Its actually very rare outside of small radical feminist circles or people making fun of feminists. It has to do with women wanting not to be merely a derivation of men - linguistically, biblically… MOST feminists I know find it to be rather silly.
Let me simply state that the majority of benefits have accrued to women, and that concern for equality should militate towards action to remedy that situation.
I disagree. If one is specifically campaigning for acceptance of rape victims it is incumbent upon one to try and ensure that all rape victims are included. Campaigning only for female victims may be acceptable, but not while also claiming to be working for equality. To try and maintain a monopoly on the cause of equality by insulting the mens’ rights movement while not working for equality is the very height of churlishness.
I don’t have the greatest respect for feminism, but I doubt I could go to a feminist website and find a page headed “Male rape victims? Fuck’em!”. Not because that sentiment isn’t felt, but just because of simple political realities. At the very least, finding such a thing might require googling and I am quite lazy.
Even so, I remembered this quote from the well-known feminist sexual violence researcher, who helped the CDC and FBI with their relatively recent broadening of the definition of rape:
“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.”
I’d say that the foremost feminist researcher on rape and sexual violence, originator of the main source used for the “1 in 5” figure on female victimhood, and so on, is the equivalent of a feminist organisation on this topic, and concealing the extent of male victimhood is functionally similar to opposing serious treatment of the subject.
Helping women can help everyone, but not after women become equal. When women are a large majority of university students and graduates, affirmative action for women is not in the common good. When children benefit from joint custody, helping women to obtain sole custody is not in the common good. And, when male rape victims are still figures of ridicule while female rape victims are more likely to be vieweed sympathetically, ignoring and suppressing the plight of male victims is not in the common good.
It’s definitely not common. Of course, in Old English the term mann was gender-neutral, as it appears in the Book of Genesis.God created man, male and female created he them, and so on. In Old English male men were “weapon men” and female men were “wife men”.
What you mean to say – although of course it’s unfair to hold your feet to the fire too much about this one quote that cropped up out of the ether offhand-fashion, you being too lazy to track it down too much and certainly not having read it thousands of times and knowing exactly the context in which it occurred, I admit – what you mean to say is that twenty years ago, an influential researcher unwisely indicated that because of a sort of stubborn formalist interpretation of the rape statutes of 20 years ago, the definition of rape should not include incidents which the current understanding – even the current feminist understanding – of what rape is actually does capture. Right? When you said foremost and used the present tense, that’s what you meant. You didn’t mean to suggest that right now, there is someone who is the foremost feminist researcher, who is concealing the extent of male victimhood even in the face of an actual federal definition of rape that reflects that male victimhood.
Because then your offhand, barely-recollected morsel of nebulous provenance (somebody said it! Don’t know who, or when, but here’s the exact quote!) would be sort of misleading.
When one group is disproportionately disadvantaged/victimized, then this is what one would expect. It would be the same for an organization whose goal is to help single black mothers in poverty, for example.
What if one is specifically campaigning for acceptance of female rape victims? Targeting efforts is fine. In fact, I would have no problem with an organization whose mission was to assist male victims of rape, as long as they did not belittle or attack female victims.
Who says they have a monopoly on the ‘cause of equality’? They don’t, and most of them don’t say they do. Again, focusing efforts on one group is not unequal.
So all you got is an old, uncited claim. Even if this is true, one feminist not treating seriously male rape does not equal all (or most) feminists not treating male sexual assault with seriousness.
Women are not yet treated equally. They’re not the only ones, of course. As John Scalzi put it, ‘straight white male’ is the lowest difficulty setting in the game called life. It doesn’t mean it’s always easy, it just means that, all other things being equal, straightness, whiteness, and maleness makes life easier.
Women are still treated unequally in the workplace. But feminism and affirmative action are two different issues.
I don’t know what this has to do with feminism or rape, but if men are treated unfairly in custody arrangements, this is not the fault of feminists or feminism.
Again, this is not the fault of feminists or feminism. Feminists and feminism (in general) do not ignore and suppress the plight of male victims.