What About the Women?
Content Note: Rape, sexual assault, harassment, violence
(This piece is part of a wider body of work that I’ve been doing about gender and masculinity, which I am turning into a book with Unbound. You can preorder #MansplainingMasculinity here. That book can only happen with your support.)
This summer, I was working at a music festival when I sat down on a bench to look at my phone. I was on my own surrounded by people, and I was feeling generally overwhelmed. There were two women nearby leading people in what I would describe as a cross between interactive theatre, a drinking game and a team bonding exercise. They were gathering people into a circle. The person in the middle of the circle had to say something they’d done, and everyone who’d also done it had to jump up from where they were sitting and find another place in the circle; whoever couldn’t find a seat set the next disclosure. The women leading this activity were mic’d up, so I found myself sucked in by the sound and began observing the activity out of the corner of my eye. I noticed that one of the men from the audience seemed to be deliberately making sure he got to set a lot of the disclosures and was choosing statements related to sex. The two organisers made a few comments about him being a bit creepy with it, but these were presented as saucy jokes rather than admonishments, and he was allowed to keep doing it. After some time, the activity ended, and I went back to scrolling through Twitter.
The next thing I knew, one of the women facilitating the event was standing above me, blocking my light. I looked up and realised she was talking to me. It turned out she was trying to gather another circle’s worth of participants, but was finding it difficult. I told her I wasn’t interested. She kept pushing me to get involved. I told her I was socially awkward, and that this wasn’t my kind of thing, and she responded by crouching down in front of me so she could look me directly in the eyes, one hand placed on each of my thighs. I was wearing shorts, so her hands were touching my bare legs. I immediately froze and felt tension fill my body. The position she had taken — in addition to the non-consensual contact with my body — triggered memories of when I was sexually assaulted by a woman when I was 19 years old. Remaining in this position, she continued trying to persuade me to get involved; you might say she was doing so in a flirtatious way, although I don’t doubt that any flirting was a tactic to get me to participate. When I told her “no” more firmly, she removed her hands from my thighs. Once she’d done that, I found within myself the ability (which I have frequently lacked in my life) to articulate the issue. I said, “and please don’t ever touch someone like that ever again without their consent.” She looked at me, shocked, and shook her head. “I was just being friendly,” she said.
For the rest of my time at the festival — and for quite some time afterwards — I kept coming back to this sentence: “I was just being friendly.” This is part of the rape culture script, and it’s one we expect men to say. I was shocked that a woman would use this script and not be aware of the connotations and the history of that phrase. As a woman in the world, she is very likely to have heard the phrase used by street harassers or worse. Even if it has never been directed at her, it’s hard to imagine she hasn’t heard it on TV or read it on the internet. It’s possible, I guess. And it’s also possible that — at least on some level — she did notice what she’d said and what she’d done, although from the look on her face and the headshaking she was doing as she walked away, the impression I got was that she thought I was being unreasonable.
Although I am a survivor of sexual assault, I have also been a perpetrator of non-consensual acts. Occasionally as I was growing up, these acts were within the sexual arena, but most of them were not related to sex. We live in a non-consensual society, as the brilliant sex critical sex educators Meg John and Justin are always saying on their excellent podcast (and in other places). Because of this, consent is much harder (and much simpler) than we often think, as we’re trained pretty much from birth to ignore others’ consent. As someone who was systematically bullied at school and had experienced various traumas in my home life, I was familiar with people crossing boundaries and ignoring my agency and autonomy a long time before I was raped.
But I had also been socialised in certain types of masculinity, so before I was raped, I had myself engaged in Harrison Ford style attempts at kissing and in feeling like I was entitled to women in certain ways. I wouldn’t have used the phrase, but I definitely considered myself in the ‘friend zone’, an idea that devalues the concept of friendship as well as consent. When I managed to get 20 weeks of therapy from the NHS last year, one of the things we focused on was the complex feelings I have around trying to work out if a drunken grope I was responsible for happened before or after the night I was raped. They certainly took place within months of each other. I should make it clear (as my therapist regularly pointed out) that I have a tendency to present my bad actions in the worst possible light, and that whilst what I did during that incident was a betrayal that ended a friendship, it was less physically invasive than the woman placing her hands on my thighs at the music festival. I realised immediately that I had committed a violation, and stopped as soon as I understood what I’d done. Be that as it may, my motivation for this act came from a mix of jealousy, frustration, self-loathing and entitlement. Those are all things I believe to have been part of why my rapist behaved the way she did. Motivations and intentions, as we are all hopefully starting to understand, are not as important as effect, but they are important. They help us to work out ways to change ourselves for a start. I often wonder how my rapist sees what she did. Does she know that she raped me? Sadly, I think it’s unlikely that she does.
Initially, I didn’t see my experience of being sexually assaulted as a rape because it was committed by a woman, and I was a man. That’s actually an idea embedded into UK law, as legally only a person with a penis can commit rape. It’s also something that has filtered through to our attitudes to sex, in the sense that we only see penis-in-vagina-sex as sex. My rape was an act I would define as sex, but some wouldn’t because it didn’t involve a vagina. Regardless, both legally and socially, it would be seen as sexual assault. In theory at least: some people said to me when I finally began to tell my rape story that I must have wanted it, or that I must be getting things wrong, that it was impossible for men to be sexually assaulted by women.
When I made a show about masculinity and patriarchy that included a description of my assault and a discussion of the rape culture that helped create it, I thought that rape and sexual assault on men by women was much rarer than I now believe it is. Having done that show many times to different audiences, I have had lots of men disclose their own experiences of being raped to me. Many of those men were raped by cis women. Talking about this topic to more and more people, I have also heard from women, both trans and cis, about being sexually assaulted or raped by cis women. When I made a follow-up to the show to go out as a Radio 4 Four Thought piece, I was less sure that the numbers of cis men raped by women were as low as I’d previously thought. I do think fewer women rape, and that is partly to do with power structures, but I think more women rape than we think. And again, those rapes are related to power structures, and whilst we live in a patriarchy, that isn’t the only thing that creates power and entitlement. White women have power over black people. Cis women have power over trans people. Rich women have power over poor people. Able bodied women have power over disabled people. Straight women have power over LGB people. Power dynamics are situation-specific, so even if a man has power in some contexts, it doesn’t mean he has power in all contexts.
As Travis Alabanza put it when they were the guest on the podcast Busy Being Black:
“I think the way we talk about privilege at the moment is in these boxes of ‘I have this privilege, I have that privilege, I am oppressed by this.’ And I’m like that’s not how it works, girl! It’s situational. And there are many situations where the white woman can cause so much harm to you and you can do nothing… White women have an incredible power to weaponise patriarchy against black men.”
But because we live in a non-consensual culture which is also a patriarchy, men often don’t see themselves as having experienced rape or sexual assault when it was perpetrated by a woman. The idea that they can withdraw consent and assert boundaries is an additional damaging narrative to complement messages that are encouraging them to ignore the consent and boundaries of others. Manning up, being a man, being a real man, not being a pussy… these toxic myths result in men doing violence to themselves and others, but also in men not seeing the violence done to them as anything other than simply what happens to men. These gendered scripts are forced on everyone, and they are enforced by everyone. When I think of the ways I was bullied for not conforming to gender expectations, it is as much the voices and violence of girls and women as it is the voices and violence of boys and men that come to mind.
We are told that women aren’t violent (or at least that white, cis, middleclass women aren’t violent) and that is a script too, one which many of us know from direct experience isn’t true. We are also told that men are naturally violent, and that conditions us to think that boys will be boys rather than expecting and teaching accountability. The truth is that violence is something all humans are capable of, and it is also something that all humans are capable of resisting. I am pretty sure that as a woman living in the world, the woman who raped me will have also experienced violence perpetrated against her. I know that many of the women who have committed acts of emotional and physical violence to me were often doing so partly in response to violence enacted on them.
Within the highly important discussions and struggles we are currently having around patriarchy and rape culture, I keep seeing it stated that men are the danger and implied that women are not. I also keep seeing it implied that boys and men are safe, but that girls and women are not. Non-binary people aren’t mentioned much at all: this is wrong not only because it erases the existence of non-binary people, but because non-binary people, like all people, can be survivors and perpetrators of violence and need support. I definitely wouldn’t say that it has suddenly become a scary time for boys because boys are now potentially being held accountable for their actions, as was recently suggested by President Trump, a man who has made things much scarier for children and adults of all genders. I think holding people to account is incredibly important, although the age of a person is always a relevant factor when looking at the puzzle. But I think reacting to rape apologist nonsense by saying boys in general have it easy and are safe is a mistake.
As bell hooks says in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love:
“In patriarchal culture women are as violent as men toward the groups they have power over and can dominate freely; usually that group is children or weaker females. Like its male counterpart, much female violence toward children takes the form of emotional abuse, especially verbal abuse and shaming, hence it is difficult to document.”
Children and young people do not have power within society, and are always in danger of being exploited by those with power. It’s always a scary and dangerous time for children of all genders. Children are learning and developing, and shouldn’t be held to the same standards of accountability as adults; our brains are not even fully developed till our mid-20s. We need to increase the amount of children we protect and support, rather than decreasing it further. Boys are not safe: that is another myth. Boys are being sexually assaulted and raped, as are men. And it isn’t just men and boys who need to look at their attitudes and ideas around consent. We all need to be accountable and look at our sexual histories, re-evaluating and making amends where possible. I’ve been approached by cis women after my show who have had the same moment many men have had during the current re-emergence of the #MeToo movement: Oh shit! I did something like that, or I have done things on that continuum.
As a survivor of rape, but also as someone who has been a part of the other side of rape culture, I have found #MeToo to both trigger memories of my own assault and other moments of powerlessness, and to bring up guilt in terms of my own complicity. Some women have, I’m sure, experienced it this way too. But I fear not enough have considered their complicity, and if we are going to change our collective understanding of consent, that process needs to happen in all of us, regardless of gender.
Men have come forward and have generally been supported as part of the resurgence of the #MeToo movement created by Tarana Burke in 2006 and given a new prominence by Hollywood actors in 2017. Not that society has supported the men coming forward: most survivors who speak up are subjected to pushback and undermined in a myriad of ways, and that’s been the case for men too. To separate this issue firmly into genders is as much of a mistake as it would be to suggest that the way we socialise people into two binary genders with set roles and set powers plays no part in who abuses power. That a rich white man accused of sexual assault, who has been through no accountability process, can become a judge who gets to create laws that will hurt all people, particularly women, is both the system functioning as it’s designed to function and an example of how some men and boys are protected by rape culture and patriarchy. People are offering compassion to Brett Kavanaugh the boy when that boy has grown unchecked into a powerful man, compassion that is not offered to black boys like the wrongly accused Central Park Five. (One of the people who wrongly accuses them is both someone who has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women and someone who is currently the President of the United States.)
But when women have the same levels of power as men, they often abuse it in exactly the same ways, and they generally abuse people with less power (who are often women themselves). Female CEOs have been accused of harassment. The woman considered one of the top empathy researchers in the world has been accused of having no empathy for the women who work beneath her. Avital Ronnell was not only accused of harassment, but defended by other powerful people (many of whom were women, and one of whom, sadly, was Judith Butler) using exactly the same kinds of scripts that are used to defend powerful men. It isn’t just women we need to believe: we need to believe all survivors.
Even within the small percentage of people who make false rape allegations, power is generally a factor there too. The histories of white women falsely accusing black men and boys, and rich women falsely accusing poor men and boys, need to be taken into account (and let’s not forget black and poor are often categories that coexist within individuals). Shame and prejudice around sex and sexuality need to be taken into account. We need to look at power dynamics and ways that we can reach for justice, such as through restorative justice programs, with an understanding that losing a job is not the same as going to prison, especially when the person losing the job is losing the ability to have power over other people. I actually think that a few people being caught up unfairly (as long as it doesn’t involve imprisonment or violence) is a small price to pay for a real reckoning with the scale of sexual harassment and abuse within the systems of power that are around and inside us. But we are surrounded by power systems, and we also have to be wary that people will try to co-opt this important moment to re-enforce systems of violence.
As with Asia Argento, it is absolutely possible that people who have been violated will have violated others; we have to be able to hold these complexities in our minds. Those of us committed to challenging this culture have to do so whilst at the same time challenging the parts of the culture that we have absorbed into ourselves. For me to talk about my own rape and the ways that men are abused within society without acknowledging that I have, at times in my life, actively contributed to rape culture, would be setting myself up for a fall; it would also be a way of avoiding accountability and accumulating a form of power, which itself could be abused. When the accusations against Asia Argento first came out, I was dismayed to see evidence both of people trying to minimise them and people trying to dismiss the #MeToo movement because of them. It was highly triggering for me, taking me back to times when people had dismissed my experiences and playing into my fears that, by trying to hold a place for nuance around these issues in my work, some may dismiss the work altogether.
But I was heartened by the reaction of Tarana Burke:
And also by the words of Mona Eltahawy:
These responses should make it clear, both to people who claim to be arguing for “Men’s Rights” or who claim that feminism and women don’t support men who are survivors, and to white feminists/women who claim that only men abuse power, that their world views are skewed. Often organisations fighting to help men mitigate the effects of violence, abuse and mental health struggles are set up and championed by women and/or feminists, and the men (and some women) who claim to fight for men actually do very little to help men and often a lot to oppress women. It is often the case that women (including feminists) don’t evaluate the areas where they have power and privilege and see how they are complicit in systems of oppression.
We have to have these difficult conversations. And in a way, one of the functions of high profile men in power who abuse people, whether they get away with it or not, is to simplify things, to be for some, monsters and for others, poor maligned saints. To make things more binary. To force us to take positions that contain less compassion because that’s the only way it feels we’ll be able to survive the magnitude of the injustices we see. They allow us to avoid looking at ourselves, and in some ways, they even stop us from looking at the power systems they perpetuate. We may find ourselves, as I have done plenty of times in the past, blaming men rather than power. We may end up saying things like, “men are safe to walk the streets, but women are not,” which isn’t really true, as men experience violence and harassment on the streets, often because of marginalised parts of their identity and often from other men. They are harassed in different ways and for different reasons — like race, sexuality or not conforming to social expectations (although, of course, women and non-binary people face this harassment too) — but it is still the reality that many men are afraid to walk the streets, possibly more than admit to it because men are socialised not to admit to being afraid. Equally, whilst there are plenty of men who live in bubbles and who don’t fully understand how hard it is for people who don’t experience the world as safe, there are also some women who live in similar bubbles. We may think things like, ‘men are likely to be raped in prison’, and make endless horrible jokes about the violence they experience, but ignore the dangers that women prisoners face from guards and fellow inmates alike. Even worse, we may focus on this patriarchal idea that only people with penises can commit rape, and try to house trans women in men’s prisons, rather than working to make all incarcerated people safe from rape. We may say that all boys are safe when they’re living through their most vulnerable years. We may suggest that boys be taught consent rather than advocating for teaching consent to all genders (both when we are children and when we are adults, and not just in the context of sex but in all areas of life). These simplistic ways of seeing things do often make things less overwhelming, but they ultimately help the systems to remain the same.
But while we have to have difficult conversations, we also need to find ways to take the difficult actions that will result in changing the systems that allow rape culture to continue and to adapt. That won’t happen just by removing the power from individuals who use these systems to abuse people, but also by removing the structures that encourage and allow this abuse.
There are many fronts we have to fight on in order to become a society that respects boundaries, a society that doesn’t oppress people and that gives us the tools to both articulate our desire and to understand consent. The battles we have to fight are internal and external, simple and complex, not binary but filled with nuance, and they will be as painful as they are liberating. But they are battles worth fighting, and I have found from personal experience that fighting them can bring you joy as well as knock you down.
This article isn’t intended to say we are all equally damaged or that we are all in positions where we can fight these battles explicitly and safely. Rather, we are all locked into the same systems and, in that respect at least, these are communal battles to fight. Learning to be allies with each other whilst not erasing the different struggles we have is a big part of this fight. We need to strive for everyone’s liberation, and that also involves holding everyone — especially ourselves — accountable.
As Audre Lorde put it:
“You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.”
As I mentioned at the top of this piece, I will be collecting my work on masculinity together with the results of an anonymous survey I did of 1000 anonymous men’s thoughts on masculinity and patriarchy in a book called Mansplaining Masculinity, but I can only do that if enough people fund the project by preordering the book:
