We need to get over the myth that men are invulnerable to sexual victimization at the hands of women says Hugo Schwyzer.
On Thursday, an Ohio judge sentenced Stacy Schuler, a popular high school gym teacher, to four years in prison for having had sex with at least five male students, including at least two members of the football team. During her trial, Schuler’s defense lawyers suggested that her judgment had been compromised by her vegan diet, irritable bowel syndrome, and anti-depressant medication.
Schuler’s case raises a familiar debate, one that’s been going on at least since Mary Kay Letourneau became a household name fifteen years ago. (For those who’ve forgotten, Letourneau was a 34 year-old middle school teacher when she began a sexual relationship with a 13 year-old student named Vili Fualaau. Sentenced to prison for second-degree child rape, she bore two of Fualaau’s children – and ended up marrying him after he turned 21.) The debate hinges on fundamental questions about the differences between the sexes – and about what it really means to be abused. What it boils down to is this: are sexual relationships between grown women and underage boys as harmful as those between adult men and underage girls?
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Because women are much less likely to sexually abuse teens than are men, those rare cases that do feature female defendants tend to attract lots of media attention – particularly when the woman involved is relatively young and conventionally attractive. Invariably, someone will suggest that the boys involved were lucky, and that rather than being abused, they had lived out every straight teen guy’s fantasy of nailing the hot teacher. When, as in this Ohio case, the boys involved are described as distraught at what had happened to them, there’s often a sense of disbelief. How could normal red-blooded American boys be upset about the fact that they got laid?
The myth that men are invulnerable to sexual victimization at the hands of women is a powerful one. It sits alongside several other myths. For one, we have a hard time believing that grown women could be attracted to adolescent boys (while we accept as normal the idea that grown men are sexually fixated on teen girls.) Second, we have a hard time acknowledging that guys are every bit as emotionally vulnerable as their sisters, just as easily traumatized by a predatory adult. Young men may indeed be horny (as are more young women than we sometimes admit), but a strong libido doesn’t functional as psychological armor.
But perhaps the most enduring myth brought up by cases like this is the idea that pleasure is incompatible with victimization. Real victims only feel pain, never arousal – or so far too many people still believe. An erection, or better still, ejaculation, functions as proof that a boy wasn’t really harmed. Most predators who molest children and underage teens know this; many sexual abusers go to great lengths to try to arouse their victims. The child’s pleasure functions as a kind of absolution in the mind of the abuser; “I can’t be that bad if I made them feel good!”
But of course, an orgasm isn’t evidence of consent. As decades of research have shown us, a surprising number of male and female victims of sexual abuse do report having experienced some physical pleasure while they were being molested. That memory of arousal can lead to greater feelings of guilt, as it seems proof in a child’s mind that he (or she) was somehow complicit in what happened. “Part of me enjoyed it, so I must have wanted it,” the thinking goes. Some therapists who work with survivors of abuse say that these cases are often the most difficult to treat.
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By not taking the sexual abuse of boys seriously, we perpetuate toxic myths about men and women alike. Muscles and high testosterone levels offer little protection against emotional violation; even football players can be profoundly injured by a sexually irresponsible adult. We need to acknowledge that young women don’t have a monopoly on psychological vulnerability, just as young men don’t have a monopoly on intense lust. And we need to remember that when it comes to relationships between adults and teens of either sex, desire and pleasure are never evidence of consent.
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photo: Joseph Gray / flickr
My boyfriend is 21. When he was a virgin and at the age of 17 he was raped by a friend of his mother. A woman who worked in the school he attended. They had more than a few sexual encounters. His mother never found out. Since then he has always been attracted to older women (I’m 30). He has a hard time maintaining an erection, he thinks because of guilt and fear that he would get her pregnant as he didn’t use a condom. He is also very depressed. Works full time but sleeps a good 3 hours when… Read more »
this is fine provided she is not having any sexual disease
Very interesting article and interesting conversation, I’m surprised there is so much minimization of the sexual abuse of boys by women. As a female survivor of sexual abuse (committed by men) I have no equivocation about the validity of sexual abuse experiences of young men who have victimized by mature women. Rape need bot be defined entirely by the physical aspects of the event; it is more defined by the emotional and personal boundaries that are first violated for the abuse/rape to occur. The power imbalance that exists between a young teen or a child and an adult is great… Read more »
As a male victim of a female paedophile, I couldn’t agree more.
Its all sexual abuse and is a crime.
“Because women are much less likely to sexually abuse teens than are men, those rare cases that do feature female defendants tend to attract lots of media attention ” Categorically INCORRECT. First of all, it is NOT rare. And second of all, the MSM bends over backwards to avoid reporting incidences of female pedophilia. Here is a listing from just ONE MONTH (Nov 2011): (AL) Amanda Watkins, teacher – Guilty of rape of boy, 15. Sentencing TBD, (CA) Chrissy Ann Dunn, 31, neighbor – Sentenced to year in jail for lewd act and oral copulation of boy, 14, (CA) Patricia… Read more »
Sources…
[…]here are some links to sites that we link to because we think they are worth visiting[…]…
When people hit puberty they should be able to consent to sex. The focus here should be on consent and not age. A fourteen year old should be able to consent to have sex with a 30 year old if they are able to consent to sex with another 14 year old. Ridiculous. The idea that social awareness, intelligence, and moral functioning track with age is ridiculous. A sizable minority of 17 year olds are more childish than the majority of 14 year olds. Age is a nigh arbitrary quantifier as regards the psyche. There are so many ‘adults’ who… Read more »
I have to agree, because you’re absolutely right. And more so that,’ if the seven year old was already prepped to take it up the ass against his will before he turned 14, you damn right he/she has the right to consent to be with someone more mature than they are. The real truth is they(we) learned already against our will by an older person ANYFUCKING way what it felt/feels like to be stuck with those feelings, They stay with you until You decide to disarm those feelings and desires you’re having SECRETLY. That’s hell itself when you believe for… Read more »
No statistics to quibble about here!
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=39783
Go for it.
At long last, Schwyzer writes an article where women are actually held responsible for their actions.
With any luck this will continue.
Come on Ohio…. FOUR YEARS IN PRISON ????
By all means, fire this teacher. Ensure she never teaches again. Counsel the boys on norms of sexual behavior and appropriate boundaries. However, I can’t believe that these cases cause any long-lasting psychological damage to the boys concerned. What a waste of time and resources… somewhere out there, there are some real criminals committing actual crimes.
GMP this is despicable. You allow this comment to stand while silencing the voices of real victims.
Shame on you.
Pat, you are a disgusting apologist for female privilege. Seek therapy and stop damaging the world with your warped views.
(CO) Brenda Lynette Harding, 30,
babysitter – Gets 90 days jail for sex with boy, 15, who committed suicide,
She was too impatient. She couldn’t wait a year or two until they graduated and everything would have been totally legal?
What that female teacher did was coercive and out of bounds because of the power imbalance, not so much the age discrepancy. Those boys were students at her school, which means she was in a power relationship over them, which by itself is inappropriate, no matter what their ages. Even if they didn’t feel coerced, even if they were old enough to consent, there is an inherent power imbalance there. It’s the same as having sex with someone under your command as a military officer — even if there could be consent, there really couldn’t be full consent. Bear in… Read more »
Wellok, if I heard the press reports correctly, at least some of the males were plied with alcohol beforehand. If we can agree that intoxicated college women cannot legally give consent to sex, I would hope we could agree that intoxicated high school males cannot legally give consent either.
Rape is rape.
I didn’t know about the use of alcohol. If someone is too intoxicated to consent, then there is no consent, and it’s rape. I agree, it should be the same whether the victim is male or female. It is possible for a man with an erection to be raped, if the sex is coerced and not consensual. (An erection can be an involuntary response, not a clear sign of consent. And you can be deeply drunk and still get an erection. Well, some people can….) I was trying to say their age alone was not enough to show that they… Read more »
We’ve had cases on our campus of both partners in a student couple giving consent while drunk, then the woman turning in the man the next day. This should be unenforceable.
I’d just like to see the actual video footage on that one. With two people smoking crack and consenting, should that be unenforceable too? That one I’say, Hell ya. People drinking together, ya never know Unless you were there. As much as I hate to give credit to the level of honesty when it comes to a crack smoker, they tell you right UP Front what they expect Before you drank their beer or you watch them smoke. Sad reality is that neither one knows why they’re getting high or drunk in the first place.
Is that because that would be too controversial, or because it would have made no legal difference?
No, it is probably because she plead not guilty by reason of insanity. If she tried to claim that the boys were of the age of consent, she would essentially admit that she knew what she was doing when she did, and could therefore be held culpable. Luckily, the judge bought Schuler’s nonsense “Zoloft made me do it” argument (although I am sure Schwyzer does).
Good point. I hadn’t thought of that.
Great article. This area is really murky to me, even as a feminist with relatively well-established beliefs around sex and sexuality. I guess that, raised within the society I was, I have a very hard time picturing what the situation might have been like between Schuler and the boys she abused…….
This area is really murky for men and boys, too, Juliana. We males are never supposed to not want sex. Yet we do end up on the business end of creepy situations, and some of those do involve women as the perpetrators. And just as with women victims of rape, the rape apologists inevitably show up and claim that the boy or man must have enjoyed it, so it can’t be rape. I also wish it were as rare as Hugo states. It is not. One of the better compendiums of the scientific literature on the subject can be found… Read more »
One other note.
I find it fascinating how quickly apologists in these cases conclude that 12-15 year old boys have sufficient emotional maturity to consent to and handle a sexual relationship with an adult woman.
In my experience, boys of that age are usually less mature than girls of that age, and only crackpots (and the Legislatures of a couple of benighted states) would claim that a 14 year old girl is mature enough to give consent to sexual relations.
Me, at the age of fifteen(as I look back) those thoughts of being with girls that way didn’t excite me at all. On the same note(especially after I was raped by a man), could not understand why the ones I di encounter they all wanted me in that way but the Feelings(sadly) were not mutual. We got along so well as friends. I couldn’t understand why at the age of 15 or so, I all of a sudden developed a sexual attraction to older men. OOH maybe because of the bastard that raped me when I was seven(that son of… Read more »
I think the article might be a bit of a white wash, the modern research is showing that sex criminality is not gendered and most male rapists were sexually abused by women in their childhood, which like the truth about domestic violence, its very threatening to feminism in its current ideological form.
Most male rapists were sexually abused by women in their childhood?? Say what?
“Most male rapists were sexually abused by women in their childhood?? Say what?”
Just that. There are a number of studies that show most male rapists have been sexually abused by a woman as a child.
A question to ponder. Could it be possible that the woman that supposedly raped a boy was trying to do him a favor in effort to convert him back to normality due to prior damage possibly already had been done by a male figure?
Excellent article, especially the shame factor over assault-arousal response. I posted the following on Hugo’s blog: Having treated both boys and girls and women (few men) who were survivors of sexual abuse and rape, I can tell you the “arousal/orgasm” factor is absolutely the most difficult piece to address and work through. Sadly, even some of my colleagues will get sidetracked by that factor and, depending on the age of the survivor, wonder if there was an element of consent involved. One aspect of my work I’ve found fascinating are the number of young women I’ve worked with who told… Read more »
Men being cautious about going in that direction Should do so, especially in today’s society. Why would a woman want to talk a man about women issues without a hidden agenda except to get her appetite fed. To me the very thought is sickening and maybe that was because I was raped by a man. Til this day, at my age, I do not feel comfortable with a woman checking me for prostrate cancer maybe fearful she’ll attempt to take advantage of me and be dissatisfied miserably. It has been very helpful for me to talk to another male because… Read more »
By the way, for me at the age of seven, DEFINITELY none consensual. I’ll admit myself Now, as I look back, Had one of my male teachers( whom I secretly thought were very handsome men and Well built) had approached me to engage in sexual activities that were not harmful to me or violent in nature, with them, HELL2THAFUCKINGYYEEEAAAAHHH! Got Butter!
Cases like this are not as rare as Schwyzer and others would have us believe. Anecdotally speaking, i know of at least three guys I went to high school with who had had sex with teachers. One of them with almost a different teacher every year until his senior year.
And this was in a small town of just under 4000. One wonders what a big city school would be like where the rumor mill is less agile
The purpose of the article was to state that cases of woman on boy rape seldom if ever happens.
I guess I have tuned in to the wrong station because I can’t say personally that i understand or have experienced that. I do think of those guys being some lucky bastards because they’re not forced to deal with intrusive thoughts of constantly craving COCK 28/7 in a given day. AT LEAST the gender Order was proper even though the act/incident was improper. For the guys who’s been ramrodded against their will (esp. childhood years) by another male, sucks really bad. Honestly we’re the one’s who have been robbed of divine natural ATTRACTIONS a man should have towards a woman.… Read more »
It’s really hard for me to grasp that it would not be consensual especially between a man and a woman if neither of them has never been victimized by the same sex. If the woman is butch and develope an overwhelming craving for some dick then I could probably see a glimpse of probability. I am curious to know do these guys who claim to have been raped/molested by women end up solely reversing the role or just holla a whatever?
I am truly sorry for what you’ve been through. I hope that you have been able to find both sobriety and treatment to help you through this. There really is safety and peace away from your nightmare if you find a good therapist to work with.
My best.
Some of the most effective treatment that has brought me true success to help me through it all was, simply, Taking the risk of talking it out and often times in the company of complete strangers. The benefits Thus Far has been nothing but beneficial. What’s really strange is that I was more comfortable with the strangers than my psychiatrists, counselors, psychologists, and countless others,and including a prison inmate.
I see that now TGMP is again deleting comments critical of Schwyzer’s change in position.
A sexual predator starts w/ easy targets, all sexes,all ages.Happens in every bar in the world, unreported.Sexual predators are well on their way to a lifetime as psychopaths capable of anything. Psychopaths cannot be reformed. Their goal is to destroy people,break down identity, enslave the victim. Some victims get away. Some don’t. Listen to divorce cases.
Sex is not ownership.
At the age of 7 I too was an easy target by a perp that was my neighbor. While I was outside alone (family in the house) on my bike, he approached me and asked me to go to the store with him as he made false promises to coerce a broke, lonely lil’ boy with no real father figure in the household at the time. I bought the lie and went only to be deceived. He detoured from the store’s driveway entrance and proceeded to the back school yard playground. Slid up and down the sliding board is where… Read more »
I showed this to my grandfather, who’s immediate reaction was, “Well, what about the rest of the football team, isn’t this teacher not abiding equality?” He meant this as a joke. Then he actually read the whole thing and asked me what I thought the purpose of it was. I said “To get people thinking about this issue.” he responded with another question, “Do you really think society feels this way about it?” I said “grampa, the first thing you said about it was a joke. This is meant to get people to take the problem a little more seriously.… Read more »
The purpose was to claim that such cases are overblown in the media, and are actually rare, not common.
Posted this on Hugo’s site, but thought it worth adding in since it focuses on the content of the article: Having treated both boys and girls and women (few men) who were survivors of sexual abuse and rape, I can tell you the “arousal/orgasm” factor is absolutely the most difficult piece to address and work through. Sadly, even some of my colleagues will get sidetracked by that factor and, depending on the age of the survivor, wonder if there was an element of consent involved. One aspect of my work I’ve found fascinating are the number of young women I’ve… Read more »
Tom Matlack says:October 30, 2011 at 8:35 am Thanks for this Hugo. We were fighting about this case at our kitchen table last night since really I wasn’t sure what the heck to think. But I came around to exactly where you came out (after listening to women say that the boys here enjoyed “nailing their teach”). Teenage boys want sex, yes. So do girls. But more than that they want safety. And they are emotionally every bit as vulnerable as girls. Or maybe even more vulnerable than girls given how the brain matures. My understanding is that on average,… Read more »
Seems to be a bit of quibbling about the statistics. I’m going to assume this is because the details that matter are undisputed: myths about male sexuality, both psychological and physiological, make it more difficult for a) men and boys to recognize they’ve been abused and b) for society to acknowledge its (evidently still disputed) frequency.
Actually, the problem with the statistics comes from how they are gathered, who gathers them, and the social norms that influence people’s opinion about the frequency of female-perpetrated sexual violence. The situation for female-on-male abuse is pretty bad because there is so little research, but it is even worse for female-on-female abuse as literally only a handful of people research it.
Hi Jacob,
Agreed! I think there’s a cart before the horse problem involved though. One of the difficulties in a) obtaining credible statistics but also b) getting people to take real cases seriously is exactly the “he got hard so he must have wanted it, he ejaculated so he must have participated” myths Hugo says (correctly) that we need to overcome.
figleaf
It is somewhat disappointing to read this article and realize that the ethical questions that better define the damage that can occur are hijacked by the narrative style .If we alter our language to accomodate our desired beliefs by projecting our personal insights as nailing the hot teacher are we addressing the issue or confining it to a preferred interpretation. Isn’t this exactly what the media does with regularity when addressing this issue. Can we sell it any softer. Does’nt our understanding really reside in the narrative. Once we refer to it as less coersive than it is aren’t we… Read more »
I have to say that Hugh and Tom are two of the men who give me hope for this world and for men. Thank god for you guys – if it weren’t for people like you on this site, the incendiary, reactionary wingnuts would have absolutely no opposition as the degradation of our society and safety of both men and women continues unabated. It’s nice to know that some people are willing to acknowledge certain glaring realities, and start living in 2011 (going on 2012) and not holding up the 1950s as some gilded age of sexual norms.
Hm… I think you just might be tilting at some imaginary windmill, there.
Show of hands how many people commenting here want to go back to the 1950s?
The “windmill” isn’t imaginary. Check out this article/post: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/fck-the-cleavers-how-shifting-gender-roles-affect-sex-relationships-the-economy/.
In the comments section there seems to be some people who would argue your assumption that few want to go back to life in the 50s.
Not a bad article, albeit rather at odds with the description of a man’s rape as a “seduction” in http://www.hugoschwyzer.net/2009/09/15/lots-daughters-and-ours-on-sexualization-feminism-and-the-absence-of-agency/ .
There’s nothing analogous between a biblical narrative about Lot and his daughters and the Schuler case. Sheesh. I didn’t write this piece to ingratiate myself to the “What About the Menz” gang and their MRA sistren and brethren. I wrote it because I thought the point was worth making. Happily enough, I’ll be back soon to writing the sorts of columns that leave reactionary wingnuts foaming with frothy indignation. I’ve never denied that boys can be victimized — indeed, this piece is consistent with my stance that men and women are more alike than different in terms of their emotional… Read more »
“There’s nothing analogous between a biblical narrative about Lot and his daughters and the Schuler case. Sheesh.” You mean apart from the fact that both involve a woman having sex with a male without his consent? And, indeed, both involve commentators after the fact suggesting that the male in question was rather fortunate for what happened. I would hope that the analogy wouldn’t prove overly elusive merely because in the former the case the commentator was you. Rest of comment snipped: you might find it productive to consider the possibility that strong criticism of your writing is not exclusively or… Read more »
“I’ve never denied that boys can be victimized.”
Yes you do. BY claiming that it seldom if ever happens.
Your statement to that effect: “Because women are much less likely to sexually abuse teens than are men, those RARE CASES that do feature female defendants . . .”
I suppose that should have been, “Yes, you have” rather than “Yes, you do.”
Exactly.
Hugo clearly used an example of boys being abused by mentioning the Schular case, and writing about it. He may have stated that it is more rare, but he i obviously saying that it does happen and it is an issue worth pointing out.
Foiled again by the auto-refresh! Better start using the word processor is right.
The writer was sure to clearly make the unsubstantiated claim that boys are seldom if ever victims.
A good opportunity wasted by falling back on the same old themes: males are evil abusers of females, seldom if ever the reverse. And if the reverse does occur on a very rare occassion, it’s because of something that male have caused the poor woman to do.
By the way, this is a good and sadly common example of evidence that feminism =/= equality; rather it promotes and defends misandry.
“Happily enough, I’ll be back soon to writing the sorts of columns that leave reactionary wingnuts foaming with frothy indignation.”
How nice it must be to be protected under threat of banishment from any perceived “personal attacks on the writer” while still being able to launch them at readers you disagree with.
Its almost like having your cake…and eating it too.
“Because women are much less likely to sexually abuse teens than are men, those rare cases that do feature female defendants tend to attract lots of media attention.” That is not factual. Female on male cases are much less likely to be reported, believed, investigated thoroughly (e.g. no rape kits), and are not equally legislated. For example, this woman has sexual intercourse with five (5) boys a total of 16 times. 16 counts of rape, essentially. The sentence? 4 years. Clearly, a male teacher would have been sentenced to several decades in prison, as per the sentencing guidelines. Why no… Read more »
You’ve got a bad track record for promoting gender bias, but even a broken clock is sometimes right. “when the woman involved is relatively young and conventionally attractive. Invariably, someone will suggest that the boys involved were lucky, and that rather than being abused, they had lived out every straight teen guy’s fantasy of nailing the hot teacher.” If we live in a “rape culture” it is one that teaches boys that they should want sex and a culture that deliberately ignores male victims and diminishes their experiences. The statistics are somewhat unreliable, depending on how sexual assault is defined,… Read more »
“IMO, the numbers of male victims are significant enough that they should never be dismissed because they are less than 50% and should be included in every discussion with more than a cursory note that males are less than female.”
But here’s the thing, bad man, we have no reasonable evidence that men are less then 50% of the victims of sexual assault and evidence that suggests they very well might be.
The problem with statistics is that public perception is orders of magnitude different which creates perception bias and cognitive dissonance. Hugo allows that perception bias to persist.
This is where I hold academics like Hugo to a higher standard. My central point being that it is long past the point of arguing over statistics and time to de-genderize they system.
I’ve read that the prevalance of men who’ve experienced rape is one in seven. However, these stats are likely to be off, as the FBI did not include many instances of assault or rape, and almost nothing about rape perpetrated against boys and men. Apparently, the FBI has changed its definitions of rape, so that these crimes are tracked in a way that reflects reality. I just got back from a feminist site where there was real concern that men still wouldn’t be included in the definition of victims of rape, particularly if the perp was female. We’ve been trying… Read more »