Can testify it does a number on male development too
I am just now getting my career on track, but I am essentially starting from square one again. As a programmer your primary tool is your brain, and when it simply isn't working...
What, to me, is positive, is that we are talking about it. Just being aware of this pain and not replicating it is what is needed to shift the world.
As a boy, I carried my shame in silence, and learned early to dislike and avoid extended family gatherings, masking my avoidance in a blanket of "family sucks/is boring" cynicism.
As an early teen entering puberty, I grew increasingly disturbed about had happened. I tried to force the feelings away, almost ritually, but grew increasingly mired in confusion about what was wrong with me. Why did I (despite the fact that I was but 5-6 years old at the time) not take action? Did this mean I enjoyed being abused? Did this mean it wasn't abuse? Did the fact that I didn't stop the abuser mean I was not heterosexual? I began bombarding myself with pornography, almost as a salve against the uncertainty and doubt about who I was.
It wasn't until nearly 40 - and in the context of therapy to try to prevent the most important relationships of my life from falling further apart - that I had even considered the fact that I'd survived abuse. I felt ashamed to even think about accepting that statement, as I knew many others had suffered so much more serious forms of long-term abuse.
Only now have I come to marginally accept that decades of suffering internalized shame, fear, pain and mistrust deserve to be called survival.
I now have children who I love with all my heart. I cannot fathom inflicting such suffering upon them - or anyone else, for that matter. I will never be able to entrust them to the care of close family or friends. It's a constant internal struggle when they ask about sleepovers with friends. Such trivial things as "going over to someone's house" trigger immense uncertainty and fear, which I do my best to not burden my children with. I don't know if I will ever truly be able to shed the thick cloak of cynicism - largely a defense mechanism - that has and continues to impede my ability to relate meaningfully to the world and the people around me.
I hope I can - and I hope that awareness grows, so that other people aren't exposed to a similar experience.
My heart aches because you sound so much like my mother.
What I will say is that as her child, one thing I appreciated so much is that I never had to worry if my parents would believe me if something happened. Your kids will have you always in their corner and that makes such, such, such a difference. So much of my mother's turmoil is related to her mother not believing her + the victim-blaming. You're helping and shielding your kids just by being who you are, even if you don't want to worry them.
https://www.kidpower.org/books/safety-comics/
And I also learned a lot and had some big mindset changes from reading the giant Kidpower Book for Caring Adults, which really goes in depth and is good at breaking things down into simple practices.
https://www.kidpower.org/books/kidpower-book/
I really like the mindset of teaching kids how to be safe in a positive way (i.e. without scaring them about potential dangers) and the serious-business approach to our responsibilities as adults.
It's awful -- like getting slapped in the face repeatedly -- but it works.
- Females, of course, can get pregnant, and our assaults are more likely to be physically painful.
- Males have zero social support and are far more stigmatized for being victimized, and they also have less of a support network/are more isolated than females on average. They also have fewer resources available since sexual assault is seen as only happening to females. Fewer shelters, hotlines, etc.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I wonder why you think this is the case?
I think this because:
Rape (and sexual assault in general) are (usually) the result of a combination of power dynamics + sex. The other main assumption I'm making is that women are mostly sexually assaulted by men, and that men are sexually assaulted by both women and men in fairly equal numbers. (I think that women are as likely to be effed up in the head as men, but a substantial amount of male victims are victimized in male-only or default situations like the military or prison, and if all the people around you are men, all the assholes and rapists are too.)
So, examining each component separately:
Sex is going to be based on what sex acts are most common, and the most common male-female configurations focused on male pleasure have pain as a possibility for the female. Forcible vaginal penetration hurts more physically than being forced to penetrate, and being forced to gag on a penis is, in my opinion, more likely to cause pain than forced cunnilingus. So the acts themselves are more likely to cause physical pain.
With regard to power dynamics, I think most females are assaulted by men and those men are going to use their physical superiority more often (because it's the power tool they use). For male victims, I would guess whether or not their experience was physically painful would depend a lot on both the sex of their assaulter and how old they were at the time. I would expect boys that are victimized as children would be more likely to report physical pain since, like with adult women victims, there is often a physical strength differential between victim and assaulter. (Or, for example, I was physically abused by a woman as a child, and she was stronger than me.) I would also expect more physical pain from men who are sexually assaulted by other men in a social space where physical prowess is important.
The flip side of this is that I think men who are sexually assaulted by women are more likely to experience social and emotional pain/turmoil. Much like men are taught to wield their muscles as weapons, women are taught to wield our social abilities, and a woman who wants to humiliate a man or assert power over him is more likely to gaslight him, convince him to gaslight himself, etc. than beat the crap out of him. You also see this when some asshole women are dismissive of men getting erections during an assault. "He's hard, he wanted it."
I'd also hate to compare the experiences and I wouldn't say one is worse than the other. I think we should understand the variables that might cause differing results so that we can support all the victims. A focus on self-defense and overcoming feeling weak isn't going to help a male victim who could have physically stopped his attacker but didn't for social reasons: They need validation of their experiences and decisions. You know?
Sexual abuse is to women as police violence is to black people. These classes of people are affected more (far more - perhaps 2x?) than others, but that doesn't mean others aren't affected. A broader class of victim lets you draw lines more clearly: BLM isn't about police vs black people, it's really about police vs not-police. Sexual violence isn't about men vs women, its also about abuse of power, over children. Children includes boys and girls of all colors, of all religions, of all sexual orientations.
Abuse of power knows no gender or race. Mothers abuse their sons. Teachers abuse their students. The more we allow the culture to ignore some abuse to make other abuse more narratively appealing, the more we abandon those victims that don't fit the protected class, and the worse we do at actually identifying the problem itself. This is a great moral and practical failing, an example of the potency of left-wing "other"ing.
The culture does not want to hear from victimized men, especially straight white men. It is okay to withhold empathy, because SWMs are "powerful", they always have been and they always will be, and are to blame for most, if not all, of the worlds problems, especially abuse of power in all its forms, they say.
We've been encouraged for years to express vulnerability, expressing more of a softer, feminine side. Now, we are punished for it, and then we get some unwanted appellation like "men's rights advocates", which is a liberal code for right-wing anti-feminist reactionaries working nefariously to maintain the status quo.
The dead comment is right: no-one cares about men. I will go further and say that its a deeply evil thing, and I fear for my 2-year-old son. This is a real fear, not a construction, and it should be okay to share the concern in a public forum without being attacked for saying something I'm not. But I know it will happen, anyway, because you cannot fight the tide.
Both your comment and the flagged comment make that claim.
It seems much more so the case that people can care about how bad actions affect both female and male victims than the hypothesis you propose.
And, in fact, straight white men can be in a position of power, and have advantages, and also be able to share stories where they are victims, and find support. These things do not have to be black and white and contradictory.
Who the victim is and how they are affected does not speak about who the transgressor is, nor does it do so in inflexible, absolute terms. So the effects of being a victim can be explored without going into a "victim mentality" as someone who does not happen to be the primary focus of this article.
They can, but that doesn't mean they do. It is dangerous to be caught caring about men or boys. Consider this recent SNL skit "man park": https://youtu.be/9XOt2Vh0T8w?t=131. I've linked to the part where a woman is saying something sympathetic to men, and then panics that she'll be caught on camera saying it. This is after showing men in a dog park. E.g. equating them to dogs.
Note that my comment was NOT triggered by the OP's study, but rather that a comment was flagged and killed stating something that I think is obviously true, but quite inconvenient for some people to read.
Not at all in my experience. Comedy skits aren't evidence, or we could have some very interesting discussions!
As men, our expected place in society is to contain our emotions. To be silent. Our traumas are not ours to share. The social costs of doing otherwise are unbearable. Society has no tolerance for our victimhood. ...The Audacity!
So yes, exactly. No one cares about men.
The parent reads like the ever-present 'reverse discrimination' complaint, but it's not the same. Discrimination and prejudice are about power. If the abuser doesn't have the power, they are a lot less dangerous.
This is true statistically, but I think OP's point is that statistics should not be used to dismiss individual experiences. Daniel Shaver was white, for example. Cheye Calvo was a white mayor when his house was raided (speaking of power!).
Thing is, police has too much power relative to the vast majority of citizens. The delta varies drastically between different population groups, but it's "too much" for all of them.
No, it's true really. White people, overall, really have much more real power. It's not a number in a report, but a hard fact of reality.
And then, any time racism comes up, lots of white people find any way to downplay it.
This is Qanon-level conspiracy thinking. By and large, white folks are safer around police because their interactions are qualitatively different from the interactions Black folks have with police.
To be sure, this includes quite a bit of anti-Black racism within police forces, but even that is better described as prejudice than "white folks have undue power in the legal system". Also, to be clear, the criminal justice system does tend to screw over marginalized Black communities in countless ways - and this impacts the kinds of interactions Black folks have w/ police, but even that is a matter of bad structural/institutional design, not white folks individually having too much power.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-...