My Website is a Bystander-Free Zone

In 1986 I joined Men Stopping Rape (MSR). MSR was a community-based men’s activist anti-rape group in Madison, Wisconsin founded in 1983. Our prime focus was on educating teen boys and men since it is males who commit the vast majority of sexual assaults. This I learned was primary prevention—intervening preemptively to address the problem at the source—by educating potential perpetrators before sexual assaults are committed. Educating all boys and men was necessary since all of us grew up in and live in a rape culture. Rape culture? You might say that in the past there were victims of rape but no perpetrators of rape. Of course there were perpetrators but there were multiple institutional, religious, cultural and legal mechanisms set up to allow and even promote rape by defending and exonerating perpetrators for whom there was no punishment or preemptive education.

In ancient Babylon, Assyria, and Israel, there was no concept of forcible rape or aggravated sexual assault. Instead of being understood as an act of violence, rape was seen as sex out of wedlock, adultery, and condemned and punished as such. Frequently the woman who was raped was put to death; sometimes victim and perpetrator were both put to death. Never was the perpetrator alone executed. The resistance of the victim was ignored, first by the perpetrator and then by authorities. Biblical text and practice allowed rapists to avoid punishment by marrying their victims. The feelings of rape victims about being forced to marry their perpetrators were never taken into account. The capture and rape of slaves were common, accepted practices. Many of these rape-supportive beliefs and practices hang on tenaciously today. 

Rather than speak out against and forbid rape, the Bible and those men who ostensibly spoke in the name of their God(s) made rape a commercial transaction, as they codified solely financial penalties for rape. When priests, patriarchs, rabbis and other religious leaders were the authorities or controlled the secular authorities, the most stringent penalties for rape were fines based on the damage to the females who had been raped which diminished their usefulness and trade value. Remember, in those good old Godly days, women were chattel, owned property who had no autonomous rights.

There was a complex formula to determine the fines. The lowest level of the recompense scale was when the victim was a servant. It was recognized that her value to her owner was compromised by her rape and therefore he was entitled to compensation from the rapist. The largest fine was paid to the father of a virgin female. If she were raped, the diminution of her expected dowry and generally degraded “marketability” justified the larger fine paid to her father. 

There is no record of punishment for slave owners who raped or even killed their slaves. Those were absolute rights granted slave owners. In The Doctrine of Discovery, during the 1400s the Vatican gave explicit permission for Roman Catholics to capture and own slaves. Slavery was approved of as long as it was done in order to convert the slave(s) to Christianity. The absolute right to own and rape other humans carried down through history to the US where the rape of slaves continued.

Throughout history, it was said about girls and women that, “She got herself pregnant,” and even that, “She got herself raped.” Girls and women were thus warned that pregnancy and rape were always her fault, that if she were impregnated or raped, she would be held responsible for her “failure” to set limits on a male’s behavior. The presumed impossibility of educating males or stopping them from rape, reinforced notions of the inevitably of females becoming sexually-assaulted. That girls were held responsible for the abusive acts of men was one of the most putrescent features of that cancerous, male-privileging belief system, Patriarchy. 

It was as if females were doing the wrong thing, and that that was why they had been assaulted, not the males who committed the sexual assaults in the first place. There was never education directed at males—as perpetrators or survivors. Girls were mostly warned about the menace of strangers when, then and now, most of those who would hurt and betray them were males known to them.

Meanwhile, the Patriarchy defended the absolute right of males to act as they pleased, impregnating or raping. Males were just doing what evidently came naturally, sticking their penises into whomever they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. There has never been any real, substantive education created to teach boys to take responsibility for their acts. That he chose to act was sufficient grounds to pretend that the act were consensual in a world where there was never an expectation that he would at very least first find out if the act was consented to. This pre-intercourse “check-in” would have been utterly unthinkable in the distant past, and is only slightly less so unthinkable today. We still need to include the unfamiliar concept of consent in law because of its rarity. 

The birth control pill was developed in the face of the refusal of hundreds of generations of males to take any responsibility for their part in causing pregnancy. Condom use would address male responsibility for pregnancy and blithely spreading Sexually Transmitted Infections. Attempts at birth control had always been a female secret and was of course the sole responsibility of females, not males. Male refusal to use condoms and take responsibility for their contribution to pregnancies resulted in untold numbers of deaths of girls and women because of forced pregnancies, illegal abortions, and suicides. Since birth control for females is much more dangerous than a condom, it is outrageous that the ongoing debate on abortion seeks to solely regulate female sexuality and lives, never the slightest regulation of male sexuality and lives. None of the anti-abortion discourse is about enhancing women’s lives. It is all about controlling women and is anti-birth control. The goal is women being kept pregnant and obedient and dependent on males.

Abortion is necessary and is too often a desperate, last resort because of men’s privilege and learned capacity to divorce sex from its consequences, our ability to amorally compartmentalize sex from the partner with whom we are sexual. Males’ sanctimonious display of fake virtue about abortion only reveals the hate and ambivalence about sex, females and what it means to be a man held by males, while providing a smoke-screen to defend business as usual for males. The very existence of and continuing need for abortion shows starkly the systemic hypocrisy rampant in male culture. Male refusal to take responsibility for their contribution to making a baby is the entire problem.

The US is presently in the midst of another orgy of attempting to control the bodies and lives of girls and women, competing to see which state can pass the most heartless, stringent law constraining abortion access. These laws do not address any urgent need—they are only punitive and serve to greatly exacerbate problems. These hateful laws only make women’s lives more difficult. These hateful laws only make the lives of the babies carried to term more difficult. There is already insufficient health care for newborn babies and their mothers. There is insufficient emotional and financial support for the babies and their mothers. Once the “sacred” fetuses are born they are on their own, to be neglected by our system which devalues babies and mothers. Blinded by their desire to control women, many anti-abortion partisans prefer live fetuses to live women. 

Not one of these laws addresses male responsibility regarding the pregnancy. As long as birth control use by males is optional, abortion is a necessity. As long as few if any anti-abortion partisans insist that their sons take responsibility for the babies they help make, abortion is a necessity. Until a time where most pregnancies are consciously planned for and desired by both parties involved, abortion is a necessity. As long as few if any boys are hearing older males talk about the joys and challenges of raising children and few boys hear anything other than that relationships and children are onerous and “the death of sex,” abortion is a necessity. Until we teach young boys the skills necessary to be good, nurturing, present fathers by buying them dolls and encouraging them to play with and nurture and love their “babies,” abortion is a necessity and men will continue to struggle to be better fathers than were so many of their fathers. 

It must be raining assholes today! Rep. Steve King told an Iowa crowd Wednesday (8/14/2019) that humanity might not exist if not for rape and incest throughout human history. “What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape or incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?” he said at the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, Iowa. “Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages taken place and whatever happened to culture after society I know I can’t certify that I’m not a part of a product of that.”

The sex which Patriarchs celebrated and taught never imagined intercourse beginning when an enthusiastic female invited a male to enter her. Nor did Patriarch-approved sex conceive of intercourse beginning only after that explicit, uncoerced invitation. Never was it said of intercourse that, “She engulfed his penis.” Intercourse was only seen as an active male penetrating a passive, preferably inert female. Patriarchal sex cast women as an outsider, an incidental observer of the sex being done on her and to her. Females were seen as the less-than-human recepticle for male-defined and controlled sex. 

In the distant past, the idea of female as initiator of sex would have been inconceivable to men. This was an outgrowth of complete male ignorance of the clitoris and female pleasure. It would have been received with complete bafflement and hilarity. It flew in the face of the known “truth” that females lacked a sex drive. Simultaneous to that unfounded typification, was the fear of voracious, unbridled female sexuality. Women were insatiable and all expressions of their deeply sexual natures needed to be tightly controlled. Men have feared, misunderstood and misrepresented female sexuality for millennia. (I am reminded of the stage name Virginia Dentata, an exotic dancer who I saw referenced in a book I read.) Controlling female sexuality was paramount. Forced clitorectomies are an extreme, grotesque manifestation of that hate and fear of female sexuality.

Throughout recorded history, and to this day, in common usage among males, there are no positive words or phrases used to name and celebrate a sexually-active female. And, no, “slut,” “ho (whore),” and “nymphomaniac” do not qualify as positive even if thousands of teen boys cited them to me as positive when I asked.

The perversion of rape to a mere act of sex and not as a debased, felonious misuse of power, grew out of and reinforces ideas by which we are all still oppressed. Remember the long history that treated rape as adultery. This refusal to see rape as anything more than sex persists. In his first statement about the deluge of news about the sexual assaults committed by US clergy, Pope John Paul II said that the worst thing about it was that the clergy had broken their vows of celibacy! In saying this, he revealed his deep ignorance and total lack of empathy for abused children. To him, the acts of rape of children were the same as consensual sex acts and that the most important aspect of that “sex” was the clergy losing their virginities!!! The next day he emended his outrageous statement to deliver platitudes about the poor children (you remember, those poor children that the church had utterly failed to protect for generations.) But the framing of rape and sexual assault including the assault of children as being “sex,” and not a betrayal, a criminal misuse of power and control, persists. I feel we can say that many people still cannot even see that rape is not sex; that rape debases sex into a crime, turning a penis into a weapon.

Recently, the emeritus Pope Benedict, (who was Cheney to John Paul II’s Bush), chimed in to reinforce the “rape is sex” canard. In his effort to further delay the Church from having to finally take some long-overdue responsibility for allowing and covering up for massive numbers of sexual assaults committed by criminal clergy, he casts blame ridiculously upon the wrong perpetrators and their supposed motives. He held high positions of power in the Church hierarchy for decades and helped cover up reports of clergy sexual assaults and did little to help end sexual assaults perpetrated by clergy. Attempting to deflect attention from himself and from the Church hierarchy as a spectacularly out of touch old boys network that has always defended any and all crimes perpetrated by clergy no matter the immorality and illegality, he attacks gays, permissiveness, and that most appealing, all-purpose target, the 1960s. 

The abuses committed by clergy have gone on for generations. They didn’t start in the “permissive 1960s.” I am reminded of a college student who came up to me after a speech I had just delivered. He was holding a Bible and waving it in my face. He asked me where I stood on it? I responded that I didn’t think it was respectful to stand on the Bible. (OK, my flippant remark wasn’t my best moment. I was tired immediately post-speech and there were other students lined up to ask me questions that presumably were not kindergarten level, theological posturing. Anyway, my snarky response went over his head.) He then asked me if I wanted to know when rape started? I responded that I was all ears. He said, “Rape started in 1952. That was when prayer was taken out of the schools.” I didn’t have the time or energy (I had another session starting in five minutes) to debate with him how many rapists could dance on the head of a pin. I did point out that it was more than ironic that he was holding a reprint of an ancient book that is full of rape while ahistorically insisting that rape “started” in the 1950s.

Benedict’s historical revisionism is wrong on so many levels. The sexual assault of girls and women have long been ignored and almost seen as normal. If all the survivors of abuse committed by clergy were female, there would be even less attention paid to the assaults, not that the assaults committed against boys and men are taken particularly seriously either. If the sexual assault of males (or females) were taken at all seriously, wouldn’t there be prisons full of assaultive clergy? There are not. Wouldn’t there be pre-emptive education of seminary students, to try to protect them as students while teaching them how to understand and teach consensual sex in church schools? There is none. According to his effort to deflect attention away from the long-standing institutional protection for all perpetrators, Benedict blames gay men. In his sad, confused fantasy, gay men are sexually assaulting girls and women as well as boys and men! There are no doubt gay clergy, some of whom commit sexual assault. But unless all clergy are gay, which is absurd, sexual assaults committed by perpetrators who are gay represent a small percentage of all sexual assaults. All assaults are wrong, but for hundreds and hundreds of years, the Church has covered up for all perpetrators. 

The sexual assault of boys are immoral and illegal crimes, not homosexual sex acts. Inability to see the difference between sexual assault committed by any male—homosexual or heterosexual—and consensual sex between two males is a primary reason the sexual assault of boys continues to be “titillating” news and so misunderstood and misrepresented. The sexual orientation of a sexual assault perpetrator is no more relevant in assigning blame than whether the perpetrators are left-handed or not. It is as if the decision to hold someone legally responsible for burning down a building was predicated on whether or not the accused could be proven to be a pyromaniac. What drives the perpetrator is irrelevant.

As the great Joanna Russ wrote: “As my mother once said: the boys throw stones at the frogs in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.” 

Many clergy have fathered children. Some clergy have raped boys and girls. Indeed, some have raped nuns. Do we attribute the motivation of those clergy who choose to sexually assault girls and women to their (presumed) heterosexuality? No. It raises interesting questions: are clergy who are truly celibate for life asexuals? Is it any more than academic to call them heterosexual or homosexual if they never engage in consensual sexual acts with whomever they are wired (ordained?) to desire? And are heterosexuality and homosexuality only exemplified by sex acts separate from love or committed relationships? Clearly the sexual assaults have long been defended by the Church, while committed relationships by clergy are absolutely forbidden. What a reductionary, debased and rape-supportive concept of the difference between sex and violence organized religion has long promoted. 

Organized religion has long been heavily implicated in the maintenance of the Patriarchy. When counseling women who have been beaten and/or sexually assaulted by their husbands, clergy have discounted the violence and the violator by advising, “Stay with him; he is a good provider.” Keeping deeply dysfunctional families together at all costs enables domestic violence and marital rape. The costs are borne by the abused spouse and children. There is no history of those same clergy counseling domestic violence and marital rape perpetrators to help them to stop their abusive behavior. Nor did clergy condemn domestic violence and rape from the pulpit or insist on curricula to educate boys and girls in religious schools to understand the abuse they witnessed and experienced and to help them heal their traumas. Thus the traumas of one generation are replicated in the next. 

Some religious leaders and personnel in all world religions have been identified as having committed felonies by sexually-assaulting children, women and men. The institutional tolerance of sexual abuse perpetrated by clergy is the logical outgrowth of the demonization of teen sex, non-procreative sex, any sex outside of sanctioned marriages, same-sex sex, female sexuality uncontrolled by a male, and the total castigation of pleasure. The absolute forbidding of most sexual expression caused (and continues to cause) great difficulty for normal, healthy, sexual humans who waste much energy trying to deny their innate sexuality, their humanity. The hypocrisy and mixed messages condemning healthy expressions of sexuality while defending and protecting sexual assault perpetrators is breath-taking. 

As a holdover from biblical biases and prejudices, through the late 1960s, the act “rape” was the most extreme “sex crime,” forced penis-in-vagina. “Sex crime” was how these horrific acts were conceptualized, misrepresented, and trivialized. Rapes were listed among acts like indecent exposure, public urination, obscene phone calls, distribution of pornography, lewd behavior in public, and “deviant” acts of homosexuality! Yes, all homosexual sex acts were designated in law as “deviant.” Forced anal penetration or forced oral acts or vaginal penetration by a male against a female with objects other than penises were not considered rape. “Rape” really meant stranger rape. Rapes by people known to the victim were often called “forcible seduction,” especially if the victim was poor and the perpetrator wealthy. The permission granted by this legal, “white-collar rape” has continued through to today on every college campus. 

The historical language by which sexual assault and sexual assault perpetrators are described is crucial to maintaining rape culture. The performer Whoopi Goldberg introduced a fatuous new phrase into the sexual assault discourse. While minimizing the heinous act(s) of Roman Polanski, film director and famed assaulter of at least one thirteen year-old girl, she said, “I know it wasn’t rape-rape. I think it was something else, but I don’t believe it was rape-rape.” His “rape-rape,” in other words, was not stranger rape, i.e., “real” rape. This man administered Quaaludes to a thirteen year-old and then inflicted sex on her while she was incapacitated. What else would you call this, sweet lovemaking? The problematic language of the past hangs on tenaciously. It is ironic that a Black woman would promote this reading of “real rape” being stranger rape when so many Black men were lynched for false charges of rape. 

In religious and secular law, for all of recorded time, until the latter half of the 20th century, rape in marriage was not a crime; it had never been illegal. In fact, there was a long-standing exemption in the rape laws of every state (and country) which exempted husbands from prosecution for rape, the “marital exemption.” “Any man who rapes a woman not his wife shall be charged…” In 1979, during the debate in the California legislature on the bill that would ultimately criminalize rape in marriage, a state legislator plaintively asked, “If a man can’t rape his wife, who can he rape?” Luckily, his confused but inadvertently revelatory question did not succeed in derailing the effort to finally criminalize marital rape in California. 

But ignorance and unexamined privilege never die. The age-old permission to sexually assault wives (and some states that permission was extended to dating and cohabiting couples) hangs on tenaciously. In 2005, Virginia State Senator Dick Black spoke on the legislative floor about how he “did not know how on earth you could validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape, when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie, and so forth, there’s no injury, there’s no separation or anything.” He cannot merely be accurately written off as a dinosaur or a simpleton, though it is noted that his first name was presciently well-chosen. 

For him and so many other men, “living together” implies consent (which is unnecessary to verbally corroborate). For him and so many other men, “sleeping in the same bed” implies consent (which is unnecessary to verbally corroborate). For him and so many other men, that “she’s in a nightie” implies consent (which is unnecessary to verbally corroborate). For him and so many other men, and “so forth” implies consent whatever he intends by that (which is unnecessary to verbally corroborate). For him and so many other men, that “there’s no injury” implies consent (which is unnecessary to verbally corroborate). For him and so many other men, “there’s no separation or anything” implies consent (which is unnecessary to verbally corroborate). This pro-rape-in-marriage advocate will never practice consent in his sexual interactions, nor will he teach his and other people’s sons consent, nor will he advocate for improved sex education to include education about consent. 

Rape in war has long been accepted and promoted as a legitimate tool to demoralize the enemy and for revenge. This obscene strategy completely dismissed the damage to the minds, the bodies, and lives of girls and women caused by their rapes towards the supposed goal of the possible military value of the effect of those rapes on male enemy combatants. But rather than demoralize armed enemy combatants or relatives or countrymen of the raped girls and women, many of the raped women have been blamed for their rapes. So frequently the effect of the rape on the women is further male violence against those same women. The rape of women becomes the rationalization for men killing women. 

Many raped women have been shunned or even killed by men who felt that their (the men’s) honor was compromised by the rape of “their” women and that those ostensibly beloved women and girls were incurably damaged by their rapes. Thus the rapes of the girls and women of one side in a conflict invariably served solely as a rationalization and as an excuse, when the supposedly demoralized fighters in turn raped the enemy females, thus continuing the horrific cycle. Being allowed to rape with impunity has long been a critical element of warfare. Rape is a perk for military personnel if they choose to exercise their privilege. 

Today, every single US military base in the world is surrounded by military-sanctioned houses of prostitution and “coochie bars.” The absolute availability of female receptacles is assured by the military and access to compliant females is seen as being as important militarily as ammunition or jets. Monitoring whether the sex is consensual or non-consensual is not felt by the military to be important nor to be their responsibility. Rape has always been a “benefit” for soldiers who are so infrequently confronted or prosecuted that rape, was and is, military policy. Since the rape of indigenous women, children, and men was “good, defensible practice,” no wonder confronting the rape of US women who serve in the military has been so utterly challenging for the US military to effectively address. Rapes of indigenous women, children, and men, committed by US troops explains much of the hate directed at the US by people in countries around the world. And no, George W. Bush, they do not “envy our freedom,” they hate our sexual imperialism.

The US military does not even see fit to address the horror of military personnel who take advantage of the low age of consent in countries where the US has bases. For example, the age of consent is eleven in Nigeria. It is twelve in the Philippines and Angola. The age of consent is thirteen in Japan and in Niger. The military personnel and contractors who are interested in legal sex with children are free to do so. Legal that it is, it is clearly, utterly immoral. Age of consent laws are culturally determined but most citizens in countries with relatively low ages of consent are unhappy to see US service personnel assaulting their children. But the US military does not see this behavior as problematic. And those who choose to continue abusing children when they return to the US? Also not the responsibility of the US military, according to them.

In the early 1990’s, I facilitated two trainings for the US Navy SAVI (Sexual Assault Victim Intervention) personnel. The head of the program at the time said she chose me because I was the only speaker she had encountered who talked about male survivors and confronting perpetrators. In conversations with the program head and SAVI counselor/educators, I heard many stories about their efforts to address the unpublicized numbers of male survivors serving in the Navy and sexual assault committed by Naval personnel. Soon after the Bystander Intervention practice was introduced and disseminated. As a result, the brief era of increased confronting of perpetrators was ended. If most men were merely bystanders, which is inaccurate, rape prevention was unnecessary for most men. Colleges were off the hook for the huge numbers of sexual assaults they were so assiduously avoiding addressing. 

All-male environments have all been the site of same-sex sexual assault and the sexual assault of males by males has always had a home in the military. It was only because of successful feminist pressure which finally allowed women to enter previously all-male bastions that the abuse that epitomizes male-only environments began to be revealed. To bring up male-on-male sexual assault or female perpetrators is not part of an attempt to minimize the severity and volume of sexual assault of women in previously all-male environments such as: colleges, the military, fire departments, police departments, and innumerable other work and associative environments. But the sexual assaults did not start the first day women showed up in the military. Male-on-male sexual assaults have always thrived in the military, a place epitomized by blatant secret acts, well-known and never spoken about. As women began to complain about the volume and severity of sexual harassment and sexual assault inflicted on them, male abuse of males became revealed. The feminist critique of rape culture gave men a language to understand and describe their abuse, if they were willing to use language and concepts created by women. 

Sadly, the training boys undergo has always taught us to discount and deny the value of females and femaleness. As a result, many males are unable to use feminist language and concepts to describe their abuse. It must be said that it was only in response to feminist pressure to change the rape laws to make them more accurately reflect a range of sexual assaults which previously had not been illegal that the sexual assault of males was finally criminalized. 

Yes, for the millennia that men alone wrote the laws, enacted the laws, interpreted the laws, enforced the laws, the rape of boys and men was never a crime. Men never did anything about the rape of males. Take that in. The first time I encountered male college football players parroting Rush Limbaugh by referring to “Feminazis” was in the late 1980s. I took a bit of pleasure out of blowing their minds by revealing to  them that it was those damn, “man-hating Feminazis” who were solely responsible for criminalizing the sexual assault of males. For millennia, the rape of males and the threat of rape served its purpose in maintaining male obedience to the hierarchy of fear and pain which epitomizes the Patriarchy. One of my athletic coaches in high school told us that if we “didn’t straighten up and play harder,” that he would “bend us over and use us like the bitches that we were.”

Until the late 1960s, there had never been rape crisis centers. All those males who had information about rape and incest survivors (therapists, police, clergy, relatives, friends) never saw fit to pressure governments to allocate resources toward providing support for survivors. The first rape support counseling services were offered by feminist women volunteering to provide supportive listening and caring counseling for rape survivors, often in the volunteers’ own apartments. Overwhelmed by the needs they uncovered, some women publicized their phone numbers to offer more support to more survivors. Some pooled their money and paid for dedicated phone lines to deal with the flood of survivors coming forward seeking help. 

Eventually, armed with local statistics and anecdotal evidence of the vast amount of abuse that was going unreported and un-dealt with by police and local governmental authorities, they were able to pressure local governments to help support them to support rape survivors. Even when governments slowly, grudgingly began to provide a pittance to help support rape crisis centers, the funding was never intended to help change a sick culture. The never sufficient funding was always a compromise designed to shut up those annoying women. Previous to the 1960s, counseling and other emotional support, and later, legal and medical advocacy provided by Rape Crisis Centers had never been seen as necessary and therefore was never provided for rape survivors by the Patriarchy. 

For many years, the sexual assaults reported to colleges were not reported yearly to local police and authorities. Has this changed? This underreporting has helped to dramatically distort local and national statistics while promulgating the lie that, “Our campus is a safe campus” that all campuses proclaim themselves to be. It also predisposes the police to avoid sexual assault policing on college campuses since no problem exists (and most of the perpetrators are white and middle class and rich boys anyway). Sexual assault on campus has long been treated as being akin to plagiarizing, a minor campus conduct infraction, not a felony. In this, sexual assault committed on campus is similar to “hazing.“ For generations, the frequently criminal abuses of males by males including sexual humiliation and sexual assault were sanitized and trivialized by calling them “hazing.” Just like with sexual assault, the violence of hazing was reduced to “youthful hijinks.”

In the early 1990s, during a lecture I presented in a criminology class, the professor who had previously been a Chicago cop in the 1960s, said that he and other rookies were not trained at all about rape. All they were told consisted of a sergeant saying that, “Any woman who comes in to report rape is a prostitute who hasn’t been paid.” Believing that the police have more than a peripheral role in ending rape culture is delusional. By design, police regulate the flow of a commodity—crime. Police work is not a deterrent nor is it preventative. 

Historically, depending on the police to respond to rape survivors competently, with empathy, and without bias has proven a frequent disaster. Police departments have backlogs of sexual assault testing kits that have sat unexamined for years. Police practice has been to focus disproportionally on stranger rape while much more ambivalently addressing the vast majority of rapes where the perpetrator was known to the victim: date rape, acquaintance rape, marital rape and incest.

Many police officers have extorted sex from arrested sex workers, women arrested for other crimes and non-arrested women who came to them for help. Most states have not specifically barred sexual conduct between police officers and those they arrest. Presently there are 36 states that permit police officers to use “consent” as a defense to sexual assault allegations. These states refuse to criminalize rape by police and prison personnel. Other states have not explicitly defined sexual contact between detainees and officers as nonconsensual though consent would be impossible to establish under these circumstances and between these pairs of people. Police officers and corrections personnel should not legally be allowed any sexual contact with people they have control over. What possible justification can there be to continue to allow these legalized rapes? And do we really believe that those who can legally commit rape will sensitively respond to survivors who were raped by other perpetrators? 

The FBI has also played a significant role in officially understating the prevalence of rape. For years, they used the oldest, most restrictive definition of rape and rejected reports of sexual assaults from states that had improved and broadened definitions of criminally assaultive behavior. Thus the FBI has helped underestimate national rape statistics and underestimate the extent of the problem. Clearly, they were too busy investigating the peace movement, the civil rights movement, masterminding the execution of the Black Panther Party, and harassing other non-violent social change movements to educate themselves about sexual assault.

Since recorded time, the affects of their rapes on the millions of women was irrelevant to the Patriarchs, to clergy, to militaries, to legislators, to police, to husbands, to men. So naturally there was no real prevention. “Rape prevention” was comprised of castigating females as “sluts,” victim-blaming, and holding girls and women completely responsible when someone chose to assault them. This was completely unfair, utterly useless in ending sexual assault and as such, purely evil. There was never a realization that preemptively educating males and holding them responsible for their acts were potentially effective, fair and equitable, and necessary. 

Being designated a slut isn’t just an insult. There can be a threat in being so designated. There are girls and women who were coerced into submitting to sex because they had been called “slut” and someone assumed that since she had (allegedly) been sexual with one person (or more) that she couldn’t subsequently say, “No” and be taken seriously. 

What are the effects on perpetrators of crimes of committing crimes whether or not they are prosecuted? This has not been sufficiently studied or quantified. Most studies on rape perpetrators are based on incarcerated men, a skewed sampling. Allowing most perpetrators to walk leaves them full of guilt, fear, shame, resentment, and relief about having perpetrated. Some will repeat their behavior. Why stop? It’s barely illegal. Have we always lived in a rape culture? Yes. Do we continue to live in a rape culture? Oh, yes. 

That was then; this is now (Circa 1986-7)

Probably all education is but two things: first, the parrying of the ignorant children's impetuous assault on the truth, and second, the gentle, imperceptible, step-by-step initiation of the humiliated children into the Lie.

—Franz Kafka

When I first went to high school to present rape prevention sessions with Men Stopping Rape (MSR) in 1986, I was utterly unprepared. I had little understanding of the prevalence and virulence of rape culture or of the history of the effort to end rape I’ve briefly written about above. Here I was, a newly-minted educator who wanted to change the world but who was at the same time, deeply unprepared to do so. Oh, I had memorized some statistics, but did I understand the depth of the problem? Was I ready to meet students where they were at? Did I have a sense of what students needed to learn (and unlearn)? Was I in a process of better knowing myself, and being comfortable in my body and confident in myself and my message? Not so much. 

I came to see that I was perfect to go to high school and help the students as I processed my own parallel process of learning. I was newly sober. As I struggled with my sobriety-revealed demons I only later realized that my real addiction was to masculinity, a much more serious and potent “substance” than any other drug I had smoked or snorted. I myself had only a rudimentary sense of the possibilities for honest, love-infused sex. As students asked questions, to try to put us on the spot and to try to understand these huge real issues, we MSR presenters had to examine our biases, painful experiences, and compromises in order to be better, clearer educators and advocates for students.

I hadn’t expected high school to be so evocative with painful echoes and smells and memories triggered for me. And there we were opening ourselves to potential abuse and attack for discussing topics that would have certainly brought male censure to anyone who had brought up such forbidden, dangerous topics when I was in high school. We entered the lions den to lead discussions that could touch on such loaded topics as: rape culture, healthy sexuality, racism, sexism, homophobia, male responsibility, gender roles, the sexual double standard, male survivor issues, misogyny, and the effects on boys and girls of growing up in homes with domestic violence, among others. 

Initially, I misread students’ complicated responses as simply being expressions of resistance to sand our message. Considering that our appearance was the first time most students had heard what they previously felt to be their painful personal and family secrets named in public, I shouldn’t have been surprised how they seemed to be responding to us. Of course it was not initially reassuring for them to have their carefully constructed, precariously-balanced, private compromises with the world upended. Our discussions may have been the first time that anything so personal, so immediately relevant, however painful to them, had ever been explored in school. And here we were blithely bopping in to stand in front of them seeming to say, “Hi, we know everything about you, and by the way, everything you know is wrong.”

Yes, after years of therapy to heal my high school experience, I chose to return to high school. Only this time I came to listen to and understand students and their lives instead of hiding from mine. “If I could examine my messy life, there was hope for you to examine yours,” I told them. But what were we telling them? It was one thing to be against rape, but what was I for? We could say that, “Rape isn’t sex,” but as I came to understand, neither was sex, sex. From their responses and questions, it became obvious that no students (nor it turned out, many of their teachers) had an idea of sex that was completely and distinctly different from sexual assault. 

From their real sex education, delivered by peers, porn, and pontiffs, boys had no idea of even the possibility of sex that was life-affirming, sweet, generous and not so frequently non-negotiable and coerced. They had no idea of a practice of sex that was consensual and mutually-pleasurable. “Loving,” “kind,” “soft,” “sweet,” “sensual,”“tentative,” “safe,” and “gentle,” are not words that have ever been used by boys or men to describe to other boys how sex can and could be savored. The possibility and importance of imbuing sexual relations with trust, caring, comfort and friendship so that partners were allies where they each wanted the best for one another is alien to today’s kids (and parents). 

We learned that kids were still being taught that masturbation will harm them and were still being taught that sex is power and leaves you powerless. We learned that kids continue being taught that Blue Balls is real (and continues to provide males a rationalization for forcing someone to submit to sex). Such extorted sex is rape. Kids continue learning that oral sex is fellatio and cunnilingus is a “sin” (and a relative rarity). Cunnilingus is nearly universally seen as “foreplay,” a few perfunctory licks then on to “real sex,” vaginal and anal intercourse and fellatio. Meanwhile, fellatio is much more frequently seen as a stand alone sexual act. Kids continue being taught that neither oral sex nor anal sex is “real sex.” (This semantic hair-splitting would be familiar to Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, piggy exemplars and soul brothers in hypocrisy.)

If students had sat through any previous discussion about sexual assault, it was undoubtedly of the After School Special variety, designed to be entirely unobjectionable, generic and so full of mixed messages as to be useless since most education had little to do with students and their lives, they were used to being ignored. Education was pablum that was spoonfed to them. So, of course they were shocked by us. But almost unbelievably (to us) from the start, their written evaluations of our presentations were extremely positive. Over 80% said they wanted to participate in follow-up discussions with us. Over 90% felt all students should participate in our discussions! But most teachers and administrators were not prepared to respond and follow up after us.

As I came to decipher student responses and questions as a complex mix of pain, confusion, desperation, hopelessness and hostility, I also could see their responses as their way of testing me. Was I just another uncaring, dishonest adult? They had certainly had enough of those inflicted on them in school and outside of school. Was I going to be another man who would mansplain and adultsplain their lives to them one more time? “What was my motivation for caring about these ‘female’ topics,” they asked repeatedly? When they were asked, they reported never having previously been exposed to a man who cared about sexual assault. That was a daunting prospect to me, and should be to all of us. 

In time, as I grew more confident in myself as a presenter, I became more sensitive and open to them, less frightened by what they might ask and more able to read between their “emotional lines.” I developed “survivor radar.” Now I was able to hear even more layers in their comments and questions. I was increasingly able to ignore their sometime misuse of language and read the nuances in their questions, and indeed, what they revealed about their lives. However erratically they enunciated their feelings and questions I could hear their tentative expressions of feeling reassured, their surprised appreciation for the opportunity to explore these crucial topics which had never been broached in or out of school, and even cautious optimism about the process, and their futures. It was an honor to be able to challenge and inspire them and to be allowed to witness their lives, to help them make sense of a seriously deranged world. 

One of the most revolutionary things I learned from MSR was the cruciality of opening by establishing that the session was a Safe Space. These days, this is called Trigger Warning. Safe Space was intended as an early warning to prepare the participants for the discomfort they might feel in response to our making public what they saw as their secrets, to encourage them to take care of themselves in light of our potentially painful material. Even as we reassured them that we did not know anything about any individual present, only that they were human and therefore had stories, pasts, possibly painful secrets, students would constantly tell us that they knew that we knew all about them and their particular personal, painful stories. Even as it might disturb some participants especially survivors of incest or other sexual assaults present to hear that there were perpetrators present, eventually I included that statistically, there were survivors and students present who had perpetrated in every single session. 

See SAFE SPACE on my website  http://www.teachingsexualethics.org/perspective/safe-space/

As a boy growing up, I would not have had a clue if the concept of Safe Space had been mentioned. Safety? With males around? Feeling Safe With Males? To me, those were four random words which fit together to create a nonsensical whole phrase, like Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Safety? What, no guns? I began to see that I had my own personal work to do in order to reach my goals of connecting with students and in doing so, changing the world. First I needed to understand and face one primary impediment to my effectiveness. I began a process to identify and heal my fear of males.

Growing up, I had learned to distrust and fear other boys and men through bitter experience. My father was not a physically abusive man, but I read his emotional distance from me and his sometimes unhappiness with the world as negative judgement of me. He didn’t hurt me, but neither did he protect me from the violence of male bullies or even teach me how to survive in the dangerous, volatile male world. I understand now that neither he nor any other adult male had known how to non-violently protect himself; they hadn’t been taught either as boys. But that hadn’t occurred to me at the time. So I felt alone, abandoned to live with no protection from male bullying and abuse. I didn’t know yet that this was the normal way boys were raised: the uncaring toss-them-into-the-lake-to-teach-them-to-swim model of emotional abandonment of boys; The Lord of The Flies writ large.

Fear of other males was a constant in our lives and continues to be a constant in the lives of today’s boys. We dread what will be done to us by other males if we appear weak. We dread what will be done to us by other males if we appear too strong. We are afraid of the possible punishments for things we have done in order to avoid censure from other males. Our lives are defined and constrained by our fears. Each of our places in the pecking order changed arbitrarily and constantly without warning. 

Other boys and men were dangerous, capricious, untrustable and vicious. The hurts, bullying, threats and arbitrary cruelties they inflicted on me and other boys sometimes came from out of nowhere from males including some I least expected to attack me. All males hadn’t hurt me, all hadn’t bullied me, all hadn’t threatened me, but since so many males had I couldn’t predict who would suddenly turn on me. It was simpler to fear and distrust all males preemptively. This was how I attempted to protect myself.

All of us boys had seen other boys abused, had seen other boys threatened with abuse, and been ourselves abused by bullies. Absolute distrust of males and a constant defensive posture was how I coped. Men were guilty until proven innocent. But distrust and defensiveness were such givens that I wasn’t even really conscious of them. If I had been asked about my constant fear I would have automatically denied it, it was that much a part of me. And adults who witnessed the bullying did nothing we could discern to stop the bullying. 

Instead of being angry at the bullying males, we boys directed our anger at girls and women. Females were far safer to be angry at; they rarely hurt us as the males repeatedly did. This was unfair to the females and short-circuited the cursory instruction from adults encouraging us to respect females. Who but women bothered trying to teach us boys to respect females? Unfortunately, following the lead of older boys and men, we were already learning to not take women seriously. Males? We were already used to seeing some male teachers and other men staring hungrily at girls our age and younger. Some male teachers would “accidentally” knock pencils off their desks in order that the girls in the front row would bend over to pick them up. I didn’t understand why the teachers were doing this when I noticed it. This gave the teacher a view down girls’ blouses in third, fourth and fifth grade! Innumerable girls and women have reported similar experiences to me over the years. 

 Since we boys didn’t understand what was going on, at first we were jealous of the attention paid to girls by the men. We thought the girls were lucky. They didn’t have to do anything to earn the scrutiny of the men; the adult male attention paid to them was a gift to them we boys felt enviously. Were these men who were so shamelessly intoxicated by ten to thirteen year-old girls going to teach us boys to respect females? Oh, I’m sure. When would they teach us, during a momentary lull in their disgusting leering?

We boys received no treatment from men that singled us out as being important and deserving of their intense watchfulness, except if we acted out and got in trouble and were thus in for scolding or physical punishment from them. Sadly, we came to accept being ignored by men, including most of our fathers. We were learning to deny our need for loving connection with other people—especially males—becoming inured to loneliness and isolation. We received so little attention from fathers that even punishment was better than the usual: no attention at all. Many males have reported to me that the only time their fathers had ever touched them as boys was to hit them. We were learning to be Real Men, real lonely men.

In a training in a small town in Ontario, Canada, a man interrupted my discussion of the emotional distance between fathers and their sons. “You’re right,” he said. “I can still remember the day when I turned five years old. As I had every previous night, I went to say, ‘I love you’ and kiss my father good night. On this night of my fifth birthday though, he (my father) pushed me away brusquely. He reached out his hand to me and said, ‘You are a man now. Men don’t hug. They shake hands. And they don’t say, ‘I love you’ to other men, either.’ We shook hands that night and every night as long as I lived at home. I never again told him that I loved him. He never said that to me either. Now he is dead.”

He was quiet for a moment, composing himself. Even more than twenty years later, it was clear that he was still grieving the loss of the emotional connection to that man whom he had loved. He said, “I have a question. I have two young sons. I tell them that I love them all the time. Can you tell me about the research that shows you can tell your sons that you love them too much? Is it harmful? I don’t want to hurt them. What does the research say?” Even today, years later, I tear up a little as I remember his very touching question. 

I responded, “First of all, let me say that there is no research about the possible negative effects of saying, ‘I love you’ too much to boys, however we would define ‘too much.’ Unfortunately, so few boys have been told that that they would have trouble finding a sufficient number to study. I think we can look around and see the effects of most fathers not telling their sons that they love them. Prisons are full of men who never were told that they were loved and never felt loved; as are men in the military and in governments, among other groups. Few men grew up feeling confident and frequently reassured of their father’s unconditional love. 

“About your sons, tell them that you love them as much as you feel like doing. You need to tell them. They need to hear you. If you tell them five hundred times in a day, that might be a tad compulsive, But don’t worry, if you tell them too often, they will just tune it out. That’s OK. Again, tell them. They are lucky to have a father who does love them and who tells them that he does.

“The only possible downside that I can imagine is your sons being so confident in your love, taking for granted being enveloped in your love, that they may say to their male friends, ‘Oh my father was just going on about how much he loves me like he always does all the time. You know, like your fathers do,’ assuming that their friends were being told the same by their fathers. Their statement would probably be met with silence as their male friends think of their distant, disapproving fathers. Not that their friends would necessarily punish them, their friends wouldn’t know how to act in the face of this abnormal situation. But that is not a reason to stop telling your sons that you love them. They will be the vector for a positive infection of love.”

This man wasn’t foolish, asking a question with an obvious answer. Many other men and boys have asked me similar questions. Some have declared that it wasn’t necessary for fathers and sons to express their love, that there was something “off” about it. I’ve heard the same about expressions of caring between male friends. Some have insisted that similarly it isn’t necessary for males to tell girlfriends, female partners, and wives that they love them, that any and all expressions of love are iffy, that love weakens us. From so many of our fathers and the Patriarchs we learn that love makes us “female” or even “gay” and therefore even more vulnerable to male censure. We hear that Real Men, Real Sons can’t show love and indeed, don’t love. 

Back to our leering teachers and other men. At first, the men staring at girls were mysterious and disturbing to us boys. Eventually, as we saw them staring so frequently, we stopped envying the girls. The staring was starting to feel a little weird. We still didn’t exactly know what was wrong with the men’s leering, but we began to sense that it was creepy. But creepy or not, we saw it so often that it began to became normal for us. So we squelched our feelings of disgust for the staring and the starers and eventually mostly stopped questioning it. We came to accept it as a fact of male life, just one more example of adult male weirdness we saw and mentally catalogued daily. But men sexualizing little girls stopped being so creepy as we realized that when we became men we would have to act like the creepy men did. So as we prepared to act as they did, we memorized these and other actions of men so we could eventually emulate them and become Real Men (however piggy) ourselves. 

It never occurred to us boys to ask the girls how they felt about being stared at, or whether they were even aware of the males’ continual, blatant staring. Or how girls and women felt about the outrageous, insulting comments of older boys and men that verbally undressed, dissected and coldly critiqued their female bodies. Older boys and men acted as if they were potential buyers at an auction inspecting the females as if they were animals or slaves for sale. 

The older males’ comments were amazingly dispassionate. Sometimes males spoke about individual girls’ or women’s bodies right in front of them as if the female didn’t exist. Sometimes they spoke about girls or women who weren’t present in front of those girls or women who were present, while carefully watching them, to test them, to see how they would react. Would the girls squelch their possible feelings of empathy in exchange for belonging with the males and possibly avoiding themselves being dissected hatefully by the boys?

The males watched the other males present even more carefully, since it was really for them, for their approval, that males performed their verbal abuse of females. No male ever objected to or confronted the casual, compulsory hate of females constantly proclaimed by other males. Yes, there were males who were uncomfortable with the sexist posturing, but we boys never saw one boy or man speak that aloud let alone challenge another male. We never heard of such an occurrence and couldn’t even imagine such foolhardy behavior which would no doubt be punished severely.

We grew up without a concept for an emotionally literate man, what we might call a non-sexist man. Therefore, of course we had no positive word or name for such abnormal men other than the usual automatic presumption of their homosexuality. We used the accusation “faggot” or “homo” as an explanation for everything with which we were uncomfortable (which was practically everything). The term “gay” was not in the bully lexicon at that time. Our understanding of males who were authentically nice, good, sweet, gentle was non-existent.These were all manifestations of weakness, “accusations” to be vehemently denied. The idea of a male freely choosing to be so vulnerable confused and frightened us and we would have been embarrassed for such a male. Expression of their emotionality would have been seen as a loss of control. It would have been as if they had urinated in their pants in public. We had never seen such a unicorn, so even when we encountered a nice guy, their niceness did not reassure or inspire us. In fact, their niceness frightened us because we couldn’t imagine acting like that and not being killed by older boys and men. So we did not learn from or emulate the nice men.

Eventually, we boys accepted the way the males spoke about females as normal, definitely not questionable. Yes, the way the older males stared at and made comments about girls and women made us uncomfortable at first, but what they said about females was not the main problem as we saw it. As stunned and even anxious as we boys grew watching the older males’ brazen sexism, as a compromise to their outrageous behavior we could only imagine not saying those piggy things directly to her face. 

Behind her back, we had less of a problem with their comments. Behind females’ backs we could more easily ignore their humanity as we were learning to do under the tutelage of older males. Insulting and harassing while sneaking around behind her, metaphorically viewing her from the rear as we dissected her body, we could forget the undeniable, human individuality we saw on her face.

From behind, she became generic. It made it easier for us to imagine ourselves talking that way behind their backs too. Maybe that we should act/talk/think that way too was initially a compromise between our discomfort with the overt sexist rudeness and our sense that it was inevitable, biologically-determined that we would act that way since we were boys who would grow up to be men. But, never seeing an alternative model of masculine behavior modeled and practiced, we came to accept that that was just how men are. So it goes.

Initially, we were embarrassed for the females who were talked about. But at the same time we were impressed and titillated by the trash talkers because those “brave guys” were defiantly breaking the “act like nice, little gentlemen” rules. We chafed under those “nice, little gentlemen” constraints and were mortified if others thought we were “nice” whether or not we were nice. “Nice” was an accusation, an insult, not a compliment. 

Other males’ piggish behavior was instructive to us, too. We assumed that the leering, older males knew something that we should know, and would have known if we had been Real Men. So we watched the older boys and men, and once again we squelched our empathetic feelings that something was wrong, as we strained to figure out what they saw in the girls that we were supposed to see as well. 

Imitating the older boys and men, we stared at girls’ barely-formed or even not yet budded “breasts;” many of them had no more breast development yet than we boys did. We didn’t know what we were supposed to be looking at or looking for, but there must have been a good reason for all those older males to be staring. Maybe the staring older males could see more than we boys could yet see, just as dogs hear higher frequencies than humans do. (I bow to Barbara Goudy for this amazing and incisive image from her novel, Mr. Sandman.) 

In grade school and junior high school, since the abuse of boys by boys was dismissed, the abuse of girls by boys was ignored too. The adults excused all but the most egregious abuse of girls by boys. If pressed, the adults called it “flirting” or “teasing.” “He is not trying to hurt you. he is just doing that to tell you he likes you,” as generations of girls were told when boys touched them, groped them, shoved them, or even punched them. Whether the adults truly saw it as harmless or were once again automatically denying the substance of girls’ reports of being physically hurt by representing it as cute and harmless, the girls were little if any better protected from abusive males than we boys. 

If we boys did like a girl, we had no clue how to make that known to her. The adults never taught us good, non-hurtful ways to tell someone that we liked them. Any attention we paid to a girl, even if we hurt her as part of the communication, was supposed to communicate our interest in her. Truly innocent flirting and teasing was tainted, overwhelmed and subsumed into what would now more accurately be called “sexual harassment.”

No one taught us boys the difference between flirting and sexual harassment. Why would we need to know? So what if someone was made uncomfortable by something that we said or as a result of something that we did. We were already learning that any negative effect we might have on another person was that person’s problem, not ours, especially if the other person was a girl. 

Boys’ Learned Ignorance about Rape 

In his book The Diamond Age Neal Stephenson incisively writes how one male character’s ability to form intimate relationships with females was shaped by “a gallimaufry of primal influences, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amount to rank superstition.” Brilliant and true for all boys who are forced to muddle through and figure life out on their own. 

For me growing up as a boy, rape was mixed up inexorably and confusingly with sex. Maybe it was “too much” sex or was something mysterious and adult, or was somehow wrong, but we boys had next to no information about rape. With no positive adult direction or education to help me and other boys understand, rape was an unimportant mystery that did not have anything to do with us. In this, rape was similar to menstruation: another insignificant fact of female’s insignificant lives that was kept a complete mystery to us boys. 

We boys were already drowning in male lies and exaggerations about the volume, the vehemence, and the emotional disconnection of the sex that was rhapsodized over by older boys and men. The sex which males described was something sneaky that the most lauded males “got away with.” They won; they put one over on her; they fooled her. We felt lucky to get their valuable male information. Even if we couldn’t begin to understand “fucking her legs off” or “fucking her brains out” or “fucking the shit out of,” the seeming violence, exaggeration, and alienation implicit in those phrases completely confused us. Was the aftermath of good sex a room full of legs, brains, and fecal matter? 

“Good sex” was any and all sex; any and all sex as defined by males that is. He did sex to her was how we saw it in our befuddled, rudimentary understanding of this mystery dance. As young boys, we could only wonder in complete confusion as sex was described, “She let you do that to her?” There was never a moment that we wondered or heard older boys and men talk about, “Did she like it??” or even more improbably, “Did she want that done to her?” All of the male lies only served to reinforce the utter alien nature of females. So to us boys, all of sex was male lies and female incomprehensibility. 

We did hear, “She screamed for more,” which didn’t illuminate anything about female desire. It wasn’t until years later in a workshop I was leading with teen offenders, that a boy said, “She screamed for more.” I hadn’t heard that in years and had to respond, “Of course she screamed for more. Like most of us, you came in, what, two minutes?” I wasn’t just being snarky; I was ruefully confessing to my own past ignorance. I used his age-old utterance as the jumping off point for a discussion of male selfishness, ignorance and dishonesty and how to imagine and practice a more nuanced, mutually-pleasurably sex. 

So if rape was “too much” sex, how could that even be in the face of all the male lies? There could never be “too much” dishonesty in male culture. We had already witnessed innumerable instances of flagrant male lies elevated to “truth” by dint of loud repetition and the threat of violence if we doubted or questioned them. So whether we believed the lying males or not, we didn’t question or challenge the lies or the liars. 

It was as if rape was the strongest expression of sexual desire, uncontrollable passion which could be typified, “I was so horny I had to rape her. I couldn’t stop myself.” This is completely untrue and it sets us off into a weird dead end. I can understand the appeal of acting on one’s belief that, “I just couldn’t stop.” A friend was in Italy years ago. Italian men would say about her and other women, “So many curves, and me with no brakes.” In practice, this translates to, “I was so horny that I had to hurt someone; it wasn’t my fault: her beauty made me do it. I am not responsible.” This isn’t lust; it is hate. 

 Since rape was represented as being sex; the motivation of the perpetrator was presumed to be sexual and not criminal. Maybe the rape was sex “that got a little out of hand,” but it was still sex. This taught us the lie of the biologically imperative inevitability of rape. This allowed males to define rape. Historically, the men who wrote, enacted, and enforced the law referred to rape as a “sex crime.” Figuring out what drove rapists was only important to the rapists if they desired to change their attitudes and behaviors, to their therapists, and to their God. Their motivation was not germane to any one else, especially their victims. The damage was still done. A crime is a crime. 

The emotional, psychological, and physical harm that being raped causes was never discussed. It was irrelevant; the perpetrator’s motivation was paramount. His motivation (and his race, social and economic class) were deciding factors affecting the decision whether it was even seen to be a crime. Thus the presumed motivation of the perpetrator defined the act and denied the perception of the victim. Later, I came to see that his motivation was irrelevant; that if someone felt assaulted they had been assaulted. According to the prevalent cultural stereotypes most perpetrators were Black. This is of course, not the truth. But notice that misrepresentation conveniently lets me and all other White males right off the hook for assaults we might commit. “Not my son(s)” exonerates the acts of everybodys’ sons. When it is said that, “Boys will be boys,” even the most egregious acts committed by all boys and men are excused. 

Few if any families have talked at all about sex let alone talking well about how to eventually practice a loving, torrid and consensual sexuality; few if any schools have done this either. Most students though report being exposed to clergy who repetitively and thunderously condemned sex outside of marriage, but never were they exposed to clergy who spoke out and condemned child abuse, incest, domestic violence, rape or sexual assault.

The useless sex education my peers had had inflicted on us in the 1950s and 1960s could be easily summarized as diagrams of internal organs, and slogans such as: “Don’t get her pregnant” and “Don’t contract a sexually transmitted disease and die.” Good, if minimal, advice as far as they went, but there was really absolutely nothing at all about sex in sex education. In “sex education” there was never mention of kissing, licking, sweetness, nuzzling, clitorises, masturbation, sexual attraction, hugging, kindness, or the dirtiest word of all in the Patriarchy, the dreaded “P word,” pleasure. Since there was absolutely no discussion of sex, there could be no discussions of just how to establish consent before sexual activity. So of course there was no room for discussion of non-consensual sexual behavior. As presented, sex education has always been utterly useless, any potential value excised, compromised out of existence. Would we date fallopian tubes? 

“Sex is dirty; save it for marriage” summed up the adult message. More enigmatic adult crap; nothing useful. Few parents, teachers or clergy ever spoke about sex as if it were something potentially wonderful in which their children, their students and their parishioners would eventually participate. Which makes as much sense as Drivers Ed that never allowed students near a driving simulator or, heaven forbid, a real car. “Quick children, avert your eyes; it’s a car!” So we depended on overheard lies and posturing from older boys and men, and complete idiocy from our male peers. When I think back to my what my spectacularly inexperienced and ill-informed male peers said about sex, in retrospect, I realize that their information was utterly untrue, completely disgusting, physically impossible, and probably illegal. 

I was at a private school talking to high school and middle school students and teachers and the school asked if I could talk to younger kids. I had little experience with younger kids so I started out slowly, kind of meandering into the discussion. This gave me time to monitor their responses so I could see if they were getting it; to make sure I wasn’t getting too far ahead of them. After a while, I asked them if they knew what sexual assault was. A fifth-grade boy giggled and said, “It’s when a man lies on top of a lady.” Many of the other kids laughed and giggled. One girl sighed extravagantly and said, “No, no. It is when someone forces sexual acts on someone else.” Since few children experience comprehensive sex education they are literally unable to tell the difference between sex and sexual assault.

Other educators and parents have noted that kids this age only recognize the word “sex” in the term sexual assault. And “sex” is actually worse than “sexual assault” because they have heard much more about the evils of sex: forbidden, awful, adult. And even as “sex” has been only represented to them as you know, forbidden, dirty, and adult, sexual assault or rape is even more of a complete unspoken about mystery since that has never been addressed in substance, let alone explained and forbidden.

No one had ever talked to me and the other boys in the 1950s and 1960s about rape. No one had ever spoken to us as potential survivors, as potential perpetrators, or even that we were already or would definitely eventually be friends, relatives, classmates, coworkers, or lovers, of survivors of incest or other sexual assaults. No one spoke to us to tell us that rape was a men’s issue, one that was forced upon females until it was theirs. Rape was never mentioned as an important topic for us boys to think about or care about or do something about. 

In fact, the only mentions of “rape” I can remember were several rape jokes from a couple of coach/gym teacher/Nazis. Others than those “jokes,” rape was only peripherally mentioned, and then only in relation to girls and women and like other female issues was to be ignored or made light of in the male world. Even if we had some sense of female fear of rape, their fear was something else to make fun of. Since rape was discounted as only another trivial female issue the word had no element of fear or immediacy or importance to us boys. It was more smutty and puzzling than something important to be intensely opposed to. Rape was unreal and unimportant. As one older MSR member (Hi Dave K.) used to ask, “How does rape affect us and how do we affect rape?” This was never asked of boys of my generation. 

When I joined MSR, I learned of the necessity to educate all males. All boys grew up in a rape culture and learned the theory of how to win at sex at any cost, at power-over sex. Boys have never been taught to conceptualize and later practice a loving, consensual, and mutually-pleasurable sexuality. All males have not or will not commit sexual assault though many follow through on their training and do practice assaultive sex. And, however egregious, there remains little male pressure on other males to change any of our behavior. 

Words for female (and female genitals in particular) are still the deadliest insults leveled at boys and men. Females are reduced to their genitals and the hate of femaleness is nowhere better seen than the constantly repeated accusation “pussy.” The accusation is always negative. Reductionary and stupid? Yes, emphatically, but “female” and “gay” are always linked as the ultimate in awful, un-disprovable insults. Once, when I was being a little testosterone-y while driving in traffic, another driver shouted at me that I was a, “pussy-licking faggot;” no cognitive dissonance there. I yelled back, “You are fifty percent right, stud. Which part scares you more?”

In the late 1980s, after presenting rape prevention workshops with boys in high school and men in college for a couple of years, I was invited to do a workshop with juvenile offenders in a pre-release prison program. They were incarcerated for a variety of crimes, not all were in for sexual assault. I was nervous, full of stereotypes I unconsciously held about whom I would encounter. But the first and subsequent workshops were revelatory and inspiring as well as depressing and daunting. The boys enunciated some things that I found extremely worrisome and problematic partially because I abruptly realized that though unaware, I still held remnants of some of the same attitudes and beliefs that they did! I was chagrined. Where did they learn these stupid things? Where had I learned those stupid things?

And just like these boys, I had never examined these atavistic beliefs which clung like velcro to our subconsciousnesses. Why would we practice self-examination? We had all seen older males vehemently defend patently ludicrous and obviously dishonest claims. Why should we admit to self-doubt and open ourselves to appearing weak and deserving of male censure? Growing up, available to us there were no models of males who voluntarily examined and changed their own attitudes and behavior. 

From the juvenile offenders, I heard the same rape supportive attitudes and behaviors enunciated (and often, assaultive behaviors described) as I had previously heard in high school and college. This was shocking to me. I knew that all of the “the bad guys” weren’t in prison, but coming to understand how the socialization of “normal boys” and that of incarcerated teen offenders were the same, revealed the enormity of our work educating every single one of everyone’s sons. 

Each month, for what turned out to be a voluntary ten year “sentence” for me, I met with a group of teen boys who were cycling out of their time in juvenile prison. There would be different boys each month. In an early session with the juvenile offenders, I went through my introduction discussing Men Stopping Rape and my motivation for being involved with MSR and my motivation for coming in to talk with them. We discussed safe space. I asked them if they had any questions about rape to start. Their first question was, “What do you think about that thing that women do every month?” 

I was briefly taken aback. “Be in the moment,” I told myself. “Adopt, adapt and improve.” This was spoken by a character played by John Cleese of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in a sketch on television.

I answered, “What do you mean? Which “thing that women do every month?” Do you mean think, breathe, read, eat, laugh, walk?” Of course, he meant menstruate. What were they expecting? That I would express revulsion for and opposition to menstruation? Well, actually yes. 

I quickly realized that like me they had only been exposed to older males who would groan about menstruation and say hateful, idiotic things. Those other men had set the bar pretty low for me so I dove right in. I told them that the boys of my generation had never been taught about menstruation and that as a result all some of us did was to stupidly and cruelly tease girls about menstruation. I told them that our ignorance had made it harder to be friends with girls, harder to be partnered with girls and later, women, and harder to take women seriously. We males can vote a billion to none that females stop menstruating—some females might vote with us—but they just won’t stop. In all but a few cases, it means that they are healthy. So maybe we should get a life. Menstruation is a fact of their lives. If we care about them, then it is a fact of our lives too. 

They were fascinated. I warmed to my topic. They asked more about menstruation. We talked periods for four or five more minutes. It was amazing. But it shouldn’t have surprised me then or you now reading this. You know males. Get us together alone and we just talk, talk, talk about menstruation. I was amazed. This was the last thing I had expected they would bring up. But then it got even better.

“Do you do oral sex on ladies?” was the next question they asked. This was another “last” thing that I never expected them to bring up. I mean, this was a rape prevention education session. But, meet participants where they are at. “Well, I don’t conceptualize it quite that way,” I responded. “Do I love my partners orally? Do I lick them from head to toe? Sure.” “Isn’t that nasty,” they asked. “Not to me,” I replied. “Do they like it?” they responded. “Yes, they do seem to appreciate it.” I replied wondering how much more they were going to continue. “Really; they really like it?” they wondered. “Do you want to see claw marks on my head?” I replied. “Seriously, they do seem to like it. It is almost a guarantee of orgasm for her. Intercourse alone results in orgasm only one third of the time. So depending on Mr. Happy (I like to use proper, technical terminology) to carry the day, is a set up for her dissatisfaction. And it is only fair—if she is pleasuring me orally—that I enthusiastically return the favor.” I do understand that this is one more of my beliefs that is way out of the mainstream. Isn’t equality of orgasm in the Constitution? It should be. Why not? Oh, right. Men wrote the Constitution and create the vast majority of porn. 

If you watch lizards and lions copulating, then you will see that in 200 million years the male has not had a single new idea.

Robert Ardrey

It became almost scripted; every month the two opening questions from the incarcerated teen boys concerned menstruation and cunnilingus. The only difference month to month was the order of the questions. When I saw how wide-spread the male training of boys taught them ignorance of, hostility to and fear about menstruation and cunnilingus, I started to bring these up in my sessions with high school boys and college men. Or maybe it was that I was more open to hearing any question from them and they all wanted to ask about menstruation and cunnilingus. They had the same questions and reactions, but the main difference between them and the incarcerated teens was that the juvenile offenders were less “civilized,” they didn’t know about what was “appropriate” for them to ask about. They would frequently say that I was the only male they had ever encountered who didn’t respond in  that stereotypic male manner.

This became a very appealing aspect of my sessions with the “hoodlums” as I began to call them to myself. I appreciated that they did not spend much energy maintaining a facade beyond the usual tough guy personna. And no one cared what I talked to them about since they were seen as “America’s garbage,” (not at all my feeling). I could tell them my truth without any need to modify my material to assuage their parents, teachers, athletic coaches, clergy, Scout leaders, high school administrators, college administrators, etc. Males not in prison were much more cosseted and protected from having to take responsibility for their abusive acts by the adults around them. “Not our boys,” you remember? 

I had never thought of myself exactly as a public “cunnilingus advocate” but when, month after month, the boys in the juvenile offender program (and in high school, in middle school, and in college) asked about it, I was forced to examine what I never had about my feelings about cunnilingus. I was no  fetishist, or saint; it just seemed fair and was highly pleasurable to me as well as to my partners. In the same way that it was obvious about the teens I was addressing, neither did boys of my generation ever encounter an older male who rhapsodized about cunnilingus. Neither had we been taught about the existence let alone the importance of the female orgasm. 

After a date or hookup, we were asked (grilled) by other males. “Did you do her?” Not, “Do you like her?” or “Do you think you’ll see her again?” or “What did you two talk about?” or if there was sex, “Did she cum?” No. “Did you do her?” In other words, “Did you ejaculate on, in, or near her, or lie to us about it?” Indeed, you might say in my generation that the female orgasm was an “ill-proven hypothesis,” a chimera. The dialogue from the movie Grease reveals the skewed training of boys and girls when Danny is asked, “Did she put up a fight?” Sandy, meanwhile is asked, “Was it love at first sight?”

When I brought up male hostility, squeamishness, and hypocrisy about cunnilingus in my discussions with males, male statements about cunnilingus were a prime example. One teen boy talked with real enthusiasm about receiving fellatio while he simultaneously went on about the “nastiness” of female genitals. Ironically, the last time he had been in close proximity to a female’s genitals was probably at birth. I wasn’t ordering them that they must go down on females, only that reciprocity was fair and that I found it pleasant and erotic. 

That boy went on further about the “nastiness” of cunnilingus and rhapsodized about receiving fellatio until I asked him what exactly was the problem with cunnilingus. Get ready for boy logic. “They pee there,” he responded. “Come on kid, you pee through your penis, don’t you?” After a few of his friends laughed at him and his obvious hypocrisy, he blustered and insisted that there was a huge difference between fellatio and cunnilingus (besides the obvious physical differences). “Well, that (cunnilingus) is just different,” he insisted clearly running out of steam. “Kid, vive la différence!’” 

During my interactions with teen boys or college age men, there appeared to be one or a few alpha males who were loudest in negativity about cunnilingus (or other acts). Many of the other boys present were seemingly just watching and listening. They didn’t vehemently repeat the cunnilingus hostility of the few. But all were worried that they would be judged for not falling into line with the alphas who’s volume and menace won the discussion.

As we have all grown up in a world defined and controlled by males, we should be familiar with male blustering and defense of ever more risible contentions. As a part of the discussion about cunnilingus one month, another vehement alpha insisted that he would never perform cunnilingus. I wasn’t trying to convince him to someday do so, but I did bring up rampant male hypocrisy. “Eventually, females are going to tire of your no doubt twelve inch, fantasy high school boy penis. Some day, you won’t be able to achieve an erection. Cunnilingus is your friend.” He repeated heatedly that he would never do that. In fact, he said, “I don’t even touch their breasts.” “Oh, no,” flashed across the faces of the other boys. “Now touching their breasts is a new proof of gayness I have to guard against.” Wow, I thought, the most heterosexual boy ever. 

At the end of that interchange, a different boy asked me who was that guy about whom they had read about in a book who went around the country planting apple trees. I replied, “Johnny Appleseed?” “He replied, “Yeah. You said you go around the country talking to men about all this stuff. That makes you Joe Cunnilingus-seed.” I have never been so extravagantly amused and honored. Finally an epitaph for my headstone! When some of the other boys concurred, besides my feeling honored and amused, it was thrilling that these hoodlum males were using the term “cunnilingus” at all and as a positive. That had to be a first in male history. 

Their expressions of revulsion are learned absolutely from the overheard public pronouncements of older boys and men. The one-dimensionality of male imagined and practiced sex and lack of imagination (and experience) means that no boy has ever heard other males use words such as “salty,” “musky,” “sexy,” “provocative,” “primal,” to describe women’s aroused smell. Male’s learned revulsion is reinforced by their exposure to mainstream porn where males enjoying performing cunnilingus through to her orgasm is a rarity. Search porn sites for “Cunnilingus”and you will mostly find lesbians (or heavily made-up pretend lesbians with long Ginsu knife, fire engine red fingernails wearing high heels in bed) going down on other women. (Just like all the lesbians I know.) The relatively few male cunnilingus practitioners only very rarely lick women to orgasm. They only produce what the great, great, great Yeastie Girlz referred to in their magnificent song You Suck as “just a token lick.” In porn and too often in real life males give a few cursory licks on the way to the real action, fellatio and vaginal and anal intercourse. Hypocrisy abounds in male culture. I told those boys that and boys and men in the thousands of other groups I addressed.

Confront Other Males? Moi? 

Every boy spends some time in locker rooms. This is where the lowest common denominator of male and female stereotypes are rigidly held and adherence and submission to the Masculinity Party Line is violently enforced. There is no nuance or tolerance of non-conformity allowed. This is one of the places where rape culture replicates itself generation after generation. Even those outraged or grossed out by the utterances of proudly selfish, ignorant, disturbingly sexist male peers rarely confront those males. And those piggy males absolutely do not expect to be challenged. Besides fear of being called gay or female (in familiar, hateful slang terms) what keeps many males from challenging other males is that they know that they are not so utterly different. They have thought, or said, or done problematic things themselves. “So who am I to tell anyone anything?”

From the guilty looks, the desperate, frequently ludicrous defensive responses, the stunned silences, and confessions from some male participants in every session I facilitated in high school, college and prison, I learned the necessity of at least naming the fact that statistically there are males present in every education session who have committed sexual assault whether or not they had planned to commit assault, or conceptualized it as such, or even whether or not if their partner/victim identified their experience as sexual assault. 

After hearing hundreds of stories by females sexually assaulted by males I began to realize how common rape was. After hearing hundreds of stories by males sexually assaulted by males I began to realize how common rape was. There are also female perpetrators of sexual assault of males and females. I believe that by high school and definitely by college, over half of males have committed acts that could legally qualify as sexual assaults. 

I began to incorporate a statement of my belief of the prevalence of sexual assault as part of my introductory remarks in every session I facilitated, in fraternities, with athletic teams, in juvenile and adult prisons, in the military, and in high school. I would say, “I believe a significant number, probably over half of males present, have committed acts that would legally qualify as sexual assaults. I am here because the problem is here not just over there.” In Madison, I would say that the problem is here in Madison not only in Milwaukee. [In Wisconsin, Milwaukee is synonymous with Black and poor and all students hold unexamined stereotypes of people of color and poor people, i.e. “others.”] 

I would also state that many males present feel guilt and shame about things that they’ve done in relationships or on dates, or feel guilty that they did nothing to stop other males from “doing screwed-up stuff.” I would also state that some males present feel fear that their acts could be named as sexual assault. I don’t have statistical “proof” of my belief about the prevalence of males who have perpetrated present in every educational session. We would have to take girls and women seriously to see this truth revealed. We would have to read between the lines of what males say (or do not say) to see this truth revealed. We would all have to look at our own behavior in relationships: casual, short-term, committed and long-term.

Of course male students didn’t cheer my, to them, shocking pronouncement. “Yay! The speaker just called us all rapists. Yay!” but in response to my comments, their responses in every session I facilitated were quite revelatory. “If people start listening to women, we are all screwed.” “If that [what I had explained] is rape then every guy here is guilty.” “You mean that that could be rape? But every guy here has done stuff like that.” I took them at their word. 

In every session I facilitated, I encountered much guilt, shame and fear. It quickly became obvious that they appreciated my candor and honesty and caring about them enough to not be dissuaded by their resistance while giving them good tools on how to practice consensual sexuality. Tens of thousands of male students have expressed appreciation for my “bravely” stating that the entire responsibility for perpetrating sexual assault is upon the perpetrator.

If educators do not at least mention in every educational session, that statistically speaking, some males present have committed sexual assault at some point, they are not doing all they can to end sexual assault. What are they afraid of? 

I base my assertion that over half of the males present have committed acts that would legally qualify as sexual assaults on seven items. Consider: 

1. That tens of thousands of males in workshops and speeches haven’t argued with me when I said it directly to them. They do occasionally make incorrect guesses about my sexual partners. And sure, they vehemently ask for clarification and definitions, but never a thrown chair. The truth remains, many of them have not taken it seriously when someone said, “No,” once or even multiple times. Many have ignored clear, unmistakable body language. Many have won the “wrestling match” by any means necessary.

2. That thousands of boys and men, upon hearing the rape laws read and hearing rape defined for the first time, with examples to “translate“ the legal jargon into vernacular human speech have said, “If that’s rape, then every guy here has raped ” or other fearful, inadvertent confessions. “You mean that if there is a girl passed out in a room at a party and guys go in and have sex with her, that could be rape?” This was a disturbingly frequent question. “How could it be anything but rape,” I would reply. “There was no consent possible.” “You mean if I grab a girl’s crotch, that could be rape?” demanded a college football player. “Depending on details like her age and how inebriated she was among others, yes, it would be a sexual assault by the laws in this state.” I replied. “That’s not fair,” he exclaimed. Spirited discourse ensued.

3. When I ask boys and men to forget the stereotypic movie rape, i.e., perpetrated by a Black stranger with a knife to her throat in a parking structure at night, etc. and think about what is the smallest thing that they have done that could make or did make someone feel really uncomfortable ranging to someone feeling that they had been sexually assaulted as a result of their acts, many look conflicted and many have confessed to me. The aftermath of good sex is not tears, freezing up, refusal to make eye contact, refusal to talk, running from the room as soon as possible. If someone feels assaulted, then they were assaulted. After the fact is too late to begin to protect yourself from yourself, your drive to win and get sex at any cost. After the fact is too late to deduce that you screwed up, guys. That’s why consent is your friend.

4. When I would talk about how boys in previous generations including mine were emotionally neglected and never taught a loving, torrid, and consensual sexuality by caring older males, and that I believed they were similarly deprived, no more than a handful of the hundreds of thousands of students I have addressed have ever demurred. None described how they had been taught to be good sweet, gentle lovers. Not all males commit sexual assault; but all are taught the theory. They have learned how to win in power-over interactions. They have learned that it is their privilege as males to unilaterally define the interaction as “sex” without checking in to ascertain the feelings of their partner/victim. Because of our having been born male, we are entitled to define sex including that it starts when we say, that it goes on for as long as we say, and that it is over when we say. These are not negotiable. Like previous generations of males, boys have learned that consent is unfamiliar and since it requires taking female partners or male partners seriously, consent is more of an onerous, deeply unfamiliar issue of etiquette (and thus easy to discount and ignore) than a wonderful gift by which we keep sex from becoming sexual assault. When consent is described, when males hear what that process might actually look and sound like, establishing consent sounds like it would be a waste of valuable time that could be better off “doing sex stuff.” Consent? “What’s in it for me?” many males have asked. This is the question of the century. How would you respond?
   All boys were raised as if they were born heterosexual and would always be heterosexual. Many boys who are gay transfer from females to males the very flawed heterosexual relationship practices, rationalizations, and beliefs that they and all boys learned. Without revelation about the deep issues in “normal” i.e., heterosexual interactions, the “sexiness” of: age and power imbalances; distrust and fear and removal of humanity of the female “other;” “heroic” volume of partners (whether real or fabricated); the privilege to define and control the sexual interaction; the separation of sex from feelings; the reduction of an entire spectrum of possible mutually-pleasurable sexual acts to ejaculating on, in, or near someone; the hostility to and discounting of love among others will be practiced in gay relationships with just the locus of attention changed from female to male. If few parents have taught their kids safety in heterosexual sexual relationships, none are discussing safety in gay sexual relationships. Along with their saying that he will grow up and find the woman of his dreams, do any parents validate equally that their sons may find the man of his dreams? Can they conceive of that possibility as an eventuality that they would celebrate—that their son would find a lover and mate with whom he was happy and that they in turn were happy for him and about him and his choice?

5. That when a male in one of my workshops confesses to having committed sexual assault (and hundreds have confessed to me in sessions) many other males present get a sickly look on their faces as if to say, “Me too.” “I think I’ve done what you are talking about. What should I do?” is how some have enunciated it. Some state this aloud; many others have confessed to me in writing on their evaluation forms or after speeches in person. I have received email confessions! This happened so frequently that I began to preemptively bring it up as part of my introduction/Safe Space discussion.

6. That when you survey females and ask, “ Have you been raped?” 2-4% answer “yes.” When you ask females, “Have you ever been forced to submit to sexual acts against your will?” 10% to over 50% answer “yes,” depending on how safe the respondents feel and how much they trust the questioner. This is the essence of the legal definition of sexual assault. It is not a small handful of males who are assaulting over half of females and an under-studied number of males. Many males have committed acts that would legally qualify as rape/sexual assault. I met a college lecturer who taught an Introduction to Sociology class for first year students. For years she gave students an optional True/False questionnaire. She wanted to gauge the experiences and attitudes of each year’s first year students. In response to the statement, “Intercourse is always painful for females,” year after year, over 80% of male students answered “True” and over 70% of female students answered “True” as well. There is no reason to presume that every male respondent had gone out of his way to make intercourse as painful as possible, but alternately there is no reason to presume that every male respondent had gone out of his way to make intercourse as pleasurable and painless as possible. This remains very sad and very revelatory of what we face in ending rape culture. Since sex education has never taught about sex, especially female pleasure and sexual response, this is the end result of poor, conflicted sex education and of pornography, the default sex education. Female pleasure and sexual response are feared, widely misrepresented, frighten Patriarchs, and are punished.

Not enunciating the ways that males are affected by growing up in a rape culture and not discussing that some have perpetrated and holding only a tiny few perpetrators responsible has served to reinforce the “not our boys” canard. In my experience, males responded well to my naming their guilt, their shame, their regret, and their fear that their acts might be named. They report that my session was the first time they had heard material like mine and the first time they had been called on their behavior. They also responded well to my discussion about what consensual sex can look and feel like. Naming all men to be bystanders causes no men to self-reflectively re-examine their behavior and attitudes only the behavior of others. And many of them have done problematic things. 

I have long felt that it is the same with the use of statistics: not one male has ever heard the statistics on rape and has responded by feeling compelled to examine his own behavior. The only time to use statistics is when participants refuse to believe a problem even exists (as do so many college presidents, for example). But, be warned, if you use statistics you will waste time debating statistics with participants, an utterly valueless process of dueling statistics and no rape supportive attitudes and behaviors confronted.

At a sexual harassment training for middle management at a Veterans Administration hospital I facilitated, I experienced a particularly revelatory episode. A participant who was a doctor kept sniping at me, arguing over language and the extent of the problem, posturing and monopolizing a disproportionate share of the allotted time. He finally shouted, “I just don’t believe these statistics.” I asked him, “What numbers would you prefer that I cite? The large, true numbers that you keep disbelieving or should I invent smaller numbers that would enable you to assert that it wasn’t enough of a problem to be worthy of attention?” 

He stormed out of the room. I was a little taken aback by his dramatic departure, but relieved. His continuous attempts to control the flow of the session kept attention on him. This is a familiar ploy. When male participants try to do this, I give them time to speak and then cut them off to be fair and give others their turn. With this doctor grabbing a disproportionate share of the session, I let him go on a bit longer to fully implicate himself with his defensive posturing. Unexpectedly, in response to his departure, there was applause from other participants, as if I had bodily removed him. Participants informed me that he was facing multiple charges of sexual harassment at the facility. I hadn’t known that but wasn’t at all surprised. Of course he wouldn’t want to leave unchallenged the idea that sexual harassment was an important problem. 

I wrote and have been distributing versions of this since the late 1980s.

How Living In A Rape Culture Affects Males: 

1. As survivors of incest or other sexual assault: One in six males are assaulted by age eighteen. Perpetrators include: clergy, coaches, Boy Scout masters among others. One element in boys’ lives that serves as a deterrent for them to understand their abuse is the virulent homophobia that constrains the lives of all boys. Most males assaulted as boys or as men fear that they were the victim of a homosexual sex act, not that they were the victim of a crime. Further, they fear that they were made gay as a result of that act and that the perpetrator was gay. They were not turned gay nor were the vast majority of perpetrators gay. They are stunned when I tell them this. Additionally, many males sexually assaulted as boys by females also assume themselves to be gay. How? They assume they are gay because they hadn’t liked the non-consensual “sex” that was inflicted on them.

2. As “significant others:” We all know someone, female or male—a relative, friend, lover—who is a survivor of incest or other sexual assault. Considering the prevalence of the problem, each and every one of us know many survivors though we may not have been told. By age eighteen, one in three females has been the victim of an attempted or completed sexual assault. We are affected when a partner admits that she doesn’t trust men. We are affected when a date reveals having been assaulted by a “nice guy.” We are affected when a close friend is raped. We are affected when a close friend is accused of rape. We are affected when we partner with or marry someone who is a survivor of rape. We are affected when strangers to whom we have no close connection are assaulted.

3. Men distrust other men: We know what other males are thinking about when they look at our sisters/girlfriends/partners (we’re thinking the same about their sisters/girlfriends/partners.) We compete with other males for access to females; especially those previously untouched (unharmed?) by other males; especially those younger females with low or no expectations of males.

College football player: “I’m not letting my sister out of the house for ten years.”

Joe: “Really. Who are you protecting her from?”

College football player (replying while pounding on his desk for emphasis): “Guys like me!”

1. Men fear/distrust women: Too often, in response to discussions about sexual assault, males respond with defensive charges of “men-bashing.” Some males rape while, ironically, angry/fearful about “false” accusations of rape. Many of us feel shame and guilt about what we may have done in the past and fear and confusion about what to do now. A college football player stood up to announce that “all females were skeezers and liars and gold diggers.” He sat down to appreciative barking and clapping from some of the other participants. I responded, “That is really perceptive of you to see through them. So as a result, I assume that you have nothing sexual to do with those untrustworthy females?” He demurred, aghast. I asked him (and really all males), “What is the quality of all of our interactions including sex with people we disrespect, scorn and deeply distrust?”

2. Fear of rape looms over our relationships with women and with men. There is a broad spectrum of behavior now legally, rightfully identified as sexual assault. Many boy’s and men’s sense of what sexual assault is remains rudimentary—limited to stereotypes that couldn’t include them. This is not an excuse; they have never needed to know any better (though the motivation of the perpetrator is, presumably, of little importance to the victim). Behavior that is never challenged is unlikely to be changed. Male privilege is a double-edged sword.

3. As survivors who perpetrate: Many of the males who perpetrate were taught the ethos of power-over sex (sexual assault) when they were assaulted. On college campuses, fraternity men and male athletes are the two groups that are responsible for perpetration of sexual assault in numbers far disproportionate to their percentage of the total male student population. They are not the only perpetrators, but it is not a coincidence that these are the two environments on college campuses where an entire range of male-on-male sexual humiliation, sexual harassment, sexual terrorism, and sexual assault thrive. It is covered up by administrators who oversee fraternities and athletic department personnel and school administrators who when pressed refer to the abuse as “hazing,” or “initiation rites.” It is in this environment of casual tolerance for male-on-male sexual violence that the wholesale tolerance of male-on-female sexual violence thrives unchallenged and unabated. Studies show that most of the males in prison for all crimes are survivors of incest or other sexual assault. One of the greatest things I learned from Feminism was that, “Rape is learned behavior,” that rape was not innate, biologically-hard wired. Whether or not survivors who perpetrate are attractive to us in light of their perpetration, it remains eminently true that their perpetration was learned behavior. This is of course not even slightly an excuse for any of their subsequent abusive behavior.

4. As “bystanders”: Note: Before all men were turned into bystanders by statistical sleight-of-hand, I believed that male fear and lack of skills and encouragement (and models) to be able to safely challenge other males’ problematic attitudes and behavior was a real part of the problem, perhaps 5% of the solution to the problem of ending sexual assault. But that is all it is.
   College men are being told that only a tiny percentage of males commit assault, and the rest of males are “bystanders.” This is simply untrue. Avoiding defensive male reaction is not a valid reason to employ this dishonest analysis. Males’ paradigm experience is as perpetrators, (and as significant others, survivors, etc.) From where and from whom did so many (or any) of those newly anointed bystander males learn to practice a truly consensual sexuality? There is no organized effort in the U.S. teaching boys how to make love and certainly not how to engage in sexual acts in a manner that at very least does not hurt either party. Not all males will assault, but all learned rape supportive attitudes and behaviors growing up. Those who have become sweet, torrid, gentle, consensual lovers have had to unlearn the pornographic lies about males, females and about sex that they learned growing up.

   The pretense that most males are “bystanders” (read: innocent) bystanders, does males no favor except to exonerate perpetrators. The purpose of this fraudulent analysis is to reassure college administrators who want to make a big problem on every single campus in the country disappear. It is ironic though, as male students confess to me as having committed sexual assault (and over the years thousands have), administrators at those same schools have told me “no problem exists here.” Besides direct confession, many more males have admitted to “having questions” about things they have done or to being “not sure what to call” acts that they have participated in. Many males know exactly what they have done. What about them? The designation bystander protects them and also slaps in the face the millions of females and those uncounted males who know that they have been sexually-assaulted by males. High school and college administrators have had to be evermore clever and watchful to avoid somehow, inadvertently hearing the voices of the female (and male) students at their schools who have been sexually assaulted by male students, faculty and staff.

For those educators who work in high school and college who use some variant of the bystander analysis, I have two questions: 1) While we can quibble about the exact percentages of boys and men who have committed acts that would legally qualify as sexual assaults, it is delusional at best to act as if none of your boys or men have committed sexual assaults. When in your interactions with them have you ever mentioned this, let alone confronted those who have perpetrated? 2) If you do not or have not done so, why not? At worst you are colluding in their assaults. Find out from where they learned consensual sex or non-consensual sex. To be a rape prevention educator and never confront rape supportive attitudes and behavior is wrong. I would like to hear how you confront perpetration and perpetrators.

Institutional Denial as Epitomized by College Presidents

Musing about institutional denial that a problem exists reminds me of a training session I facilitated in 1990. I was speaking to staff from the University of Wisconsin-Centers campuses. During the session, I noticed one man sitting in the first row get up several times, leave the room and return a few moments later. I wondered what was going on but I did notice that each time he returned, the rest of those in attendance would literally lean towards the man as if awaiting a sign from him. He would shake his head “no,” and the others would sigh and return their attention to me. I began to watch. What was going on?

After several of these mystifying exchanges, I asked what was going on. People explained that the state legislature was deliberating over the “Crime Awareness and Campus Security” act. The people in attendance in my session were awaiting the outcome of the bill. The man leaving the room was keeping track of the bill’s progress. 

I believe that the main beneficiaries of these sorts of bills are their sponsors. They can claim publicly that they are doing something brave to address sexual assault on campus. These bills aren’t very effective to that end because they leave huge loopholes, I suspect intentionally. But even as flawed as they invariably are, I support these bills as tiny, positive steps forward. Who could be opposed to them, except that they do not go far enough? 

I said as much to the group. Another man stood up and said that he was opposed to the bill. “Why?” I asked. He replied, “If this bill passes I will have 300 female students who have been assaulted, sitting in my office expecting me to do something.” I paused, not exclusively for effect. I wanted to let the full ramifications of what he had just said sink in. “What support are they receiving now?” I asked. Silence resounded throughout the room. 

“None,” I answered for him, “absolutely no support. And of course, WHAT ABOUT THE PERPETRATORS?”

Few students entering college come having received comprehensive sex education and rape prevention education at home, in schools, in churches. Most students received little or no sex education, or much worse, abstinence-only sex education. Pornography and popular culture like the hugely popular HBO show, Game of Incest Thrones has functioned as default sex education misinforming kids and popularizing incest/sexual assault/non-consent/painal (intentionally painful anal intercourse). Porn and pop culture have made crimes and bad sex “sexy.”

For some students, the first day of college is the first day their abuse at home has ended. Some of the assaults impacting students were committed years before the students arrived on campus. While therefore, some of the incest and other sexual assaults affecting students are not the responsibility of the institution as are assaults committed on those campuses, students are affected no matter when and where the assaults were committed. No one is expecting colleges to have prison cells in the basement of the administration building. Neither is anyone expecting a one-to-one student to counselor ratio. But if colleges are in the business of education, why after decades of publicity and pain are schools not providing that comprehensive education for every student yearly? 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if colleges committed to all students graduating having had attended multiple, quality rape prevention and comprehensive sex education sessions so that they will be ready upon graduation to be the first generation of parents prepared to educate their kids well? Punting support and education to one or a very few counselors is not practical nor is it kind nor is it helpful to counselors or to most students. Most students have graduated high school without having learned much of anything helpful about sexual assault. Most are graduating college without having learned anything more than a one hour, first year student orientation session that is never followed up on. We can do better, much better. Will we?

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As Five Thirty Eight points out, this kind of “not on my campus” thinking is pretty delusional, given the widespread attention paid to campus sexual assault and its mishandling at dozens of schools in recent years. But it’s in line with what we already know: that college administrations tend to treat rape as a PR problem that’s best not acknowledged unless absolutely forced to.

College presidents appear to be out of touch. 

From FiveThirtyEight.com

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So just to reiterate, sixty-eight percent of college presidents do not believe that sexual assault is prevalent on US college campuses! Stunningly, ninety-four percent do not believe sexual assault is prevalent on their campus! No, this was not a survey from 1952 or some other ancient, “innocent” time. Don’t you just hate it when you think you’re being cynical about something and then you find out that the truth is infinitely worse than you could have imagined? Where to begin here?

First of all, how can any president answer, “Neutral?” Quick, college president, answer the question, “Is murder bad?” “Gee, I don’t want to take a stand, to look biased. I want to be objective. Let’s appoint a committee. Let’s wait until all the facts are in. If I delay long enough, my successor can address it.” It appears that the stereotype of the college president solely there to raise funds for a football stadium and to make sure that huge problems are finessed so that appearances are kept up is true. They are seemingly not hiring for empathy and courage and skills in listening to students. 

I really have never expected college presidents to go out of their way to listen to students. That would be a 1930s movie trope: the caring, kindly, avuncular college president. I don’t expect college presidents to go out of their ways to hear about student’s lives, to care about their lives though I would love it if they tried. And they must not care in order to report their opinions in this survey. In light of decades of student complaints, student protests, studies, made for television movies, campus judicial board hearings, nosy local reporters’ articles, national attention however ambivalently informed, state and federal legal action, innumerable articles in campus newspapers, for any high-level college administrators to deny the prevalence of sexual assault on their campus is mind-boggling since it is a large problem on all campuses. 

And if only a very few presidents will even admit that there is indeed a problem on all campuses including theirs, they are irrelevant by choice and are an impediment to the campus-wide effort to address the problem. No college presidents have admitted the unconscionably large number of sexual assaults committed on their campuses and then enumerated the verifiable and substantive changes that their campus was going to make in order to finally create a safer campus environment for all. There has definitely never been a college president who stated the obvious: “There are male students, faculty, and staff on our campus who have committed felonies, and this is our comprehensive educational program to address our very real problem. No longer will this university insult hundreds of thousands of survivors by continuing to participate in the charade of insisting that only a tiny number of students have been sexually assaulted.” 

The constant refrain of “not our boys” enunciated or fervently believed and unenunciated have the same result: only a minute percentage of perpetrators of felonies are ever held responsible for their acts. If the truth were to be, as the I believe spurious research “proves,” that only a relatively few males commit sexual assault, then those perpetrators must be assaulting twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And little is being done to those few officially-admitted perpetrators. Usually “Geographic therapy.” They are allowed and encouraged to go to a different school without any mention of the assault(s) on their record.

“Not our boys” or “boys will be boys” is unfortunately not a thing of the past. As I am writing this, there was an alleged sexual assault in a high school in Madison, Wisconsin. The school district’s safety and security coordinator's first public statement was, “Our buildings are full of kids and kids will be kids.” Nice.

When asked, most students report knowing at least one student who has been sexually assaulted. Many know more than one. Some know many survivors. Those who report that they do not know a survivor, just have not yet been told. When school reports zero, one, eight, forty-five, assaults they are spitting in the face of the hundreds and thousands of women and men who over the years have been sexually assaulted while students on that campus. 

As a society, we have never taught boys the skills necessary so that they would grow up to be good lovers, good partners, or good fathers. We have never engaged in a debate to agree on just what those skills might be and what a good male lover, a good male partner, or a good father would look like. Generations of never teaching the skills and supplying them with good male models of these behaviors has resulted in the maintenance of rape culture and sad, truncated male (and female) lives.