A Story about the Invisibility of Male Rape

Hello all.  I thought about doing a nice introductory first post about me and my views and what I’m all about, but I think I’m still kind of figuring that stuff out and besides, I think it’s a little late for something like that now, isn’t it?  So I’m just going to jump right in.

[Trigger Warning for Rape]

Most people reading this blog are pretty familiar with rape statistics.  We look at the numbers and we’re horrified by the prevalence of rape all around us.  We look around at our friends and family and lovers and we think “Maybe one of them was raped and didn’t tell me.  How would I know?”  It’s sickening and disheartening.

But at the end of the day, they’re just numbers.  Women have more than numbers.  We have stories and rape shelters and visibility beyond just the statistics.  Sometimes its negative visibility.  Sometimes it’s really disgusting visibility.  And sometimes, that very visibility is what gives female rape victims a support system.  One can go one the internet and find any number of strong, successful women who have survived sexual assault.  Women like Jaclyn Friedman who have yelled a rallying cry for strength against sexual assault, who have written books and blogs and started whole movements and created safe spaces for abused women to lick their wounds in the comfort of friends who understand them.  I’m not trying to belittle the experiences of female survivors, or deny the horrors they have to go through whether or not they come forward with their experiences of rape.  I’m not trying to create an oppression olympics between male and female survivors, or denying the really bad shit that comes from rape of women having visibility.

But I have yet to see men talk about their abuse and how they have healed from it.  I have yet to see men join in solidarity in a community of kindness and safety, of healing.  I have yet to see one man turn to another and say “I know what you’re going through, and what you’re feeling is okay.”  I’ve yet to even hear about experiences of male survivors of sexual assault and rape more personal than a list of statistics extrapolated to real life.

It is quite likely that these things happen, just not in the areas of the internet that I frequent.  But when I think about how easy it is to trip over a female survivor safe space, or how easy it is to hear about an uplifting, painful story of a female survivors road to healing, it becomes clear to me that if this happens, it does not happen nearly enough.  Male rape, unlike that of women, is all but invisible in mainstream media and discourse.

I cannot alone give visibility to male survivors of rape.  I can’t provide the sort of community that visibility can create.  I can’t tell male survivors I’ve been where they have been and I know how they feel.  Hell, I can’t even refer them to a sexual assault hotline that I have any confidence is any help for men.  All I can give is a personal story, instead of statistics.  I can inject something personal about an issue that is almost completely talked about in statistics, and maybe do my part in making the issue of male rape more visible.  So that is what I shall do, under the cut.  Once again, trigger warning.

One day, I was having dinner in a diner with a man I love very much.  He’d been taking a recent breakup very hard, and I wanted to try to cheer him up.  We talked about a lot of things and generally had a pretty good time until, while we were drinking coffee, the subject turned to a mutual friend of ours.

Neither of us were best pleased with this mutual friend, not the least because she had gone a long way towards initiating the breakup that was causing my friend so much pain.  It was obvious to both of us that she wanted my friend, but he wasn’t interested for obvious reasons.  As the conversation went on, he got more and more visibly uncomfortable, and i was getting worried.

“So… I had sex with her,”  He said, finally.  I was shocked, because he had been going on and on about how he had wanted nothing to do with her.  With the statement, he seemed to shrink in on himself, and got smaller and smaller as he described what had happened.  He told me how they had been hanging out together and how she had brought up his ex and started wearing him down, bringing up all the shit that he had been going through before the breakup.  When he was depressed and upset and emotionally vulnerable, that’s when she pushed him for sex he didn’t want.  He felt guilty and ashamed after, and I was horrified by what I heard and that he would describe such an experience as “having sex”.  He’d had no other words, though.  He hadn’t been tied down or pushed down or violently sodomized.  He’d been on top of her, and he’d had and erection so in his mind, and in the public discourse around male rape, no rape — or even assault — could have happened.

It didn’t end there, though.  When a women says she was raped, she’ll generally be met with skepticism and slut shaming, but there will usually be some close friend who can help her through it and be a support through the internal and external horrors she will have to go through.  But if my friend were to say that he was raped or assaulted by a girl smaller than him and deeply entrenched in his friend group, well, all of his close friends would have laughed in his face.  My friend was well known for being something of a horn dog, so to his friends minds, there’s not WAY he wouldn’t want sex from someone who so obviously wanted him.

He had no way to avoid her, either.  His abusive parents simply LOVED this girl and invited her over all the time, for one thing.  Even if they didn’t, avoiding her, without explaining WHY (which, of course, he couldn’t) would mean completely isolating himself from his entire social circle.  So he had to go on like everything was all right.

It got even worse, though.  Before she assaulted him, they had planned a trip together with a couple of friends, and she had payed for his part because he was strapped for cash.  After the assault, he had no way to bow out of the non-refundable trip without looking like a complete ass to his entire social circle.  So he went along.  The other friends on the trip saw nothing wrong with leaving the two of them alone, even though he asked them not to, and he ended up sharing a hotel room with his rapist.  The only thing he could do was make it explicitly clear that he wanted no sex at all ever.

Naturally, she got drunk, stripped naked, and decided it was a wonderful idea to give him a blowjob while he was sleeping.

At this point, you may be spluttering in rage and shouting “what the FUCK!?” over and over.  Don’t worry, this is normal;  It’s what I did when I first heard what she did.  The worst part is that even though this is SO OBVIOUSLY RAPE OH MY GOD YOU DON’T PERFORM SEX ACTS ON SLEEPING PEOPLE WITHOUT NEGOTIATING CONSENT ARRRRRRRRG, there was absolutely NO WAY he could tell any of his friends about this (especially the male ones) with out them replying with some variation of “Dude, you got your dick wet, what are you complaining about?”  And that, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, is seriously, SERIOUSLY fucked up.

This is what “boys will be boys” and “men are animals who want sex all the time and will do anything to get it” means for men.  This is what the idea that men always want sex always all the time means.  It means that “no” never really means “no”.  This is rape culture, and it seriously fucks men over.