Natalie,

Please process that your comments have put tears in my eyes. I was routinely raped as an adolescent by a baby sitter. As the right words escape me right now, what she did to me amounted to sexual hazing. I was really fucked up by it through high school, well into college and still have residuals. While as a full grown man I don’t have fear of being attacked by women on the street, there are routine situations that trigger trauma. A woman with a certain brand of cigarettes, wearing a specific article of clothing, or hearing certain songs can leave me shaking. I still sometimes have embarrassing erection issues… either getting them at the wrong times or not getting them at the right times.

In your quest to be so damn right, you keep missing the point. This is not a numbers game. People like you are the reason I never reported it… and rarely bring it up. Would you dare say to blacks that racism is not as BIG a problem as sexism because blacks only make up 12% of the population and women 51%. Please stop comparing like you do. It’s sick… and sickening.

Here are some stats from Rainn. Bless you Tori Amos!
7% of girls in grades 5-8 said they had been sexually abused.
3% of boys grades 5-8 said they had been sexually abused.
What is an acceptable number of male victims and female perpetrators for you to start listening?

Every thread here about women’s experiences with rape is moderated heavily to keep derailments about men’s experiences with rape out and rightly so. But this thread was supposed to be about those rapes that fall outside that cis-woman-centered experience. We’ve had a two-hundred-plus comment thread with so many of y’all complaining that this one didn’t center your experiences also. Those of us whose experiences didn’t fall into that cis-woman-centered frame got buried. Some of you acknowledged mine, eventually, because I stayed here and kept at this. At a fairly large emotional cost to me — trying to talk about this in the face of people who want to have a theoretical discussion about themselves is a bit taxing.

And when you talk about rape in terms of men and women you are leaving everyone not cis and not binary out of it. When you talk about male privilege you mean cis men. When you talk about the female experience of rape you mean cis women. Even though what we experience when we are raped or when we commit rape is not actually alien**, the concepts you are using to frame the discussion exclude us. And they exclude a good many cis women and cis men whose race or class or just the peculiar circumstances into which they were born puts them in a position where they never had any expectation that they would not be raped; there was never any safety to be violated.

You talk as though your particular experience is or should be universal. Which is the frustration so very many of us have with feminism. Y’all have no idea.

* I suspect that with more awareness and more acceptance we would see more men reporting sexual contact without having given consent. Just as with any event, some will be traumatized and some won’t. But these are just personal conjectures. If the rape culture has taught us anything it is that consent is always presumed. Tracing abuse back through my family shows me that anyone can be an abuser. Privilege helps, but is not required.

Every survey of rape I have ever seen has exactly two gender categories. Yeah.

** A lot — with regards to what is actually done to us — depends on the attacker’s perception of our gender and whether that perception changes during the assault. Our own experiences are, well, I haven’t been anyone but me but yes! My rape was traumatic. Not because the act was that violent though it wasn’t exactly pleasant either. It was traumatic because someone I loved and trusted and I thought loved and respected me violated that trust and used my body without consideration for my needs.

Faith/ThankGoddess: If you want to define rape so that it includes things which a lot of people consider normal, acceptable, interaction: OK, that’s your call. But in that case, being labeled a “rape apologist” or a “rapist” or a “member of a seriously fucked up relationship” doesn’t mean much, does it?

It’s a bad dichotomy: if we have to decide whether most people are rapists and/or rape apologists, or whether you’re unreasonable extremists… you lose. You say that your language is merely trying to help; I think it’s simply so extreme as to hurt the cause you’re professing.

Life is nuanced. The reason it’s so damn difficult to discuss rape at all is because so much of it IS nuanced: it represents a “not OK” border between people who often communicate poorly and act thoughtlessly and who each have their very own set of rules and likes and dislikes and circumstances. Unless you’re living in a police state or 1984, you have to deal with that.

And returning again to the earlier post: the more individual we get, the less the general rules apply. Men are generally more privileged than women, but some men are less privileged overall than are some women. Men are more likely to rape and less likely to be raped, but that doesn’t mean a given man isn’t a victim, or that a given woman isn’t a rapist. And so on.

The reason that it sounds so weird to talk about women who are rapists is because women tend not to do “violent assault penetrative rape” which is what society reflects. And women, being less empowered and less physically strong generally, also do less “implied threat of violence of economic ruin-type rape.”

But when we are really out of that trend? If we start classifying “anything other than fully enthusiastic consent” as rape? Welcome, women, to the experience of being schrodinger’s rapist. It’s an odd feeling, isn’t it?

So this is an interesting test. It’s easy to say that we can wrap our heads around the concept that sexual assault is gender neutral. but it’s a bit trickier put into practice. And although i don’t agree with the hard liners here, I have to assume it’s the first time that some women here have been (indirectly or not) accused of being rapists and/or rape apologists, and I wonder how that will affect their future rape discussions.