Towards a Feminist Politics of “Male Survivorship”

I have spent the last month or so writing a proposal for a fellowship that, if I get it, will buy me some serious time to write. The project I am proposing will allow me to go back into the prose I’ve written over the past nearly thirty years about manhood and masculinity and perhaps actually write the book I started back in the 1990s. Some parts of the proposal bear directly on discussions we’ve had here on Alas, and so I have revised them into this blog post, which I hope will be of interest. These discussions have been enormously helpful in clarifying my own thinking on these issues, and so I am interested to see how this post might move those discussions forward. What follows is the central argument of my proposal:

I came to see myself both as a survivor of childhood sexual violence and as a man committed to feminism after reading the essays of Adrienne Rich in the early 1980s, a time when, as far as I knew, no one was talking about the sexual abuse of boys. Rich’s polemic against men’s sexual violence against women gave me for the first time a language I could use to name as violations what the men who’d sexually abused my teenage boy’s body had done to me. The seeds of whatever healing I have achieved, in other words, are firmly rooted in the feminist vision of gender justice. Nonetheless, taking those roots for granted, as I did for many years, inevitably papers over some difficult tensions. For while feminism may have given me a language with which to name my experience of sexual violence, and despite a growing awareness among contemporary feminists that men are sexually victimized in much greater numbers than previously imagined, I have found little room within feminist discourse for who I am as a survivor of that violence.

In “Sexual Violence Against Men and Women in War,” for example, published in The Nevada Law Review, Valorie K. Vojdik addresses herself both to the frequency and brutality with which boys and men, soldiers and civilians, are sexually victimized during wartime, highlighting how invisible that violence has historically been within feminist discourse. Her goal, however, is not to illuminate the experiences of those boys and men as victims and survivors. Rather, she wants to make “masculinized violence against men” visible in order to deepen feminists’ “understanding of…the construction of certain male bodies as masculine and dominant, in both war and in peace” (952, italics mine). Vojdik’s focus, in other words, is on telling us more about what we already know, or think we know, i.e., that perpetrators’ bodies are male and that the goal of the violence these male-bodied perpetrators commit is to construct themselves as “masculine and dominant.”

Granted that deepening our understanding of how male dominance is constructed is important. Nonetheless, Vojdik’s analysis actually obscures more than it reveals about the boys and men who are the victims of “masculinized violence.” Elsewhere in her essay, for example, she writes that, “The rape of men [in war] turns the male into a powerless victim, a symbolic woman who is sexually violated by the perpetrator through rape” (945). Given this framing, whether she intends it or not, Vojdik implicitly proposes that the best way to understand men’s experience of rape is not to reveal what that experience might be, but rather to use women’s experience as a model. To put it another way, Vojdik does what feminists have long criticized male scholars for doing in fields as distant from each other as English literature and medical research: proceeding from the assumption that their gendered perspective is the norm that applies everywhere to everyone.

Adrienne Rich, along with all the other feminist writers whose work helped start me on my path to healing, proceeded from the same kind of assumption. In the world of their writing, sexual violence was committed by men against women, full stop. Indeed, I don’t remember any of them addressing even the possibility of a male victim, let alone a female perpetrator. The only way I could find myself in the world of this feminist writing, therefore, was to co-opt women’s position within it, to view my own experience through the lens of what men’s sexual violence against women meant to women. To carve out, in other words, a space within feminism not so different from the one to which Vojdik argues male perpetrators send their male victims—one where I was, symbolically, a woman.

The difference, of course, is that the society I live in, because it sees the violations I survived as unmanning by definition, has generally wanted me to occupy that position (though things are beginning to change). Feminism, on the other hand, doesn’t care that the men who violated me did so in ways that directly parallel men’s sexual violence against women; I am, in feminist terms, still a man in a society that licenses men to commit such violence. To presume to occupy women’s position in feminism, therefore, even symbolically, and even for reasons as sympathetic as mine might be, is still, when understood through a feminist lens, to exercise that license. To unpack this conundrum, to ask what it means be both a man committed to feminism in a world that privileges men and the sexually violated boy who grew up to be that man, is to ask what a feminist politics of “male survivorship” might look like.

Depending on the measure you use, studies show that as many as 20% of men will—at the hands of both men and women—experience some form of sexual violence at some point in their lives. That we finally recognize these men as people who have been violated, rather than people who should learn to “suck it up” and move on; that we as a society have a growing awareness that this violation is a social and cultural (in addition to being an interpersonal) injustice; that we increasingly believe those who survive this violation deserve to heal, and that they deserve as well our compassion and our support as they do so–all of this is rooted in the work feminists are still doing to expose men’s violence against women as gendered violence and to establish ending that violence as one central goal of gender justice. I am, in other words, not the only male survivor who has a stake in feminism, though I do think feminists have largely and consistently, by omission if not commission, misrepresented what that stake might be.

Correcting that misrepresentation seems to me a necessary step in moving the feminist conversation about gender justice forward.

Cross-posted on my blog.

This entry posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Men and masculinity, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues. Bookmark the permalink. 

16 Responses to Towards a Feminist Politics of “Male Survivorship”

  1. 1
    Aapje says:

    Adrienne Rich, along with all the other feminist writers whose work helped start me on my path to healing, proceeded from the same kind of assumption. In the world of their writing, sexual violence was committed by men against women, full stop.

    The only way I could find myself in the world of this feminist writing, therefore, was to co-opt women’s position within it

    How did these feminist writers help your healing, when they denied that you could be a victim, unless you pretend to be a woman? From what I’ve read, male abuse victims face unique challenges. For instance, the narrative that abused men become abusers is gendered and is only a stigma for men. Furthermore, men have a much harder time recognizing their victimization and probably blame themselves more due to ingrained gender stereotypes.

    By your own admission, feminist theory is completely unsuited for your situation, since as a man, you first have to fight for the right to be a victim. You say that feminist theory was the first thing that gave you a way to talk about your experiences, but that doesn’t mean it is the best way. I suggest you broaden your horizon and look into resources like: http://www.1in6.org. Feminism doesn’t focus on helping abused men, but that organization does.

    To unpack this conundrum, to ask what it means be both a man committed to feminism in a world that privileges men and the sexually violated boy who grew up to be that man, is to ask what a feminist politics of “male survivorship” might look like.

    Mainstream feminism has adopted many of the traditional male stereotypes: men are strong, violent and aren’t as sensitive as women. So when they are victimized, it can only happen by the hands of men or when women defend themselves. When they are victimized, it is not as serious as similar experiences that happen to women. Note that feminists didn’t invent this, they just copied the existing sexist beliefs, because those are very useful in the narrative that men oppress women.

    all of this is rooted in the work feminists are still doing to expose men’s violence against women as gendered violence

    Because those feminists are women’s activists. They advocate for women, not for equality. They do not care about you, as a man.

    Correcting that misrepresentation seems to me a necessary step in moving the feminist conversation about gender justice forward.

    Can it really be fixed while feminist keep believing that men are privileged? Perhaps feminist theory is wrong and men aren’t so much privileged, but rather oppressed in different ways. Where women are infantilized, men are ‘superheroed.’ They must provide, protect and serve, without complaining and accepting hardship & suffering as ‘real men.’ Outwardly, the situation for men looks much better. Men work more and a minority of men are in positions of power. But if they use this power to help others (women and children…or a small elite), then this power doesn’t help men in general, since others benefit from this power.

    If you look more closely at society, there is a ton of evidence that men aren’t actually better off in many ways. Perhaps the clearest example is that women are traditionally happier than men, but as they have copied the male role more and more, their happiness has been declining. If feminist theory was correct and men were oppressing women for their own benefit, you’d expect something completely different: men starting out way happier and women catching up to them, due to feminist successes.

  2. 2
    Nancy Lebovitz says:

    Aapje, Uhura meant a lot to black women, even though she had a very limited job in on the Enterprise. She was still a great deal better than no representation at all.

  3. 3
    Aapje says:

    @Nancy

    I wasn’t denying that feminism may have helped him at one point in time. But when 2 sentences in an multi-page article are about how feminism helped him and pretty much the rest of the article is a complaint how feminism cannot deal with male abuse victims very well, then I find that very telling.

    Note that I am attempting to steer him towards an organization that makes it their primary goal to help male victims of child abuse. Even if you disagree with my assessment of feminism, I hope you can agree that such an organization may help him a lot, not in the least by putting him in contact with other male victims.

    Right now, Mr Newman seems to approach his healing process in just 1 way, by theorizing about it from a female perspective. A more diverse approach may be more helpful.

  4. Aapje:

    It’s telling to me that the quotes you pull are from the end of this post, ignoring in particular the way the beginning of the post answers your very first question. You want to know

    How did these feminist writers help your healing, when they denied that you could be a victim, unless you pretend to be a woman?

    It says so pretty clearly right there in the first paragraph:

    I came to see myself both as a survivor of childhood sexual violence and as a man committed to feminism after reading the essays of Adrienne Rich in the early 1980s, a time when, as far as I knew, no one was talking about the sexual abuse of boys. Rich’s polemic against men’s sexual violence against women gave me for the first time a language I could use to name as violations what the men who’d sexually abused my teenage boy’s body had done to me. The seeds of whatever healing I have achieved, in other words, are firmly rooted in the feminist vision of gender justice.

    Whatever critique I may have of feminist discourse surrounding male survivors, what I said in the above paragraph remains true, and not just for me. Go read Mike Lew’s Victims No Longer, one of the first books—it might have been the first book—directly to address, from a therapist’s point of view, the specific issues and needs of dealing with male survivors. On pages 38-39 he has a special section called “Our [and he is referring to male survivors and the people who help them heal] Debt to the Women’s Movement,” which I do not right now have the time to look up and quote from.

    In addition, I think you will find that many of the ideas put forward by organizations like 1in6 and MaleSurvivor—I appreciate the referral, but I do already know about them—are also rooted in the feminist critique of gender and understanding of the nature of sexual violence. The fact feminist discourse like Vojdik’s has its limits when it comes to talking about male survivors does not invalidate either that critique or that understanding. Just like any other politics/form of analysis, feminism has room to grow, to become more inclusive, to address ideas and phenomena it has not till now addressed. My hope is that what I have written, what I plan to write, will help move that conversation forward.

    It also occurs to me that I perhaps should have resurrected the “feminist-identified only” clause we used to put at the end of certain blog posts, but since I didn’t, I will also say this: You and I clearly have different ideas about what feminism is and isn’t, about the nature of male privilege, about the nature of male dominance/patriarchy, etc. I, however, am not personally interested in engaging in that discussion in this thread, since this thread has, for me, a very different purpose. I’ve had the conversation you want to have before, and if you’re really interested in what I’ve written on the sexual abuse of boys and men, feminism, masculinity, and so on, you can search the blog. I’ve been writing here for a while.

    Still, other people might be interested in this conversation, and since I can sort of see how it might be relevant to the issues I have raised here, I’m not going to ask you not to pursue it any further. Please do understand, however, that I will not personally engage with you further about the issues you have raised in your comments and also that, as soon as the conversation becomes derailing, I will ask that people take it elsewhere.

  5. 5
    Tamen says:

    I came to see myself as a victim of rape when I realized I should have the same right to not having people (in my case: a woman) having sex with me without my consent as I was told women had in the sexual awareness campaigns we had at school back in the late 80’s.

    My perpetrator was a woman and I soon found out that if there was little room for male victims of male perpetrators in feminism there were even less room for male victims of female perpetrators. My experience was denied and ridiculed when I brought the issue up in the few forums I knew of – what was worse was that I was called a rape apologists, that I used female-on-male rape as an argument for allowing men to rape women. It simply was untenable and hurtful for me to try to address this issue within feminism – I would have to deny parts of what I experienced in order to find a place within feminism.

    It’s interesting how you found that feminists who wrote about male victims of male perptrators assigned the role of a symbolic woman – as in the Vojdik quote you provide:

    The rape of men [in war] turns the male into a powerless victim, a symbolic woman who is sexually violated by the perpetrator through rape

    Male victims of female perpetrators occurs even more rarely in feminist discourse. When they do their experience (like you’ve illustrated for male-on-male victims) are being defined for them, although in a different way. Not by turning the male victim into a symbolic woman, but by positing the male victim’s experience as something totally different from female victim’s – as something less serious, perhaps even inconsequential. Examples are Mary P Koss paper Detecting the Scope of Rape : A Review of Prevalence Research Methods

    Although consideration of male victims is within the scope of the legal statutes, it is important to restrict the term rape to instances where male victims were penetrated by offenders. It is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman.

    A similar view is expressed by Nicola Gavey in her 2005 book Just Sex?: The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape.
    Here she first argues that acknowledging sexually aggressive women and their male victims “has radical potential for a feminist analysis of of rape and sexual coercion (of women by men)”. She goes on to discuss a film scene from the movie White Palace where Susan Sarandon’s character (Nora) performs oral sex on a sleeping James Spader (Max) despite him rebuffing her sexual advances prior to falling asleep. “However, because Max is initially asleep, it is unclear whether er sexual aggressiveness leaves her as some kind of feminist heroine or, rather, as a sexual aggressor, whose actions should be condemned in the interest of moral consistency.” Gavey goes on to state:
    That is, the meaning of a woman giving oral sex to a man who is asleep is profoundly different from the meaning of a man giving oral sex to a woman who is asleep.

    For an interesting feminist criticism of Gavey you might want to check out this book: Male Rape is a Feminist Issue Feminism, Governmentality and Male Rape by Claire Cohen

    Some quotes:

    Unlike other authors, Gavey (2005) goes to great lengths to pre-empt criticism for exclusion of the male victim from her thesis, and consequently acknowledges the male to a far greater extent than many of contemporaries, Yet, despite Gavey’s (2005) efforts, her form of ‘inclusion’ is expressly reluctant and at times apologetic, and sees her, therefore, conscientiously toeing the invisibilization line. (….) – for Gavey (2005), gender-neutrality is misguided and ‘gender-equivalency’ is explicitly denounced as backlash. This is a technique of de-legitimization utilized several times where exclusion of the male might otherwise seem indefensible.

    Cohen also criticizes Joanna Bourke’s Rape: A History from 1860 to the present along with Gavey’s book:

    Both books cynically rest their thesis on an uncritical acceptance of official statistics (and even official estimates) to justify female rape as their priority, and both express concerns regarding the recognition of the male as facilitating backlash; and reject gender-neutrality. In addition both draw on a notion of heterosexual versus homosexual rape. As a corollary, both therefore effectively draw on and credibilize contigent rape myths, such as male rape is of low incidence, low harm, driven by or in accordance with sexuality, et.; and both are seemingly unaware that these resonate with and revalidates the logics around the ideal victims.

    Interestingly, each of these authors credibilize male rape myths within chapters where these selfsame myths have already been expressly problematized (albeit to varying degrees) in respect of female victims. What is truly fascinating is that these myths then are given credence that in effect beyond any consideration of facticity – and as aconsequence they can be simultaneously deconstructed (for female victims) and shored back up (for males).

    A superficial distinction between these two works is that Gavey (2005) appears to reject any significance of male rape beyond the merely theoretical, whereas Bourke (2007) accedes that there may indeed be far more male rape victims than presently acknowledged. Unfortunately, they both concur that analyses that incorporate the male victim as an equal victim are quilty of ‘equivalency’ and are therefore dangerous for feminism and activism in respect of backlash.

    I wish you good luck with your project as I see a clear room for improvement.

  6. 6
    Aapje says:

    @Richard (feel free to ignore parts of my comment if you do not wish to go in that direction)

    in particular the way the beginning of the post answers your very first question

    I understand that it is important to have a vocabulary and perhaps find a way to blame society for creating the abuser (it is a common desire to find deeper reasons for events, although I think that such a pursuit can be self-deluding in quite a few cases). However, my question was referring more to how you seem to argue that male victims get dismissed by feminist theory. It’s my understanding that the denial of abuse is very harmful to victims and as such, I wonder if your healing process isn’t harmed by this?

    Just like any other politics/form of analysis, feminism has room to grow, to become more inclusive, to address ideas and phenomena it has not till now addressed.

    The room is certainly there, but when a key anchor point for most feminists is that women face drastically more oppression than men and the key goal is to elevate women, there is no real incentive for those feminists to adopt your ideas. Recognition of significant male suffering and structural unfairness to men that women do not experience far more severely (which is often used to justify an exclusive focus on problems that women have), will then be seen as weakening their side (while bolstering their ‘enemies’) and thus as derailing the movement. It will be fought tooth and nail by a large number of feminists.

    PoC had an enormous fight to get recognition of their issues by the feminist movement. Yet their fight was immeasurable easier than yours, due to the undeniable existence of WoC. The threat was that these women would split from the feminist movement, so this provided the incentive to adopt these issues and close the ranks along gender lines.

    As you purely advocate for men, you have no such crow bar. You will just be seen as an MRA by many feminists (and your writing is pretty similarity to some MRAs I’ve read, except for your conclusion that feminism can be changed from within).

    I, however, am not personally interested in engaging in that discussion in this thread, since this thread has, for me, a very different purpose.

    So what is that purpose? To make more feminists here accept that male victims exist? To convince them that the amount of abuse of men is way higher than they realized? To gather a bunch of feminists that are willing to make an actual effort for male victims of abuse? Something else?

    Your article discusses quite a bit in general, without really diving into a specific issue (like giving detailed statistics comparing the number of female and male abuse victims). So I fear that many feminists who read this will just give lip service. Just like I’ve so often see feminists given the most minimal amount of lip service to male problems (as in “yes, it exists, now lets talk about women’s issues again”). I don’t think that will achieve anything.

  7. Tamen:

    Thanks for that post, especially for the links. I knew about Koss, but the others are new to me.

    I’m sure you noticed that the my post nodded its head in the direction of female perpetrators and male victims/survivors, if only vaguely and insubstantially. When I was first working on the proposal, I tried including both kinds of perpetrators, but precisely the differences you point out in how people (not just feminists) view men and boys who are violated by men versus men and boys who are violated by women was just too much to deal with in what has to be a 1500 word project description (remember, the post is adapted from the text of the proposal), and the Vojdik article presented itself as a perfect illustrative example. She also nods her head in the direction of female wartime perpetrators, but it is barely a nod and they get lost in the kind of rhetoric I quoted in my post.

    I do, however, intend to take on the question of men who are sexually violated by women, but I want to start not with the question of what it means/could mean within feminism that the perpetrators are female. Starting with the perpetrators also violates what I have always understood to be a central principle of feminist critique and politics: that one should start one’s analysis with the experience of those who have been subjugated, that understanding this experience will ultimately reveal what you need to know about the perpetrators, because to start with the perpetrators is inevitably to reify the perpetrators’ values.

    To put it another way, I am interested in asking, starting with my own experience, what the experience of male survivors—whether they were violated as adults or children, by men or by women—might reveal about gender.

    One last thing. If you’re comfortable sharing it, I’d love to hear the story of how you came to realize you “should have the same right to not having people (in my case: a woman) having sex with me without my consent as I was told women had in the sexual awareness campaigns we had at school back in the late 80’s.”

    Again, thanks for your comment.

  8. 8
    Tamen says:

    Oh, that’s quite a bag to unknap, Jeffrey, but I have told this story and parts of it elsewhere online a few times so why not. This might end up rather long and meandering with heavy doses of TMI and poor language (English is not my first language).

    The campaigns dealt exclusively with female victims and male perpetrators. A girls’s “no” should be respected and boys should refrain from pressuring a girl into having sex they didn’t really want. The campaigns were mainly in the forms of “don’t”s and did little in showing examples of positive sexual experiences. Having an egalitarian bent already back then I already had assumed that women had a sex drive just as men had a sex drive and that my idea of an ideal sexual relationships were one where I was just as desired by the woman as she was by me. Nowadays I would call it mutual enthusiastically consent. I can’t really explain it, but to the extent I was aware that there was other narratives I intuitively thought of that as something artificial imposed by social pressure rather than something biological or innate. I guess the idea that men and women are equal resonnated that strongly with me. Despite this I accepted the one-sidedness of the prevention campaigns. The possible ways a sexual encounted could happen was by mutual consent or by the man violating the woman. Other options were not possible – they didn’t even exist as a theoretical concept for me.

    Unexperienced as I was with girls I had the naive yet contradictory view that sex could be a purely physical thing while at the same time I was a hopeless romantic having a series of unrequited crushes hoping for the one true love.

    I was very shy and at the same time overly terrififed of ending up pressuring a girl into having sex with me, so any little experience I had in “making out” at that time I got because the girl eventually initiated it. Most girls didn’t and nothing happened while a few did.

    This girl did. I visited a friend out of town and he brought me to a party. I met this girl at this party and we ended up making out at her place much later that evening. We talked and agreed not to take it further – not to have sex. I was relieved – I didn’t see her as “the one” and I found that this really wasn’t the context I wanted when loosing my virginity (half-drunk with someone I barely knew). I asked if I could sleep over since it was in the middle of the night in winter and I was a stranger in this town and didn’t know how to get to my friend’s place.

    When I later woke up with her straddling me with my penis inside her I was shocked and had a flurry of thoughts running through my head: What is she doing? I’m not a virgin anymore? I should be enjoying this. I’m not enjoying this. Why am I not enjoying this? Is there something wrong with me. I want this to stop. How do I get this to stop? And so on while my body remained passive.

    To this day I cannot fathom why I didn’t just push her off, why I didn’t just tell her to stop. Although she was about my height and my weight I think could’ve pushed her off me and made her stop that way. But the thought never even occured to me. The only was I could think of to make this stop was to fake an orgasm. So I did and amazingly enough it worked and she climbed off me. I had to stay the night until I could find the nearest bus-stop early in the morning. I didn’t sleep – hoping that she didn’t wake up until I had left.

    Only having heard of male perpetrators and female victims I had no concept, no name of what had happened to me. So even though I knew I didn’t want what happened and wished it didn’t happen it had no name and therefore it was nothing. I put it aside. I basically surpressed it.

    I believe that this caused me some serious sexual issued as well as trust issues when it came to women. Still not comfortable with initiating myself I found that in later sexual encounters I would tense up during intercourse. This affected my ability to orgasm during intercourse. After having dealt with the unpleasant anger and hurt from the woman when I was unable to orgasm I soon began to fake orgasms. This pattern lasted some rare sporadic one-night stands over a period of a couple of years.

    I can’t recall if there was a specific episode which prompted it, but I found myself contemplating the first time I had faked an orgasm an why I did it. And it just hit me: She raped me. Men and women are equals, men having non-consenting sex with women is rape hence what I experienced is rape. It felt as a relief – as if something shifted inside me.

    At first I thought I was a unique case, but then I started to wonder about some of the stories I’ve heard from some of my male friends over the years. Stories about women who couldn’t resist them. Stories where they woke up in bed with a woman not remembering how they got there. Stories where the woman who were sexually aggressive were invariable desribed as “ugly” when he rejected her advances and often as beautiful when he did not reject her advances. All behind a veneer of bragging.

    I started to search for more information, but aside from the rare article about male-on-male rape I found very little at that time. I also noticed that the issue of rape was primarily – almost exclusively – discussed in feminist forums and tried to broach the issue in those forums. As I’ve outlined in my earlier comment that didn’t go too well – in fact I was totally blindsided by the responses I received considering the feminist “men and women are equals” message I understood to be the core of feminism at that time.

    In the last 5 years or so I’ve seen a sharp increase in male victims telling their stories. There are threads on reddit where several thousands of male victims tell their stories. Approaches to male rape like those from Vojdik, Koss, Gavey and others are becoming increasingly untenable – not the least because of the voices of the suvivors like for instance James Landrith.

    I hope you can make some sense of this.

  9. Thanks for sharing that, Tamen. (And it’s Richard; Jeffrey’s my middle name.)

  10. 10
    Spoonwood says:

    “Depending on the measure you use, studies show that as many as 20% of men will—at the hands of both men and women—experience some form of sexual violence at some point in their lives. ”

    Many, if not most or all, of these studies exclude consideration of males whose penises got made to penetrate an object. This number is a substantial proportion of the population in America that would be hard to underestimate.

  11. 11
    Lirael says:

    Sexual violence is clearly a feminist issue, but I think it would be useful to get away from the popular framing of seeing it as only a feminist issue. It’s also clearly an LGBTQ issue, since some subgroups of LGBTQ people (particularly, bi/pan and trans/gender nonconforming people, as well as incarcerated LGBTQ people) have a very increased likelihood of experiencing it. It’s an anti-racism issue, because multiracial people regardless of gender, Latino men, and Native women, are more likely to experience it in the US than men or women do overall, according to the NISVS (and because black and brown people are the primary targets of mass incarceration, and our incarceration system is terrible as far as sexual violence goes). It’s an anti-ageism/adultism issue, because children are so often targeted by adults and have many extra barriers to receiving help. It’s a disability justice issue because people with certain kinds of disabilities are so much more likely to experience it.

    It’s also, I think, its own kind of anti-oppression issue, related to others and part of a general anti-oppression agenda, in the same way that The Network/La Red (an organization that I volunteer for that works against partner abuse) frames partner abuse this way:

    The Network La Red understands oppression to be an imbalance of power intrinsically linked to the privileges bestowed on some at the expense of others, based on but not limited to: race, ethnicity, gender expression and identity, class, ability, sexuality, religion, citizenship status, age, language capacity and history of incarceration and court involvement.

    Partner abuse exists to achieve and maintain control, and reflects and perpetuates the larger violent culture which condones and rewards interpersonal, institutional and im­perialist abuse of power in order to control and/or exploit groups of people. The Network/La Red links domestic violence to all other forms of violence, oppression and abuse, because the values and tactics behind each are identical.

    It’s terrible that so many men who have experienced sexual violence have had bad experiences in feminist anti-rape spaces. I hope this is gradually changing – I volunteer for the RAINN Online Hotline and on the public education/organizing side for my local rape crisis center, both of which have gender-inclusive volunteer bases and provide services to men, and both of which had trainings with units on the special issues of male survivors (e.g. barriers to disclosure and being taken seriously, laws that don’t define being forced to penetrate as rape, non-sex-inclusive rape kits in many states). My local rape crisis center has a men’s support group, and RAINN-affiliated rape crisis centers are required to abide by RAINN’s nondiscrimination policy (and you can complain to RAINN if they don’t). I know, of course, that policies are not enough, they are only a start, it’s attitudes that have to change.

  12. 12
    Copyleft says:

    I see the awareness as proceeding through four steps, based on the four roles/identities.

    1. Recognition of male as attacker. This has been around for a long time, and it simply needed recognition that sexual assault can be a type of violence.

    2. Recognition of female as victim. This went hand-in-hand with first-wave feminism and has been thoroughly accepted.

    3. Recognition of male as victim. This is what Newman is going through, and he’s encountering opposition from both traditionalist society and more than a few feminists.

    What’s still missing, of course, is…

    4. Recognition of female as attacker. Nobody, but nobody is willing to discuss that one, and anyone who tries will be swiftly condemned as an obvious misogynist.

    Naturally, there are further complications when children (male vs. female) are included as another category, but the dichotomy exists even there. Picture any male teacher/female student story and the corresponding female teacher/male student. Those who claim the male student was ‘lucky’ will never even think of the possibility that an adult female could be guilty of sexual assault. And again, both traditionalists and many feminists will be in solid agreement on that point.

  13. 13
    Ben Lehman says:

    Good luck, Richard.

    @copyleft You sometimes see it discussed in the context of female attackers of female victims. But, even that, pretty rarely, and it’s pretty minimized.

    yrs–
    –Ben

  14. First, Lirael, thanks for that reminder. It’s important.

    Second, Thanks, Ben!

    Copyleft, Part of what I want to explore in the work I am proposing—or at least to propose that we should be exploring—is what happens when we don’t start with the categories you outline, which is not to suggest they are not valid, but start instead with the experiences of men who have survived sexual violence, regardless of who the perpetrator was, of the survivors’ sexual preference, of the age when they were assaulted, whether they are trans or cis, white or of color—and there may be other distinctions that I am overlooking here.

    This is not as clear in the original post as it might be, but it is the direction I want to go in.

  15. 15
    PAO says:

    I absolutely understand how/why feminsm gave you a language to understand your sexual abuse as a boy and I am very glad. I also understand (meaning my understanding, others will surely disagree) that feminism is a movement for the liberation of girls/women/females so asking why violence against boys and men is not adequately addressed (or centred or whatever you want to call it) is like asking why “black lives matter” isn’t addressing the violence against people other than black people.

    It is not that I think that violence against boys/men/males whether it is perpetrated by other boys/men/males ( as it overwhelmingly is) or girls/women/females isn’t an urgent issue that should/needs to be addressed, I absolutely do and am glad that feminism has helped make that possible but I don’t see why it’s is the job of feminism to have done or continue to do so.

  16. PAO:

    I’ve been mulling your comment over for the past couple of days because what it has made me think about is more complex than will fit manageably into a blog comment and I do not have the time to write the separate post that I think a full response would become. So let me, initially, say this:

    I don’t think I am asking “why [sexual: because I am talking specifically about sexual] violence against boys and men is not adequately addressed” within feminism, in the sense that I think it is a failure of feminism not to have addressed this issue from the start. I agree that feminism is and should remain, at its roots, a liberation movement for women. That I think the process and eventual fact of this liberation represent real opportunities for an equally necessary, but very different kind of “liberation” for men does not change this fundamental fact. (I put the second liberation in scare quotes because the idea of “liberation” from a social/cultural/ideological position of dominance requires some unpacking.)

    Nonetheless, when feminists like Vojdik enlist what I and other male survivors (because I know I am not alone in this) experience as a fundamental misrepresentation of our experience in pursuit of that liberation, I don’t think addressing that misrepresentation is the same thing as criticizing feminism as a movement for centering only women/not also centering men.

    To put it another way: Were this a thread written by someone else about ending men’s sexual violence against women, I would never presume to introduce my experience as a survivor of sexual violence in a “this happens to men too, what are you going to do about it, why won’t you talk about me too” sort of way. On the other hand, if it were a thread (still written by someone else) about understanding men’s sexual violence as a part of/tool of/etc. patriarchy (which is how I understand Vojdik’s piece), then I think my experience would be relevant.

    Unless, of course, you want to argue that men’s sexual violence against women is an entirely different species of violence from men’s sexual violence against men (which Vojdik’s piece, in fact, seems to argue against).

    And if my experience as a survivor of male sexual violence is relevant, then it seems to me at least reasonable to ask if the experiences of men who were violated by women might also be relevant—unless you are going to argue that we are two entirely different species of survivor, an argument which, as far as I know, the research does not bear out. (Not that aren’t differences; just that the differences do not create two entirely separate and non-overlapping categories.)

    None of which is to suggest that feminism needs to “correct itself” by centering men, and it is entirely possible that this line of inquiry will result in something separate from but related/connected to feminism—which is what some people mean when they insist men who are committed to feminist values should call themselves pro-feminist rather than feminist.

    Okay, I’ve gone on longer than I intended. I need to get back to work.