Sex + Relationships

Erections Aren't Consent: What the New FBI Definitions Might Tell Us About Male Victims of Rape

By Hugo Schwyzer

January 11, 2012

Last week, to considerable fanfare, the FBI announced it was updating and expanding its antiquated definition of rape. Though rape is generally punished by criminal statutes in individual states, the feds are in charge of gathering crime data based upon a working definition of what constitutes a particular crime. Last updated in 1929, the FBI’s definition of rape had been “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” Rape that didn’t involve physical force didn’t count—and neither, of course, did rape against men. This didn’t mean that men weren’t legally protected from rape; it did mean that sexual assaults against males (by either women or men) were not as easily tracked.

The FBI is not the only federal agency that tracks sexual violence. The CDC also monitors rape and assault statistics, and just last month released a troubling and exhaustive report. According to its authors, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men will be victims of rape or attempted rape. Rape, as Soraya Chemaly wrote recently, “is in our air.”

The FBI’s long overdue acknowledgment that men can be raped and the now infamous 1 in 71 figure from the CDC, have been subject to intense criticism from men’s rights activists. Some point out, for example, that while both male and female victims often don’t report rape, men may well be even less likely than women to speak up about their assault. In the case of male-on-male rape (most rapists, regardless of the sex of their victims, are men), guys often fear physical retaliation, especially in correctional settings, if they report what they endured. And when men or boys have been sexually assaulted by women, men’s rights activists suggest that their fear of being ridiculed—or simply not being believed—keeps them silent.

Without getting mired in the tiresome debates over statistics, it’s safe to conclude three things from the recent data and the changed FBI definition. First, men make up a heavy preponderance of those who commit rape, though a significant minority of women does commit acts of sexualized violence. Second, women are statistically at much greater risk of rape than are men. Three, acknowledging these first two truths doesn’t diminish the reality that more men and boys than we realized are victims of rape and sexual violence. We need to avoid the twin errors of claiming false equivalence on the one hand, or denying the reality of male vulnerability altogether on the other.

Since I started volunteering as a peer sexuality educator as a 19-year-old Berkeley undergrad more than 25 years ago, I’ve heard many painful stories of sexual abuse from both men and women. Not infrequently, I’ve listened to college-age guys tell me stories of sexual encounters with women that, as they reported it, fell fall short of the gold standard of “enthusiastic consent.” These weren’t confessions of having assaulted women. These were accounts of being pressured to go “farther” than they wanted to go.

I never heard a story from a college guy of being held down and forcibly raped by a female peer. I didn’t hear about guns to the head or knives to the throat. But I’ve never forgotten the story of “Ian,” an 18-year-old whom I worked with when I was a Cal senior back in 1989. Ian came from a conservative Christian family; he wanted to be a virgin until marriage. Like many, Ian had a rather literal definition of abstinence: He was willing to do “anything but” penis-in-vagina intercourse.

Shortly after returning from winter break, Ian had hooked up with a female friend in his dorm room. Both had been drinking a little bit; clothes came off. While they were fooling around, this young woman told Ian she wanted to “pop his cherry” and take the last vestige of his virginity. He reminded her (they’d known each other for a while) that intercourse was off limits. But at one point, she suddenly straddled Ian, grabbed his erection, and slid his penis inside of her. He ejaculated within seconds.

Ian was devastated with shame. Though he was never sexual with this woman again, he couldn’t name what had happened to him as rape. Neither could I. He and I—and, from what I could tell, the woman involved—all operated on the assumption that when it comes to heterosexual sex between adults, an erection is evidence of consent. When I shared this story with one of the mentors for our peer outreach program, a nurse practitioner, she shook her head. “That was a very selfish and manipulative thing to do,” she said, describing what this woman had done to Ian. Selfish and manipulative yes, but not rape. She couldn’t call it that.

A lot has changed since 1989. For one, we’re more open about the reality of male vulnerability. I’ve told Ian’s story many times in classes and workshops. More than once, I’ve heard from women afterwards who’ve related anecdotes about pressuring male partners for sex. I’ve been asked, more than once, by voices charged with fear and horror and incredulity, “Is it possible I raped my boyfriend?” Friends of mine who work as full-time sex educators report hearing similar queries quite frequently.

Rape is, as we were reminded by the FBI this month, a word with a specific but evolving meaning. I’m leery about applying the term too quickly to Ian’s story, or to similar incidents that I’ve heard about from students of both sexes. But I have no problem saying that what happened to Ian fell well short of the enthusiastic consent standard that ought to be the sine qua non of every sexual encounter.

Ejaculation is not evidence of enthusiasm. Orgasms (both male and female) can be coerced. Those are truths that bear repeating. They are worth remembering not because we’re witnessing an epidemic of female-on-male sexual assault. They’re worth remembering not only for the sake of preventing the rare but real incidences of female on male rape, but for teaching all of us— especially men—that a partner’s physical arousal is not a sexual blank check.

I still hear the witticism that “a hard dick has no conscience.” This belief that men “think with their dicks” serves to make men (like Ian) vulnerable to sexual assault, just as it serves to excuse away the rapes that aroused men commit. For the sake of the small but suffering number of male victims—and for the far greater number of women who are the victims of men—we need to shatter this pernicious myth about the male body. Men are not so tough that they can never be sexually assaulted by women. And by the exact same token, they are not so vulnerable to lust that rape becomes physiologically inevitable.

Men, we need to acknowledge, are both much stronger and much more fragile than most of us were raised to believe.

Hugo Schwyzer has taught history and gender studies at Pasadena City College since 1993, where he developed the college's first courses on Men and Masculinity and Beauty and Body Image. A writer and speaker as well as a professor, Hugo lives with his wife, daughter, and six chinchillas in Los Angeles. Hugo blogs at his eponymous website and co-authored the recent autobiography of supermodel Carré Otis, Beauty, Disrupted.

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Posted in Current Events, nfti-home, Sex, Sex and Relationships, Sexual Violence

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Laurie A. Couture
04/28/12 at 04:44 PM #
I am appalled! The woman raped Ian clearly- He said NO, she put his penis inside of her against his will- THAT IS RAPE! Why would you write an article about raising awareness to male rape while calling a clear rape anything other than a rape? This scenario is much more common than you believe, but men do not report because of people like you who do not believe rape is rape- unless of course the sexes were reversed. Your article simply reinforced the myth that women can be as sexually aggressive as this wish, but it isn’t sexual assault or rape. Your article added to the suffering of men and it made it just a little bit more difficult for men to realize when they are victims and for them to heal.
Justin Cascio
01/18/12 at 11:24 AM #
Is your standard for rape “penetration against one’s will” or is it “being forced to perform a sex act against one’s will”? If you agree that the latter is also rape, then Ian was raped. It doesn’t take the FBI, the CDC, or your state to define it as rape, in order for you, as a human being, to acknowledge Ian’s pain. Calling it by some other name makes it seem to be something less horrible. That’s minimizing.
sine qua non
01/18/12 at 10:08 AM #
It seems that the FBI are backwards with the definition of rape. The International community have been using the same one since 1998.

“a physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive”

Maybe someone forget to tell them?

sine qua non indeed?

Truths that bear repeating.

One should examine both History and Gender Issues – and not just on a parochial basis.
BG
01/17/12 at 05:58 PM #
I’m not sure what everyone is so riled up about. Yes, the author did give a sentence with a handful of qualifiers (“leery about applying the term too quickly to Ian’s story”) that perhaps could be expanded upon, but this article is VERY CLEARLY advancing the position that Ian’s story IS materially similar to some stories of male-on-female rape.

And the revision of the FBI rape definition is a step in the right direction.

Thanks, Hugo, for this interesting article.
DavidByron
01/14/12 at 05:33 PM #
This article is misrepresenting the results of NISVS.

Specifically the NISVS recorded men and women raped in equal numbers over the 12 months prior to the survey (1.1% of sample) Again 79.2% of the men reporting they had been raped, said that a woman was the rapist. This information is easily verifiable on page 18/19 and the bottom of page 24 of the full report on the CDC website here:
http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf

This information has been pointed out to the author of this piece before. For example here:
http://goodmenproject.com/good-feed-blog/new-cdc-study-on-sexual-assault/
girlwriteswhat
01/14/12 at 02:57 PM #
According to Hugo Schwyzer, a man forcing sex on an aroused but clearly non-consenting woman is rape. A woman doing the exact same thing to an aroused but clearly non-consenting man is “not rape”.

With every article written by this “man” that I come across, I become more disgusted by the fact that he’s been entrusted with a position of “intellectual” authority, or the institutional power to teach anybody anything. I’m stymied as to which I find more appalling—his misandry or his misogyny.

Misandristic in his willingness to blame male victims, to ignore and dismiss men’s capacity to feel pain or even be wronged, and to undermine and attack men’s human rights in the service of being a good lick-spittle for his feminist “friends”.

Misogynistic in his eagerness to absolve women of the most egregious and toxic behaviors, as if they’re not even human enough to be expected to know the difference between right and wrong, or be held to any standard of basic decency.

After reading this last example, I feel like I need to scrub myself with some lye and a wire brush before my soul will be clean again.
Matt
01/14/12 at 02:27 PM #
I guess if a girl becomes wet while being raped by someone, it isn’t actually rape, right? Of course it is. An erection is the same thing. It’s just a physical response to stimulation.
Jake
01/14/12 at 01:54 PM #
“While they were fooling around, this young man told Sarah he wanted to “pop her cherry” and take the last vestige of her virginity. She reminded him that intercourse was off limits. But at one point, he suddenly straddled Sarah, grabbed her body, and slid his penis inside of her.”

Rape, much?
Eoghan
01/14/12 at 01:13 PM #
This is feminism promoting rape culture.

When someone forces another to penetrate them, it rape. Feminists can deny and deny it. The feminist lobby groups and the FBI can refuse to classify it as rape, and deny that it counts when women do it to men and children, but we know its rape.

Gendered rape is an illusion created by the way we define it, feminists create a rape and abuse culture by lying about abuse being gendered.
Anna
01/12/12 at 04:38 PM #
I’m not sure I understand your hesitation to label what happened to Ian as “rape.” It was an act performed against his will and without his consent. If the roles had been reversed – if the woman in the story had been physically aroused, yet indicated that she was unwilling to be vaginally penetrated and Ian had proceeded to do so – I don’t believe that that would be defined as anything but rape.

I guess I’m just confused by your affirmation that physical arousal does not equal consent, yet your inability to label Ian’s sexual assault as a rape.
Tamen
01/12/12 at 05:13 AM #
Schwyzer says he’s leery about calling what happened to Ian rape. I strongly suspect that he wouldn’t be leery of calling it rape if Ian had penetrated his girlfriend after they had agreed that intercourse was off the table. How anyone can claim that this is not a double standard is beyond me.

He states that the number of male victims is small and the number of female vicitms are large. He then mentions that not infrequently men talked to him about being pressured to go farther than they wanted and he has been asked more than once by women if what they did were rape and he says he knows a sex educator told him she got these questions not infrequently. But yet it’s so rare so rare.

Viewed in light of the “last 12 months” prevalency numbers from NISVS 2010 Report from CDC which showed that 1.1% of women reported rape and 1.1% of men reported “being made to penetrate someone else” and that 79.2% of them men who reported “being made to penetrate someone else” reported a single female perpetrator (p. 18-19 & p.24) I wonder if being leery of calling Ian’s experience rape is the only way Schwyzer could maintain the now dogmatic belief that the vast majority of rape victims are women.
GudEnuf
01/11/12 at 10:31 PM #
“He reminded her that intercourse was off limits. But at one point, she suddenly straddled Ian, grabbed his erection, and slid his penis inside of her.”

Sound it from the hilltops, Hugo Schwyzer doesn’t think this is rape.
GudEnuf
01/11/12 at 09:34 PM #
When I pointed out that black people assault white people far more often then the reverse, they called me racist. When I pointed out that men assault women more often than the reverse, they called me a feminist.