In some cases, people code coercive behaviors by men as aggressive but coercion by women as romantic and seductive. We're also more apt to label an incident of heterosexual sex as rape if it involves a male aggressor and female victim, perhaps in part because men are seen as more threatening. Research consistently shows that Americans are more likely to find coercion of men by women acceptable, compared with the reverse. And she took that away from him."Īssumptions about male and female sexuality are deeply engrained in the way with think about sexual encounters. He wanted his first time to be with somebody he deeply cared about, that he chose. "For one male that I interviewed it was devastating. Taking sexual coercion against men seriously gives us even more reason to fight against those stereotypes. 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. 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. 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 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. "When you talk to the general public, there's the idea that this can't happen. "It's so contrary to the stereotypes of female behavior," Struckman-Johnson says. Studies showing widespread sexual coercion and assault by women against men, on college campuses and elsewhere, have trickled in consistently for decades, but they haven't entered the public discussion of sexual violence, she explains.
They also contradict standard assumptions and cultural scripts about male aggression and female passivity.Ĭindy Struckman-Johnson, a psychology professor at the University of South Dakota, has studied male victims of sexual assault since 1985. These men's experiences usually aren't as horrific as those of women who are assaulted, but they represent a clear, and mostly hidden, problem. Each year, according to an estimate in a literature review, roughly 19 to 31 percent of male college students experience some kind of unwanted sexual contact, and researchers say the vast majority of that is perpetrated by women. However, the reality is not humorous: Women do sexually assault men on college campuses, on a regular basis. The assumption that men always want sex and that women are inevitably more reluctant is so universal in our culture that the unambiguous rape of men by women can serve as a punch line in popular movies. A description of a man performing sex acts on an unresponsive woman would have raised a lot of red flags for most of us: Is she conscious? Is she too drunk or too afraid to speak up? If the supposed victim is a man, these questions vanish or become a sort of tired parlor joke. Banzhaf's selection of this particular hypothetical is an obvious one. News & World Reportabout the new California law requiring colleges and universities to adopt a "yes means yes" standard for their sexual assault policies. That’s the way George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf spoke to U.S. This may seem bizarre that a guy who is presumably laying back and having oral sex and one assumes enjoying it-or at least tolerating it-is not consenting simply by doing that, but under that definition if he didn’t say 'yes,' she’s a sexual violator. When they are, the language often looks something like this: In news coverage of campus sexual assaults in recent years, scenarios with male victims aren’t depicted too frequently.