Flipping the Script on Rape

So, rape.

Pop Culture Detective released a while back an interesting video essay on how abhorrent the trope of sexual assault of men played up for laughs is. It focused on male perpetrators of rape, especially in the painfully tired prison soap reference. It was a very difficult video to watch for me. Maybe it's because I'm a criminal defense attorney and the subject hits too close to home. I find it an atrocity that rape is used as an implicit extra-judicial component of prison punishment.

Then, the same guy releases a part two, about instances where women are the perpetrators. And I'll be honest, it was hard to focus on the message because I found nearly every example displayed extremely arousing. So maybe I'm just outing a kink I wasn't previously aware of, but I don't seem to be alone given how pervasive this trope is. South Park wouldn't have hit a nerve about this otherwise.

So we have an obvious scissor statement in the form of a media trope. Plenty of people (I gather mostly straight men like me) find the idea of an attractive woman raping a man a turn-on and this appears to be reflected in popular entertainment.

I think this raises a few interesting questions. Yeah yeah, double standard discussions have been pounded to the ground, but maybe that's the root of the discomfort and disagreement. There is an effort to argue that there is no material difference between men and women when it comes to sex, but the reaction to statutory rape predicated on the genders belies that. The legal system itself doesn't really know how to deal with it and avoids the inquiry altogether anytime it imposes a per se age of consent.

Let's pretend I'm thirteen years old. I can appear as mature, as coherent, as intelligent as I want, but society at large will not consider me capable of formulating sexual consent no matter how much of a tantrum I throw. It's literally paternalistic, but there are compelling reasons for it. But then we run into the same issues that Scott touched upon on a parallel issue with developmental disabilities. I'm an adult in my mid-30s and without any conditions or disabilities that would render incapable of consent. If you ask me today whether I would, retroactively, consent to having sex with an attractive adult woman when I was thirteen years old, I don’t hesitate to say yes. I find the prospect almost debilitatingly appealing. I was obsessed with sex around that age and would anticipate that I’d memorialize such an encounter for a while. But despite having almost the platonic example of Rawl’s veil of ignorance, it’s not really going to change anyone’s minds regarding the validity of my teenage consent. And I think the reason the trope still exists is because I'm not alone in that sentiment.

But maybe this is all hubris on my part. When Lil’ Wayne was asked about his first sexual encounter at the age of 11, he looked visibly traumatized and shaken despite an raucous audience hooting and cheering him on. I also have my own personal experience with sexual assault, or something close to it. I met up with an ex-girlfriend a while back whom I hadn’t seen in a while. I had no intent or desire of hooking up with her again, but she kept buying me shots and even winked at a guy at the bar who commented on how much alcohol she was giving me. We end up at her room where I collapse on her bed. She asked if I wanted to make out and I said yes, and she then proceeded to escalate it further into unprotected sex while I just laid there basically motionless. I was way too intoxicated to say anything, and had she asked if I wanted to have sex I would’ve said no. Yet, I was also into it about 30% of the way. It was uncomfortable after the fact and the rest of the weekend I flinched anytime she incidentally touched me, but parts of it were also really hot. I don’t know. She considers herself a big time feminist and was offended that I even considered that rape. She blocked me on social media before any substantive discussion about that incident. I never outed her or made a big stink about it.

Perhaps the current system’s intent is to keep Pandora’s box close. It creaks and groans at the margins when audiences laugh at or get titillated by men getting raped, but it’s stable enough to sustain itself in the long run.

There is this pressure to prop up the equivalence regarding rape of men versus rape of women. We're supposed to think they're both equally bad and while that may be the public face of we generally put forward, it doesn't seem to be what people actually believe. Accepting that female rape of men is not that bad relies on accepting foundational premises about the disparate cost and risk of sexual encounters for men and women and that fishing trawler will dredge up a whole lot more than just that.