Men on TikTok are “training to hit women in case they reject the man’s proposal.” Men have driven the viral trend across social media, posting videos of themselves punching and kicking mannequins. They caption these clips with variations of “training in case she says no.” You cannot dismiss this as just another stupid trend. It emerged after a man stabbed a Brazilian woman named Alana approximately 50 times for rejecting his advances. Her mother told investigators that the attacker regularly consumed this precise category of online content. As Alana fought for her life, men training to hit women became a trend.

New “trend” for men, old reality for women

 

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Here’s the thing about calling this a trend: it implies novelty. It suggests that men rehearsing violence against women who say no is some new phenomenon. It isn’t. Violence against women who reject men is as old as male entitlement itself. What’s new is the format. What’s new is the audience of thousands pressing ‘like’.

The “if she says no” TikTok trend did not invent rejection violence. It just gave it a hashtag. For generations, women have known that how they say no matters as much as whether they say it at all. The wrong tone, the wrong location, the wrong man can turn a simple refusal into something that lands them in a hospital or a morgue. The misogyny pipeline that feeds these videos—what researchers and activists call “Red Pill” culture—has been growing steadily online for years. A 2026 study by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro found 123 YouTube channels promoting control over women and spreading hate speech, with a combined 23 million subscribers. This figure grew 18 per cent in just two years. The videos on TikTok are the visible tip of an enormous, well-subscribed ideology.

Closer to home: India’s long record of rejection violence

India doesn’t need a TikTok trend to illustrate what happens to women who say no. The country has a long, extensively documented, and deeply disturbing record of men responding to rejection with catastrophic violence. The methods vary, but the cause—a bruised ego, an entitlement to a woman’s “yes”—rarely does.

The most well-known weapon in India is acid. India reports 250 to 300 acid attacks annually, though advocacy organisations estimate the real figure exceeds 1,000, given how many go unreported. The Meer Foundation, which works on rehabilitation and legal support for survivors, has found that 36 per cent of acid attacks on women occur after she rejects a marriage proposal, a romantic advance, or a sexual overture.

The most galvanising of these cases is that of Laxmi Agarwal, who was 15 years old in 2005 when a 32-year-old family acquaintance threw acid on her face at a bus stop after she rejected his proposal. She underwent seven surgeries over seven years. More recently, in December 2025, a man shot a 25-year-old woman named Kalpana inside a club in Gurugram after she repeatedly refused his proposal. In April 2026, just days ago, another man set a woman on fire in Kolkata after she rejected his advances.

These are just a few incidents that were reported. And this violence has been normalised to the point that it’s not even surprising, which is perhaps the most disturbing part. They are part of a pattern so consistent, so geographically widespread, and so socially entrenched that they have their own legal category: femicide.

Men training to hit women trend: Who created this monster?

What social media has done is take a private, simmering entitlement and give it communal validation. These men are not just rehearsing violence alone; they are sharing it and suggesting that other men do it. They are building a community around the idea that a woman’s ‘no’ is an injury worth avenging. The UN Women and WHO data reveal a global crisis: nearly one in three women worldwide, around 840 million, have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. In 2024, approximately 50,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members, that is 137 deaths every single day, according to the UNODC and UN Women’s 2025 femicide report.

The TikTok trend, then, is not a new story. It’s an old one with a new format, a new audience, and a new comment section. The men in those videos may be using mannequins. But the women watching them understand how easy it is for them to become that mannequin.

For women in India, Brazil, and everywhere else, the question has never been whether rejection violence exists. It’s whether the world is finally ready to take it seriously.

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