Sexual Violence – Not Just About Men
By Mark O’Brien
I have been thinking recently about male sexuality and how it seems to have become one of the unmanageable things in our society.
The papers are full of assault, rape, men spiking drinks, child pornography, paedophilia, wanking in the sand dunes…
As a man it feels a bit embarrassing and sad to read of men’s lostness in the sexual arena.
My feeling is that it is a lot about power. It is well understood that rape is not so much a sexual act as one of assertion of power.
Why is it that men, who are after all supposed to be the more powerful of the sexes (physically at least), feel so powerless that they have to take it out on those who are ‘weaker’?
What is the collective wounding that makes men such bad guys, so immature as to wank in the sand dunes on the beach in the direction of some strange woman, so pathetic that they have to spike a woman’s drink in order to get laid, and force themselves on women, to have sex with a child, to break all the taboos?
Maybe they were born arseholes, or maybe their mother freaked them out, or some woman in their past castrated them (most women will know exactly what I am talking about – the little digs about sexual performance, size, the rejections, the ‘ho hums” that can be absolutely devastating to male sexual confidence).
Maybe they never learnt how to express themselves, and are afraid to try?
What I keep seeing is that it is not just about men. It is about their relationship with women, all women. Man and women have been cruel to each other for centuries, maybe forever. Man, being the physically stronger, has been the more obvious aggressor with women the usual victim.
Historically it is a fact that women have been seen as a prize of war, of power, and much pain has been visited upon them by man. Even now this is often still the case, except the war is a financial one, and the beautiful woman the prize for wealth.
This is perpetuated by the media, by men, and by women themselves who often as not will go with the man with the new car, the fancy house, or so the marketing gurus tell us.
Marketing of so many goods depends on the sexual factor; buy this and you will be more sexually attractive.
The same movie that makes women anorexic or bulemic to try to fit some stereotype, creates frustration in men making them sexually aggressive.
Perhaps these men have been molested themselves (50% of child molesters were molested themselves). Perhaps their mother laughed at their first erection, or cringed when their little boy showed the first signs of horniness.
Most likely they were never told by their father or any older man about how to intelligently deal with the charge they feel in their genitals.
Sometimes apparently successful men are driven by their sexual powerlessness. Nothing can make a man feel so insecure as being cut down, rejected by a woman, so an insecure man will avoid being in that position at all costs
One thing is sure though. Men who resort to sexual sleeziness feel powerlessness. (If they were feeling powerful, women would come on their own.)
The usual way to deal with powerlessness is to get angry, and in man’s case, to get violent, or have the threat of violence hanging over the other.
Sometimes men are so afraid of women that they will do anything to avoid confronting their fear.
They’ll pay a prostitute, go to a peep show, watch child porn … all these are ways to have a particular sexual experience without having to deal with a woman and all she represents, which is not all sweetness and light but including her judgements and her bitchiness.
Our society emasculates men and treats male sexuality as some kind of sickness. Little wonder that’s how it manifests.
There are lots of things where there are major double standards around sexuality, where some things are OK for women but not men.
• It is fine, even cool for a woman to have a dildo, and women can be quite open about it, even proud (“None of the men around can do it for me”.).
Yet if a man were to do the same, a la a rubber vagina, he would be laughed at, ridiculed (“Can’t you get a real woman?”), as though he was really weird, disgusting.
• The wanker in the dunes. If a woman is masturbating on the beach, who cares?
It is different, as men often direct their sexual energy towards a woman, but not necessarily. He’s more someone to feel compassion for rather than lock up.
Women feel threatened by these guys who wander along the beach with a boner, but really, he’s just showing his powerlessness and vulnerability, however he disguises and deals with it. I feel embarrassed for them, and for myself as a man.
And yes, some guys use the threat of their hard-on as weapon to intimidate women. And rapes do occur.
• Nude bathing. A naked woman is not likely to prompt any complaints, yet a cock dangling in the breeze will. The threat and the perceived threat are often very different, though I daresay they are often hard to distinguish.
Male sexuality has become politically incorrect, and that pushes it into the unconscious, into weirdness.
Man’s violence to women has been well documented, yet little is said about women’s violence; the rejections, the sexual withholdings (for whatever reason), the undermining, the nagging, the sexual and emotional blackmail, the threat of emotional storms which can be every bit as controlling as physical violence.
The law only recognises male violence, those wounds you can see. It does not recognise the different yet (almost) equally potentially devastating violence of women, the wounds you cannot see.
Male suicide rates are double that of women, while teenage male suicide rates are triple those of girls. It is related.
The woman who makes her man come quickly every time and then belittles him for not being able to satisfy her also plays a double game, that also indicates a wounding she carries.
One thing I would say is that until women accept some responsibility for men’s pain, in the same way as men need to accept responsibility for women’s, the cycle will roll on, and men will rape women, women will castrate men.
The games men and women play feed into each other, perpetuating the inter-sexual violence. Women remain the popular victims in the sexual wars, a position that is neither always true nor helpful.
I do not condone sexual violence of any sort, merely opening the discussion up.
First published in Here & Now magazine, May 02 issue
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