Feature
- Do You Hate Your Partner, Too?
- California Teen Avoids Heavy Sentencing by Passing the Buck
- Wanna Buy Your Teenager a Padded Push-Up Bra?
- Vampires in Texas!
- These Guys Are As Bad As Westboro Baptist Church
- Funny Letters Sent to Women's Magazines
- Women's Ski Jumping: Still Not a 'Real' Sport
- Will the World Be Pro-Choice Soon?
- Are We Getting Too Lazy to Even Divorce?
- Forever 21's Maternity Line: Glamorizing Teen Pregnancy?
Cara Kulwicki wrote a captivating essay on male rape for the blogs The Curvature and Racialicious. Kulwicki based the essay around a comment that Lil’ Wayne made on Jimmy Kimmel Live about the infamous rumor that he lost his virginity when he was 11 years old. Although, in the interview, Lil’ Wayne gives few details about the experience, it does sound like rape and he admits that it effected him negatively. What struck me most about Kulwicki’s essay was what she had to say about our society’s reaction to instances of male rape where the rapist is female. While rapes that involve both a male victim and male rapist are usually turned into some sort of joke at the expense of the victim, rapes that involve a male victim and a female rapist are often ignored as being instances of rape or assault because, clearly, men are always willing to have sex with a woman:
In the majority of sexual assault cases, where a woman is the victim of a man’s violence, rape apology is rooted primarily not in the denial that male violence exists, but in the denial that male violence means something and needs to be stopped. Conversely, in cases where a man is the victim of a woman’s violence, rape apologism is strongly rooted in the denial that women’s actions can count as violence at all — and especially that their actions can count as sexual violence against men, who are routinely construed as incapable of being victims.
In cases of both of these two types of sexual violence (though hardly the only two that exist), the victim is accused of “wanting it.” But while the female victim is also, when that reasoning fails, accused of deserving it, this seems to not be the case with men. No, they just always wanted it. (Again, talking only about male victims of women — gay male victims of other men are routinely portrayed as “deserving” it as well as “wanting” it.) There are no sneers about what he should and shouldn’t have been doing. Just jokes about how awesome the assault must have been for him. Like we see Jimmy Kimmel engaging in above.
While Kulwicki points out that Lil’ Wayne’s supposed rape is probably overlooked because he is not only male, but also African American (and, lest we forget, a famous rapper) and therefore highly sexualized in our society, I couldn’t help but remember a white male acquaintance of mine who was raped by a girl who described herself as a radical feminist. Moreover, I remembered how my friends and I reacted to his story, which, I am sorry to say, was not the best way to react to someone who just revealed that they were the victim of sexual assault.
Many years ago, in the comfortable middle class suburbs of southern California, my male acquaintance (let’s call him Brandon) revealed to me that he had been raped by a female acquaintance of mine (let’s call her Alice), who was coming home from college. He told me that Alice had pursued him for a while before she left for college, but he had denied her advances. One night, during a party, Alice cornered Brandon in a room and, against his demands for her to stop, performed forced oral sex on him. When I heard this I didn’t really know how to react. Alice was a staunch radical feminist and was studying Gender Theory at college. Surely, a feminist–someone who knows the political power behind rape–wouldn’t assault someone, would she?
I asked some of my friends about it and, surprisingly, most of them knew of the story and knew that it was true but they wouldn’t admit that Brandon was a rape victim. “How can a girl rape a guy?,” they would say. Most of them thought that he probably didn’t want to admit to hooking up with Alice and so he created a fabricated story. Sound familiar?
Later, I asked Alice about the situation and she never denied what had happened, and only said that she was drunk at the time. God, imagine if you confronted a male rapist of your female friend and they brushed off your accusations by saying, “Oh I was so drunk, whatever!” Heads would roll. And yet, I didn’t react. Instead I just sort of ignored the situation as Brandon and Alice’s issue, but chalked the incident up as an example (among many other examples down the road) that Alice was an idiotic psychopath.
Brandon, however, never stopped bringing the incident up, even when skeptics would get on his case about it. Usually when he told someone about his rape their response would be along the lines of “LOL, did you cum?” or a string of questions to try to prove to Brandon that he wasn’t actually raped by her because he must have had an erection (as if a bodily reaction was ever a sign of consent). Brandon never changed his story and he never gave up on the fact that Alice had sexually assaulted him, which I suppose shows that even if many of us weren’t willing to realize that a man could be raped by a woman, Brandon at least could continue to talk about his rape despite the abuse from skeptics. And what happened to Brandon was without a doubt, rape.
I wonder how my old friends would have reacted if the roles were reversed. Would they have decided that the victim was “asking for it” because they were drunk and alone in a room with the rapist? I’m not sure. Would I have raised my voice in protest if they had reacted this way? Absolutely, but it is still difficult to compare things to hypothetical situations. Brandon’s case shouldn’t have been handled in a more accepting way just because if it had happened to a woman she would have possibly not have met such a strong level of aggressive skepticism (plenty of female victims of rape do receive a disgusting level of skepticism). Brandon’s case should have been handled with more acceptance because he was raped. Period.
Why are we as a society less willing to recognize what happened to Brandon and possibly Lil’ Wayne as rape? Again, as Kulwicki said, it has to do with men being stereotyped as constantly wanting sex and women being stereotyped as constantly being victims. Being weak and victimized is a negative stereotype often associated with femininity and virility is a positive stereotype often associated with masculinity. How could a woman–a perpetual victim–ever possibly rape or overpower a man–a perpetual aggressor? Surely a woman could never be sexually aggressive and a man could never be weak and shrinking from sex, right?
Over the years I wised up and would now consider my handling of Brandon’s rape horrible. If something similar happened to one of my male friends, I know I would react differently, but I also know that many people would react the same way the skeptics reacted to Brandon’s experience. How could a woman rape a man? Simple, by forcing a man to have sex with them. A feminist woman can rape, an anti-feminist woman can rape and a woman who couldn’t care less about feminism, gender politics and patriarchy can rape. Why is that so hard to understand?
You Might Also Like ...
-
-
13
She forced oral sex on him? How does that even work, physically? Was he restrained or something? It’s hard for me to understand it, though I’m not denying it happened.
As for people being skeptical of rape charges, well, cases like this don’t help http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-505428/Victim-false-rape-claim-pay-12-500-bed-board-jail.html , nor does the “guilty until proven innocent” attitude that tends to be thrown at people, especially men, accused of rape. It’s really depressing a few girls cry wolf and everyone has to suffer for it, we need to figure out a better way of handling and proving or disproving alleged rape.
Pants are really easy to take off. I’m speaking from experience here. It would not at all be difficult to remove them enough to expose the genitals even when dealing with an unwilling victim.
And for those who think erection, and thus bodily response, is necessary to begin…They have probably never given head. Unless foreplay or sweet talking precedes it, that is, surprise oral is almost always administered, at least to begin with, on a flaccid phallus.
Well, let’s see. She pulls his pants off and puts her mouth around his thing. I mean, it sounds really simple to me. He doesn’t have to be hard even for her to do it. Also, even if she’s on there for like 2 seconds before he pushes her off, it’s rape. If a dude put himself in me for 2 seconds without consent, I’d call it rape. And I imagine you would, too.
Exactly, Rachel.
Well the way it was written it sounded like more than two seconds, give me a break. I’m a dude, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the idea is all. If your head’s down there it’s hard to restrain someone unless they’re way tinier than you or nearly passed out. I’m just trying to understand what this dude went through.
It’s really depressing that* a few
The double standard for this is so sad, but true. Even for young boys, if they are molested by a female, it’s laughed off and considered something they should have been grateful for, like unwanted sexual contact is something they should want regardless of age. I have a friend who suffered through something like this at the age of 15, and even now as an adult he has to be very careful who he tells about that time in his life. It was very traumatic for him, a violation of trust, something that led him to an almost near emotional break down and thoughts of suicide, but he has been met with anger, laughter, and jeers by just about every one he’s told about it. Had he been female, they would have been outraged for him but because he was a teenage male, they seem to think he should have been happy for the sex. Men have the right to choose when and where they have sex just as much as women do, and being male does not mean they want sex all the time regardless of the partner.
I know a male can be raped. Because, yes, they can get hard even if they “don’t want to”. But, and please bear w me, how can a guy not push this chick off him, unless, of course she’s much bigger than him, drugged him, etc. Again, please don’t think I’m saying that it couldn’t happen, but I just want to try and understand it more. And thanks to Rachel, because while it makes sense, I never really entirely thought about it that way (even if it’s just for two seconds, so long as it isn’t wanted, it’s rape).
I agree with SSG: maybe he did not want to have to assault her because who would ever believe his story “she was trying to rape me!” She was drunk and would have been pissed #1 because he didn’t want her and #2 then he hit her. She would have run out of that room to the party crying and bruised and all of a sudden he is guilty.
I have never been raped, but there was an incident where I was sexually violated by a close friend. My sister was raped by an ex bf that she still hung out with. In both these instances, we froze. It is scary and you can’t really process fast enough that it is happening or what to do. You feel bad and awkward and want it to just end. You’d think you would react in a different way, but when it’s happening, you don’t.
I imagine he felt something like this.
Yes. This is exactly what happens. For those of you here that are guys, how many times have you been told that you never, ever, ever hit a girl, no matter what? Guys are told this ALL THE TIME. Also, as LDW says, what happens after he shoves her away? Everyone will take her side because he now Hit A Girl. A guy in this situation cannot win.
Not to mention the whole societal thing that we have right now that basically because a girl is smaller and must be “weaker” (again, huge fallacy) then if she starts getting violent it’s “cute” and “harmless” but if a guy is violent it’s intolerable and brutish. Violence is violence, and assault is assault. It doesn’t matter who is committing the violence or how much the victim resists. It is never OK.
The HUGE misnomer that a guy won’t get hard unless he wants it is a big thing too. Just like when lawyers tried to claim that because a girl got wet she couldn’t have been raped, this is bullshit. Your body responds to stimuli whether or not you emotionally want it to. You cannot ever use that as proof a guy (or girl, obviously) wanted you to keep doing what you’re doing. Your friend was raped. End of story.
I can’t help but feel that if a guy had “pushed this chick off him”, it could have come back to him as assault… It’s a bloody fine line
It probably would have come back as assault, and it likely would have seemed like assault to the other folks at the party.
Well maybe he didn’t “just push her off” cause she had his PENIS IN HER MOUTH AND COULD HAVE CAUSED HIM SEVERE INJURY!
Ya know, I would have just waited until it was over, you don’t know what a crazy bitch will do. And a lot of rape victims just let it happen to prevent injury. So it sounds like rape to me.