Originally published 2018-10-15.
In October 2018, the American novelist and essayist A.R. Moxon posted a long Twitter thread that asked men to picture a world where being kicked in the groin was treated the way sexual violence often is: joked about, blamed on the victim, rarely punished and confused with intimacy. The thread went viral within hours. It became one of the most widely shared pieces of commentary written during the fight over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the US Supreme Court.
The idea is simple. Almost every man knows exactly how a blow to the groin feels, and no man mistakes it for sex. By borrowing that instantly recognisable pain, Moxon tried to make the everyday caution, shame and disbelief that many women describe feel concrete to readers who had never had to think about it.
Below, each screenshot of the thread is explained in order, followed by a selection of reader replies and a look at what the analogy captures and what it leaves out. Moxon, who wrote under the handle @JuliusGoat (his display name that month was "Julius Ghost"), later said he knew the comparison was imperfect, and that limitation is part of the discussion too.
Who A.R. Moxon is and why he wrote the thread
This is Moxon himself. He writes novels, including The Revisionaries and Very Fine People, and a weekly essay newsletter called The Reframe. In 2018 he was best known online for long, carefully built Twitter threads on politics and culture.
He posted the thread on 6 October 2018, the same day the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh by 50 votes to 48. Kavanaugh had been accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford when both were teenagers, which he denied, and Ford had testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee nine days earlier. In interviews afterwards Moxon explained his reasoning: men rarely have to consider what women are feeling in order to stay safe, so he looked for an experience men would understand in their bodies. He also said he picked the groin because no man confuses getting kicked in the nuts with sex
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The thread, part one: growing up careful
The opening tweet sets the scene with the physical shock of a deliberate, painful kick, repeated more than once. Moxon starts with pain rather than politics so the reader feels the event before arguing about it. More than 7,700 people liked this first post.
The second tweet makes the reader a 12-year-old and the attacker a trusted adult, a friend and business partner of his mother. The detail mirrors a pattern found in research on child sexual abuse: most young victims are harmed by someone they or their family know, not by a stranger.
Here the boy's father tells him that women simply want to kick men, so he must learn to protect himself. Moxon is pointing at the safety advice many girls receive from parents, which places the burden of prevention on the potential victim. The final line, about planning a life around avoiding the kick, describes the constant background vigilance many women report.
The analogy now moves to street harassment: older women staring, following and commenting on the boy's body. Reversing the genders makes familiar catcalling sound absurd, which is the point. It asks why the original version is so often treated as harmless.
This tweet covers clothing and media. The boy hides his body and buys protective gear, while advertising shows men's crotches without their faces. It is a direct inversion of how women's bodies are often cropped and sold in magazines and billboards.
Moxon notes that most of the boy's friends have been kicked but have told no one, and that the older girls at school joke about it. The single word "Jokes" at the end lands hard. It reflects how widely assault goes unreported, and how humour can make victims feel their experience doesn't count.
The thread turns to religious teaching that tells the boy his body causes temptation and that preventing an attack is his responsibility. Purity-culture messages like this have been criticised by many former churchgoers for teaching shame rather than consent.
The thread, part two: partners, police and courts
Now an adult, the man is hurt by a girlfriend he loves, then mocked for being upset. This is the analogy for assault within a relationship and for the denial that often follows. Being harmed by someone you trust is among the most common forms of sexual violence, and among the hardest to name.
When he reports it, the police ask what he was wearing, whether he had been drinking and whether he had been kissing her. These are the questions survivor advocates say still deter many people from going to the police. Moxon ends the tweet with two blunt words: he left.
This tweet refers to laws that once excused assault within marriage, and to survivors paying for their own forensic exams. In the US, every state had criminalised marital rape by 1993, and federal law now says victims should not be billed for forensic exams. The "1% conviction" figure is Moxon's rhetorical shorthand; anti-violence groups such as RAINN, using federal crime data, estimate that only a small fraction of sexual assaults ever end in a conviction.
The image of a star swimmer let off lightly by a judge worried about the attacker's future points to People v. Turner. In 2016 Stanford swimmer Brock Turner received six months in county jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman in 2015. Public anger at the sentence led California voters to recall Judge Aaron Persky in June 2018, the first such recall in the state in 86 years.
The thread, part three: politics and the Kavanaugh confirmation
Moxon points to the #MeToo movement, when large numbers of people described past assaults, and to the response that worried most about false accusations and about romance being spoiled. Research suggests false reports are a small minority of cases, though the exact share is hard to measure.
The reversal continues with a woman running for president who is recorded bragging about attacking men. This mirrors the Access Hollywood tape, recorded in 2005 and published by The Washington Post on 7 October 2016, in which Donald Trump described grabbing women.
Here the imagined candidate calls her accusers liars and insults their looks, then beats an experienced first major-party male nominee. It is a role-reversed retelling of the 2016 election, written from Moxon's openly political point of view.
The Senate candidate in this tweet refers to Roy Moore, the 2017 Alabama Republican nominee accused of pursuing and assaulting teenage girls, allegations he denied. The judge is Kavanaugh, and the accuser who hid from death threats is Ford, who said her family had to move several times.
Days before the vote, President Trump mocked Ford's testimony at a rally in Mississippi, drawing laughter from the crowd. Kavanaugh was confirmed on 6 October, and Moxon notes that a decisive vote came from a man; Senator Susan Collins, a woman, also announced her support the day before.
The final twist widens the analogy to pregnancy: a kick that could leave you carrying the attacker's child. Moxon links it to fears that Kavanaugh's appointment would help overturn Roe v. Wade. That did happen in June 2022, when Kavanaugh joined the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
How Moxon ended it
The closing tweet admits that the exercise only brought him nearer to understanding women's anger, not all the way. It ends with a request to be kind to women and a final joke turned back on abusers. This was the most-liked part of the thread after the opening tweet.
A short follow-up notes how strange it is that an analogy was needed at all. It is a fair self-criticism: the reason the thread worked is that many women's direct accounts had not been heard in the same way.
How readers responded
Thousands replied on Twitter and Facebook. Most responses were grateful, some added caveats, and a few pushed back. A selection follows.
User Meidara extended the analogy: after all that pain and fear, the men in Moxon's story would not want revenge, only for the kicking to stop. It is a reminder that most survivors ask for safety and accountability, not retaliation.
Susan Krussell replied simply that the thread made her cry. Many replies were like this: short, emotional and from women who said it described their own experience.
British technology journalist Charles Arthur quote-tweeted the opening post and urged everyone, male or female, to read it. Shares from accounts with large followings helped spread the thread far beyond Moxon's usual audience.
Another reader thanked Moxon and said the comparison worked because many men struggle to see how a sexual act can be painful or abusive. Separating sex from violence was the core aim of the analogy.
Posted two days later, this reply called the thread beautiful, showing how long it kept circulating after the confirmation vote.
Laurel Schellenberg thanked Moxon and hoped it would spark empathy in at least a few men. Gratitude mixed with modest hope was a common tone among replies.
Kelly J praised the thread as provocative and well reasoned. Readers who liked it often valued that it was built step by step rather than as a single angry post.
Terry Newberg called it a good exercise in empathy that might help some men finally understand. Note the timestamp: the conversation was still going in the early hours of the next morning.
Not everyone agreed. On Facebook, Joline Swan asked readers to imagine being falsely accused because of their gender. Worry about false accusations was the most common objection to the thread, and it shows how differently people read the Kavanaugh hearings.
Shell Mitchell said she wanted to hug Moxon because the thread described the world women live in, then urged critics to read the other comments before replying. Her comment contains strong language, so the screenshot is blurred until you choose to view it.
Eva Wilson said she could not finish the thread without tears and hoped that if one person understood, more would follow.
Kaylyn Fristad raised an important point: men are also raped, and they too face mockery and disbelief. She argued all victims deserve justice. Male survivors are real and under-supported, and recognising them strengthens rather than weakens the case Moxon was making.
Barbara Holmes liked the analogy but said it could not fully capture the sense of violation that comes with sexual assault. Moxon agreed with this kind of criticism himself.
What the analogy gets right, and where it falls short
Analogies are useful when they move a reader into someone else's position, and this one did that for many people. It works because it is physical, universal among men and unmistakably violent. It also covers the whole chain around assault rather than the act alone: the jokes, the advice to be careful, the questions at the police station and the lenient sentences.
Its limits are just as clear. A painful blow is not the same as the loss of control, intimacy and trust that survivors describe, and Moxon never claimed it was. Analogies can also centre the listener's feelings rather than the survivor's own words. The best use of a thread like this is as a doorway: once it makes the issue feel real, the next step is listening to survivors directly, believing people enough to take reports seriously, and supporting fair processes for everyone involved.
If you have been affected by sexual violence, in the US you can reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673; in the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222.
Sources: A.R. Moxon's original Twitter thread (screenshots credited to @JuliusGoat and the named commenters); armoxon.com; Wikipedia, Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination; People v. Turner; Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape.
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