A t-shirt sheds light on the fact that men get raped too (Photo Credit: Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA) (Sipa via AP Images).
Women Raping Men: Rethinking Our Definition of Victim and Perpetrator
At the young age of 21, a young man was tied up in the bed by his then-girlfriend.
She told him all of the things she wanted to do to him sexually, so he consented to her demands of being tied up.
There was only one catch; he had to be able to untie himself after his girlfriend left the room to get his “reward.”
When he was unable to untie himself, she told him he would be punished instead.
His girlfriend then proceeded to sodomize him with her vibrator. Although he said no multiple times and was crying she continued to sodomize him while beating him.
The whole ordeal lasted an astonishing six to seven hours.
Although women raping men is not often talked about, rape is just as devastating to male victims as it is to female victims.
According to an April 29, 2014 Slate.com article by Hannah Rosin, “Last year (2013) the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men.”
Lara Stemple of the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA said society should “completely rethink our assumptions about sexual victimizations,” which tends to stereotype men as the perpetrators and women as the victims.
Furthermore, women raping men has become more commonplace although it is often not reported or seen as rape.
“Often, male survivors may be less likely to identify what happened to them as abuse or assault because of the general notion that men always want sex,” said Jennifer Marsh, the vice president of an anti-sexual violence organization called Victim Services at RAINN.
According to Slate.com, “A recent analysis of (Bureau of Justice Statistics) data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator.”
It’s possible that a new definition of rape has contributed to the apparent increased number of women raping men, which includes being made to penetrate as a form of rape.
“This definition includes victims who were forced to penetrate someone else with their own body parts, either by physical force or coercion, or when the victim was drunk or high or otherwise unable to consent,” Slate.com reported. “When those cases were taken into account, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence.”
Rosin reported that although the made to penetrate definition has not caught on everywhere, society might need to rethink its definition of sexual arousal.
She wrote, “We might assume, for example, that if a man has an erection he must want sex, especially because we assume men are sexually insatiable. But imagine if the same were said about women. The mere presence of physiological symptoms associated with arousal does not in fact indicate actual arousal, much less willing participation. And the high degree of depression and dysfunction among male victims of sexual abuse backs this up.”
Stemple’s research also found some common misconceptions about the prison rape culture, and discovered incidents of women raping men even in correctional facilities.
The research showed, “Women are more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse.”
When the aforementioned 21-year-old finally freed himself hours after the assault, he was able to call the police and his girlfriend was arrested although he later decided not to press charges.
After the arrival of the police officers, she immediately began to play the damsel in distress role, playing on society’s stereotypes about the rape culture.
Luckily for him, the officers did not buy her story and took the reality of women raping men seriously.
