Sexual Assault and Gendered Stereotypes

Lately, I’ve been coming across articles that address cases of gendered violence where the victims are men. The most recent piece I’ve read is “When Women Sexually Assault Men,” by Livia Gershon. The thing that strikes me most about the article is its emphasis that we often dismiss the idea that a man has been sexually assaulted because of the stereotypes that we subscribe to. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the same holds true for our dismissal of the idea that a woman has been sexually assaulted:

THE NOTION THAT SEXUAL assault of a man by a woman is impossible, and even laughable, rests on the same gendered assumptions that are also used to downplay assaults on women by men. Even after decades of feminist activism, many discussions of sexual violence still center on telling women to stay sober and be cautious around men. The ideas behind that advice—the image of men’s sexual desires as constant and all-consuming and of women as the gatekeepers to sex—also makes it impossible for many people to imagine men as victims. If men are always seeking sex, and frequently shot down by disinterested women, then they should be grateful—or at least not traumatized—by any kind of sexual attention from a woman. Taking sexual coercion against men seriously gives us even more reason to fight against those stereotypes.

These stereotypes have an impact on male victims of sexual assault and on their likeliness to report their experiences:

Men who experience sexual assault or other violence by intimate partners are less likely than women to report the incidents to the police. They frequently think no one will believe a woman sexually assaulted them, are embarrassed at not being able to fend off an attack by a woman, or harbor fears of being perceived as “gay” or not masculine for not wanting to have sex, Struckman-Johnson suggests.

For me, this particular article is valuable because it touches on something I’ve been thinking about: the idea that men and women are radically different, enshrined in the title of a popular book, “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.” I haven’t read the book, but I have noticed how quick people are to grab on to the idea that men and women are so dramatically different that we have to learn each other’s “languages” and ways of thinking in order to better understand each other.

Of course there are differences between men and women, based on biology and on the ways we have been socialized (and it follows that there are further variations based on culture, class, and other factors). But I think that, in our eagerness to emphasize these differences, we’ve been too quick to sweep our similarities under the carpet. By denying our similarities, we make it more difficult to recognize that other people have the capacity to feel disempowerment, pain, and shame, as we do. So we allow ourselves to diminish their experiences of discrimination and trauma, claiming that they can’t be as bad for “those people” as they are for us.

I’m also starting to think that the tendency to emphasize our stereotyped differences is a way to avoid seeing ourselves and others as individuals. If we can put everything down to the rationale that “men are this way” or “women are that way,”, then we don’t have to recognize that people are individuals who subscribe to philosophies/belief systems and have personalities and the right to choose what kinds of situations to get into. Ultimately, this makes it easy to avoid examining our own behavior and motivations and taking responsibility for them.

Quoted in the article by Livia Gershon, Struckman-Johnson puts it well. She points out that stereotypes about women’s and men’s sexuality make it possible for female perpetrators to rationalize their sexual aggression and minimize the traumatic experiences of their victims:

 “Because of the idea that men are sexually oriented and wanting it all the time, it kind of lets them off the hook,” she says. “They get to assume they’ve got a ready and willing partner here who would just love to have sex with them. That is not the case, that’s denying individuality, it’s denying personality, it’s denying people’s rights to choose their sexual situations.”

Violence and Accountability

http://fromthoughtsintowords.blogspot.com/2013/06/violence-and-accountability.html

Lately, there have been many media reports about rape incidents and the public’s responses to them. So discussions of victim-blaming, what it constitutes, and why it is wrong have been making a regular appearance in various electronic magazines and on discussion forums. The discussions that have made the most sense to me have been those that have emphasized that rape is an act of violence and domination.

As many have already pointed out, there is too much of a tendency to think of rape as a sexual act, and to therefore explain it away as a “normal” response to a victim who was “asking for it.” I have often heard the argument that, if we were talking about any other form of violence, or if the rape victim was male, people would not be so quick to resort to victim-blaming. I don’t agree with that, though. In fact, based on what I have seen and heard over the years, I think that more and more people are inclined to view vulnerability as something to be detested and dominance and power as ideals. It is very much evident, not just in the way they talk about rape victims, but also in the way they talk about other individuals or groups of people who have been subjected to violence, systemic or otherwise.

These are learned attitudes. They’re not just pulled out of the thin air. That’s why I absolutely agree with those who say that we have to educate youth and adults to regard rape as unacceptable and to hold rapists responsible for their actions. But I think the education has to be broader than that. It really should address our attitudes towards violence and victims of violence as a whole.

An article on RHRealityCheck discusses precisely this issue, referring, at some length, to the violent sexual assault of a 13-year-old boy, the use of euphemisms to disguise the violence that was done to him, and the subsequent scapegoating of the boy and his family by residents of their town. The boy’s story is told in greater detail here.

I find it very troubling that the town turned away from the boy when it seemed evident that the violence he was subjected to was part of a ‘tradition.’ This form of sexual violence is likely to have been done to other boys, and probably will be done to yet others – the town residents’ sons, brothers, cousins, nephews, grandsons. So why isn’t the first instinct of these people to protect the boy? Also, where on earth did the boy’s attackers learn how to rape a younger boy? This is not the behavior that anyone in their right mind expects of teenage boys. Were they themselves victims of similar attacks in the name of “hazing”? The article raises very troubling questions about the types of communities we’re living in and about our safety and the safety of those we love. It makes it pretty evident that violence and victim-blaming are problems that we need to address now.

This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.