material. Use it.

Follow voices doing this work thoughtfully, people like Professor Neil (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwqw5TzzwXcsEBvAYLnPrvw) in Canada or Speechprof (https://www.youtube.com/@therealspeechprof) in the US, who are having real, nuanced conversations that deconstruct masculinity, the manosphere, and what healthy male engagement in these conversations actually looks like.

3. Be Curious, Not Defensive

When a woman in your life shares something that made her feel uncomfortable or unsafe, your first response must not be to argue facts, quote statistics, or explain why her experience is an outlier. That is defensiveness dressed up as reason, and it causes harm.

Ask: What would be most helpful right now? Do you want me to listen, or are you looking for support in another way? And then honour the answer.

When you minimise, argue statistics, or jump to "but not all men," you are telling the woman in front of you that her reality is less important than your reputation. That is invalidating. That is its own kind of harm.

4. Engaging With the Manosphere, Even Passively

If you are following influencers who peddle misogyny, even occasionally, even "just to understand what's being said," consider what your engagement signals: to algorithms, to those platforms, and to the women in your life. There is a difference between critical analysis and passive consumption. Be honest with yourself about which one you're doing.

5. Talk to Other Men

This is arguably the most important point in this entire post. Women have been having this conversation among themselves for generations. They are tired. They should not have to be the ones convincing men to care about women's safety.

Talk to your friends, your brothers, your fathers, your colleagues. Challenge the joke that doesn't sit right. Ask the question in the group chat. Name the pattern you've noticed. It is not enough for it to be " not all men" until it becomes "no men." That shift requires men talking to men.

6. Understand and Acknowledge Rape Culture

If you have never interrogated the water you swim in, the media you consume, the jokes you've laughed at, the assumptions you've absorbed, now is the time. Rape culture is not something that exists only in extreme cases. It lives in the everyday normalisation of women's discomfort, in the way victims are questioned and perpetrators are protected, in the culture that celebrated Hugh Hefner rather than holding him accountable.

You do not have to be a rapist to have absorbed and perpetuated aspects of rape culture. But you do have to be willing to look at it honestly.

A Note for Queer Folk

This conversation must also include queer men, who navigate their own layers of complexity here. Queer men, particularly those who are visibly gender nonconforming or trans, also experience profound unsafety from misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia that are often deeply intertwined. The structures harming women are the same structures that harm queer communities. Standing up for women's safety and standing up for queer safety are not separate projects. They are the same work.

This is Now Men’s Work

Women have been naming this for a very long time. They have written the books, made the documentaries, given the testimonies, filed the reports, and held each other through the aftermath, and what culture has enabled.

They should not have to do this alone. They should not have to do this at all, but they have, because the alternative was silence, and silence is not acceptable.

It is now men's work to carry this forward. Not because women are too weak but because women are tired, and because the people best positioned to change male culture are other men.

This is not about guilt; this is about responsibility, accountability, and the simple yet radical act of deciding that the women in your life and the women you will never meet deserve to feel safe in the world.

You Don’t Have to Navigate This Alone

Whether you are a woman processing fear, grief, or trauma, or a man who recognises they need support in doing this work, professional help is available.

If you are experiencing distress, trauma responses, or feel you need a safe space to process what you're feeling, please don't hesitate to reach out for stress management support. Or book a free consultation

You deserve support that is skilled, compassionate, and specifically equipped for what you're carrying.