5 Bizarre Realities of Being a Man Who Was Raped by a Woman
Pointing out that society has a rape problem should be about the least controversial thing you can do, in any setting. It's impossible to say how many rapes occur (because so many go unreported), but there is universal agreement that too many women are being victimized and
that the system often fails them. But we fail victims in another way, too: by automatically assuming, as we just did there, that all of the victims are women.
Most of us realize
in theory
that men can be raped by women as well, but it's just not seen as that big of a problem. Unless the victim is a child, female-on-male rape is considered so absurd that the only time we really see it is when it's being portrayed as a carousel of slapstick wackiness in mainstream comedies. You see a beautiful actress force herself on a tied-down Vince Vaughn
and the only thought is, "Ha, I wish!" After all, don't movies tell us that men want sex, all the time, from absolutely anyone who'll give it to them? He should be thanking her!
Well, we spoke with a victim of female-on-male rape to find out what it's like to be the victim of a crime that most of society refuses to acknowledge is even a thing. Spoiler Alert: It's awful.
#5. People Don't Believe It Can Even Happen
A few years ago, I was at a house party, and I'd had what could politely be described as a bit too much to drink. My girlfriend tried to convince me to leave with her, but I assured her I was having fun and would be fine, and she somehow understood me even though I almost certainly sounded like I was speaking Dothraki at that point. It soon became clear to me that "fine" was a planet I had left hours ago, so I found a couch to crash on.
My face slipped neatly into a cushion ass print.
From here on out, every part of this story would be absolutely typical of a sexual assault ... if the genders were reversed. In fact, if I were female, many of you would literally be saying, "Are you
crazy? This is how people get
raped!" as you read this next part.
A resident of the house, being a good hostess, generously offered to stash me away in the relative privacy of her bedroom. Sometime later, another woman who was at the party came into the room, got into bed with me, and started trying to convince me to have sex with her. My memory of all this is very hazy, but I know that I repeatedly said, "No thanks, I have a girlfriend, surely you understand."
Nope.
That's where my coherent memory of the incident ends, but suffice it to say, she absolutely did not understand at all -- she took advantage of me while I was barely conscious and could no longer say no, which is more or less the exact definition of rape.
If the genders were reversed.
But for me, whenever I tell someone I was raped by a woman, they act like I just told them I was bitten by a leprechaun. They can't even fathom how such a thing would be possible. By far the most common response is a brief pause, followed by, "What do you mean?" One of the most hurtful responses was from a close male friend, who dismissed me by saying, "I'm sure she didn't hold you down."
"Or did she? What position were you guys in? C'mon, give a bro some deets!"
And that, right there, seems to be the psychological hurdle no one can get over. It's based on the idea that sex is something men do to women. Men give out sex, women receive it, and that's just how sex works. So if sex occurred, it must mean I was the one who made it happen. That either knowingly or deep down, I must have
wanted
it to happen.
That I was "asking for it."
Yeah, sound familiar?
#4. Men Get Slut-Shamed, Too -- Just in a Different Way
First, there are the people who look you anywhere but in the eye as they nervously whisper, "But how did you get an erection?" The implication being that my penis couldn't possibly have been hard enough for intercourse unless I was enjoying it. If you own a penis or have seen one in action, you know that the things have a mind of their own -- hell, half the time you
wake up
with an erection. Boners happen at the drop of a hat, a rustle of fabric, a gentle breeze, you name it -- as long as everything works down there, literally anything can set it off. An erection is not a dowsing rod of intention, it's a bundle of nerves that can be manipulated by anyone who halfway knows what they're doing. If men had absolute control over their arousal, premature ejaculation wouldn't be a thing.
If a man gets hard showering, that doesn't mean he wants to fuck loofahs.
"All right," they say, "then why didn't you just shove her off?"
First, think about how horrific that question sounds when asked of a female victim, since most people will accept that a 120 pound woman isn't able to overpower a rampaging rape monster two and a half times her size. But even people who would never ask a female victim that assume I could easily have fought off some
girl. You know, if I'd really wanted to.
There are actually several reasons why I didn't physically defend myself. First, how about the fact that I don't want to inflict violence on anyone, regardless of who they are or what they're doing? You know, like most of you -- all of us have been put into situations that maybe could have been solved by physical force, yet most of us haven't been in a fistfight since grade school.
Not even with those people who really deserve it.
I'm a pacifist, but really so are most of us in polite society -- it's crazy to
ever
ask a crime victim, "But why didn't you just overpower your attacker?" Hell, Sugar Ray Leonard was sexually assaulted
as a young man, when he was already an Olympic contender on his way to becoming a prizefighter. Don't you think he would have stopped that if he could have? It's not the same thing as fighting off a mugger -- all of your physical strength becomes useless, because your attacker makes you feel powerless. All of society's messages about what's happening are wrong.
And then there's just the fact that I'm not a big guy. The average man is stronger than the average woman, but there's definitely some overlap in those statistics. And while
maybe
I could have physically stopped her if I was at full strength, I was blackout drunk at the time -- I couldn't have wrestled a hamster to the ground, let alone a grown adult.
I'm not even talking about a full-sized hamster. I mean one of the runts that the mom usually eats.
But even all of that is just avoiding the obvious: imagine I had fought back. Now imagine me trying to explain that to a courtroom after the fact: "Yes, she's bruised, your honor, and yes, I'm the one who beat her up, and yes, I am injury-free, but I swear I thought she was going to force me to have sex with her." That's a surefire way to win a game of "Let's Go to Prison" in a single move.
So, yes, I've suffered my share of victim-blaming. Just like a woman in my situation, my entire sexual history was called into question, and just like a woman, my sexual history is irrelevant -- I could've banged every girl in the county, it doesn't mean I can't ever say no. My relationship with my girlfriend fell apart pretty soon afterward, partially because, for a long time, she didn't really believe I'd been raped either, treating it as if I'd cheated on her. I'd also completely lost interest in sex, turning to porn to regain the control over the sexuality I felt I'd lost (which is a very common response in rape victims).
And no, you may not use that excuse next time you're caught jacking it.
The parallels are there at every turn, but that one simple change -- switching the genders -- suddenly makes my story impossible to swallow. Yet ...
#3. It's Way More Common Than You Think
It's easy to see why people think of female-on-male rape as thoroughly bizarre -- historically, the data has shown that men don't get raped, period. As recently as 2003,
men accounted for only 10 percent of sexual-assault victims, and it's so widely assumed that all of the attackers were other men (think: prison) that most studies on the subject don't even include that data. However, more recent studies have produced some revealing numbers -- a 2012 survey of 40,000 households found that a staggering
38 percent of sexual-assault victims were male. Nearly half of those men reported that their attacker was a woman.
Officials blamed the rise mainly on Jerry Sandusky.
(Not a joke.)
So what's going on here? Well, for starters, if you ask a man who's been coerced, intimidated, or physically forced into sex with a woman whether or not he's been raped, he's pretty likely to say no (it took researchers years to even think to ask men this question, by the way). But they eventually figured out that if you rephrase the question and ask whether or not he has been "made to penetrate" another person, they're more likely to respond in the affirmative.
That's because the word "rape," in their minds, represents something totally different from what they experienced. It's a masked man in a dark alley holding a knife to some terrified woman's throat, or it's the violent shower sequence in
American History X.
Of course, the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults don't look like that at all, which is the same reason why a disturbing number of people still don't believe that date rape is a thing. Which is to say, the same problem plagues female and male victims alike: in real life, rape just doesn't look like it does in the movies.
And Ed Norton is involved approximately zero percent of the time.
But if you look at those survey results, you realize that you probably know a guy who this has happened to. Yet I bet almost none of you have heard a man admit it -- I know I haven't. That's probably because ...