Where MRAs and Feminists Have Common Ground (and why it’s so frustrating that they aren’t feminists) Part 2: Male Victims of Sexual Violence

S.S. Borough
Aug 26, 2017 · 22 min read

TW, CW: Mention and discussion of sexual violence, rape denial, and rape apology.

Part 1: https://medium.com/@Ssudborough/where-mras-and-feminists-have-common-ground-and-why-its-so-frustrating-that-they-aren-t-feminists-11fb64f728b8

A review of relevant abbreviations:

MRA/MRM=Men’s Rights Activist/Men’s Rights Movement

EF=Everyday Feminism, probably the most expansive and most well-known feminist publication.

AVFM= A Voice For Men, one of the most well-known and recognized MRA publications.

ROK= Return of Kings, another well-known and recognized MRA publication.

MRM Movement Goal #2:

(2) Government programs that assist only women rather than both genders, especially those that give aid to female victims of sexual assault — MRAs claim that men who suffer the same abuse are often ignored;”

Since neither EF or the MRA websites discussed a lack of programs to help male victims of sexual violence in detail and because I think the bigger issue that this touches upon is the fact that sexual violence towards men isn’t taken very seriously in our society, in this blogpost I will be analyzing the MRA and feminist views on issues regarding sexual violence towards men.

I want to begin my discussion of this topic by saying that there is one common MRA viewpoint on the sexual violence towards men that I have chosen to omit for discussion because I found it so vile and despicable that it is not worth giving any ounce of legitimacy by taking the time to debunk an outrageous and evil claim such as this one. If you would like to know what it is, you are welcome to PM me about it.

Anyways, I also think it is important to point out that most of the citations in the MRA articles I am addressing lead you to either articles from the same website, reddit threads, obscure blogs with little to no actual citations, cherry picked articles from other countries, or as I found most commonly, 404 file-not-found pages. If you think I am exaggerating, go and see for yourself.

Generally, the MRA viewpoint on the rape of men and boys is that it is not given enough attention or taken seriously enough, and that feminists have a double standard based on gender when it comes to rape and sexual assault. I will begin with the most easily refutable claim that MRAs have on this subject: that is that feminists think that jokes about sexual violence towards men are funny. As stated in this ROK article: “What they omitted is that it isn’t that feminists don’t have a sense of humor, it’s that they don’t have a sense of humor about anything that affects women…Jokes about men,…in which they’re subjected to violence (even sexual violence), continue to be okay.”

EF has multiple articles that call out how messed up it is that we view men enduring sexual violence as funny: “It’s no secret that the rape of men is downplayed by the media and often made the punchline of jokes. Whether it’s a news commentator doubting the legitimacy of a survivor’s experience, or a crude joke on Tosh.O, the rape of men by women simply isn’t taken seriously in the public eye. But here’s the thing. Rape is never funny. Certainly not to survivors. And it should never be delegitimized or downplayed.” As is consistent with feminist ideology, EF maintains that rape jokes are never funny, and that our society has become particularly desensitized to the idea of men being subjected to sexual violence.

According to MRAs, another double standard feminists have in regards to sexual violence is the belief that when a woman has sex drunk, she is automatically a rape victim, while if a man has sex while equally drunk, he’s still a rapist. They claim that the feminist view that your ability to consent is compromised while drunk is used only to allow women to make rape accusations and is never applied to men. They claim that the biggest hypocrisy occurs when a man is accused of raping a woman while she was too intoxicated to consent but the man himself was also very intoxicated. As expressed in this ROK article:

“…when the genders are reversed, plenty of…women have alleged rape after consuming a handful of drinks. It doesn’t matter in these cases whether their (male) sexual partner drank four times as much. The common theme with all these cases is that men are never the victims. It’s a job description filled only by females. When it comes to alcohol,…consent is always presumed for men, both by the partners and the legal system.”

This particular article attempts to prove this claim by showing us a case where a drunk man was convicted of assault because he started doing sexual acts that his sexual partner did not consent to: “She herself said that Price (the male partner) ‘was very drunk, blind drunk’ and large numbers of men…have been convicted for having sex with women deemed too drunk to consent. The failure to reprimand Sandlin (the female partner) for an act that would have landed a man in jail for rape represents another victory for female privilege…How could Elizabeth Sandlin presume that Samuel Price was consenting if he was blind drunk?…Alcohol is not consent…unless you’re a woman having sex with a drunk male”

The first thing this author misses is that feminists do not assert that it is impossible to consent while drunk, just that it can impair one’s ability to consent and a partner’s ability to recognize consent or lack there of. As explained in this EF article:

“Is Sex Always Nonconsensual When People Have Been Drinking? The short answer is no. Plenty of people have wanted sex after drinking alcohol — and to pretend otherwise…disregards a lot of folks’ real experiences. But after someone is drinking, it does become harder to convey consent to another person — or to determine that a partner has consented to sex…What If All People Involved Are Drinking? Having multiple drunk people doesn’t cancel out the possibility that someone isn’t consenting to the sex taking place. And being drunk isn’t an excuse to commit a sexual assault…in situations where all people are drinking, charges are often brought against the person who is determined to have initiated sex, even if they’re also drunk.”

Thusly, the author is wrong that Sandlin would have automatically been accused of rape by feminists in this situation had the genders been reversed. The EF article does admit that charging the person who initiated the encounter often causes the male partner to be the person who gets charged. This can be problematic if both parties feel there were parts of the encounter they did not consent to, but in that case, the article explains later, both parties can be charged.

But that still begs the question, how do we know whether consent was given and accurately assessed? While people should generally be careful about making sure consent is given when either or both parties are drunk, what we should take most into account is the victim’s feelings after. The author of the ROK article completely ignores the fact that Price didn’t say he felt he had been victimized in any way during the sexual encounter. So while Sandlin could’ve been charged for rape had Price felt he was too drunk to give consent, he gave no indication that he felt he had been raped by her. Sandlin wasn’t prosecuted because Price never wanted her to be, not because of some feminist double standard.

The author of the ROK article also ignores the fact that the reason Price was charged wasn’t because Sandlin had not consented to the sex itself, it was because she hadn’t consented to the sexual acts he performed on her. According to The Daily Mail, “Samuel Price, 24, and Elizabeth Sandlin, 20, who had an on-off relationship, ended up in bed together after exchanging flirty texts on Valentine’s Day. But Price, who was drunk, ‘went too far’ and became rough — pulling Miss Sandlin’s hair and biting her on the neck…But once under the covers he bit her on the bottom and thigh, leaving a large bruise. At 4.30am, Miss Sandlin called a cab home and contacted police.”

Price assumed that since Sandlin had consented to sex with him that he was free to perform any sexual act on her without asking permission, and that is where he went wrong. As explained by another EF article: “If someone consents to one type of sexual activity, that doesn’t mean they’ve consented to any others. You always need to get permission. Consent can be withdrawn at any time.” So, in reality, there was no double standard going on in this instance, and Price was indeed in the wrong.

Another instance of this supposed double standard can be found in this ROK article, where the author claims that a particular college poster insinuates that “only men are ever guilty of rape by intoxication:” “This year an ‘old’ anti-sexual assault poster from Coastal Carolina University made the rounds online. It features two hypothetical students, Jake and Josie, who were both drunk and ‘hooked up.’ The poster then tells readers that Josie could not consent and Jake was charged with ‘rape’… Men are then warned that a woman who is intoxicated…cannot consent and that ‘proceeding’ is a crime.”

Certainly, it is understandable that one might be upset that this example was gendered. While it did not preclude the possibility that this situation could happen regardless of the gender of each person, explained the concept correctly, and would be useful on a college campus, it would be more helpful if it were made clear that the gender of each party in this situation could be any gender. However, one college poster that the college themselves called “outdated,” is certainly not evidence that “the moronic dissemination of the poster demonstrates how SJWs believe they are a world unto themselves…Eventually, the simmering prejudice boils up in a volcano of anti-male rage,” as the author later states.

This one example does not de-legitimize the widespread belief among most feminists that yes, women can rape men when intoxicated. As explained in yet another EF article: “The idea that victims, particularly male victims, actually want to be assaulted is the cornerstone of one of the more insidious myths about male rape, the ‘hot for teacher’ phenomenon that dictates that women never rape men, implying that men are always along for the ride. Anderson says he’s spoken with many men who are sexually abused by women who were told that they should ‘consider themselves lucky.’…‘somewhere around a third of men who are sexually abused as children are abused by women,’.” So, in fact, feminists do agree that women can rape men through intoxication or without.

The third double standard MRAs claim that feminists have in regards to sexual violence is that feminists refuse to call it rape when the victim is a man. One particular article gives two pieces of evidence. The author contrasts the outrage among feminists about the Steubenville case and the lack of response by feminists to the two cherry-picked cases they present in the article. The author presents this as evidence that feminists refuse to see men as victims of sexual violence or women as perpetrators.

The first example they give is a case where two teenagers anally raped another teenager with a pencil (we’ll call it the Norwood case from now on). The author asserts that this incident should have received the same coverage and outrage from feminists that the Steubenville case did. They are correct that the Steubenville case got national coverage while this incident barely got local coverage and that there was much more outrage over the Steubenville case. But maybe there’s a good reason for this?

Firstly, in the Norwood case, the perpetrators were barely high school aged and received juvenile detention, which is essentially the harshest punishment for their age. In the Steubenville case, the perpetrators were young adults who were given only a year to two years in juvenile jail which isn’t even close to the maximum sentence for rape. In the Norwood case, the perpetrators were probably troubled kids more interested in embarrassing the victim than raping them given that supposedly hazing was common at the school. In the Steubenville case, the perpetrators not only took sexual pleasure in taking advantage of a girl incapacitated from drinking too much, but they took pictures of the incident, spread the pictures around, and bragged about their exploits.

The author also rather desperately tries to misconstrue the reactions of locals in the Norwood case to make it seem like that of the reactions of locals in the Steubenville case: “Notice that the community’s response was to defend the perpetrators by citing a perceived tolerance for hazing. The parents weren’t angry about the environment to which their children were being subjected. They came forward to argue that being protected from it was a form of special treatment.”

Here’s what the author’s own cited article actually said about the local reaction: “That call landed the two brothers in juvenile detention, something that has some parents and students enraged, saying hazing incidents happen all the time and the principal turns the other cheek. Only reacting now because his son was the victim…There were about 60 people at the meeting, a lot of them saying the principal needs to be fired for letting hazing take place all the time with no consequence.” Clearly, the parents in Norwood were not upset because they thought being protected from hazing was special treatment, but because they knew hazing had been a continuing problem at the school and were upset that the principle did not take actions against hazing until his son was the victim.

Conversely, in the Steubenville case, locals and even the people reporting news on the case were sympathetic to the perpetrators. Even CNN, a fairly liberal media outlet, famously made a huge faux pas when one of their reporters, Poppy Harlow, said it was “Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart…when that sentence came down.”

Feminists were outraged by the Steubenville case because so many people, both local and national, were blaming the victim and protecting and sympathizing with the perpetrators. From the police to the football coaches to the judge, the perpetrators were getting off easy. In the Norwood case, it was merely a matter of a neglectful principle. The comparison of the Norwood case to Steubenville fails on every level.

The second example this author gives is even more ridiculous. They claim that feminists would have been outraged that a gay highschool senior named Kaitlyn Hunt had sex with a freshman girl if Hunt had been a boy. Technically, yes, this was an adult having sex with a minor because Hunt was eighteen and her lover was fourteen. But let’s be honest for a second. Wide-eyed fourteen year old freshman girls naively and willingly date and, unfortunately, have sexual relations with eighteen year senior boys in their high school all the time. Sure, a minor’s status as a minor is reason to doubt their ability to consent, but that doesn’t mean that every time this happens it is not consensual. Feminists would be crazy to get outraged every time an eighteen year old senior has sex with a fourteen year old freshman. That’s why they don’t.

What we find in all of these article is that MRAs love finding random, cherry-picked examples of feminists not reacting to a case of sexual violence (or in some instances cases that aren’t sexual violence) and misconstruing feminist ideology to try to make it look like feminists are hypocrites.

An even more insidious claim MRAs make in regards to feminism and sexual violence towards men is that feminists want to define rape so that it only applies to women and not men. One piece of evidence given in this AVFM article is that Mary P. Koss, who has been influential in studies and of rape, specifically defines rape only as forms of penetration and does not include what they call “being made to penetrate,” meaning, a situation where a man is coerced into penetrating someone else with his penis.

In this they are correct. Koss has been influential in our culture’s ideas of rape whether we know it or not. And while she may not be strictly feminist as these MRAs claim, she certainly has been influential to feminist thought, at least indirectly. MRAs claim that she has influenced parts of our government into agreeing with her belief that a sexual violence is not rape without the victim being penetrated, and while there’s no proof of this, she has served on many CDC committees and panels and it would be naive to assume that her beliefs did not influence her actions when on these committees and panels.

This is a unique moment in which we finally have a claim made by MRAs that is mostly true without being misleading. While that particular article did not show how Koss has personally affected anything, one of the author’s contemporaries did find examples of her viewpoint affecting government research on rape. This author points out that not only do the DOJ and FBI definitions of rape not include “made to penetrate” in their definition of rape, but that the NISVS (National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey) also does not. This is quite alarming considering these are the statistics used by the CDC.

Another article on the subject, written by rape apologist and anti-feminist Cathy Young, goes even deeper into this study and finds: “when asked about experiences in the last 12 months, men reported being ‘made to penetrate’ — either by physical force or due to intoxication — at virtually the same rates as women reported rape (both 1.1 percent in 2010, and 1.7 and 1.6 respectively in 2011).” If this is true, then it is possible that men are experiencing sexual violence at rates comparable to women, and that is something that we should all be aware of.

(I think it is worth noting that the government isn’t totally blind to men being victimized by being “made to penetrate.” Firstly, the study in question clearly thought of it as relevant to sexual violence because they included it in the study. Secondly, the government compiled studies on sexual assault and rape in 2014 and concluded that there are a lot more men victimized sexually by women than we think. Thirdly, most states define rape merely by “unwanted sexual intercourse” and not by penetration, thus “made to penetrate” would count at rape under most state laws.)

But the question remains, is it because of feminists that the government is not including “made to penetrate” in it’s definition of rape? Let’s see what feminists have to say on the definition of rape. Of the three EF articles I could find that were addressing only male victims of sexual violence, all of them go into detail about how women committing sexual violence against men is more common than we think. But even more important is the fact that in one of the articles we even find the exact same statistic quoted by Cathy Young:

“Fact three: Sometimes women are the perpetrators. According to the CDC’s 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 93.9 percent of men who reported being raped also reported male perpetrators. However, when the CDC also asked about men who were made to penetrate, 1 in 21 men reported that, yes, that had happened to them, and 79.2 percent of those perpetrators were female. Similarly, among men who reported being sexually coerced, over 83 percent of those perpetrators were also female.”

Interestingly, two of the three EF articles discuss an important issue regarding male rape that is barely mentioned in any of the MRA articles- the idea that just because a man is erect does not mean he is enjoying a sexual encounter or that he has not been raped or assaulted. As explained by one of the articles:

“1. An Erection Does Not Equal Consent. Let’s start here: Not all men have penises, and not all people with penises are men (because not all people are cisgender!). However, the social myth that it’s impossible for men to be raped by women comes from the (oppressive) assumptions that 1) all men have penises and 2) erect penises are always signs of sexual arousal and consent. But despite what people will tell you, it is physically possible for someone with a penis to be raped by someone with a vagina. The scientific truth is that men can have a physiological response to sexual coercion even if consent has not been given or desire does not exist. Research shows that deep fear and traumatic stress, coupled with the physical stimulation of an assault, can result in involuntary erections or ejaculations.”

I think it is safe to say that feminists believe that men are raped by women more than is generally presumed and that they accept “made to penetrate” as being a form of rape.

Once again, one of the more frustrating parts of analyzing MRA opinions is seeing MRAs recognize how the gender roles they prize end up hurting men. Both feminists and MRAs seem to agree upon why it is that male victims of sexual violence are not taken seriously. One of the MRA articles hits the nail on the head:

“Much of the response to male victims can be attributed to common misconceptions and myths about them, with consent considered a given, the presumption that when it’s not, all he has to do is resist, the treatment of his body’s reaction as indicative of his intent, and ignorance of the danger a rapist does or does not present to a male victim. This contributes to under-reporting by male victims by making it hard for them to think of themselves as victims, much less advocate for themselves, by shaming them into silence, and by shaping the professional response when victims do come forward…

Another reason for the double standard male victims face is the expectation of male stoicism; when faced with an adverse condition men are presumed better equipped to withstand adversity than women. From childhood, they’re taught that when faced with adversity, in order to be “real men,” they should disregard their own suffering and continue offering their contributions to society as if undamaged. ‘Tough it out,’ says society…

Male victims who report sexual assault often face dismissal and ridicule by people who refuse to believe that a man can be overpowered by a woman, who consider admission of having been victimized an unbecoming show of weakness, who question or attack his sexuality in response to his complaint, or who assume that a man’s presumed toughness makes the violation he suffered less than a woman would suffer from the same type of attack.”

EF’s explanation of this problem is almost identical:

“Myth 1. Men and Boys Can’t Be Victims. This myth is largely the result of traditional definitions of masculinity and the socialization of our boys from an early age…Those norms vary to some degree, but they rarely stray from the prescriptions about toughness, and a renunciation of fear, vulnerability, helplessness — precisely the emotional states that accompany sexual abuse… There is an added layer to this for men who are abused by women…[m]ale victims often feel as though there must be something ‘not right’ with them if they did not want or enjoy the attack.’ The shame and confusion that results from the disconnect between what victimized boys or men feel and what they think they should feel makes it less likely for them to disclose the abuse, reinforcing the silence and the myth that males cannot be victims.”

And again:

“4. Survivors Who Are Men Are Even Less Likely to Report Being Assaulted. Survivors of sexual assault who are men are much less likely than women to report it to the police. There are many reasons for this, all grounded in society’s fucked up teachings about gender. Sadly, some men may not even realize that a crime has been committed against them. According to sexual assault researcher Garnets, ‘because most men have internalized the social belief that the sexual assault of men is beyond the realm of possibility…men have trouble accepting their rape experience as real, not only because it happened to them, but that it happened at all.’…

Other men may feel that they have lost their manhood as a result of being assaulted and experience profound shame and embarrassment, causing them to stay silent. Many straight men don’t speak out due to fear of being ridiculed as gay because they weren’t interested in sexual advances from a woman. Project Unbreakable has chronicled some of the horrible things that male survivors have been told by their rapists and their supposed ‘support systems.’ One survivor’s ex-fiancé told him to ‘man up’ when he panicked after seeing his rapist for the first time in the eight years since the rape occurred. Another young man was told by his rapist, ‘You’re a guy. You can’t say no to a girl like me.’”

The only difference between the MRA article’s explanation and the EF articles’ explanations is that the EF articles openly cite traditional gender roles as the cause of the lack of reporting by male rape victims, the reason they can often feel ashamed of the trauma they are experiencing, and why sexual violence against men is often not taken seriously. One again, we see an MRA espouse a practically feminist viewpoint while narrowly avoiding tying in that what is causing the problem is the oppressive gender roles that feminists fight against and that MRAs embrace.

This author in particular even tries to frame gender roles in such a way that it sounds like they are beneficial to women:

“In female perpetrator, male victim circumstances, the attitude toward the victim is exacerbated by social attitudes toward the roles of the sexes in the context of a sexual encounter, in which males are presumed interested, and females are presumed reluctant. It’s expected that a woman’s consent will be sought, while a man’s right to consent or deny is ignored. Men are seekers of consent, and women are gatekeepers…As a result, the social response to male rape victims is hampered by the idea that it’s abnormal for a heterosexual man to not automatically consent to any sexual contact from a woman. While society treats “no” as the default answer for women, until a “yes” is earned and offered, the default answer for men is treated as “yes,” leading to a tendency to disbelieve men who report being victimized.”

The irony of this misleading passage on gender roles is that this is the same article that compared the Steubenville case to the Norwood case. Because of this, the counterexample to this assertion is right there in their own article. If women were always presumed to say “no” and that answer was respected, the Steubenville case would never have happened. In fact, a woman’s right to refuse sex is so disrespected that in the Steubenville case, people believed it was the victim’s fault for “letting” the football players rape her while she was unconscious. They believed that the fact that she let herself get so drunk that she became unconscious meant she was “asking for it.”

In our society, a woman’s “lack of a no” is considered a “yes” even if she isn’t conscious to give an answer. And even when she does say “no,” oftentimes men persist because they believe she’s “playing hard to get” and that she must really mean yes because everything from the clothes she is wearing to the fact that she smiled at them meant she was attracted to them.

One very important commonality among these MRA articles that I have yet to mention is that in almost all of these articles, the authors devoted a significant portion of their articles to asserting that women commonly make false rape accusations as a means to assert power, that women are subjected to sexual violence less than we think they are, that lots of situations we think of as rape, such as a man having sex with a woman too drunk to consent, are not actually rape, or just simply decrying feminists and feminist ideas in general. Examples:

  1. In this article on how feminists supposedly try to define rape not to include men, the last third of the article is devoted to discrediting feminists, including this passage: “It’s no wonder feminists have fought so hard to keep rape laws and sexual misconduct policy from treating male and female perpetration equally. These laws and policies have created an environment wherein women can and do abuse the power of the vulnerable woman/dangerous man concept by using false accusations as weapons in minor disputes and in custody battles, tools of revenge, or an alibi for cheating, or even just for attention.”

2. In this AVFM article, the accusation against Mary P. Koss, who has not openly identified as a feminist, is headlined: “Mary P. Koss, Feminist Rape Apologist.”

3. This AVFM article, which is supposedly focusing on how horrible it is that jokes about men facing sexual violence are acceptable, devotes five out of nine paragraphs to mocking the idea of rape culture and claiming that women are not raped as much as we think: “‘One in four women is raped in their lifetimes,’ yet the methodology behind that go-to scare statistic has been repeatedly debunked and the figure revised enough times to eliminate any credibility. Women should be able dress how they please, act how they feel like, be as drunk as they want, go where they want (at whatever time they want), yet bear zero responsibility for their own safety.”

4. Half of this ROK article, which is supposedly about calling out authorities for not arresting Elizabeth Sandlin for rape, is spent critiquing “Feminist Crusader Allison Saunders.”

5. This article ROK, which is claims to be critiquing a college poster that insinuates that men can never be the victims of drunk rape, spends most of the article asserting that the idea of drunk rape is just a means to convict men in “rape tribunals:” “Because affirmative consent, which sinks male due process rights to a depth lower than the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, is even more euphemistic than the US missile dubbed “The Peacemaker,” the removal of an explicit poster about exclusive male responsibility and criminalization only of their behavior does not negate how this concept is still used to falsely label men as rapists.”

And these are just examples from the articles I encountered that were supposed to be about sexual violence towards men or ideas surrounding it. This doesn’t even cover the endless articles produced by these websites that are openly about critiquing feminism. I’m not going to spend the time refuting their attempts to downplay sexual violence against women as there is plenty of evidence to show that this is a widespread and pervasive problem.

It is important to note how much time these articles spend “taking down feminism and it’s ideology” and how it is weaved into all their so-called “activism” even when the focus is supposed to be on male victims. It reveals something key about MRA “activism”- it is as much about reacting against and trying to discredit feminism as it is about combating gender inequality issues that affect men. Honestly, I’m not convinced a lot of these authors even care very much about male victims of sexual violence.

One can easily see the difference between feminist activism, which is actually about helping victims, and MRA activism, which is largely reactionary. The fact that the EF articles on sexual violence towards men all provide resources for male sexual assault victims and their families and spend a large portion of their articles on the experiences of the victims while the MRA articles spend a quarter to a half of their articles simply trying to prove feminists wrong cements this. MRAs feel a need to downplay the issues of the movement they oppose, while feminists focus their activism on victims of all kinds without trying to de-legitimize another movement’s concerns.

So, what do we learn from all of this? Firstly, we know that MRA’s like to cherry-pick examples from anywhere they can find them to try to find some kind of feminist double standard that doesn’t actually exist. Secondly, feminists agree with MRAs on many issues surrounding male victims of sexual violence. Thirdly, like we saw with gender bias in family court, MRAs choose to frame issues in such a way that only the ways that sexism harms men are acknowledged while avoiding how the gender roles they idolize are the culprit of this sexism. Lastly, MRAs are as or possibly more concerned with rallying against feminists and feminist ideas as they are with actually helping men who are harmed by gender inequality because their movement is less about activism than it is about being a reactionary anti-feminist movement.

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S.S. Borough

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