That's the address of a GQ article about sexual assault against men in the military.
This is the address for a Google search of the term "male victims of sexual assault feel ashamed":
Sexual assault is not about what you wore, what kind of person you are, what you said to someone. It's about what people are socialized to think about sex, power, gender, and a lot of other things.
Men rape more often than women do because men have more physical strength, so when they are socialized to think that rape is a normal part of being a man, they are able to physically act on that idea more often than they would be able to if they weren't usually stronger. That's a de facto result; if you socialize men and women both to think that raping someone is normal, more men will rape than women because men have the power to rape more often than women do.
It's not about what the victims or the bystanders are being told to think; it's about what the perpetrators are being told to think. That's the issue, and it's the issue that people want to address much less often than they want to avoid it. That is the issue that needs to be confronted. It's not "what did you do to make him think he could rape you," it's "why does he think that raping you was something he should do?" People don't want to address that issue because it is part of the context of male power and to address it is to address what society thinks masculinity is.
Not everyone is a rapist, obviously. Not even every sexist man is a rapist. Rape is an extreme form of a mindset.
I also don't subscribe to the idea that rape is only about power and it's not about sex. It's about power and sex; it's using sex as a weapon. It's about the perpetrator displaying his or her sexuality as powerful and attacking the sexuality of the victim. The perpetrator often wants the victim to feel shame, when it's the perpetrator who ought to feel shame for having raped.
"You got what you deserved" is a common attitude from perpetrators and victim-blamers.
I think a male student was harassing me by coughing loudly and repetitively at the other end of the hall while I wrote this at my phone last night. I think that a few other people coughed at me at school yesterday. It's not rape, but it's bad.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, January 27, 2017 @ 5:53 p.m.
