From the Hulu series Furious to recent novels like “Honey and A Certain Hunger,” popular culture is increasingly portraying women taking revenge on men who assault them. After a decade of institutions repeatedly refusing to deliver justice, no wonder fiction is giving women what reality won’t.
The impunity America grants to powerful men is truly astounding. In November 2025, Congress passed the Epstein Transparency Act, promising long-overdue accountability. Yet today, the Department of Justice is still withholding 99% of the documents related to its investigation of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators. Worse, in the few files released, federal officials inexplicably redacted the names of accused men while exposing the victims’ identities. Survivors have marched on the Capitol and testified at congressional hearings, only to be repeatedly ignored by attorneys general and prosecutors. In response to decades of men’s widespread sexual abuse of girls, the United States has convicted only one person — a woman, Ghislaine Maxwell.
This protection of powerful male abusers is no anomaly; it is the defining characteristic of American civic life. Over the last eight years, voters twice elected Donald J. Trump to the presidency, despite more than two dozen women accusing him of rape and sexual abuse, and his infamous dismissal of sexual assault as mere “locker room talk.” In office, the Trump administration has rolled back Title IX protections for student survivors of sexual assault and harassment, while gutting federal funding for rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters.
This complicity infects even the nation’s highest court. The U.S. Senate has rewarded two men credibly accused of sexual abuse — Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh — with lifetime appointments on the Supreme Court. In June 2022, these justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, tearing away women’s constitutional right to bodily autonomy and opening the door to state-sanctioned reproductive coercion — an intimate assault that mirrors the dynamic of individual abuse on a structural scale.
Rape culture thrives when society systematically normalizes, minimizes, and excuses sexual violence through social practices, media representations, and legal norms. In the United States, statistics reflect this reality with terrifying clarity: an estimated 99 percent of rapists never spend a single day in prison. Violent pornography generates $100 billion annually, and the online “manosphere” seethes with virulent misogyny, elevating femicidal killers and incels like Ted Bundy and Elliot Rodger to hero-outlaw status. Meanwhile, while abortion bans in many states are killing women, the Trump administration is threatening to impose a nationwide ban on abortion medications used in over two-thirds of abortions.
Given this reality, it is no surprise that contemporary culture reflects a rising tide of female fury. Deprived of systemic justice, women are turning to dystopian fiction depicting direct retaliation against male abusers. In Hulu’s Furious, a survivor exacts revenge on the men who bought and sold her when she was just 14 years old. The same fury animates several recent novels: Imani Thomson’s “Honey” (2026) follows a woman targeting a predatory professor, a male student who objectifies his female classmates, an Andrew Tate-like influencer and his supporters; Chelsea G. Summers’ “A Certain Hunger” (2021) portrays a female serial killer targeting sexist men; and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s “My Sister, The Serial Killer” (2018) features two sisters taking revenge on abusive men, including their own father.
These narratives portray women fighting both their abusers and the institutions shielding them. The protagonists act out of pent-up rage cultivated over years of victimization. While shocking, these stories offer profound catharsis against a real-world backdrop dominated by figures like Epstein, Trump, Kavanaugh, and Tate — fiction supplying the justice reality has withheld.
In “The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls,” Egyptian-American feminist Mona Eltahawy argues that violence forms the very foundation of patriarchy. “Whether any individual man has ever beaten up or raped a woman is beside the point,” Eltahawy writes, “because such violence, which is enabled and protected by patriarchy, helps maintain a social construct that privileges all men.” Women are left living in the shadow of sexual terrorism.
Eltahawy poses a radical thought experiment: What if the tables were turned? What if women terrorized men the way men terrorize women? “How would men feel when they saw so many of their fellow men, murdered simply for being, like them, men?” she asks. “How would boys feel, knowing their gender makes them walking targets?” Eltahawy condemns the double standard that treats systemic abuse against women as inevitable: “A daily war is carried out against women, and yet it is not called ‘barbaric’ or ‘savage.’ We are supposed to learn to live with it, accommodate it, never fight it.”
Democratic governance is based on the idea that members of society grant the state a monopoly over the use of violence in exchange for protection from violence. As the U.S. justice system is now being weaponized to protect abusers instead of their victims, the rising surge of vigilante fiction is a direct warning: when institutions refuse to deliver justice, women may eventually reclaim that power and exact their own.
Carrie N. Baker is a professor in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Smith College and a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine.