This article appears in the June 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
“Have you seen the video of the female bonobos stomping out the male bonobo?” my friend asks over dinner. Our mini girls trip to see Cardi B in Palm Springs is beginning in tonal perfection.
“Yes! They beat him to death because he was abusing one of the baby bonobos!” my other friend cries.
I look the story up. The attack was called the “most violent ever documented” among bonobos, a notoriously matriarchal and largely peaceful species. Five females took turns stomping on the male’s body, bit his testes, and pleasured themselves on top of him while the assault happened. Gangster.
“Did you know bonobos share 98 percent of our DNA?” says my friend. “We also share the same amount with chimps, who are super-violent.” We all pause for a moment, almost wistful.
The conversation then turns into a discussion about how we might manage our own matriarchal justice, and whether our softer political tendencies around restorative justice should apply. (For the record, I’m fairly merciful.)
This is what women do nowadays when men aren’t around: swap skin care routines and discuss how to exact justice on male predators.
It’s been just a few weeks since millions of Epstein files were dumped on the public to fester like a landfill. They included thousands of pictures of abused girls, a diary of a victim discussing being robbed of her baby just after giving birth, and lurid details of collusion with businessmen like Les Wexner, whose company Victoria’s Secret shaped so much of the cultural obsession with girls’ bodies in the ’90s—the culture we grew up in.
It’s not just the Epstein files. Women have been staring down a weekly onslaught of stories that remind us that despite it being the year 20-effing-26, our lives and our bodies are still sickeningly disregarded. The stories range in severity, but each one lands like a chimp-like punch to the tit.
It’s the supposed Democratic “ally” Rep. Eric Swalwell, who allegedly assaulted at least five women, including accounts of rape. Instead of taking responsibility for his harm, he preferred to maintain his innocence while resigning from public office. “I’m innocent, here’s my gun and my badge.” (I guess we can expect Swalwell to grab a nighttime spot on NewsNation, right after Chris Cuomo and Bill O’Reilly. It’s a streaming sanctuary for predators.)
It’s the CNN exposé about a website where men trade tips and sell videos of themselves raping their unconscious wives or girlfriends. Women who trust them. Women who love them. Women who already consensually sleep with them and their mangled little dicks. That story is followed by the arrest of a pop singer named D4vd for the alleged murder and mutilation of a 14-year-old girl named Celeste Rivas. Her body had been found decomposing inside a Tesla registered to him.
Add to that some comedy news: Louis CK headlining the Netflix Is a Joke Festival at the Hollywood Bowl in L.A. Maybe this time if he masturbates in front of a female comic in the greenroom, they get to headline the festival next year! If only!
It’s all a bit much. We are living in the cold unrelenting backlash of the #MeToo movement. Hell, even Harvey Weinstein is back in court after an appeals court threw out his conviction. The backlash is now playing out under yet another Trump presidency, the man who inspired its creation in the first place. And just like the second Trump administration, a second #MeToo movement is looking like it will be darker and more unhinged.
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a viral tweet I had somehow missed: Men should start off in jail and prove their way out.
The subsequent belly laugh was healing. It’s obviously a joke, but the premise stands. Men (not all men) are not only dangerous to women and children, they are on the loose! And more than that, they’re in charge.
Why wouldn’t the next #MeToo movement involve a little bonobo justice? Would it not be warranted? Women are living in a country that is currently charging them with manslaughter for having lifesaving abortions, while we’re simultaneously being waterboarded by pundits asking whether men are OK. Cue the belly laugh.
For now, it seems women are biding our time, forming our underground networks of solidarity as we wistfully swoon at our mammalian counterparts for how they so swiftly handle predators in their midst. But don’t worry, men, whatever revolutionary feminist movement arises next—and it will arise—remember we only share 98 percent of our DNA with bonobos. The other 2 percent is up to you.
This article appears in Jun 2026 issue.
