A new study reveals that men are often the victims of sexual assault

Please clarify what you meant... citation would also be nice.

I don't think this is really a classic narrative regarding rape. If anything, a lot of discussion of late has focused explicitly around how that's so often not the case.

It's kind of sad that sexual assault and rape are oftentimes viewed through the lens of gender-based crimes. In reality, sexual assault and rape have nothing to do with gender, and should be treated as serious problems regardless of the sex and/or gender of both the victim and perpetrator.

Sexual assault and rape are almost entirely about gender, because the effects and circumstances surrounding the crime show quite a difference between men and women; there are typically different causes and different issues to face. For example, men have to deal with the fact that they're more likely to be rasped by another man, or that if they're subject to sexual assault by a woman, that they're likely to face a "you're a man, you can't be raped" attitude. These are different challenges from those faced by women.

I didn't comment when I saw this thread because I thought "well, that's common knowledge..." Interesting article on an important issue nonetheless.

I'm not downplaying the fact that men get raped. This is an important issue and people should be aware of it. I did upvote the thread.

See, this is why I really don't like it when this kind of issue appears on HN.

The headline said sexual assault, not rape, so presumably they are aware of this definition and chose not to invoke it. But this definition precludes the possibility of men being raped by women who force themselves onto the men.

[1]: http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/January/12-ag-018.html

Farther along, readers of the article find out, "The final outrage in Stemple and Meyer’s paper involves inmates, who aren’t counted in the general statistics at all. In the last few years, the BJS did two studies in adult prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities. The surveys were excellent because they afforded lots of privacy and asked questions using very specific, informal, and graphic language. ('Did another inmate use physical force to make you give or receive a blow job?') Those surveys turned up the opposite of what we generally think is true. Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse."

They don't - the downvotes (none of them mine) are because this is a somewhat dismissive mischaracterisation of the issue.

No reasonable person or group objects to discussion about issues that affect men. What they do object to—quite reasonably—is the often-associated attitude which runs along the lines of "Men suffer from <any problem> too, it's not a feminist thing!", which isn't really helpful.

The idea suggested by this article is that men are actually approximately as likely to suffer from sexual assault as women are. That's a perfectly valid possibility, and it's likely true.

But what's the general goal of a "feminist," if you can use such a broad term? Let's keep it simple, and say that "a feminist's goal is to further the cause of equal rights for women." Given that, why would we expect feminists to be talking about the effect of sexual assault on males? It's not their responsibility to do so, and I'm absolutely certain that most feminists would not object to male campaign groups which highlight the problem of male sexual assault. The problems which affect both genders, even in this area, are actually quite different!

The problem with these discussions is the ease with which one can focus on outspoken minority groups. The vast, VAST majority of feminists are not "anti-male"; that vast majority of men are not anti-feminism. It's easy to get carried away by overemphasising the views of minority groups.

Your comment is ultimately a meta version of that - in truth, there's very little opposition to discussing men's issues, but instead a fair bit of opposition to discarding womens' issues because "men have it bad too."

No, as thoughtful comments to you that preceded my comment in time[1] point out, your statement "In fact, any attempt to talk about the struggles of being a man is invariable associated with anti-woman rhetoric" appears to be factually incorrect, because a woman who appears to be a feminist is the main source interviewed for the article submitted here. A comment that deals more directly with what the submitted article says may perhaps help bring about more thoughtful discussion here, which is always the goal on Hacker News.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7669982

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7670097

Lewis could quite easily have been describing life in prison. I found it astonishing.

I would say it's especially relevant here, though not necessarily this particular story. The way women are treated online is still very, very much different from the way men are treated. And this has widespread and significant effects on damned near everything. Whether it's the structure and makeup of online communities (like this one) or the acceptance of women's voices in online gaming and tech journalism to the participation of women in hacking/development activities and the encouragement/discouragement they receive to do so, and so on.

Best thing you can do is just flag and move on, or log out and set your homepage to /best. FWIW, the founding father has moved on from the site, so what does that tell you about where its been headed?