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Over 10,000 people.
That’s how many people watched my then-partner have sex with another woman, without his prior knowledge or consent.
He told me about the incident when we first started dating.
We were talking about past relationships — what went right, what went wrong — when he mentioned one of his more recent ex-girlfriends.
“She had gotten into webcam modeling towards the end of our relationship. I worried about strangers harassing her on the Internet, but I wanted to be supportive. I didn’t want her to feel stifled or like I was holding her back,” he said, hesitating as he related what had happened.
“The only instance I ever really had a problem with it was this one time while we were having sex. I looked over my shoulder and saw this weird light in the background.”
That light was a webcam, live-streaming the entire course of their intimacy for over 10,000 people to witness.
“When I asked her why she turned on the camera without telling me, she told me: ‘Well, if we’re going to have sex, I might as well get paid for it.’”
I shuddered.
“Did you report this?” I asked quietly, not sure of how to respond.
“No,” he replied. “Why would I report it?”
Over the course of our relationship, my partner would wake up startled, mistaking me for his former girlfriend.
I recognized the midnight fright from my own traumatic history.
The emotions were guttural. Immediate. Raw.
Several friends to whom he disclosed at the time confirmed his story as well as a pattern of abusive behavior, ranging from her hitting him to her pressuring him into sex acts with which he was not comfortable.
It was enraging.
I couldn’t understand how a woman who had experienced the pain and objectification of everyday sexism could enact sexual violence on someone else.
But rape culture isn’t about two individuals and their respective gender identities so much as it is about the abusive ways we construct masculinity and femininity in a violent, binaried system.
Men are supposed to want sex, always; women are supposed to be the gatekeepers of sex. No room for genuine consent, let alone individuals who don’t fit into this dichotomous, heteronormative paradigm.
The dominant understanding is sexual assault is something that happens to women by men. It’s a power-move rooted in patriarchal conceptions of women as available for the taking and therefore, subordinate.
And in many cases, that analysis makes sense.
But what happens when the narrative gets flipped? How do we understand sexual assault and dating violence when it happens to a man?
Typically, the answer is that we don’t. As a society, we look at male victims as laughable because we don’t have a social script for comprehending that kind of sexual abuse.
We engage in tired, victim-blaming myths like: “well if he got it up, he must have wanted it” — which is a ridiculous understanding of how erections work — or, “he could have fought her off if he wanted to.”
And yet female-on-male sexual violence does happen more than we care to acknowledge.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC)’s data show that nearly a quarter of men said they experienced some form of sexual violence over the course of their lifetime.
Moreover, roughly equal percentages of men and women reported experiencing sexual violence over the course of the preceding 12 months, according to the same CDC survey (4.7% of women experienced sexual violence in the year preceding the survey versus 3% of men).
And for most men who reported sexual violence, the perpetrator was a woman.
Yet, we fail to see men as victims — especially at the hands of women — because we tell men that sex with a woman is a sign of virility.
We tell men that refusing such sex is emasculating.
We tell men that women are weak and therefore, unable to “take advantage” of them. And if women do “take advantage,” we tell men they should look at it as a privilege.
Another notch in their belt. Another “score” to brag about.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a sexual assault I experienced. In the account, I detailed the ways in which my privilege played a factor in my “being believed.”
I wrote about the fact that I was a white woman with a white boyfriend. The fact that I was well-educated with a “respectable” job in financial journalism.
But I failed to consider how my gender identity as a woman played a factor in such belief.
In so many facets of life, I’m used to seeing my female identity as a liability — something that subjects me to the time-consuming emotional coddling of the men in my life. To questions about my ability in certain male-dominated spheres. To unwelcome “compliments” about my physical appearance.
Yet when I was sexually assaulted, my (cis)female identity (among other factors) played a role in my being in my being validated by friends and family and in my being taken seriously by police.
Would the same have happened if I were non-binary or trans?
Would the same have happened if I were a man?
I don’t think that it would have.
As a society, we’re used to seeing women — especially white women — as victims because that label fits with our understanding of women as lesser.
Yet we do not make space for understanding that men can be victimized as well.
Instead, toxic masculinity demands we see men not as people but as gods — devoid of vulnerability and weakness — which is dehumanizing in its own right.
Recently, Dori Myers, a 30-year old female teacher in the Bronx, pled guilty to sexual abuse after she performed oral sex on a 14-year old student.
Her sentence was no jail time, 10 years probation, and the privilege of keeping her teaching certification.
When I read about this case, I thought about the public outcry after Brock Turner was sentenced to just six months in prison for sexually assaulting a fellow (female) Stanford student.
I thought about how the victim’s impact statement quickly went viral. How swift the condemnation was. How the judge who delivered the controversial sentence was eventually recalled.
I wondered whether the leniency of Dori Myers’ sentence would draw the same outrage as Brock Turner’s had.
I don’t think it will.
A pretty brunette performing oral sex on a teenage boy just doesn’t draw the same ire.
And why should it?
In a world where heteronormative sex is a sign of manhood and women are never perpetrators of sexual violence, this case won’t be more than a blip on #MeToo’s radar.
Yet, her behavior is just as abusive and just as traumatizing, even though we don’t talk about it in the same way.
At best, we overlook these cases of female-on-male sexual abuse and at worst, we rely on victim-blaming assumptions about how “lucky” men and boys are supposed to feel about sex — even non-consensual sex — with an attractive woman.
Because in the #MeToo movement we’ve built, men are the abusers, always. They are the ones with the power. They are the ones who need to be held accountable.
Yet, while most sexual assaults are enacted by men, it’s true that toxic masculinity can also hurt the very men it privileges.
But why should we (feminists) care about the abuse of men, when for years, “they” used that same (male) privilege to silence “our” abuse?
Why should we talk about men in a “women’s” movement when every other sphere of our society privileges “their” (male) comfort over “ours”?
These were the types of questions I got the first time I pushed back on gendered language defining sexual assault as “male-on-female” violence exclusively.
And putting aside the obvious cis/heteronormativity for a moment, it’s a fair point.
Why should we talk about the minority of sexual assault victims (men) and the minority of sexual assault perpetrators (women)?
If our goal is solely to oust and shame men for the victimization of women, then we shouldn’t.
But if our goal is to create a culture where enthusiastic consent is the norm and violent conceptions of masculinity and femininity are dismantled, then we must.
When we erase male victimhood from the conversation — particularly when it comes at the hands of a female perpetrator — we reinforce toxic notions of male invulnerability.
We allow the patriarchal assumption that women are weaker — and therefore, too submissive to act on violent impulses— to persist.
And we leave intact a coercive system in which a male “yes” is assumed rather than freely given in sexual encounters.
In excluding an entire third of sexual assault and intimate partner violence survivors from #MeToo, we are effectively telling some victims that their experiences do not merit our attention.
That their voices deserve to be silenced in favor of simplistic notions of how power operates in a patriarchal system.
That they deserve to be invalidated, laughed at, or otherwise taken less than seriously.
When men can’t say “Me Too,” toxic masculinity prevails.
And when men can’t say “Me Too,” the same patriarchal system that victimizes all gender identities remains intact.
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Originally Published on Medium
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