anonymous said…
Helen, the way to help the guys win is not to adopt the sorry tactics the left has used supposedly on behalf of women for years. You have to take on that stuff, not weaken men by pretending they are “victims”; hell, everyone’s a victim.
This has nothing to do with the gender war or politics. It’s not about helping anybody “win”. There are NO winners where sexual abuse is concerned. There are many losers however.
I will say this about feminism…
I was a teenager in the seventies. There were marches I participated in that were, to me, an natural offshoot of the civil rights movement that so influenced my earlier political awakenings. Among those crowds were two of three sisters. The third sister was absent. She was also the one who had taken some liberties with myself some years earlier. As we marched we chanted “Equality, equality, …”. I miss those feminists. Maybe it’s a good thing they used a different label.
Lea said…
But it’s not unreasonable to draw a line and call blackmail blackmail and not rape. You could physically remove yourself at this point, an option most women don’t have when faced with a similar situation. I personally would draw the rape line at the point when you are either physically incapable of getting away or you are reasonably threatened with violence if you try to get away. You were in a different situation (at this point, not before) and I don’t think you should take people’s disagreement with you about this part personally, because it’s really more about where the line is. Nobody is saying that the women should have done that, it’s pretty terrible and as a woman, it pisses me off, because then whenever a woman says someone raped her, men think of these crazy women and dismiss it. It hurts all of us!
Lea, why is it that we are constantly exhorted to not draw attention to a womans attire if she is raped? I’ll come back to that.
James was a marine at the time of his experience. Six years prior to my own experience in the eighties I represented my country as a javelin thrower. I can’t speak for James but I was stronger and faster than most of the planet’s population at the time. How the hell could any woman, or even most men for that matter, rape me?
Yes, Lea, I could easily have physically removed her. Do you think I haven’t asked myself about this a million times? Why doesn’t a woman fight off her rapist? You don’t ask her this. You simply make assumptions. Besides, that’s too much like “blaming the victim”. Simple truth Lea, I froze. Apart from saying no in several different ways I was a passive agent through the entire thing. The potential consequences of my physically removing her were far worse than my allowing her to get it over and done with as quickly as possible. Consider where you might have heard something like that before.
So why shouldn’t we draw attention to the miniskirt (a sentiment I have always agreed with by the way)? Significant problems for rape victims are sourced from guilt, shame, self recrimination. Blaming the victim for their circumstances magnifies these issues for the victim. Do you actually believe that men don’t also experience guilt, shame or self recrimination and for the same reasons? What makes you think that a male won’t have exactly the same issues? I never defined my mid twenties experience as a rape. That was done by others. I still have difficulty addressing it in those terms. The fact is, though, that the outcomes for me were little different to those experienced by any number of female victims. I didn’t seek help for years and then only because I was ordered to by my doctor. I’d had no way of linking my health concerns with an event I couldn’t view as rape, or even sexual abuse, because nothing in the culture enabled me to make those connections.
Lea, if I’d had you as a guide, rather than my doctor, eight years ago I’d probably be dead. Thanks Lea.
By the way a physically violent rape is TWO crimes. It is both a rape and a physical assault. A rape coerced through blackmail is likewise two crimes. Arguably both are worse than rapes which devolve only to issues of consent.
Mary Jackson said…
My disagreement is with the view that it is rape. This is not a disagreement of principle, but one of law, which defines rape narrowly as penetration by a penis. As such it can only be perpetrated by a man. Sexual assault, which may be more serious in some cases, may be perpetrated by both sexes.
Australia has defined rape in such a way that it doesn’t matter who is doing the penetrating. Laws were amended in the late nineties when it was found that women couldn’t be charged at all let alone convicted. The couple of women who sexually abused me twenty years apart did so legally!
You seem to have your own definition. Mine requires coercion of some form. There are many forms of coercion other than the physical.
ddc said…
Tell us, or explain to us WHY such things happen to women, to little girls and to little boys, mostly at the hands of men.
The majority of child abuse is committed by women even when sexual abuse is included. Female perpetrators account for a quarter of child sexual abuse and constitute significantly more than a quarter of individual abusers. Look up “The Invisible Boy”.
Toy Soldier:
Brian, that is a truly disgusting, sexist and utterly moronic comment, so much so that you have lost any remote credibility, making it highly doubtful to believe that you would sympathize with any man, woman or child who was victimized. It is quite literally that kind of inane thinking that leads to men and boys remaining silent, and to be honest, the kind of sentiment that leads to further abuse and rape. At least the other dissenters had the general decency to imply that they thought this without directly saying it.
Between two thirds and three quarters of the men guilty of seriously physically abusive rapes were sexually abused by a woman during their childhood. Treating the victimisation of boys with the same gravity applied when the genders are reversed may make a big dent in the number of violent rapes experienced by women and girls.
ddc said…
Little boys get raped. The vast majority are raped by other men. For them I have sympathy. For James, zero. The good Dr. can bring that up as well. Saaaay, use her Doctor skills to rather than explain why poor James was so frightened by the pregnant girl, why men rape little boys.
Incorrect. Boys are approximately half the victims of child sexual abuse and are abused EQUALLY by either gender.
@Toy Soldier…
Thankyou for those links. There’s research referenced there that I’ve not seen.
Kali Munro’s closing thoughts should be heeded…
Men who were sexually abused by women rarely see their reality reflected in articles, books, services, and web sites that are created for sexual abuse survivors. The fact that it is not widely acknowledged or accepted that boys as well as girls are sexually abused, and women as well as men sexually abuse children is damaging to men who were abused by women.
Many male survivors live in isolation, fear, shame, anger, and silence precisely because they know the taboos in our culture about talking about this form of abuse. It needn’t be this way. We can acknowledge that boys are abused and women abuse children without diminishing the reality of male perpetrated violence and female victimization. Understanding this form of abuse contributes to our knowledge about abuse in all its forms – something that we will all benefit from.
