I think you’re personalizing this way too much. He’s not saying that it’s bad to be a woman. It’s not like male minus penis equals female. It’s that we strongly identify with our manhood, and it’s terrifying to have that stripped away.
“Act like a lady.” I don’t know how common that is these days.
I recall a study claiming that women tend to suffer more long term trauma from vaginal rape. No cite, sorry.
That would make sense to me.
I’m actually *not * personalizing it, I’m exploring the question of why people have viscerally different reactions to the idea of men vs. women being raped.
Frankly, my feeling is that a man’s “identity” is only wrapped up in his “manhood” (read penis) inasmuch as his “manhood” represents his power, and that the underlying assumption behind all this talk of emasculation is “Well, it’s *different * when it’s a guy. Sure, it’s unfortunate when it happens to women, but you can’t be stripped of power you didn’t possess in the first place”. This makes people comfortable asserting that raping a woman is an attack only on her person, and her oh-so-delicate feminine psyche, but not her identity. But that’s crap, because my identity is just as wrapped up in the ability to control my destiny as yours is.
Again, I’m not attacking anyone. I’m just making observations based on my experience, and asking people to perhaps question their own assumptions.
As a woman, I’d rather be vaginally raped than anally raped. I’m at least used to one form of penetration. I have tried out anal sex (well, accidentally). Based on that “experimentation,” I don’t ever, ever want to experience that kind of pain again. Ever!
Interesting point. Joel Cairo gets slapped (by Sam Spade) in The Maltese Falcon, but he is gay, so maybe the same taboo is being preserved.
Regards,
Shodan
In terms of this identity stuff, one could argue that a woman’s identity is tied up in deciding when and where and how a man penetrates her “vessel.” You know, the whole idea that a man is the gas, a woman is the brakes.
Or we could just throw “identity” to the wind and acknowledge that people feel disgusted and violated and seriously pissed when they’re raped or sexually assaulted, no matter in what orifice or what gender. How it feels is so subjective, but I think we can agree that generally there it’s bad for everyone.
I don’t perceive rape any differently for a man or a woman, regardless of the sex of the victim or the perpetrator.
Rape is always serious.
It’s been a long time since I thought of rape as funny
I think the extent to which our culture as a whole thinks male-on-male rape is more serious is based in the suspicion that male-on-female rape is actually somehow consensual. I think perhaps it’s also considered morally safer to joke about male-on-male rape because people who write these gags think it’s more politically correct than male-on-female rape.
Finally, I’ll admit to being surprised at the preponderance of women teachers as opposed to men teachers getting sexually involved with their students. And I suspect that there are plenty of people who think “hot female teacher + underage male student” is no harm done.
I strongly disagree.
First, start with “female circumcision,” which is more aptly described as “female genital mutilation”. In the mildest version, it’s still a grotesquely unsafe and demeaning procedure that enforces the idea that an unaltered woman has no control over her sexual impulses. From there, some cultures appear to take pride in destroying a woman’s ability to enjoy sex by removing the tip of the clitoris, the major labia, and sewing up the minor labia so that only a trickle of menstrual blood can escape.
Please consider how you might feel if someone amputated the glans of your penis, all the slack skin of your scrotum, and then managed to sew it all up so that if you ever had an erection, it would hurt. Once you have that image in mind, you have a direct translation.
Even if we’re not discussing the aberrant practices of a misogynistic third world culture, there are still parallels that can be drawn.
Until the 80s, it was still standard practice during a mastectomy to remove all the breast tissue and not consider reconstruction at all. The woman had to learn how to make a prosthesis of her own or spend an exhorbitant amount of money that wasn’t covered by insurance. Men facing an orchidectomy (removal of one or both testicles) were given silicon prostheses so they wouldn’t miss the heft of their testicles.
I would never dismiss a man’s attachment to and fear for his genitals. By the same token, however, men need to understand that their dicks are no more special and worthy of protection than our pussies.
South Park did a great episode on this where a kindergarten teacher is sleeping with Kyle’s baby brother Ike and all the adult males and cops can say is ‘Niiice.’
Male-on-female rape may not be fodder for much comedy (except anything to do with hookers. They’re pretty much presented as sub-human), but it’s sure as hell more prevalent in movies and on TV (with the exception of Oz, of course), and way more likely to be glamourized/made to look sexy.
OK, and sorry I accused you of that.
I was in the process of formulating an argument as to why my point stands, and I pretty much came up with nothing. There’s nothing special that men have that women don’t have their own version of. In fact, since we’re all different anyway, I’m sure it would be a unique sort of hell for each of us.
Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to give my brain a break from this topic for a while.
Not all sexual assaults involve penetration (and forced oral sex does).
Yes, we seem to be forgetting about oral rape . . . admittedly very, very dangerous to the rapist, unless the victim has removable dentures. :eek:
But the bottom line is: Rape is rape, and I don’t see any difference depending on genders or body parts.
Good point, I hadn’t thought of that. I was pretty much confining my thinking to the culture with which I’m most familiar.
Again, we’re talking about surgical procedures to save a person’s life. I wouldn’t ever argue that surgical loss of a part of one’s sexual identity isn’t traumatic. I was only pointing out that there’s a difference in my male mind between having to relinquish male parts in exchange for curing cancer, and having my male identity violently sliced away from me. I had to make that point to get to the point about how anal rape of a man can be emasculating, and why emasculation is particularly horrifying to men.
This not an uncommon reaction when a woman actually gets to peek inside a man’s head. It’s not pretty. But yes, I am quite serious. Men do venerate women’s procreative powers and whether you like it or not, we always will. And that threatens us, and it always will. And we have to work very, very hard to not be threatened by that, and we mostly fail.
Why do you think there are billions of images of young, beautiful women all over the internet with their legs spread wide and their bare vulvas gaping open? Because that place is a place of mystery and wonder to us. We know it has a power over us, and our nature is not to transcend that power, but to overpower it, which we do by plunging our male identities into it. Yes, yes, at some point when a sex partner becomes a friend and mate and spouse, the act becomes the tender sharing of our bodies with (hopefully) reciprocal pleasure. But until then, it’s just fucking, and that’s all about the power.
I sincerely hope that the parenting my generation and succeeding generations have done will result in boys in our culture not growing up to think of females as being less than males because they have fewer visible genitals. But if you want to know why men fear rape almost more than anything else, you have to accept that generations of us have been trained to see the world that way. It’s one thing to campaign, contribute to causes and vote for a world in which women are actually equal to men; it’s quite another to feel a gut reaction to something. And I think the OP of this thread specifically mentions gut reactions.
You know, I thought up about 37 different responses to that, and then figured that really, it’s pointless. Although I do sincerely hope that at least one guy will pop in here, read that tripe, and bother to post “What’s this “we” shit, buddy?”
I’ll admit that I don’t get quite that poetic and mystical when I surf for porn. I just venerate nice titties. And while the thought of rape is scary if I let myself think about it, I honestly don’t spend much time thinking about it.
I rest my case.
Yeah, I will! Especially the ‘it’s just fucking’ bit. The one and only time I had a one night stand it just felt wrong - and I tried to kid myself that it might lead to something more because without the emotional connection it wasn’t a good experience at all.
I’m quite willing to take the view that I’m somehow unusual in that - especially because my fantasies only very rarely are about penetrative sex alone - but if I feel like this (and have at least 3 friends that feel the same) then I’m guessing it’s not totally uncommon.
And no, sex to me is not about ‘overpowering’ the vulva/vagina. Maybe I’m lucky (or unlucky) that I prefer to make love to a person than fuck an object. I kinda feel sorry for people who do feel like that!
And to answer the OP, no, there’s no rape that I find funny. I think it’s just a sign of the times - forced sex against anyone is such a taboo now that the whole concept, whether it’s male/male, male/female or female/male, just doesn’t have the comic effect that it once did. Pure speculation, but perhaps with a worldwide media at our fingertips, we can now relate directly to real horrific events in people’s lives, wherever they are. That realism tends to take away the comedy intrinsic in unusual or (perceived) unlikely events.
Hello in your last paragraph you forgot to mention female/female also just doesn’t have the comic effect that it once did.