The idea that men cannot be raped by women has many sources; unsurprisingly, it is a staple of feminist literature like Susan Brownmiller’s “Against Our Will.” The premise was that men use their erections as “weapons to generate fear.” Rape was merely the most extreme instantiation of a much broader continuum of oppression — the oppression of the penetratee by the penetrator.
Now, whether or not there is something special about penetration-rape (and I think there is), the evidence is clear that women suffer more from penetration-rape than men do. The theory is that rape is first and foremost an opportunistic, outlier strategy for men to propagate their genes; the flip side to this is that the agony of rape for the female is especially severe because it is, like the man’s promiscuous sex-drive, deeply rooted in her biological nature. A central premise of Thornhill and Palmer’s book “A Natural History of Rape” is that “rape subverts female choice, the core of the ubiquitous mechanism of sexual selection.” This “subversion”, which violates her deepest, unconscious, most intractable desires, is experienced by the woman as unparalleled psychological trauma.
This kind of to-the-bone, spiritual trauma is simply unaccessed when a man is raped by penetration. The less extreme rape-by-commandeering is, as you can imagine, less traumatizing still. In general, at least.
This doesn’t mean that we should treat all these forms of rape different in a legal sense, but it does mean that there are, in fact, real world distinctions between the rape of a woman, the penetration-rape of a man, and the rape-by-commandeering scenarios illustrated in the above email.
