Misandry in feminist literature

"Marriage is an institution developed from rape as a practice."

"The penis must embody the violence of the male in order for him to be male. Violence is male; the male is the penis; violence is the penis..."

Andrea Dworkin, Pornography


"Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness."

"While men strut and fret their hour upon the stage, shout in bars and sports arenas, thump their chests or show their profiles in the legislatures, and explode incredible weapons in an endless contest for status, an obsessive quest for symbolic 'proof' of their superiority, women quietly keep the world going."


"He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women, whether mate, acquaintance, or stranger; he can rape or sexually molest his daughters, nieces, stepchildren, or the children of a woman he claims to love. The vast majority of men in the world do one or more of the above."

Marilyn French, the War Against Women


"I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it."

Barbara Jordan


"Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience."

Catherine Comin


"Men's sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can 'reach WITHIN women to fuck/construct us from the inside out.' Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women's own. A woman who has sex with a man, therefore, does so against her will, 'even if she does not feel forced.'"

"I feel what they feel: man-hating, that volatile admixture of pity, contempt, disgust, envy, alienation, fear, and rage at men. It is hatred not only for the anonymous man who makes sucking noises on the street, not only for the rapist or the judge who acquits him, but for what the Greeks called philo-aphilos, 'hate in love,' for the men women share their lives with--husbands, lovers, friends, fathers, brothers, sons, coworkers."

Judith Levine



"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex."

"To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo."

Valerie Solanas


"The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness...can be trained to do most things."

Jilly Cooper



"I feel that 'man-hating' is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them."

Robin Morgan



"And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference."

Susan Griffin



"MALE:...represents a variant of or deviation from the category of female. The first males were mutants...the male sex represents a degeneration and deformity of the female."

"MAN:...an obsolete life form... an ordinary creature who needs to be watched...a contradictory baby-man..."

'A feminist Dictionary', ed. Kramarae and Triechler



But a look at the facts reveals a different picture - that men are victims too - in many ways


Misandry in popular culture


An analysis of popular culture (e.g., literature, television, film, greeting cards, comics, advertisements, etc.) provides numerous examples of misandry in modern Western society, such as

General neglect of male issues, such as the facts that:

Depression affects more than 6 million men in America alone, but the figures may be even higher due to the social stigmas attached to reporting it.

A much higher percentage of male teenagers commit suicide than female teenagers.

Men constitute approximately 80% of suicides.

Men make up approximately 90% of the prison population in the United States.

The majority of alcoholics, drug addicts, and homeless persons are men.

Men have lower levels of university attendance, do increasingly worse in high schools and middle schools than women, and are far more frequently diagnosed as supposedly being afflicted with learning disorders such as ADHD.

Men, on average, have a lower life expectancy than women.

Popular culture often depicts men as sex-crazed, and overbearing, an extreme exaggeration of most men's natural interest in sexuality and evolutionary ability to act aggressively.




Prevalent attitudes in which women are supposedly superior to men, which includes such diverse anti-male claims as:

Women are able to think more rationally.

Women can make better choices, especially under pressure.

Women can understand complex issues, including politics, more easily.

Women's brains are superior to men's due to some (disputed) studies claiming that women tend to have a slightly larger corpus callosum than men.

Women have special, innate, or better-developed intuitive or multitasking abilities than men.

Depictions in sitcoms, advertising, and other television shows in which men (especially fathers) are shown as bumbling and inept.

Recounting of death in which the body count as described in terms of "X fatalities, including Y women and children," which reduces the value of the adult male lives lost.




Numerous cultural double-binds, such as:


Men and women are expected to be equal, but men are often expected to be the sole monetary contributors towards expenses (for example, buying expensive jewelry, paying for meals, etc.).

Men are told to be increasingly accepting of women who do not fit their expectations of attractiveness, while simultaneously being told (by advertising, print media, etc.) to make themselves increasingly attractive to women.

Men are expected to be masculine, aggressive defenders of women, but also to act feminine and embrace typically female traits.

Men are taught from a very young age that women are to be kept "on a pedestal" and revered, but the same cannot be said about women to men.

The increasingly popular cultural focus on the importance of having an above-average penis size, while simultaneously depicting focus on breast size, waist-to-hip ratio, and other attributes of female sexuality as sexist.

There is a dichotomy between how men and women are perceived as attractive — women are often depicted or discussed as being beautiful even to other women, while men are regarded as being innately less attractive.

Men are expected to repress their sexuality, and are taught that admiring women's bodies is wrong.
Workplaces will often taken the word of women over men when considering sexual harassment claims, even if no evidence supports the women's grievance.
In court cases regarding rape, the woman's word is often taken over the man's, even if there is no evidence that rape has taken place.


When considering crimes of equal magnitude, men will often be dealt harsher sentences than women.

Advertising and other media frequently depict men in painful or humiliating circumstances (e.g., being hit in the testicles, threatened with castration, sexually harassed, deliberately denied sexual interactions for control or amusement, raped, verbally assaulted, etc.) as being acceptable or even humorous.


The controversial French movie Baise Moi (2000) is sometimes cited as an example of a film which has attitudes of blatant misandry; two women go on a sexual and murderous rampage of various men they encounter.

A similar film by Russ Meyer entitled Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was released in 1965.

The T-shirt slogan "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them" has been criticised by some as supporting misandry.

It is also sometimes argued that misandry is present in children's culture, most notably with the saying:

"Snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails - that's what little boys are made of. Sugar and spice and everything nice - that's what little girls are made of."

While modern gender-neutral language has changed gender-positive statements in popular narratives, such as in the case of Star Trek's 'to boldly go where no man has gone before' becoming 'to boldly go where no one has gone before'; expressions which may be interpreted as pejorative, such as The Shadow's "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" remain unchanged

"Anyone who's ever dated one" was then added by Entertainment Weekly illustrating the allowability of misandry to be expressed in popular humor.



In Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide (Putnam, 2005)

Maureen Dowd claims that men are afraid of a strong female identity and rallies against men who are 'becoming extinct' and comparing them to 'ornamentation'.

In an interview about the book on The Colbert Report, Dowd denied the book is meant to be misandric, saying the answer to the titular question "is obviously yes", but there are a variety of other examples of similarly abrasive titles, as well as commentators who would claim that Dowd's overall answer to the titular question is not "obviously yes".

Federal laws require males to register for a military draft at age 18 but do not make the same national service requirement of females when they reach the age of majority.

Federal, state, and local laws that prevent men of age 18 who have not registered for a military draft from receiving benefits such as educational funding and a driver's license.

State laws that make the felony of statutory rape applicable to 18 year old males who have consensual sex with a 17 or 16 year old female.

State laws that silently and automatically remove an absent father's legal right to future legal custody of his child. For example, laws that allow a baby to be placed into adoption without the father's notification or consent.

The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture book review

http://www.lbduk.org/spreading%20misandry.htm


Androphobia: The Only Respectable Bigotry

http://www.backlash.com/content/gender/1996/4-apr96/wilson04.html

Relative to WASP-derived US cultural norms, gender roles are very different in Jewish culture, with Jewish women traditionally being granted much more power within their society, especially within households. It was also Jewish women who led the US feminist movement of the 1960s and continue to dominate it today.

They're not leading a "fight for equality."

They're not even THINKING ORIGINALLY.

They're just *cultural_chauvinists* who presume to disapprove of something that's really none of their business, then they go it one further by actually meddling with other people's societies, mainly by exploiting the vulnerability of certain gentiles (women with bad relationships with their fathers, that sort of thing).

It's a straightforward cultural conquest, and yet another clear display of their bigotry. They've gotten away with it because Americans are too historically obtuse to understand what's really happening.

They're always the first ones to spew noises about 'tolerance,' but they're the absolute LEAST tolerant of people who are different from them in any way

I've seen the bigotry from a neutral position since I have no stake in the matter directly

I've been accused and abused from people who read these kinds of books and accept them as gospel where the tragic mistakes of assuming "all men" are these characteristics are made, and in general with rare exceptions Western society accepts it as completely proper, even in so-called progressive scenes

It seems that largely the men who *do* think with that other head enable and facilitate this practice - that these consumers of said books "lead them around by their penises"

this becomes yet another form of oppression - that is even more overlooked and downplayed since then *both sexes* are pulling this in an active-passive manner

alternative forms of sexuality are completely disregarded when the framework the authors of these books rely upon to spew this bigotry are completely absent

but that doesn't stop them from generalizing and discounting what ever form of sexual relations don't fit into their pigeonholed views of the situation

they are as remarkable for what they *don't* say or address, as they are for the narrow views that they *do*

this is a dead giveaway of a self-centered attitude and *lack* of this deeper and more comphrensive understanding of complex issues that some try to claim they have an innate ablility to understand, compared to "men's brains"


even when they do acknowledge some men's abilities, they still frame it as only comparing to women - they'll say "but some men can think as well as we can"

when your world lies completely outside of this "battle of the sexes" way of thinking, this whole subject is pretty repulsive, as you then see them doing exactly what they're accusing men of doing - and then some - with nearly complete immunity and support

the comment about men "can be trained and useful" takes on a whole new meaning when you're an outsider looking in, and see the whole picture of this sorry state of affairs


I can say "lead men around by their penises" but it's politically incorrect to say "pussywhipped" even though they mean exactly the same thing

(technically I'm required to place the blame on the men themselves - "men who think with their penises" -to escape the politically incorrect condemnation since *even implying* women have any responsibility for it at all is enough to trigger the politically incorrect condemnation - it must *always* be men's fault)

women are above the concept of manipulation in this context - this just goes to show how far from reality the whole mess gets (anyone can be a manipulator at any time for any reason no matter what the gender happens to be or what gender the subject of the manipulation is)

Men should avoid public life altogether. Women should run the world. Men should stay home and be pampered sex toys.

I'm in total agreement with the real man.
Pampered is good.
Upon the 15th birthday of the grand Viziers' son, the royal procurer , was called to attend to his son's birthday wishes, as he was a generous father with great wealth and wished to make it the finest birthday of his life .
When asked what were his desire, the slender youth stated his request.
" I wish to have the palace made welcome to a beautiful red headed virgin fair and willing to please me on this day"
The procurer left and returned in the space of an hour with the blushing young maiden, looking somewhat disheveled through what must have been hard traveling throughout the realm. to fulfill the task.
Soon the young man, having had his tastes apparently whetted, requested a dancer and and a singer, also young, beautiful and willing.
Again, the procurer left in a hurry to carry out these wishes.
During the remaining long hard and exhausting day, upon the delivery of the last specific request concerning circus acrobats and sword swallowers, the grand Viziers' procurer dropped dead.
Noting the sudden silence from the here-to-for noisy quarter of the palace, the grand Vizier' came into the chamber and seeing the still form on the marble floor, remarked to his son.
" Let this be a lessen to you. Sex can't hurt you but running after it will kill you."

"Ah, you're not thinking like a good pro-Palestinian _activist_. _Other_ nations have flaws; Israel only has _fatal_ flaws that _invalidate_ its existence and _justify_ its liquidation. Other imperfect nations -- meaning all of them -- are one thing; eeeee-eeevil Israel is another, and should be compared only to Nazis and apartheid and any other utterly hateful comparison. Palestinians should be judged by their best representatives; Israel should be condemned for its _worst_ representatives, preferably with as much self-righteousness as you can feign. Murdering civilians in discos is murder, unless they're Israelis, in which case it's "resistance." And so on. It doesn't matter what the facts are; all that matters is that if you hate Israel enough, it doesn't matter what the facts are. "


This is a repost of Gehrig's: still of value for much of what goes on at Indymedia. Used without permission, but I suspect he wouldn't mind ; -)
Thanks, Gehrig. We miss you.

which head were you using when you decided to post that in a thread about misandry and feminism ?

(nothing in this article has anything to do with Palestinians, Israel or the middle east)

or is the subject too uncomfortible for you ?

These arguments, today, have as much merit as the arguments about "reverse racism." Men and women are still far from "equal," and when we are closer, the level of pain, suffering, and annoyance men will experience will dwarf your list of gripes. Eventually, you'll get used to it, if you're willing to adapt to fairness and equality.

Same goes for women. Change is difficult.

do you mean the dozens of citations in the feminist literature of misandry, or my own personal experiences with the situation (which hasn't even touched upon the subject of male rape and the neglect I've personally experienced)

the reaction I got was - (quoting this part of the article)

"Advertising and other media frequently depict men in painful or humiliating circumstances (e.g., being hit in the testicles, threatened with castration, sexually harassed, deliberately denied sexual interactions for control or amusement, raped, verbally assaulted, etc.) as being acceptable or even humorous."


"raped / being acceptable or even humorous."

The neglect I'm refering to is mostly in the broader sense of prisons - along with this attitude..


> closer, the level of pain, suffering

seems rather insensitive coming from another man, when we look at the true scope of this issue and add the _stigma, shame and neglect_ that Western cultural values add on top of it

maybe this might help to clarify where I'm coming from

"Men and women are still far from "equal" "

Neither men nor women WANT to be "EQUAL"!!

We're as dimorphic in our primordial psychologies as we are physically, to the point of resembling seperate species. This goes back millions of years into our pre-human past, and there are excellent sound reasons for it. You don't erase this biological bedrock of human psychology and society just by whimsically **wanting** to, and furthermore this is an extremely perilous hubris in the first place. Madness lies down this road.

I do agree with the feminists about one thing, and that's the rejection of lifelong monogamy as an institution

I don't agree with the way they PHRASE it, which is just more of their pure-and-simple man-hatred: "Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice."

They're reversing their chickens and eggs here. Marriage is not a consequence of antipathy between the genders. The modern antipathy between the genders is ENTIRELY a consequence of the stupid institution called 'marriage'

Because our deep animal psychologies are so different, our lifestyle preferences are also divergent. This makes male and female personae fundamentally incompatible as life partners. On the other hand, Women are completely compatible in this way WITH EACH OTHER, as are men

The most ancient kind of human society was one in which women and men both had cultures among themselves existing in parallel as loosely overlapped Venn sets. Sexual relations between individual women and men were personal affairs, not socially enforced life contracts. If and when the relationship went sour, they each had their own steadfast social order to return to. It didn't destroy anyone's life, and it shouldn't. It was a social order eminently humane in this way we have lost.

This is what we STILL NEED. The one thing that commends the military is the way it fulfills an essential male developmental need: to experience The Society of Men. I know very bright free-thinking men who spent time in the military who say it was invaluable for maturing them in a way they could never get from civilian society. They're not daft; they're witnesses to a crucial piece of the puzzle.

Marriage did not arise from male scumbags' need to dominate women. It arose from the need of privileged classes to dominate EVERYBODY. Marriage goes hand in hand with slave culture and slave beliefs, e.g. Judeo-Christian "spirituality."

The tension that marriage has produced between the genders is gigantic, and something had to "give," and that thing has been Lingam, the male persona, which has been demolished. This is primarily a consequence of enslavement, which breeds against Lingam. The male persona will not be enslaved, period, and so it ends up being severely suppressed in slave cultures, which would otherwise disappear altogether.

"Men" of the West in particular, being the end-products of hundreds of generations of slaves, are now extremely feminized. This is what has "given," and slavery was the main agent here. As social institutions, marriage and slavery are organically fitted to each other

Ball-bashers love to INSIST that modern society heaps horrors on them particularly, but this is false. Modern society caters to women's ancient lifestyle preferences quite well, and *Yoni* is consequently quite intact and dominant

It's men who have been demolished.

There are only two refuges of Lingam now: elite class culture and the armies that serve it. Class elites have monopolized Lingam as the primal source of Power, a thing they jealously withhold for their own exclusive use. Everyone everywhere else who is determined to experience real psychological maleness either does so as their agent or winds up imprisoned or dead -- where truly male slaves have always wound up

Just curious- if you really believe this- why did you marry? Why have you co-opted physically the very system you've rejected intellectually?
(And I'm not asking this to justify jumping up and down screeching "you're a hypocrite!" over and over)

There is a lot of societal pressure, granted, and some people feel driven to produce heirs. But neither seems to motivate you. So why did you make the choice you did?

The inconvenient fact that men suffer victimization too on a much wider scale than feminists would ever care to acknowledge (the worst and most direct example being male rape in prisons, the military and some religious settings, with the big problem of child abuse added to it) is discounted, ignored, downplayed, dismissed, and largely denied

then when it does manage to break to the surface of people's consciousness, the victims are subjected to extreme stigma, shame and insensitivity - they are made fun of, blamed, laughed at and ignored

if people behaved this way towards women rape victims, they would scream bloody murder and raise holy hell

there are also psychological differences between women and men which make male rape even harder for men

an interesting example is when either a man or woman is forced to strip -

women prefer to have thier clothes removed - it's less psychologically stressful to them to be the passive victim - they maintain more their sense of dignity studies have shown

men on the other hand find being stripped unbearable - it is much more psychologically devastating to their dignity than removing their clothes themselves

social stigmas and cultural norms have much to do with this, while the male psyche is itself more vulnerable to this because a man loses his sense of "maleness" along with it - it feminizes him as well



Men also have a greater difficulty expressing their feelings - often saying the shame they feel "can't be described".

Male rape victims commonly report nightmares, deep depression, shame, loss of self-esteem, self-hatred, and considering or attempting suicide.

male rape represents the most acute form of feminizing or "Loss of Manhood" because "a real man "would die before giving up his anal virginity." By the very fact of surviving the experience, therefore, a male rape victim may worry he deserved it: that he has, at the very least, been proven to be "a punk, 'pussy,' or coward by not preventing it."


statistics show a fair percentage of male rape victims commit suicide due to this having a much greater impact on their psyche - it causes them severe emotional and psychological mental anguish

Police frequently "blame the victim" themselves. Unless a male rape victim is visibly injured from a sexual assault, police often think that the sex was consensual: that the rape victim actually invited it. Male rape victims frequently say that they are treated scornfully by police and even doctors who do not bother to hide the fact that they despise men who are so "weak" as to be victimized.

"Stand up for yourself and be a man," is a common refrain. Gay male rape victims particularly those with stereotypically feminine characteristics or mannerisms, report that police are especially likely to ignore their claims of sexual abuse. Some police, in fact, appear not to even recognize that gay male rape victims have the right to refuse other men's sexual advances, viewing homosexuality as a sort of open invitation to sex.

As one male rape victim, who is not actually gay, remembered: "I had an officer tell me that 'faggots like to suck dick, so why was I complaining.


In addition to feelings of fear, depression, and self-hatred, many male rape victims have expressed a more specific anxiety about the loss of gender identity, fearing that their "manhood" has been damaged or eroded. As one sexually abused man confessed: "I feel that maybe some women might look at me as less than a man. My pride feels beaten to a pulp"


The fact of submitting to rape--even violent, forcible rape--redefines him as "a punk, sissy, queer." Other men will view him as such, withholding from him the respect due a "man."

"And the bandits and the jockers and daddies, I must stress, are not homosexual in any psychologically meaningful sense. They are heterosexuals on the Street and they pretty much treat the punks and queens just like they are used to treating women. That's the model they bring into the joint with them. They have absolutely no interest in the punk's male equipment and would be happier if somebody obligingly cut it off for them. When I was double-bunked I always had to sleep on my stomach so my "Man," when he woke up at night or in the morning, would see what he considered my "feminine" side and never a bulge in my shorts."



male rape and suicide in prison


The case of Rodney Hulin, Jr., a seventeen-year-old Texas prisoner, is sadly illustrative of the problem. Hulin was repeatedly raped over a two-month period by older inmates. In January 1996, just after he wrote to his father saying he was tired of prison life and tired of living, he attempted suicide by hanging himself in his cell. Although the attempt was discovered before Hulin was dead, he was left in a coma and died four months later.

In general, suicide rates in prisons and jails are well above those in the outside community. Suicide ranks third as a cause of death in prison (after natural causes and AIDS), while it is the leading cause of death in jails


These figures are much more striking when one considers the practical difficulty of committing suicide in prison. Unlike in the outside world, where an individual can easily isolate himself from other people for hours or days at a time, in prison a person is rarely out of earshot of others, or even out of their sight. Indeed, in today's prisons, many inmates are double-celled or live in crowded dormitories, unlikely places for a suicide attempt to pass unnoticed. Although drugs are dispensed in prison, they are more closely regulated than outside of the prison setting. Most prison suicide attempts, even those in which the inmate is determined to kill himself, are likely to be unsuccessful.


How many times do you hear of a female rape victim commiting suicide ?

Men constitute approximately 80% of suicides.

Men make up approximately 90% of the prison population in the United States.

In the US it is estimated that 92,700 males are forcibly raped each year, and that nearly 10 percent of male prisoners had been raped.

In the Abu Ghraib prison, US soldiers were using sexual intimidation and the threat of rape as a means of psychological torture to frighten their mostly male and Muslim prisoners.

Women are the main victims only if you exclude prisons where male rape is prevalent.

This is our dirty little secret. Everyone knows it, but we avoid acknowledging it. We are, indeed, heavily into denial.

I wish I had known this stuff before I married, but I didn't. The shamanic ancestral consciousness awakening in me now, this is not a thing young men know.

Growing up as I did in a broken home, raised by a woman abandoned in the harshest way, I grew up feeling that this is a monstrous thing to do, and resolved at a tender age that I would be steadfast to my own wife, and that's just how it is for me. I can not leave her. I would forfeit self-respect.

It is estimated that a man is raped every three and one-half seconds of every day in America (compared to once every 18 seconds for women).

Is the fact that most of these rapes take place behind prison walls a reason to ignore it?



Few aspects of incarceration are more horrifying than the prospect of sexual exploitation and forcible rape within jail and prison walls. It is a subject to which society reacts with a combination of fear, disgust, and denial. We don't want to believe that our criminal justice system tolerates such a cruel and unusual form of punishment. However, this is a brutal reality faced daily by inmates in crowded prisons and jails throughout the country. The issue of coerced sex will not simply go away. It is a fact of life for those behind bars.


Once an inmate is raped, he is marked as a victim for repeated sexual assaults for the remainder of his imprisonment. Generally, those who are turned out (raped) and made into slaves remain slaves and never can get out of that. It's a "no-win" situation and the primary reason that prevents inmate victims from reporting the offense. Unless the victim is immediately removed from general population and remains in isolation or segregated for the remainder of his confinement, he will promptly become "marked" by the other prisoners as a "punk" and then subjected to repeated sexual aggression, virtually on a daily (or nightly) basis. (Close your eyes for a moment and imagine what that might be like for you if you were to ever spend a night in jail ... having a little too much to drink after a party, etc. (One in four men will spend the night in jail during his lifetime.) Segregation or "protective custody" is unpleasant and is not necessarily safe. Assaults against prisoners in "protective custody" are well documented.

If a rape victim does not commit suicide, he finds little alternative to continual gang-rape but to "hook up" (form a relationship) with a strong or feared prisoner (his "Man'), who uses him sexually in exchange for protecting him from other prisoners. Bonding between two homosexuals is not allowed within the prison culture. A homosexual or "kid" is expected to hook up with a "man" This is the unwritten law, and it is enforced.

The spread of HIV into prison populations has turned rape from a source of psychological and emotional devastation into a life-and-death issue with resulting illnesses that create havoc for the prisoner and new difficulties for systems all over the country. And, since prisoner rape is usually perpetrated by multiple rapists, and anal rape commonly involves tearing of the rectal lining and bleeding, thus affording easy transmission of the virus, it follows that prisoner rape is now a deadly threat to all victims. This has important consequences for rape victims which may not immediately be apparent to those on the outside. Anal rape carries a very high risk of infection while oral sex carries little or none. Thus the target of sexual assault, faced with a hopeless situation, may save his life by compromising and "cooperating" with his assailant. This may well appear "consensual" to institutional authorities, resulting in disciplinary charges against the victim, but in actuality there is no free choice in the face of such a threat.



An academic study team found in a 1996 study that 22 percent of Nebraska inmates reported being pressured or forced to have sex against their will, with about half reporting being raped. Extrapolated nationally, that study would indicate that more than 140,000 prisoners are assaulted each year.



Prison Rape - It's No Joke


"The opposite of compassion is not hatred, it's indifference." These words were written by a prisoner who was severely beaten after refusing demands for sex from another inmate.

While often the subject of jokes on late-night TV, prison rape is no laughing matter. It has terrible consequences, not just for the inmates who are brutalized, but for our communities as well. The rate of HIV in prisons today is 10 times higher than in the general population.

Every rape in prison can turn a sentence for a nonviolent crime into a death sentence




Rape in Prison




It happens in every movie.

Due no doubt to some hilarious mix-up, a slim, clean-cut male character is thrown into a jail cell occupied by a buff, tattooed behemoth who is starved for affection. At first, the behemoth is coy. He watches the new buy, then bashfully looks away. He compliments the new guy's pants. Eventually, he makes his move. What happens next cannot be recounted in a family magazine like Stuff. Except for the part where the little guy gets raped.

The Reality

Prison rape does happen-but less than you might think, if you think that one-in-five male inmates will be forced into sexual contact isn't much, this according to a study by the Prison Journal. What makes you a likely candidate for rape? Being young, unassertive, white and on the feminine side (small stature, long hair). First-time offenders and child molesters are also more apt to be singled out. The four out of five inmates who don't get raped? They didn't see nothin'.




The Invisible Boy:

Revisioning the Victimization of Male Children and Teens




At the turn of the twentieth century, boys were routinely circumcised without anesthetic as a "treatment" for things such as hyperactivity and masturbating (De Mause, 1988). However, anyone who believes that this- inexcusable treatment of male children or youth is a thing of the past should consider the following:

An episode of a comedy television program about summer camp features the sexual abuse of a "canteen boy" by an adult camp counsellor.

A Canadian newspaper advertises a board game, "101 Uses for a Severed Penis."
Another television program portrays mother/son incest in a comedy sketch about phone sex.

A newspaper article about a mother who left her 11-year-old son tied and gagged in a closet quotes a social worker at the trial as saying, the boy had been "very prone to lying, stealing, and manipulating, was disruptive in class, and was generally an unpleasant kid.


my mom used to beat me with a wire flyswatter handle and make me stand in the corner naked for hours in the dark as "punishment" for wetting my bed when I was little







the existence of a double standard in the care and treatment of male victims, and the invisibility and normalization of violence and abuse toward boys and young men in our society.


Boys and teen males remain on the periphery of the discourse on child abuse. Few workshops about males can be found at most child abuse conferences and there are no specialized training programs for clinicians.

Male-centred assessment is all but non-existent and treatment programs are rare.

If we are talking about adult males, the problem is even greater. A sad example of this was witnessed recently in Toronto. After a broadcast of The Boys of St. Vincent, a film about the abuse of boys in a church-run orphanage, the Kids' Help Phone received over 1 000 calls from distraught adult male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It is tragic in a way no words can capture that these men had no place to turn to other than a children's crisis line.

The language we use in the current discourse on violence and abuse masks, minimizes or renders invisible certain realities for male victims. Terms such as "family violence" have become co-terminus with "violence toward women," particularly on the part of husbands, fathers or other adult male figures. Male teens, boys, male seniors, male victims of sibling-on-sibling violence and female abusers disappear in this term.






Why the Need for a Male-Inclusive Perspective?

A "male-inclusive" perspective on violence and victimization must be, of necessity, dynamic and evolutionary,

since male victims are only just beginning to speak out about their experiences.

As they do, their stories will continue to challenge many of our long-held and status quo assumptions about abuse victims and perpetrators.

It is important to keep in mind that male victims are not a homogeneous group, and over time it is likely that a number of perspectives will evolve.

Heterosexual, gay and bisexual, Native/Aboriginal, disabled/challenged, and visible and cultural minority males will all add different aspects to the story of male victimization.


The need for male victims to search for balance as they struggle to heal the emotional, physical, mental and spiritual aspects of their lives.




Sadly, as male victims' stories reveal, we are still a long way from realizing any of these goals.

Male victims report great pain, frustration and some anger at not seeing their stories reflected in the public discourse on violence and abuse.

Several large-scale studies about interpersonal violence conducted in the past several years have reported the findings pertaining to only female victims. Many academic papers written about victims of violence purport to be "balanced," yet typically bring only a faint male "voice" to the analysis.

From a conceptual standpoint, many also make the mistake of accepting and using, uncritically, a woman-centred-only model of victimization.

Male victims also find much of this work dehumanizing and dismissive of their experiences.



Male victims frequently find that therapists, counsellors or other types of caregivers trained with female-centred models of victimization are unable to help them. Consequently, they are likely to simply abandon therapy, leaving unexplored many of the issues relating to their victimization experience and to their deeper healing.




Male victims, like female victims before them, have encountered their share of critics and detractors, people who refuse to believe them, ignore prevalence statistics, minimize the impact of abuse, appropriate and deny males a voice, or dismiss male victimization as a "red herring."

When prevalence statistics are given for male victimization, it is common to hear the response that the vast majority of abusers of males are other males, a belief which is simply not true. This comment is usually intended to frame male victimization as a "male problem."

It is also insensitive and perceived by male survivors as being victim-blaming.



In many respects, male victims are where female victims were 25 years ago. Most of us forget the enormous opposition the women's movement encountered as women began to organize and claim a voice to speak against violence and name their abusers/offenders. The services and supports that exist presently for women were hard won and yet are still constantly at risk of losing their funding. By comparison, there really is no organized male victims "movement" per se. Males, generally, are not socialized to group together the way women do, to be intimate in communication or to see themselves as caregivers for other males. In short, much of what male victims need to do to organize a "movement" requires them to overcome many common elements of male socialization, all of which work against such a reality ever happening.



Much of the current thinking and discourse, both public and professional, about abuse and interpersonal violence is based on a woman-centred point of view. This is neither right nor wrong, good nor bad, but rather the result of who has been doing the advocacy. However, as a result of this history, victims have a female face, perpetrators a male face. Because of this image of perpetrators as having a male face, violence in our society has become "masculinized" and is blamed exclusively on "men" and "male socialization." Although there is without question a male gender dimension to many forms of violence, especially sexual violence, simple theories of male socialization are inadequate to explain why the vast majority of males are not violent.

Violence is even blamed on the male hormone testosterone. The irony in this argument is not lost on male victims. While women have been struggling to get out from under the stigma that they are at the mercy of their hormones, males are being accused of being at the mercy of testosterone.

Male victims walk a fine line between wanting to be heard and validated, to be supportive of female victims and to be pro-woman, while challenging assumptions they feel are biased stereotypes. Their challenges to some of these stereotypes are often met with accusations that they are misogynists, part of a "backlash" against feminism, or have a hidden agenda to undermine women's gains. If any of these accusations are true, they must be confronted by all of us. But if they are based only on the fear that recognition of males as victims will threaten women's gains, then that is the issue we should be discussing right up front, not minimizing male victims' experiences in a competition to prove who has been harmed the most. Nonetheless, it is important for all of us to recognize that it may be difficult for many women to listen to male victims' stories until they feel safe in this regard.

Sadly, male victims and their advocates risk a lot to challenge the status quo and experience much pressure to remain silent. It is ironic that the pressure males feel to remain silent replicates, at a social level, the same patterns of silencing, denial and minimization they experienced at the hands of their offenders.





For male victims, many cultural and other barriers must be crossed by boys, teen males, the professional community and the public even to be able to acknowledge male victimization experiences as abuse.

For example, gay males have to "come out" to disclose their abuse, and so typically remain silent.

Stated simply, if we do not go looking for male victims, we will not find them.

If we do not explore issues of abuse with males, they will not tell us their stories.




Sexual Abuse of Boys and Teen Males


Male victimization is greatly underreported - far more than it is for females.



In the National Population Health Survey, 90% of males and 75% of females did not report their abuse experience. Overall, female victims were twice as likely to report their sexual abuse experiences.





In the National Juvenile Prostitution Survey, 50% of the 229 juveniles involved in prostitution reported that they were approached for sexual services by an adult female, 62% of the males and 43.4% of the females. In 75% of these incidents, the services were for the woman herself, the remainder were for a male acquaintance. Twenty-two percent of the male juveniles and 20% of the female juveniles had been approached by women 3 times or more.





In the United States, child victims of violent sex crimes were more likely to be male (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1995). Evidence suggests that boys are more likely than girls to be physically and sexually abused at the same time (Finkelhor, 1984). Research exploring differences in severity of sexual abuse experienced by male versus female victims suggests that males experience more invasive types of abuse, more types of sexual acts and abuse at the hands of more perpetrators than females (Baker and Duncan, 1985; Bentovim, 1987; DeJong, 1982; Dube, 1988; Ellerstein, 1980; Finkelhor et al., 1990; Gordon, 1990; Kaufman et al., 1980; Reinhart, 1987). However, it is likely that these findings fail to consider that it is the seriousness of the abuse that brought the incident involving a male victim to the attention of official agencies in the first place. Male victims tend not to report less severe types of sexual abuse, especially those involving female perpetrators.






Male Prison Rape and Sexual Assault

The most overlooked form of sexual assault in our society happens to males in the form of prison rape. Studies concerning the prevalence of sexual assault never mention this form of sexual violence. In fact, there is no research available that documents the sexual assault of teen and adult males in prisons or closed custody facilities, though it is thought to be a common occurrence. It is easy to dismiss the plight of these males because of their diminished status as "offenders." It is all too easy to be without compassion for these males until you consider that many are victims and survivors of all forms of childhood abuse and maltreatment.





Professional Response to Male Victims as aFactor in Determining Prevalence

One problem with trying to understand the true prevalence rate of male victimization is how the present picture has been affected by factors pertaining to professional practice. Here we have to look at the low substantiation rates of all forms of maltreatment, especially in younger children. Substantiation rates are always higher for adolescent populations, typically because teens are easier to interview and are better able to articulate to investigators what happened to them.

This is even more of an issue for male victims. When boys are victimized, they tend to be seen as less in need of care and support (Watkins and Bentovim, 1992). They are also blamed more for their abuse (Burgess, 1985; Broussard and Wagner, 1988; Whatley and Riggio, 1993) and their offenders are held less accountable (Burgess, 1985). In one of the most troubling studies, Pierce and Pierce (1985) found that male victims, despite being subjected to more invasive types of abuse and more types of sexual acts than female victims, were 5 times less likely to be removed from their homes.






Media Images of Violence Toward Boys and Young Men

Looking past the more conventional forms of research and other types of information about violence and abuse, it is easy to find media images supporting male victimization. Women have long argued for greater accountability on the part of the media to refrain from using harmful, sexist and objectifying images of females in advertising and entertainment. Males are also now beginning to raise their own concerns.

Violence toward males is so normalized in our society that it has become invisible to the average person. So too have the images reinforcing harmful stereotypes about males and masculinity. For example, we expect males to be physically strong and capable or "rough and tumble," thus we ridicule in comics and comedy films the short, skinny or sensitive male. Unfortunately, young men who try to live up to the impossible standards set by bodybuilders are starting to kill themselves through the use of steroids.

Our insensitivity to male victims can be viewed in the depiction of male abuse in popular media images, commercials, comedy films and television programs, and the "funnies" or comic sections in any Canadian newspaper (Mathews, 1994). Watch America's Funniest Home Videos for a few weeks and you will inevitably see some male being injured in the testicles through a sports activity, boisterous animal, energetic child or some other mishap. A commercial for an American fast food company shows one of the characters from the sitcom Seinfeld, being hit in the testicles with a hockey puck.

Widely syndicated comic strips, such as Fox Trot, For Better or Worse and Nancy, portray girls or teen siblings punching, hitting with an object or breaking the glasses of male siblings or classmates. Other comic strips, such as Beetle Bailey and Andy Capp, routinely feature violent acts toward adult males. A recently released children's film, "Tom and Huck," portrays one of the boys being punched in the face by the female character Becky, a scene played without violence in the original movie and book. Another recent film, the "Beverly Hillbillies," features a young woman named Wily-Mae wrestling with a high school male peer and stomping on his testicles. Prison rape, injury to a man's testicles, sexual abuse of boys by women under the guise of "initiation" and other behaviours, easily identifiable as physical or sexual abuse and assault when they happen to girls or women, are exploited for "humour" so regularly that they have basically become a norm in comedy films and entertainment (Mathews, 1994).





Effects of Victimization on Males

Most of the literature on the impact of abuse has been written about female victims and thus tends to reflect a female-centred perspective. There has become, in Fran Sepler's words, a "feminization of victimization"

Males generally do not discuss their feelings or go to therapists for help so they are not likely to show up in the statistics on depression. Because boys have little permission to discuss their feelings, depression in males may be masked as bravado, aggression or a need to "act out" in order to overcompensate for feelings of powerlessness. Depressed male victims are also likely to be hiding in the statistics on suicide, addictions and unexplained motor vehicle fatalities. If males are indeed more likely to engage in acting out behaviours, it may simply be the result of us not allowing them to be vulnerable or to be victims.

However, the literature does provide overwhelming evidence of emotional disturbance in male victims. Anxiety, low self-esteem, guilt and shame, strong fear reactions, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, withdrawal and isolation, flashbacks, multiple personality disorder, emotional numbing, anger and aggressiveness, hyper-vigilance, passivity and an anxious need to please others have all been documented (Adams-Tucker, 1981; Blanchard, 1986; Briere, 1989; Briere et al., 1988; Burgess et al., 1981; Conte and Schuerman, 1987;RogersandTerry,1984;Sebold,1987;Summit,1983;VanderMey, 1988). Compared to non-abused men, adult male survivors of sexual abuse experience a greater degree of psychiatric problems, such as depression, anxiety, dissociation, suicidality and sleep disturbance (Briere et al., 1988).






One of the reasons why a male might be more affected by sexual abuse is that it calls into question his whole sexual and personal identity "as a man."


When a male is victimized, he is more likely to experience confusion about sexual identity (Johnson and Shrier, 1987; Rogers and Terry, 1984; Sebold, 1487). Male anatomy may play a key role in forming this perception. Because male genitalia is external, arousal to direct stimulation is more obvious. Obtaining an erection, experiencing pleasurable sensations or having an orgasm is, to the male victim, physical "evidence" that he is homosexual. It also reinforces the male victim's mistaken belief that he was responsible in some way because he "obviously" enjoyed it. Contrary to popular belief, a male can have an erection and achieve orgasm even when fearful.

Many male victims experience difficulties in intimate relationships as a result of being abused. They have few, if any, close friends, are promiscuous, have difficulty maintaining fidelity with partners, form few secure attachments and often become involved in short-term, abusive and dysfunctional relationships. Many experience few emotionally or physically satisfying sexual relationships and sometimes avoid sex altogether. Others become sexual compulsives, develop sexual dysfunctions or engage in prostitution (Coombs, 1974; Dimock, 1988; Promuth and Burkhart, 1989; Johnson and Shrier, 1987; Krug, 1989; Lew, 1986; Sarrel and Masters, 1982; Steele and Alexander, 1981; Urquiza, 1993).




Male victims can "take it."



The silence, denial and resistance that surrounds the issue of child abuse is particularly problematic for males. Because knowledge about male victimization is very limited in the public mind, featured rarely in media stories and under-researched, victims need to know from the outset that they are not the first or only male who has been abused or harmed. Making sure a male victim understands the prevalence of male victimization can be of significant help in ending the sense of isolation and self-loathing that accompanies a common perception that "I am the only one" or "I do not measure up."

Learning to trust a therapist and even one's own thoughts, feelings and perceptions after having been victimized is a major issue for all survivors. Opening up to a therapist can be an extraordinary challenge for male victims who must also cross a barrier with respect to gender-role socialization that instructs males to be stoic and silent, prevents them from wanting to appear vulnerable and encourages them to be self-reliant.



Because males are socialized to take charge, be responsible and take care of themselves, physical abuse and corporal punishment can be interpreted as "deserved" and internalized in a negative self-concept that supports self-blame. It can also support the internalization of anger in the form of drug and alcohol abuse, excessive risk taking, suicide and reckless attempts to reassert a distorted sense of one's own masculinity.





The language of therapy is typically a language about feelings which creates problems for some male victims.

Male victims typically struggle with expressions of feeling. This should not be interpreted as a confirmation of biased stereotypes about males as having no feelings or lower levels of "emotional literacy" than females.

Males experience the same emotions as females, they are just less likely to be differentiated and articulated. For example, feelings of shame, guilt, humiliation, anxiety, sadness and rage can become bundled together in the form of anger.

Since anger is the only "legitimate" feeling they can express, they, and we, often mistake what we are seeing when a male victim expresses anger. Some males are afraid to express any anger at all because of the potential tempest of uncontrollable and jumbled feelings they fear will be unleashed. Some are afraid to express anger because they associate it with violence.




Some male victims become intensely "homophobic," their anger emerging from self-perceptions and doubts about their "masculinity" or about possibly being "gay."

It is important to help male victims understand that being abused does not "cause" someone to become gay or bisexual. Helping males to understand that this anger stems from a perceived threat to personal beliefs about their "masculinity" and a cultural context that supports anti-gay prejudice is also important.

If we were a gay-positive society, it would be less likely for these homophobic feelings and perceptions to arise. We need to counsel boys and young men that "masculinity" is a social construction that is malleable. Many male victims suffer under the tyranny of a narrowly defined sense of what it means to be a "man."


Some male victims express no emotions like anger at all but become withdrawn, isolated and depressed. Many males hide their emotions in work-a-holism, perfectionism and over-achieving.



Because abused boys and young men often struggle with self-concepts about "being a man," all caregivers must be vigilant to how their own behaviour and expectations of male victims reinforce narrow or stereotyped notions of "masculinity." Male workers especially need to understand that they are modelling "masculinity" every moment they are with a male child or teen.




All of us, regardless of our professional role, must stop minimizing the impact of abuse on male victims or assuming they can "take it." The symptoms of abuse are often invisible for boys. By continuing to apply a double standard to male victims, we are reinforcing and supporting violence toward boys and young men in our schools, communities, homes and institutions.



The embellishment of patriarchy theory evident in the quotation from Hyde is biased in the way it generalizes a negative stereotype of "male sexuality" to all men. Most men are kind, decent, caring husbands, lovers, partners, colleagues, fathers and friends of women. Men's sexuality varies as much as women's.






The Messages We Give to Male Victims

Our minimization and denial of male victimization so permeates our culture that it is in evidence everywhere from nursery rhymes, comic strips, comedy films, television programs and newspaper stories to academic research. We give male victims a message every day of their lives that they risk much by complaining.

Stated succinctly, if a male is victimized he deserved it, asked for it, or is lying. If he is injured, it is his own fault. If he cries or complains, we will not take him seriously or condone his "whining" because he is supposed to "take it like a man." We will laugh at him. We will support him in the minimization of its impact. We will encourage him to accept responsibility for being victimized and teach him to ignore any feelings associated with his abuse. We will guilt and shame him to keep a stiff upper lip so he can "get on with it."

When we give a message to boys and young men in any shape or form that their experience of violence and victimization is less important than that of girls and young women, we are teaching them a lesson about their value as persons. We also teach them that the use of violence toward males is legitimate. When we dismiss their pain, we do little to encourage boys and young men to listen to, and take seriously, women's concerns about violence and victimization. When we diminish their experience or fail to hold their male and female abusers fully accountable, we support their continued victimization.




We would recognize that regardless of our own theoretical starting points, male victims have their own voice, their own meanings for their experiences. If we remain ignorant of, overlook or fail to explore their stories, we will miss much of what we need to engage them in therapy and healing.

Maybe Hex is right about the sociology, don't know, don't care. Maybe women are more "comfortable" with rape than men are, but Hex comes really close to saying that therefore, raping women is less heinous than raping men. Rape has been a tool to make women more easily victimized (or "comfortable")--easier to rape and escape.

If men have greater psychological problems with rape, then let me suggest male rape survivor groups and networks, male rape survivor literature, rape avoidance skills. Maybe raped women could teach you some things.

But in nearly every case, whether it's male rape or female rape, it's men doing the raping. So go deal with your own before you come to me asking me to feel sorry for you.

So could women who fended their attackers off.

See:

Its very sweet and it shows a great deal of character.

i realize coming from me its less than meaningless, but I wanted to say it anyway.

> But in nearly every case, whether it's male rape or female rape, it's men doing the raping. So go deal with your own

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"it is common to hear the response that the vast majority of abusers of males are other males, a belief which is simply not true. This comment is usually intended to frame male victimization as a "male problem."

This is also insensitive and perceived by male survivors as being victim-blaming."



also -

Male victims walk a fine line between wanting to be heard and validated, to be supportive of female victims and to be pro-woman, while challenging assumptions they feel are biased stereotypes.

Their challenges to some of these stereotypes are often met with accusations that they are misogynists, part of a "backlash" against feminism, or have a hidden agenda to undermine women's gains.

If any of these accusations are true, they must be confronted by all of us. But if they are based only on the fear that recognition of males as victims will threaten women's gains, then that is the issue we should be discussing right up front, not minimizing male victims' experiences in a competition to prove who has been harmed the most.
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The statistics don't support your claim - obviously you didn't read this but at best only skimmed over it - and now look at the top of the article at all the examples of misandry in feminist literature and ask yourself WHY you only skimmed over it...

That's kind of you to say

Hex, I think you're talking to me, but I'm not sure, since your response had almost nothing to do with what I said, except for a brief quote. I'm trying to follow your flow here, and what I'm getting is 1) women write harsh things about men, men are victims. Then 2) men get raped and react differently than women, so men have it worse when they get raped.

I was trying very hard to avoid the issue of man-hating. I could go toe-to-toe with you on the points you cite in the lead article and following, but that bores even me.

Let me point you to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/americanvanguard/. You won't find a parallel group of women anywhere.

I agreed that there might well be social pressures on men to react differently to rape than women do. I offered practical solutions, backed up by forty years of feminist experience. I told you why you're not going to get sympathy from most women, and what concrete steps you could take about that. And, let me add to what I said, when women were (are) fighting to have rape recognized as a crime and not a right, men mostly either sat on the sidelines or fought them tooth and nail. Unlike those men, I just offered you what insight I could.

You can take my thoughts or not, but don't twist them into man-hating just to prove your thesis. I opened by agreeing with you that there is sociological truth in what you said. I didn't offer up any stereotypes. I didn't even hint that women's rights were threatened. I checked my assumptions; I'd appreciate it if you'd do the same.

just pray that

1.) no one who's interested actually reads the data I posted

2.) will prefer the short soundbite twisted into "woman hater" version you just tried to sell

I posted all the material and data I agree with and support - your characterization in no way addresses *any* of it

making up your own straw man just to keep the war of the sexes going

just like while I bring Israel's booming billion dollar sex trade to people's attention and you the "40 year feminist" completely ignore your sisters in Israel since keeping the race war going is more important

now you're doing it here - to keep the sex war aflame

with flames

very very sad - I post in depth and richly cited professional referenced research to try to specifically get all sexual abuse victims working together as one

and you take cheap pot shots, press button issues and try to dash and ruin - trash the consensus to allay your own personal hangups and dysfunctions

I even quoted specifically where the professional research addresses the fallacies you've tried to forward just above here

in one ear and out the other

you change from acknowledging the body of data to attacking me personally - straw man and ad hominem

you fail the cause of feminism for your sisters in Israel by totally ignoring them AND fail your brothers here by demonizing and attacking them

very sad

We're not conversing here. I don't know what this is, but it's no longer a discussion about male stereotyping, male rape, or what might be done about it.

I didn't challenge your sources or your material, except the one that there are as many female rapists as men--and that isn't germaine to my point. I put forward some suggestions to address the problem. But that's a straw "man".

So let's look at straw "men": you say I'm keeping the war of the sexes going, while you make up sh*t about me being a man-hater. You say there's a consensus, I don't disagree, but that's another straw "man". You say I attack you personally, but I don't . . . and so on.

You accuse me of ad hominems, and then attack me saying I "failed feminism" because I didn't jump on your thread. You say I've demonized and attacked men, when I never did, that I can see.

And you top it off with a big helping of useless and patronizing pity.

Now, I will admit that I don't see everything. Maybe a couple of other guys out there will look at what I wrote here and tell me where I demonized and attacked them. Then we can talk.

Hex, you brought up interesting an interesting topic, I offered my perspective, and you jump all over me. Your attack seems really personal, and I can't begin to figure out why. But I'll take it as a warning not to try to have a civil conversation with you again.

If you want to bust stereotypes (and that's always a good thing), you're going in the wrong direction.

"We're not conversing here. I don't know what this is, but it's no longer a discussion about male stereotyping, male rape, or what might be done about it."

I lost him too. I wonder if this was an attempt to deal with a personal problem on an intellectual level, and he is just frustrated that no one picked up on it. Perhaps its less of a sociological issue than a deeply personal one? Perhaps we've failed by not picking up on that? Maybe the more appropriate approach would have been supportive rather than analytical. But how were we to know?

I don't see the connection between feminism and male rape.

Men getting rape isn't taken seriously, but I don't think that has anything to do with women, unless a woman is the rapist. If anything, feminists forcing society to take rape seriously is leading to prison rape being taken seriously. They broke the silence. For a long time, it was a kind of male privilege to rape. Men raping men is still a big joke for most guys. (i.e. nearly every American guy's heard or said, "I'm gonna fuck you in the ass, bitch." The process of emasculation is a big joke, I guess. Like Abu Ghraib.)

Just to be fair, I re-read the original post. It doesn't really cohere. The misandrist quotes aren't all man-hating; some are, and some are just clever responses to criticism. The stats are interesting, but I keep thinking that these aren't the cause of women. If anything, these things are happening in male-dominated domains: law enforcement, the courts, universities, mental health, and the media.

The stereotypes don't sound that familiar to me. The stereotypes I know are: women are supposedly *less* rational, and more "intuitive"; women are indecisive; women are detail oriented. Media depictions of men as fools, or as barbarians/warriors, are produced by men -- that seems to be the reason for saying that this or that many "women and children" were killed -- the implication is that the foe is a male barbarian, and that the killed men were probably fighting off the foe, to protect the "helpless women and children."

The cultural double binds: I just don't see them. I don't feel the oppression. I don't get the sense that other guys are really suffering that much from those things, and I don't sense a consistent pattern, except that they fit within the "official gender roles."

Even when men are depicted as "bad", "incompetent", "evil" or "stupid", it's not really as a contrast to women, but as a contrast to good or smart men. The stereotype of the woman is as the ignorant or innocent, largely irresponsible for their own moral behavior, except, perhaps, to maintain their ignorance/innocence.

The man who's the butt of jokes, the target of scorn, is usually not someone who's the "stud." He's more like a "George Costanza", a character on Seinfeld who is short, bald, overweight, and cynical. Or maybe he's the 98 pound weakling, an effeminite. The problem isn't one between men and women, but about stereotypes of male power, and what it looks like. Both men and women are mocking this stereotype, and it's unfair. It's a kind of "racism", but, it's not perpetuated only by women; men are complicit in this as well.

> feminists forcing society to take rape seriously is leading to prison rape being taken seriously

that is precisely what the data says and *why I posted it* - to show the struggle against sexual abuse is a common one and that both sexes have to work together to solve it

that it was women who laid the groundwork for the cause through the feminist movement.

that the situation men are in now is roughly were women were 25 years ago





> Both men and women are mocking this stereotype, and it's unfair. It's a kind of "racism", but, it's not perpetuated only by women; men are complicit in this as well.


sure - since it driven into our heads as cultural norms - that again is the point - the problem is with everyone - so the solution is likewise

this habit of seeing things as either one sex's fault or the other is exactly the kind of polarization that keeps this vicious circle going - as long as both sides fail to work together this will never end

these stereotypes perpetuate as male children become adults, they then fill those roles, the feminists react to them as a "mens" problem while nothing changes

women caused the awakening of these issues by thier efforts more than a generation ago but little boys are still growing up to become the same things they are rightly concerned about

this shows that nothing is being done about the root of this problem

Feminists tend to see themselves as "defending" and setting right the wrongs women are subjected to in isolation without actually working with the source of the problem - men AND women

all of the elements that the body of data addresses needs to be worked on - by everyone, if we want to see any real change



just what I quoted here alone shows this ;


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"it is common to hear the response that the vast majority of abusers of males are other males, a belief which is simply not true. This comment is usually intended to frame male victimization as a "male problem."

This is also insensitive and perceived by male survivors as being victim-blaming."

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Many feminists attempt to say only *womens problems are their concern* and any problems men have are *their own problem* -


> So go deal with your own


this isolationist attitude only keeps the whole "battle of the sexes" going

the key to the whole thing is all of us working together - not separating this common issue in to "he said, she said"

what "male rape" (which is really only the most visible part of the problem) has to do with "female rape" (which is also only the most visible part of the problem) with eachother are they are both ABUSE

so the real problem is abuse - when the problem is faced directly by everyone THEN real gains can be achieved ;

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Male victims walk a fine line between wanting to be heard and validated, to be supportive of female victims and to be pro-woman, while challenging assumptions they feel are biased stereotypes.

Their challenges to some of these stereotypes are often met with accusations that they are misogynists, part of a "backlash" against feminism, or have a hidden agenda to undermine women's gains.
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notice the "to be supportive of female victims and to be pro-woman" part - victims know no gender, the problem affects both genders..

any attempt to work together should never be brushed off as "go deal with your own"

anyone male or female who takes that stance isn't helping solve things - they are perpetuating them.

an example is me posting about the slave trade issue - I have no direct stake or interest in this subject other than to support women victims, _because they are vicims_ not because they are women

this is a perfect example of being supportive of female victims and being pro-woman

being *pro-victim* period...


now if my attitude was "go deal with your own" what would be the outcome of this effort ?

- to find a few only male victims and try to only draw attention to just them ?


this isolationist and exclusionary attitude is a barrier to everyone working together to solve these problems which affect everyone


the statistic when prison populations are factored in -

one man is raped every 3.5 seconds compared to one woman every 18 seconds

illustrates that sexual abuse is a problem which affects everyone

it's not a contest to show who is raped the most or is affected the most ;

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if (polarization) is based only on the fear that recognition of males as victims will threaten women's gains, then that is the issue we should be discussing right up front, not minimizing male victims' experiences in a competition to prove who has been harmed the most.
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it's an attempt to bond our common problems together so that we work together - not against eachother in the male camp and female camp


all these points with very detailed explainations have already been layed out in the material I posted - which is why I'm quoting them here - they've already been thoroughly addressed, and by professionals in the field much smarter than me


to all involved parties I request that you re-read this material, slowly a few lines at a time and let each concept and detail sink in - *do some reflection before moving on to the next point*, with an open mind


because what I'm saying is what they're saying

when you fault me you're faulting them as I quoted the most relevant parts that match *exactly how I feel about it*

I posted this additional material to clarify and expand on this subject - these professionals can say it much more eloquently than I can

if they can't break through I'm afraid my chances alone are rather dismal



one positive thing out of this is that other people with more open minds will read it and see the light - not light I'm trying to show as just one person, but light the professionals in the field are showing

the material I've quoted represents a "concentrate" - a condensed version of many books worth of talking and thinking - which may be difficult to take in all at once


many people rely on having a concept pounded into their head page after page before they "get it" - which is why some people spend so much time reading books, they need that repetition in order for the data to sink in

they may not be used to being sujected to a radid-fire series of concepts that demands upmost attention and concentration

the responses I've seen here indicate this is the case as all the points that are being disputed here have been layed out already above

re-read this material and take it slow - a bit at a time, to reflect on each aspect of what's being said

with whatever objection you have, *quote the relevant part of this material that you feel does not adequately address the concept or point*

in other words, _cite where the material is wrong, not where *I* am wrong,_ because the material I've posted *is* my position