It appears that this will be the FBI’s new definition of rape:
Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.
It’s a huge improvement over the current FBI definition, which excluded many female victims and all male victims of rape. But the FBI shouldn’t exclude “envelopment” rapes by female rapists from their definition. Female rapists are less common, but they exist, and there’s no legitimate reason not to count their crimes.
Thoroughly agreed. Though, I’d note, there is room to read this definition as including envelopment, because it’s not clear that the “other person” and “the victim” are synonymous. That said, I doubt the FBI is going to use it that way.
“Envelopment” is a weird word for “forced sex.” Why not just say “forced sex?”
As Diana Trilling wrote long ago. “The male can rape the female, the female cannot rape the male.” Her point is that “rape” signifies not only “the use or threat of force or violence” to compel the submission of a victim but also the penile violation of the victim by the assailant. For obvious anatomical reasons, women can’t rape anyone, male or female, in the pure and literal sense of the word.
And, most absurdly, MRAs vilify women as “rapists” for allowing biological men under age 18 to penetrate them in consensual relationships, sex equality dogma taken to lunatic extremes.
Even to describe such acts as “statutory rape” is objectively false and thus absurd since “rape” signifies the reality of penetration (of the minor by the adult) while the modifying “statutory” implies that the sex was factually consensual.
Obviously, women can commit violent sexual assaults. But when they do so, it’s usually with male accomplices, and often under the duress of a violent male. Thus it’s reasonable to assume that women acting alone commit less than 1% of violent sexual assaults.
michael kuehl @3&@4 – You’ve gone all humpty-dumpty here – “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
It’s fine for you to have your own definition of rape, just like the FBI can have theirs – but you can’t just state unequivocally what the word signifies. Note that the FBI’s definition – which is at least as valid as yours and Diana Trilling’s, and unlike yours and Diana Trilling’s, it has legal force – does not mention penises. And it does cover things like a woman forcibly inserting her fingers into a man’s anus – so the FBI, at least, thinks women can rape a man (or another woman).
Note that no dictionary I could find defines rape as involving penises. The OED defines rape as “the crime, typically committed by a man, of forcing another person to have sexual intercourse with the offender against their will”. Note that the explicit mention that it is “typically” committed by men implies that it is not always committed by men.
Merriam-Webster defines rape as “unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against the will” – again, no mention of penises.
@5 – First, do you have any actual statistics about women committing sexual assaults normally being coerced and/or assisted by a man? I’m not disputing this, I just never heard it before, so I’d appreciate a source.
But even if we were to take that as a truth, it’s not at all reasonable to assume that just because *usually* female sexual assaults have male accomplices, that means that 99% of female sexual assaults have male accomplices. I’m not really sure why you’d even think that is reasonable, unless you have actual statistics to back it up.
@micheal kuehl #3: …I believe that counts as “rape apology”. You’re saying 50% of the world cannot EVER EVER be raped.
And then with #4 you minimize everyone of ANY gender who’s been raped while underage. No, “statutory” does NOT imply the sex was consensual. “Statutory” in fact implies the sex not only was not but could not ever BE consensual. That’s why it’s illegal.
And I’m pretty sure in #5 you’re just making stuff up. According to at least three separate studies I’ve seen (all cited here; first three cites, but the specific number comes from 1), around 40% of boys and 6% of girls who were sexually abused were sexually abused by a woman. I know I’ve seen a study somewhere that backs this up after removing all the cases of multiple perpetrators, but unfortunately I can’t find it right now.
The invisibility of “envelopment” as an equally applicable word to describe what happens in various sex acts reflects the gendered nature of sex and rape in our culture. That most people, including the government, automatically use “penetration” as the go-to verbiage speaks to the fact that sexual activity (read: agency) is reserved for the male, who is assumed to be the active subject, while the female is the passive object of his advances. So if we were culturally capable of imagining women as creatures with sexual agency, sure, we might talk about envelopment as something done to someone else. But our patriarchal culture makes this inconceivable.
I was so relieved when I realised that the three comments of rape apology were from the same person. So it’s not like Alas is a hotbed for male rape apologists.
I agree with gin-and-whiskey. ‘forced sex’ may not be perfect on its own, but I think it’s a better foundation than any particular sex act.
Reply to #6: How many cases do you know of in which a woman used violence or threats of same to compell the submisison of a male and then inserted her fingers into the victim’s anus? If you want to call this “rape,” go ahead. I’d call it a violent sexual assault. Before he was killed by a vengeful mob, the former dictator of Libia was allegedly sodomized by a knife or stick. I’d call this torture or a violent assault, not “rape.” But if you want to call this “rape,” so be it.
As for your last paragraph, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you know what the word “accomplice” means, criminal accomplice?
#7: I said that “women can’t rape anyone, male or female, in the pure and literal sense of the word,” not that men and boys can’t be raped. Of course males can be raped and gang-raped, by other males, as millions of them have been so abused and tortured in jails and prisons alone.
The modifying “statutory” implies that the sex was factually consensual, not legally consensual. Otherwise, why not define such acts as “rape” as opposed to “statutory rape.” “Statutory rape” is a quintessential malum prohibitum crime. In Mexico the age of consent is 12; in most U.S. states the age of consent is 18.
The statistics you mention, even assuming they’re correct, refer to acts of consensual sex between adult women and underage teenage males and to acts of alleged child molestation, not to violent sexual assaults.
#8: Orthodox feminists often emphasize the importance of purely anatomical differences between the sexes when discussing matters such as wife-beating, pregnancy, and rape. Environmental determinists and sexual egalitarians such as yourself deny the signifcance of even purely anatomical differences. You’re more radical and extreme than most feminists in your denial of an embodied, sexualized human nature.
@9 – It doesn’t matter what *I* want to call rape, just like it doesn’t matter what *you* want to call rape. Rape is a legal term – what counts as rape is what the law (in this case, the FBI) says is rape.
As for your last paragraph, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you know what the word “accomplice” means, criminal accomplice?
I do know what the word “accomplice” means. You said above, in @5:
“Obviously, women can commit violent sexual assaults. But when they do so, it’s usually with male accomplices, and often under the duress of a violent male. Thus it’s reasonable to assume that women acting alone commit less than 1% of violent sexual assaults.”
That’s what I was responding to. It’s true, though, that I misunderstood you a bit (though not in my use of the word accomplice, as far as I can tell), so let me respond again:
I’m not sure what’s reasonable about the assumption in your last sentence. Even if the first sentence I quoted is correct, and when women commit sexual violence they *usually* do so together with a male, it still doesn’t follow that women acting alone are responsible for less than 1% of the overall violent sexual assaults. It’s possible that that’s the case, but if so, I would appreciate it if you can give me the source for that statistic.
“Obviously, women can commit violent sexual assaults. But when they do so, it’s usually with male accomplices, and often under the duress of a violent male.”
Citation needed.
“The statistics you mention, even assuming they’re correct”
He had a cite, you didn’t. His 40%/6% figure was valid, your 99% figure was bullshit. He can back up his arguments, you pull them out of yourself from a place that makes food for houseflies.
The “even assuming they’re correct” snideness is therefore like the pot calling the kettle black, except the kettle isn’t black at all in this case and the pot is retarded.
@ Hermes,
Your language sounds like it advocates holding raped men hostage until society addresses some other perceived grievance. No, I’m sure your pet issues are important too, but they’re not the main topic here and solving this particular issue isn’t actually contingent on anything.
Perhaps when men are being raped, and not getting recognized as being raped, the main people we should be concerned about are men who are being raped and not getting recognized as being raped.
Just to clarify, I don’t think that the FBI’s definition can be counted as “what the law says,” or that it “has legal force.” It’s a statistical definition, used for tabulating numbers; it doesn’t have any power to determine who gets arrested or what happens at criminal trials.
* * *
Michael, there’s no such thing as an “orthodox feminist,” afaik. And actually, most US states make 16 the age of consent; iirc there are six that make it 18.
Most importantly, just because something happens rarely — and I agree that the large majority of rapists are male — doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen at all. If I’m doing a statistical count of the kinds of vehicles that drive on a road, it wouldn’t make any sense for me to say “it’s very rare for trailer trucks to be on this road, so we shouldn’t count trailer trucks at all.”
A note to everyone: on “Alas,” try to keep your tone respectful even while disagreeing. Our moderation approach is enforced unreliably, but that doesn’t mean it’s not enforced at all.
“Embodied, sexualized human nature”? What are we talking about here, Platonic jizz spirits?
In the US, ‘the law’ varies from state to state but generally has been become more uniform as laws have gotten away from archaic definitions. The FBI definition doesn’t go by what any particular state deems illegal, but a particular definition that the DOJ uses to measure incidence of rape. If it’s illegal in 50 states but doesn’t fall under the definition used by the FBI then they don’t count it.
I just reread Hermes’ comment (#8). He didn’t say that, or anything that can reasonably be read as meaning that.
Ampersand @14 and Mythago @17 – thank you for correcting my mistaken assumption about the FBI’s definition. I don’t think that that changes my basic point, though, which is that neither I nor Michael Kuhel get to determine what “counts” as rape or not. I also don’t think that changes the fact that defining rape as an act that involves the insertion of a penis (and therefore, not performable by penis-less people), is not in line with the standard definition, as demonstrated by the dictionary entries I quoted above.
My apologies if anything I wrote came out as disrespectful to anyone here. That was not my intention.
(Also, I forgot to say this above, but I think Hermes at @8 makes a very good point.)
Eytan @18: Not disagreeing with your basic point. I just wanted to observe that the FBI is not really going by ‘what is illegal’ or ‘what the law says rape is’, but by a very archaic common-law definition of rape that most (if not all) states have moved past, and thus it’s misleading if one thinks their statistics have any mapping to actual rape or what the law even thinks of as rape.
I’m not quite certain what you mean, pocketjacks. I certainly do think we should be concerned about men being raped, and we should recognize it as such. I don’t mean to make language out to be my pet issue, but since legal definitions necessarily involve language, I just wanted to point out two things about it: 1) that our use of language determines how we view the world, often unconsciously; and 2) that our use of language is a cultural product of historical forces, and historically women have been a subjugated class.
I have to agree with Hermes @20….
Even if only one man is raped, he deserves to be recognized as a rape survivor and supported as such. Furthermore, he deserves to have the justice system call out and prosecute the offender, in this case female( as it was envelopment) , under the correct name for the criminal act done to him. Anything less trivializes the offence of the criminal as well as the male victims’ experience of it.
Where are the studies that women only perpetrate rape with a male accomplis, and usually only when forced to do so? There are men out there who will tell you they’ve been raped as young boys and that it was a woman acting alone who did this. A woman rapist may choose methods less likely to leave bruises or broken bones, but there are plenty of ways to get someone to comply against their will. If the man is vulnerable enough, I see no compelling reason that a female rapist would necessarily be any more restrained in terms of physical violence.
The FBI may not be making the laws, but if they use definitions which don’t accurately account for all the crimes being perpetrated, and by whom, their data will skew perceptions and frustrate the efforts of those seeking justice or the creation of laws which address the realities. In my opinion, the FBI change of definition is a huge step forward, although there are still some bugs to work out. Hopefully, those corrections are made as quickly as possible.
The invisibility of “envelopment” as an equally applicable word to describe what happens in various sex acts reflects the gendered nature of sex and rape in our culture. That most people, including the government, automatically use “penetration” as the go-to verbiage speaks to the fact that sexual activity (read: agency) is reserved for the male, who is assumed to be the active subject, while the female is the passive object of his advances.
Yes, this. It should be blatantly obvious that either the person with the penis or the person with the vagina can be the active participant in PIV intercourse, but because of our assumptions about gender, we assume it must be the man and don’t even consider “envelopment” as opposed to “penetration.”
I think “forced sex” is a much looser term, and isn’t actually synonymous at all with “envelopment.” Because it touches on both how you define “sex” and how you define “force.” Where “envelopment” just means the flip side of “penetration,” with the active and passive roles reversed. Putting your penis, or another object, in someone else’s vagina or anus is penetration. Putting someone else’s penis into your vagina (or your anus, presumably) is envelopment. Either one can be forced or consensual. (Though admittedly with two people consenting and actively participating, sex becomes harder to define in terms of who did what to whom.)
Then, the definitions of force and lack of consent would applied to either penetration or envelopment.
I think it’s a weird double standard that we treat PIV as the only sex that “counts” and then can’t wrap our heads around the idea that if PIV sex is forced on a man, it’s rape just as much as if it’s forced on a woman. Part of it is the idea that men are only active, never passive. Part of it may be the assumption that men always want sex, so it’s not the physical concept of envelopment being dismissed, but the idea of it not being consensual–assuming that he must want it, because what guy ever *doesn’t* want sex, so it’s not getting raped but getting lucky. Both of which are screwed up six ways from Sunday.
“Envelopment” is a weird word for “forced sex.” Why not just say “forced sex?”
Of course, once you make force an element, then you have to prove that “enough” force was used–perhaps show that the victim resisted, got bruises, cuts, and other injuries. And you might be excluding instances of alcohol- and drug-facilitated rape. The nonconsensual aspect of the FBI’s definition is actually kind of progressive.
I’ve been skimming this thread with much interest, and I have a quick question before I get back to work: How much of a penis needs to be in a vagina, mouth or anus before it can be considered enveloped? I ask not to be a wise-ass but because I notice that the FBI definition qualifies penetration with “no matter how slight.” Could there be such a thing, logically and legally, as “slight envelopment?” The word “envelop” itself seems to me to resist that kind of qualification.
Alternatively, I wonder if people who want the definition to include a word like envelop are not to some degree also projecting onto the word penetration traditional notions of heterosexuality so that penetration is always conceived of as something a man does to someone else. Grammatically, for example, the use of the nominal form–penetration–in the definition does not specify who is doing the penetrating or how it is being done. So I am wondering–and I mean “wondering” quite literally here, since I know this idea would need all kinds of unpacking before one could say it worked–if maybe the definition was written this way so it would apply also to a woman who uses a man’s body against his will to penetrate herself, not to mention a man who uses another man’s body in the same way. (I mean, and here again I am truly wondering this, is it always the case that when a man rapes a man the rapist is the penetrator?)
I recognize that this formulation only reinforces traditional notions of heterosexuality in all kinds of ways, but it does avoid the question of degrees of envelopment that might arise in a court case, if my question in the first paragraph of this comment is a valid one.
@Richard Newman: You’re playing word games. “Penetration” is a form of the transitive verb “penetrate”. X penetrates Y; since X must have something to penetrate Y with, women can’t rape men without the assistance of an outside object.
And any games you can play with the word “envelopment” can be turned back on “penetration”. “Slight penetration” doesn’t make much sense either; we know what is meant but it’s quite an odd qualifier. If it doesn’t sound odd to you it’s because you’re used to the patriarchal framing of sex.
The definition does indeed not specify that the victim was the one who was penetrated (Erl mentioned that above at #1), but it’s almost certain they’ll interpret it that way.
Black Humor:
You’re probably right about my question being word games, since now that I think of it, “partial envelopment” makes sense in the same way as “slight penetration.” And, frankly, neither of those sound all that odd to me. Anyway, like I said, I wasn’t really trying to argue for the reading I gave. It just struck me that the qualifier “slight” was so odd that it had to be an attempt to account for a certain kind of defense and so I wondered about how that would work with a term like “envelopment.” I have, above, obviously answered my own question. Thanks for pointing this out.
One point of grammar, though: just because penetrate is a transitive verb does not mean the subject can’t also be the object.
I think the idea that a woman cannot rape a man comes from the idea/s that rape requires vaginal penetration, that vaginal penetration/envelopment cannot be accomplished with a flaccid penis, and that an erection is an indicator of consent/willingness/desire for intercourse.
In regards to Emilys comment that an erect penis means desire for sex, I think its time that society let that trope go. Think about it, as women, are there times when we might be aroused but not want sex? An erect penis simply means you’ve engaged a physiological response, not that consent has been achieved or given. I would think that this response may even serve to torment men and boys who’ve experienced rape or sexual assault, since they would be forced to re evaluate their masculinity or sexuality. Not to mention that this thinking makes it impossible for anyone to believe that men can be rape victims, so who is the guy to turn to for support?
Hugo Schwyzer has a new blog post up on the very topic of erections in abused males; click here.
The word in question is “envelopment” and it is not a matter for competition and/or reductio ad absurdum wordplay. Being penetrated with anything is simply a more invasive occurence than being “enveloped”, that shouldn’t be a cause for resentment or argument for its own sake.
Rape as we understand it is not about the erasure of poor old men, its as much about the function of sex as it we know it. I’m guessing that wouldn’t centre around the “necessity” of penetration if women-and those who assume the “womanly” position- mattered enough to be involved in it.
If men object to this oh so much, they could give us all more of a clue by openly rebelling and refusing to have their sexuality led in that direction. Calling their extent of collusion “tropes” is nonsense.
Not centring sex around penetration in the first place which would be part of reducing rape and sexual assault in general, not just by changing sexual activity but the way we are trained to think of it.
The obvious problem with coining a new phrase is that it has pretty much zero recognition by laypeople. It’s fine if we’re talking about something new, uninvented, etc. But why on earth would we attempt to use a comparatively unrecognizable term for a perfectly common sex act? All that it does it to reduce the effect of it.
WOMEN can be on the receiving end of oral, manual, vaginal, anal, or other forms of sexual activity, irrespective of the gender of their partner.
If the activity is unwanted, then “partner” becomes “rapist.” and the act becomes “rape.”
MEN can be on the receiving end of oral, manual, anal, or other forms of sexual activity, irrespective of the gender of their partner.
If the activity is unwanted, then “partner” becomes “rapist.” and the act becomes “rape.”
Whichever one you talk about, the key factor is “rape,” “unwanted sex,” or whichever of the many analogs you prefer. All of those have widespread comprehension insofar as folks know what they mean, (though folks obviously disagree about the fact of male rape at all).
When you use a word like “envelopment” as the descriptor of a rape, you make it less compelling, and you break the focus away from the issue of rape. It’s fine as a physical constant in a statute, but not as a general term.
Not to mention that “enveloping” someone’s penis is not necessarily negative. (It sounds sort of positive in a porn-ish way.) Unfortunately it’s not really possible to give a good example.
I don’t care how sex crimes are defined under the law when such definitions are objectively ludicrous. Most absurdly, acts of consensual sex between adult women and underage teenage males are defined as “aggravated sexual battery,” “sexual assault,” and “child rape.” Yes, a biological man under age 16 or 18 who penetrates a woman in a consensual liaison that he initiated is a victim of “child rape” or “aggravated sexual battery”! And to those of us who respect the literal and objective meaning of words, “sexual assault” connotes the use of violence or threats of same to compell the submission of a victim or the penetration and/or molestation of a prepubertal child too young and innocent to consent in a meaningful and comprehending sense.
The last time I checked, a few years ago, I believe the age of consent was 18 in most jurisdictions. In some states, however, the age of consent is 18 but adults who have sex with minors of 16 and 17 are guilty of misdemeanors rather than felonies. Unless they’re teachers, of course. In how many states is it legal for a teacher to have sex with a student of 16 or 17? So, in respect to teachers and students, the age of consent is 18 in all or nearly all jurisdictions. And in some states teachers are quilty of felonies for having sex with H.S. students of 18 and 19.
g&w,
Emphasis added.
The reason to specifically talk about envelopment rape (and your argument could equally have been used against the phrases “oral rape” or “anal rape” at the point when only vaginal rape was viewed as being rape [EDITED to remove reference to the phrase “date rape”]), is because you unintentionally decided in writing the above passage that a person can not be raped by the use of their penis (actually, by including manually you acknowledged that manual masturbation could be rape, and orally could (as Richard pointed out) refer to a man being fellated without his consent, but none of the terms you used for how a man could be raped acknowledge that penal-vaginal sex can be a man being raped).
A rapist can use an object, their hands, their mouth, or their genitals to sexually assault another person. If a woman uses genital-genital penetrative contact to sexually assault a man, then if we describe the rapist as the active person then “envelope” is an appropriate word to use for what happened. Since rape is overwhelmingly thought of as a crime of penetration, it makes sense to add envelopment as a modifier to rape to make it explicit we aren’t talking about rape in which the penetrator is the perpetrator. If we reject this, then we are left with the following description of a rape:
“He was raped when he unwillingly penetrated a woman whom he was sleeping next to, who decided to put his penis in her vagina.”
That sentence is incredibly confusing. “he unwillingly penetrated a woman” is immediately read as a description of male rapist rather than a male victim.
If we accept that envelopment can be verb of rape, then we get the much clearer:
“He was raped when he was unwillingly enveloped by a woman whom he was sleeping next to, who decided to put his penis in her vagina.”
I personally think that this problem would have been better solved by the FBI abandoning a definition of rape and instead presenting a definition of sexual assault and collecting sexual assault statistics. It is a recognized matter of sexual assault law that penetration is not the core aspect of sexual assault, that contact is the core aspect, and that both penetration and envelopment are types of contact that can be sexual assault.
All i was intending to do was to note that men don’t have a vagina.
There’s no “gotcha” moment here.
g&w,
I don’t intend it as a gotcha.
You described women as being able to be raped manually, orally, vaginally, or anally. This is an ill-formed list, as “manually” describes the tool used for rape, not the part of the body violated by the rape, and “orally” is ambiguous, since a mouth can be used as a tool of sexual assault or can be where someone is violated.
You described men as being able to be raped manually, orally, or anally, and again “manually” describes the tool used for rape and “orally” can describe either the tool or the place of violation. What you failed to include in your list is that most men have penises, and that penises can be the body part by which a man is sexually violated, and that that can be done with something other than a hand (“manually”) or a mouth (“orally”).
True, you included “other forms of sexual activity”, but it feels strange to me that PiV intercourse gets elided into that category in your description.
Talking explicitly about “envelopment” rape is a way of highlighting that elision. It is a way of starting the argument with people who believe that PiV sex can never be rape of a man. (I don’t think you are in that second category, but your description did clearly elide PiV rape of men).
Oops!
Believe it or not, that was really just a complete typo. I was posting while I was busy. I didn’t mean to leave penises off, I meant to substitute them for vaginas; I didn’t realize it until i read this second post.
perhaps a mod can fix it before my typo causes an utter derail.
Too late!
I accept it as a typo, although I think my argument still stands. I honestly never meant it as a gotcha. I think “penile rape” (all the rest of your words could be used as reasonable modifiers to describe a form of rape) is at least as unexpected a phrase as “envelopment rape”, and it has the problem of being misunderstood because of the tool vs target ambiguity.
“I just reread Hermes’ comment (#8). He didn’t say that, or anything that can reasonably be read as meaning that.”
I read comment #8 as saying that reason that rape against men is not taken seriously is because of the (demeaning) view that women don’t have sexual agency. In other words, something bad that happens to men is really, at its heart, because of something bad that happens to women. And the causality for sure runs this way and only this way.
Consider a plant whose brambles and twigs are irritating and look like an eyesore on your front yard. You want to get rig of it forever. The roots (bad view of women) “cause” the brambles (rape of men) to grow; the brambles do not cause the roots to grow. Cutting the brambles qua cutting the brambles is a waste of time and energy, because they’ll only grow back so long as the roots remain! What you need to do is take a leap of faith and ignore the brambles entirely, even as they cut our hands and wrists as we try to reach around them, and focus solely or mainly on the roots. Getting rid of them will get rid of everything else, but you have to focus on it to the exclusion of others. Trust us.
I think Hermes sounds like a decent person who would never intentionally minimize anyone’s suffering, but the basic reasoning above inevitably follows when you try to establish causal dependency between one form of injustice vs. another. That the “contingent” injustice is lesser is an unavoidable conclusion from those premises. You don’t need to take my word for it. If the genders had been reversed; heck, if the argument were straight up reversed, and we said that it sucks that women will never be assumed to have enough agency in their sex lives until society gets rid of the idea that “agency” comes down to “blame” and we only want to blame men, even if they get raped (for example), I think you’d both have an easier time reading what is objectionable about such statements. Reasonably or not.
I had a response up here a moment ago. Was it eaten up by the spam filter?
[It was! Thanks for letting me know — I’ve retrieved it from the spam trap, so you should be able to see it now.
Why did it appear online for a minute before being eaten by the spam trap? I have no clue. The spam software is mysterious to me. –Amp]
Pocketjacks – I had a very different reading of Hermes at @8 – I don’t think he is making a claim about rape of either men or women; and more specifically, I don’t think he is talking about whether rape of men is taken seriously, just about why the word “envelopment” is not commonly used to describe sexual acts.
I think it’s certainly possible to care about men’s rape *because it is rape* while at the same time worrying about the perception of women’s agency in their own sexual activities. I agree that any position that tries to make social action on one front contingent on the other would be highly problematic. But it seems to me that it is you that are doing that – I can easily read you as arguing that it is objectionable to address the gender imbalance in language without also addressing the issue of men’s rape, even thought I don’t think that that’s what you intend. Unless I misread Hermes, however, he did not establish a contingency – he just mentioned one injustice in a thread that started about the other. At worst, it seems to me, he’s guilty of topic drift.
@ gin-and-whiskey in comment 34: While many (and indeed most) men do not have vaginas, some do. Likewise, some women have penises.
@ Eytan Zweig: I read Hermes’ comment in a very similar way.
It probably doesn’t help that we have no appropriate-sounding word for rape or a male by a female.
‘Penetration’ is a pretty vicious sounding word. Envelopment is not.
How do you view the fact that the much discussed new NISVS report by CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf) categorize “being made to penetrate someone else” as a separate category than rape (definitions of both are on page 17 in the report).
And what do you think of the results for men and women the last 12 months if one do categorize “being made to penetrate someone else” as rape (see tables on page 18 and 19) when the results turns out to be 1.1% for both women and men? What should we do with this result?
Envelopement doesn’t sound so vicious because it doesn’t have much in the way of history behind it and because there are very few people with penises coming forward to talk about their experiences and its effects. As time goes on, if this word stays in usage, people will come to see that non consensual envelopement is every bit the horror that non consensual penetration is. It comes down to awareness.
I’ve heard debate on word usage elsewhere, but I do think that rape has been gendered to mean female victim to most people. This is an idea that long predates feminism, though certainly we feminists have done much to raise awareness of it. As for the newest stats, I’d say I have some skepticism…it seems rather low. Though it is nice to see that the CDC is collecting stats for folks who bear both types of genitals or sex acts. I’m sure its shocking to many that the stats are what they are.
In the end, what descriptor gets used should be up to the victims and what they comfortable with using. Its an uphill battle whether folks with penises want to broaden the definition of rape to included acts that can happen to them or if they want to use envelopment to clarify who was the aggressor. At least, that’s my opinion.
pillowinhell: Well, I think it’s harmful to have “envelopment” as a separate term than rape since most media articles about this report summarizes it like this:
1 in 5 women have been raped while 1 in 71 men have been raped.
When the actual matter is that in the last 12 months 1 in 100 women have been raped and 1 in 100 men have been raped. A fact that no media outlet nor any feminist articles on this report I’ve read pointed out.
Which one do you think is most effective in furthering awareness?
In the words of winston Churchill “there are lies, damned lies and statistics”. As in all things, questioning is good.
Okay, so we seem to have two contradictory stats. One set says one in five.. But that was over a lifetime (my understanding), not the past year. So, if ideas about sex, consent and gender have changed…you’ll get a stat that says many more women have been raped than men. However, ideas and conditions have changed ( at least in the western world) and it means that in the past year there’s been equality ( most unfortunately) in rapes. Secondly, how broad a geographic area was included in these studies? The whole world or just north america? That would tend to skew things. Who was included? Who was overlooked? Who felt safe enough to report honestly? What are the laws or social conventions that say when a rape has or has not occurred?
I think that along with the stats that get reported in the media, there should also be a listing of what variables were or were not accounted for, the margin of error and what the results are for the average, the median and the mean. Those three things tell very different stories. Making more people aware of how stats work is the most effective way of raising awareness and creating effective strategies when coupled with discussions about factors that may have skewed the results somewhat. Including lack of studies on aggressive or rapist females and bullies.
Tamen, I haven’t gotten a chance to read the report in detail (Mandolin only told me about it yesterday, I think.)
But my initial reaction is that they CLEARLY undercounted male rape by not categorizing being forced to penetrate someone else as rape. I’d be curious to hear what their reasons were, and I hope it wasn’t that when they designed the study, they used the FBI’s definition of “rape.” But it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the case.
At the same time, I don’t think you’re right to completely ignore lifetime incidence of rape in favor of only looking at the past six months or year.
I can’t really discuss it in more detail, though, until I have time to read it, which might be a while — right now work on my book is taking precedence over doing research for blog posts.
@pillowinhell: The survey done by CDC which is a US governmental institution. Complete interviews were obtained from 16,507 adults (9,086 women and 7,421 men) and they were selected by ongoing, nationally representative random digit dial (RDD) telephone survey that collects information about experiences of sexual violence, stalking, and intimate partner violence among non-institutionalized English and/or Spanish-speaking women and men aged 18 or older in the United States (from page 1 in the report).
Incarcerated people were therefore not among the respondents.
The stats between lifetime experience and the last 12 months are not neccesarily contradictory and I don’t think they are contradictory. For instance will an increase in women being allowed to be sexual aggressive/sexual initiators without a corresponding focus on male ability to become victims (having only a few socially accepted reasons for turning down sex) will skew the more recent number towards more men being victims than in the “Last 12 months period” than in the lifetime period. I don’t think that many will dispute the increased sexual agency women have gained the last few decades in the US.
The reported statistics that majority of male victims of “being made to penetrate someone” reported only female perpetrators: 79.2% (page 24) sure points to the fact that too many of those women do not take enough care to ensure consent when they’re engaging with a partner sexually.
This is in stark contrast to the commonly held belief of man are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of rape and that women are overwhelmingly the victims of rape.
The definitions of rape and “made to penetrate someone else” that the report used was (page 17) :
Rape is defined as any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent. Rape is separated into three types, completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, and completed alcohol or drug facilitated penetration.
Being made to penetrate someone else includes times when the victim was made to, or there was an attempt to make them, sexually penetrate someone without the victim’s consent because the victim was physically forced (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threatened with physical harm, or when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.
I will not try to apply the result of this report wider than the geographic area it covered (a random sample of English or Spanish speaking non-institutionalized US citizen with a phone). A lot of people inside the US fall outside that sample – including prison inmates as I mentioned earlier.
But why not discuss this survey for what it is for the area it purport to cover?
@Ampersand:
I’ll just quickly say why I focus on the last 12 months number:
a) It is contradictory to common belief and I consider being notified of something I didn’t know as a higher value (learningwise) for me than being notified of what I already believed. The last one can often be less upsetting though…
b) I think the “Last 12 months” numbers are very important indeed if we care about reducing the number of rape victims regardless of gender. That number represents what the situation for men and women are now. And it turns out, surprisingly to many, that men noware just as much at risk as women for being raped. In fact at least as much as risk as women (note that the surrvey only had non-institutionalised respondents which means that no current inmates were asked – population who is very much at risk). Pretending that it isn’t so by only focusing on the lifetime numbers (which I am not dismissing nor disputing) is a grave mistake. No articles in the media nor the feminists articles I’ve read which discuss this report (currently only Maya at Feministing and Hugo Schwyzer at GMP and his own blog) did look at the 12 months numbers for men at all – only at the lifetime prevalence. Maya acknowledged that “being made to penetrate someone else” should be in the same category as rape but she only mentioned the 12 months number for women, not for men. Hugo did not acknowledge that “being made to penetrate someone else” should be in the same category as rape.
In short; I focus on the last 12 months number because noone else did and I feel it’s an important number as it depicts the situation now more correctly than lifetime numbers does.
I am looking forward to your take on it when you get the time to read it. And good luck with the work on your book in the meantime.
It’s interesting to note that if forced-to-penetrate, AKA forced-envelopment is counted as rape, in the United States, men, or at least those CAMAB, I don’t know and given they’re treating forced-envelopment as not-rape, don’t trust, that the CDC isn’t cissexist, make up 50% of rape victims.
That’s not a typo. 50%.
Women, or those CAFAB, probably the latter again, make up 40% of perpetrators.
Female rapists are less common, but they exist, and there’s no legitimate reason not to count their crimes.
Technically true. Though not much less common. There’s a higher ratio of female rapists to male rapists than of female murder victims to male murder victims.
So when my fellow feminists trot out ratios like 9-1, I take pause, because they ignore the erasure of rape of men (and CAMAB people generally, hullo cissexism), and the four-fold reduction in likelihood of a survivor of child sexual assualt to classify the rape that happened to them as rape, if they are CAMAB.
If you minimize rape of men, if you dispute solid evidence, if you shift the goalposts? This is going to be what you’re remembered for. Just like the second wave is remembered for it’s racism, for it’s Tuskegeesque programme of denying medicine to trans women and seeing what happens next. This is what you’ll be remembered for if you keep making excuses for rapists.
Oh, and @michael kuel? Sex with someone underage is still rape, even if the underage person enthusiastically consents, because they do not have the capacity to enthusiastically consent to someone in a position of power over them, like a teacher, especially not at 12 or 13 or 14.
I didn’t know what CAMAB and CAFAB mean.
As I understand it from googling, CAMAB usually means coercively assigned male at birth, and CAFAB means coercively assigned female at birth.
Yep, that is what those acronyms stand for. Sex is coercively assigned for everyone. The presence of a scalpel doesn’t make the system more or less likely to beat you into a pulp for refusing to be what they say you are, as anyone gatekept can tell you, as a parent who has had to decide between having their child and having their child be free from gender dysphoria can tell you, and as anyone who’s lost 20,000 nerve-endings off their genitalia in the Western World can tell you.
Valerie:
That is correct for the “last 12 months” prevalency numbers as I’ve also pointed out in an earlier comment on this thread. Somewhat simplified (if one assume that every respondents were interviewed 31st dec 2010 – in reality the interviews were conducted from January 22, 2010 through
December 31, 2010) one could say that in 2010 50% of rape victims were men.
79.2% of all men who reported being “made to penetrate someone else” reported a female perpetrator. And those two findings combined results in Valerie’s statement that 40% of all rapists are female.
And all this does not even include prison rape.
And yet, statements such as “women are the overwhelmingly majority of rape victims and men are the overwhelmingly majority of rapists” still get trotted out. I am beginning to wonder if the “last 12 months” statistics in NISVS 2010 is written in ink invisible to feminists, RAINN and others. I am beginning to wonder if the statistic that find that 79.2% of men who reported “being made to penetrate someone else” reports a female perpetrator is written in invisible ink.
And then the misanthrope in me really gets something to feast on when I encounter threads like this one at Feministe: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/09/19/is-it-rape-if-you-dont-mean-for-it-to-be-rape/
With this comment as the lowlight last I checked.
Reading that thread I am starting to believe we are witnessing a giant bait-n-switch from many feminists when it comes to the definitions of rape. I can’t help but wonder if this bait-n-switch is caused by the realization: “Wait, that would make me/women rapists also”. Hence we get articles shaming men who won’t do certain sex acts (questioning their motives for saying no), comments like Marcotte’s who more than suggests that the victimized man in reality is abusing the woman (who fucked him while he was asleep) and so on.
Valerie, I want to thank you for being crystal clear in your comments on that thread.
Tamen:
I thought the incidence (prevalence during a time period, sorry, pedantry) numbers included prisoners. That’s a horrifying thought if they don’t. (Got a link?)
And the reason that unidirectionalist feminists trot out the line about men being the minority of victims is because men are far less likely to describe what we would classify as a rape… as a rape. 64% of female survivors of childhood sexual assault describe what happened to them as a sexual assault. 16% of male survivors of childhood sexual assault do. Does that mean men are less traumatized by sexual assault? No, PTSD, depression, other symptoms are, if anything, worse when a sexual assault is not confronted.
So why do men not deal with their sexual assaults with the same frequency? One reason might be how we approach the politics of sexual assault survival. Though this was a case of misogynistic-cissexism and not misandry, I’m reminded of the case of Kimberly Nixon, a woman who survived rape, wanted to work as a counselor at a rape crisis centre, and was turned away for being trans. The centre in question, Vancouver Rape Relief, has morphed into a transmisogynistic hate site as their way of addressing the controversy, posting polemics designed to degender trans women, to treat them at best as former men, which they are clearly not. No man wants exogenous estrogen. Anyway, their woman-hating screeds include such gems as “Men in Ewes Clothing: The Stealth Politics of the Transgender Movement.”
There is, quite simply, a tendency among unidirectionalist feminists, overwhelmingly cis, to treat rape as a political cudgel, never mind trying to let the victim heal, rather they will stand on the victim to enact whatever agenda they please. You see this at Michfest which refuses entry to trans women, on, among other specious reasoning, the grounds that a survivor might be triggered by the sight of a penis (never mind, again that an estrogenic penis is rather different from an androgenic one in morphology, tactile, and olfactory attributes…). You see this as men, and CAMAB people generally, who are frequently slotted by self-proclaimed allies as men, are denied a network of healing:
First we prevent cessation of abuse: No shelters exist for battered men, for raped men.
Next we prevent confrontation of abuse: Again, without those shelters, without a network of support, it’s difficult to come forward. It’s far more difficult for a cis man to say, “I was raped,” without being implicitly and explicitly shamed, than it is for a cis woman. Cis men are far less likely to have someone defend them when they are shamed, and that’s often what’s far more galling: The wall of silence that surrounds these crimes.
Then we prevent political action: Unidirectional feminists frequently dismiss those who are witnesses to these rapes, accuse them of trying to distract from rapes that happen to women, call them misogynists, and use other ad hominem arguments that seem more designed to deflect responsibility for rape than prevent it.
Frankly, it pisses me off, for a whole bunch of reasons that would take too long to go into right now, but I’ll leave it at calling them on their bullshit.
Valerie: The NISVS 2010 Report from which the “last 12 months” prevalency numbers come from states this about the sample in it’s executive summary:
(My emphasis)