male vs. female rape victims, strange observations

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m reading a novel that has a brutal male-on-male rape fairly early.

I’m finding that I feel more unsettled by this fictional rape than by rapes where the victim is female, and I don’t have a logical reason for that. To some extent, I wonder if I’ve been desensitized to reading about women getting raped.

On the other hand, male rape is sometimes played for laughs. I can remember a movie commercial with someone getting (apparently) sodomized by a giant hamster? And there was an appallingly bad comedy a few years ago where the main character gets thrown into prison and gets raped. It’s supposed to be funny. I can’t think of an example where the rape of a female character is supposed to amuse the audience (though there’s that scene from an 80s comedy where a woman mistakes a costumed stranger for her boyfriend and has “consensual” sex with him).

So, I guess my questions are many. Do you perceive rape differently based on the sex of the victim? When the rape is “serious,” is it worse, somehow, when it happens to a man? If so, why?

Are there depictions of rape that you find funny? Does it matter who the victim is?

Thoughts?

2

Being a male, I feel it worse because:

  1. I’m a male myself and couldn’t imagine it happening to me.
  2. There is only one hole for a man to get raped in.
3

I remember a couple years ago, I saw the movie Trading Places for the first time in well over a decade. It’s the one where Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd get screwed over by some old codgers who are commodity brokers. Paul Gleason play some bad guy, and his comeuppance is to end up trapped in a gorilla suit, his mouth taped shut so he can’t ask for help, locked in a cage with an amorous male silverback gorilla.

Obviously that’s supposed to be funny. But it really bothered me. The concept that this guy was being repeatedly sodomized, couldn’t ask for help, and would be in that position indefinitely really did not sit well with me. And the casual “ha, ha, bad guy got what he deserves” aspect of it didn’t fly with me at all because he was such a bumbling jackass of a bad guy and couldn’t possibly deserve that.

I have no idea why that’s supposed to be funny, but I suspect it’s from some old dramatic tradition where a man becoming emmasculated is supposed to be humorous. (Like the way “pansies” and effete gay men have been played for laughs for as long as performance has been around.) People laugh when you make a joke about some guy becoming another man’s “prison bitch,” for example. Like “Ha, ha. He’s been forced to be like a woman. Ha, ha. He’s like the ‘weaker sex’. Ha.”

So with the expectation that it’s supposed to be “funny”, when it’s depicted in non-humor contexts, it’s probably somehow more “shocking” because it subverts our expectations. We expect it to be clownish, instead we see how monstrous it really is.

Cinematic language (whether generic damsel-in-distress or more serious stuff) teaches us that raping a woman, or any violence toward a woman, defines the culprit as a Really Bad Man. Like in Titanic, What’s-His-Face slapped Kate Winslet, and that was cinema shorthand for “He’s a total bastard.” So in a way, you accept the violence towards women as a part of an established language (which is a bit disturbing). It’s wrong, you know it’s wrong, and you accept it as an indicator of “evil”. You expect it to be “awful and shocking”.

“Humorous” male-on-male rape, is also a familiar language, but “serious” depictions of the victimization of a male is much less common. It thwarts some of our expectations, and it’s unsettling.

4

Ah. I had forgotten that one.

I think your premise is interesting, but I’m not sure if I agree that the rape ends up horrifying because we expected it to be funny since I’ve never found it funny. Wouldn’t the one preclude the other?

5

You can’t imagine it happening to you so it’s worse? That confuses me.

If a woman is anally raped, is that worse than if she is vaginally raped? Obviously, we’re talking gut reaction here.

6

My first year university orientation was full of all these awareness-raising exercises about drug use and sexual health and campus safety and so on and so forth. This stuff is usually quite forgettable but one skit has stayed with me because it was so striking.

It was a skit about date rape, with a somewhat ambiguous situation resulting in non-consensual sex. The victim was a guy instead of a girl. Everything else I had ever seen about rape involved female victims so this was something brand new.

The reason it was so effective is because it was directed at the GUYS. I think rape prevention should be directed at potential rapists, not potential victims. Representing the situation in this way made it quite clear to any potential rapists exactly how invasive and horrifying uninvited sexual contact can be, even in ambiguous date rape situations.

It was also a striking demonstration of how date rape is so often not taken seriously. Since it was a man, every person in the room had a visceral feeling of disgust and horror. The situation was ambiguous enough that if it had been a woman as the victim, many would argue that it wasn’t clearly rape. Women rape victims do not make us nearly as uncomfortable as men rape victims. Why not?

I think representing date rape like this more often would be enormously beneficial. I see an awful lot of discussion about date rape and the fuzzy area around “consent.” I think the terror of unwelcome sexual contact be a lot clearer in the minds of perpetrators if they were forced to think about it with THEMSELVES as the victim, which they rarely are.

7

I think accounts of male rape hit me harder, but it’s probably because I am male, and I can put myself in the character’s place more easily.

I agree that male rape is played for laughs (or as a justifiable result) far too often.

As for that last question? Yes, I think anal rape of a woman is more painful (physically and emotionally) than vaginal rape. I even think most women would agree.

8

Gut reaction: sure. One place is stretchy enough to pass a baby’s head and self-lubricating into the bargain - and AIUI well able to lubricate even in case of rape. The other is stretchy enough to pass a large Richard and doesn’t lubricate, and I’d guess associates itself with the word “unnatural” too. Bad enough to be raped in the first place without what I’d guess as much more pain, higher injury risk, and the violation of a taboo into the bargain.

9

No, that’s not quite the premise. I’ve never found it funny either. (Heck, Pepe LePew cartoons made me uncomfortable as a kid because he never let the cat alone.)

I’m thinking more that our response to media representations of violence against is different more because a more honest depiction of the victimization of men is newer to our cinematic culture.

There was a short film festival here that had a film noir that was essentially a gender reversal of The Maltese Falcon. Women were the “dominant gender”, so the grim private-eye who lost a buddy in the trenches of the war was a woman, the somber police chief was a woman, the bad guy thug was a woman, and the lounge singer, hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold was male. (Interestingly, he did not play it effeminately, he was straight-laced and masculine the whole time.)

You don’t actually realize how often women were slapped around in those old movies, until you see Rusty get slapped. His character didn’t really get hit any more than women did in those kinds of movies (you know, where the gangster slaps his floozy), but because, as an audience, we used to seeing women get slapped, but a lot less used to seeing a guy get casually slapped the same way. (And he got slapped a few times.) It really made a strong point about the casual violence directed at women in movies.

A reversal would be that private-eye movie with Kathleen Turner. A lot of people objected to the way she kept getting punched in the face during a scene. And the scene was defended, with people saying if that had been a man playing the P.I. role, no one would have complained. Ben Affleck was in a very similar scene in Reindeer Games - tied to a chair and punched in the face when he didn’t answer questions - no one thought that was “wrong”, but it was “shocking” when a woman played an otherwise familiar scene.

So I think our response to the victims will be different depending on what we’re used to seeing, and the context in which we’re used to seeing it, as well as our own experiences.

10

Sorry about the doulbe-post, I’m still mulling…

Historically, when we’ve seen men on the receiving end of violence (in entertainment media representations), it’s been either macho or cartoony.

Eg/
John Wayne shakes off a punch that would kill someone IRL. Batman gets a chair broken over his back and keeps on fighting. The Three Stooges beat the snot out of each other as part of their routine. When something happens to the hero, he just grits his teeth and deals with it (no falling apart or crying, shrugs off the pain).

We have a much longer history of seeing male victims not really appearing to be victimized at all.

So when we get a more true-to-life account that actually displays the physical and emotional consequences that violence has on men, we’re confronted with our fears and vulnerabilities on a much more human, realistic level.

Basically, jsgoddess I’m agreeing with your OP’s hypothesis. But that we aren’t necessarily desensitized to a woman’s trauma (it still has impact), rather we are less accustomed to seeing a man’s trauma portrayed accurately, and so it has more impact because we haven’t fully learned to deal with it.

11

I think you’re off on your count there.

12

Just a guess, but think about this:

Rape is violent, painful, and humiliating. For anybody. For a man, it is also emasculating. And then there’s that whole gay taboo thrown in as well.

Years ago I read something like an advice column but a bit more adult than Dear Abby. A young man wrote in with something like (paraphrased) “Some guys held me down and fucked me in the ass. I didn’t like it and I tried to get away, but they forced me. I’m worried that that makes me gay now. I don’t want to be gay.”

How sad is that?

13

First of all, anal rape of a woman sounds worse to me than vaginal rape of a woman. So, there’s that.

Second of all, while man-on-woman is indisputably a terrible violation, it doesn’t seem to me that it’s “unfeminizing” in the way that man-on-man is emasculating. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I’m just saying that’s how it comes across.

There’s some kind of difference – maybe just a visceral reaction on my part --because woman regularly have vaginal sex but men don’t have anal sex. (well, gay men do, but let’s not go there right now. I don’t think it’s any better for a gay dude to get raped than a straight dude)

14

Simulpost?

15

Well, it’s more physically painful. I’m not sure it’s more emotionally traumatic.

It strikes me as odd that the first word people think of in relation to male rape is “emasculating”. As opposed to “dehumanizing”. Which is what rape really is, of course.

You know, there’s no real feminine equivalent of the word “emasculate” is there? I suspect that may be the root of the problem here. Apparently *masculinity * is so valuable that losing even a little of it is a grave disaster, whereas femininity has little value, and is in fact the default you’re left with when the vastly superior masculinity has been stripped away.

This isn’t an attack on **Trunk ** or anyone here by the way, just an observation.

16

Pretty much. It’s what society has hammered into us since we were boys. Of course, you could logic us outof that mindset, but the subject here is about visceral reactions, not logic.

17

This deserves a repost in the Pit gender inequalities thread. There’s also no real, common equivalent to ‘Be a man!’ (which is sad for both women and men). Except maybe… ‘You’re acting like a woman (or throwing, or crying).’

I’m not sure sodomy is necessarily more emotionally painful than vaginal rape. Not all rapists are ‘having sex’ with their female victims. They’re slamming away at an unwilling orifice (and yes Virginia, natural anal lubrication does exist). Also, while a straight man may never have anal sex again, a straight woman who wants to have consensual sex with a trusted male partner after getting raped often has a helluva lot of emotional crap to get through first.

I hate to say it, but desensitization is definitely a factor, as well of prevailing ideas of homophobia and women ‘asking for it.’ In Deliver Us From Evil, while pedophile priests weren’t exactly punished for molesting boys, they were moved to another church. But only then. Nothing happened after it was known that they were molesting girls.

18

This is how I view it, too. Anal rape might be more physically traumatic, but it wouldn’t have the same emotional connotations.

Couple that with the very real additional fear of pregnancy, and vaginal rape goes a different direction.

19

No, because with the exception of a medical surgery performed only to prevent or arrest disease, there’s no actual equivalent of emasculation. Now, it’s true that there are men who would choose death over loss of their genitals, if surgical removal were the only treatment option. But that’s one of the many downsides of having external genitals; from earliest childhood, we have nightmares about losing our boy parts. The guys down there are part of our identity, a part we see and, out of necessity, handle several times a day. We learn very early on that it’s what makes us different from girls, so obviously it becomes part of one’s identity, to a far greater degree than any other body part. The mystique and mythology of manhood is ingrained into us from birth. For a heterosexual man to be anally raped is to tell him his genitalia are insignificant, his manood is worthless, and his value as a human is cancelled.

I don’t know, but I’d assume a woman feels much the same way when her body, capable of giving birth and then nourishing the newborn in a manner that is nothing short of awesome, is forcibly used as an unwilling cum-catcher. On the one hand, our culture celebrates the woman as mother, lover and miraculous procreator; I can’t imagine the horror when this venerated vessel of humanity’s very future is violated for the basest purpose of subjugatiuon.

To rape a man is to nullify his identity; to rape a woman is to enslave her, not just during the act, but possibly forever.

20

So, just to sum up, rape makes a man feel like a woman, and thus, not like a human? I’m really hoping that you just worded that badly.

Or does (specifically) anal rape also tell a *woman * that her genitalia are insigficant, and her womanhood is worthless, and her value as a human is cancelled?

What is this crap? Seriously, a raped woman doesn’t mourn the desecration of a “venerated vessel”, she’s PISSED that her body (that’s HER body, not some feminine ideal) has been violated. Much, I imagine, as a man would feel.

You cannot be serious. This is insulting to both genders in so many ways that my head is about to explode.