I have a new piece up at Role/Reboot this morning: Erections Aren’t Consent: What the New FBI Definitions Might Tell Us About Male Victims of Rape. Excerpt:
Without getting mired in the tiresome debates over statistics, it’s safe to conclude three things from the recent data and the changed FBI definition. First, men make up a heavy preponderance of those who commit rape, though a significant minority of women does commit acts of sexualized violence. Second, women are statistically at much greater risk of rape than are men. Three, acknowledging these first two truths doesn’t diminish the reality that more men and boys than we realized are victims of rape and sexual violence. We need to avoid the twin errors of claiming false equivalence on the one hand, or denying the reality of male vulnerability altogether on the other.
…
Ejaculation is not evidence of enthusiasm. Orgasms (both male and female) can be coerced. Those are truths that bear repeating. They are worth remembering not because we’re witnessing an epidemic of female-on-male sexual assault. They’re worth remembering not only for the sake of preventing the rare but real incidences of female on male rape, but for teaching all of us— especially men—that a partner’s physical arousal is not a sexual blank check.
I still hear the witticism that “a hard dick has no conscience.” This belief that men “think with their dicks” serves to make men (like Ian) vulnerable to sexual assault, just as it serves to excuse away the rapes that aroused men commit. For the sake of the small but suffering number of male victims—and for the far greater number of women who are the victims of men—we need to shatter this pernicious myth about the male body. Men are not so tough that they can never be sexually assaulted by women. And by the exact same token, they are not so vulnerable to lust that rape becomes physiologically inevitable.
Men, we need to acknowledge, are both much stronger and much more fragile than most of us were raised to believe.
Man: I’ll make out with you, but I don’t want my penis inside your vagina.
Woman: Whatever. (Grabs penis and puts it in vagina)
Hugo: Wow, that’s kind of douche move, but I’m not sure it counts as rape.
GudEnuf:
Hugo is Hugo. More and more people are simply giving up on being disturbed by him.
He is a narcissistic little child acting out, and he gets stupid little girls in his classes to worship him. That’s it. It’s going to be hard for him to top his attempted murder thing, but he has to have drama and he will.
And no surprises here: According to Hugo, men all have evil intentions and have to be shamed into compliance, whereas women have no moral agency at all and are not responsible in any way for things in the world.
But, according to Hugo, that does not mean that he treats women like children.
Too funny.
Hugo, while Ian might want to frame it differently himeslf and has the right to do so, surely as a somewhat objective outsider we should classify his story as rape – no grey areas in this one. He explicitly defined his boundaries and what his partner had his consent to do, she subsequently violated the boundaries and his consent – she raped him.
Now of course at the moment that isn’t rape rape because envelopment isn’t real rape according to the FBI but from a feminist point of view surely that must be classified as rape? If a case that clear cut can be seen as not-rape how can you and others honestly ask people to support female victims who had been drinking or similar if the only standard even you can accept is the violent stranger in the bushes variety.
Okay so I wonder if this in an area where HIV education might give some insights.
Early on, when doing HIV educaiton, lots of it was targeted to gay and bisexual men. In recent years, the language has changed – the term MSM or men who have sex with men has been given greater prominence. The key reason for the change is that a substantial number of men have sex with men but do not identify as gay or bisexual. Appeals targeted to gay men didn’t reach them, but those men were not only getting infected, they were spreading HIV. So the CDC and other organizations have a broad category – MSM – within which men who identify as gay and bisexual men are targeted as well as men who don’t identify as gay or bisexual but who have sex with men.
I wonder if a similar shift in language might help open up this topic and this conversation more fully.
The goal isn’t to get men to identify as rape victims, it’s to empower everyone to become moral agents around issues of sexuality and to create a society in which sex without consent doesn’t happen, a society in which sexual assault doesn’t occur. I’m not sure what that shift in language would look like at the end of day but if a change in language can help people understand better and communicate better then maybe it’s worth exploring.
In December 2010, Democracy Now! featured a discussion with Naomi Wolf and Jaclyn Friedman talking about sexual assault (framed as a discussion of charges against Julian Assange). Friedman and Wolf both reported conversations with women – and both responded very differently. Freidman described a world in which women are confused and overwhelmed by sexuality – having sex against their will and not really knowing it was wrong (! seriously !) and then responding by being confused and hurt and even more bewildered. Friedman responded by offering a road map to sexuality in which everyone regularly seeks enthusiastic consent (although her description of it painted women as helpless and hapless around issues of sexuality) while Wolf argued that everyone needs to learn to communicate better (she even used the line “men deserve to know when something isn’t consensual”).
I mention this discussion because I believe there’s a fundamental problem at the societal level – I see as a sexuality education instructor – in which women who talk openly and honestly about sex are dismissed as sluts and whores while men who talk openly and honestly about sex are dismissed as players. Women who know about condoms and aren’t afraid to talk about the importance of using them are treated as if there is something wrong with them; men are suppposed to carry them in their wallets but that doesn’t mean they’re supposed to use them or talk honestly about sexuality.
In its least toxic form, we see potrayals of love and sex happen almost wordlessly – two characters simply feel a connection and fall into bed amidst mood lighting and it’s wonderful. There’s little or no discussion or negotiation. So people have this unspoken belief that they’ll experience that. It doesn’t work like that in the real world. Discussing sexuality and boundaries and respecting our partners is the key to healthy satisfying sex. If we need to shift our language so we can talk about a broad category of nonconsensual sex within which there is rape and date rape maybe that’s what we need to do. Nonconsensual sex isn’t right but maybe if there’s not a stigma attached to it in the same way there is a stigma attached to rape we can start opening up the discussion.
Hugo’s example with ‘Ian’: maybe he needed to be able to name what happened as nonconsensual but not as rape, I don’t know. I think about a friend of mine who gave verbal and enthusiastic consent. We’d seen her have two glasses of wine; we didn’t know she was on a prescription that interacted negatively with her wine. She woke up the next morning, naked and in a strange room with few memories of the night before. She remembered someone being with her, she remembered saying she wanted to have sex. But most of her memories were a blur. To this day, she doesn’t know with whom she had sex (she offered the invitation to several men). From the outside it looked like consent. I’d seen her drink more at lunch then go back to work than I saw her drink that night. It never occurred to me she was incapacitated. But she was.
How do we talk about and educate about these situations so people can manage and reduce their risk? How do we educate ourselves and our society so that we do better at communicating around sexuality? How do we explain that when you’re drunk you shouldn’t be having sex? I don’t know the answers, but I think the broader cultural discussion needs to start by asking better questions.