You may have heard the latest MRA talking point, the claim that more men are raped than women in the US. Echidne of the Snakes takes that apart beautifully: it turns out it’s only true if you compare a bushel basket full of apples and oranges to a handful of grapefruit that you’ve pulled out of another basket containing a bunch of avocados and bananas.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Who cares? I don’t mean “Who cares if people get raped?”. Rape anywhere and everywhere is a godawful thing everyone ought to be trying to reduce. I mean who cares what group is raped more than any other group? What difference does it make? Are we to believe Senator Stoprape’s proposal to reduce rape is going to be voted down by Senator Whocaresaboutrape on the basis that this group is raped instead of that group?
And lest we miss the big picture, the rapists in the manrape incidents are other men, so how does this give succor to the poor MRAs who are trying to deflect blame for American rapiness? “Yeah, don’t be getting on us men for raping women, we rape each other too! So there!”.
This is the best:
So MRAs who will argue that only forcible penetration amidst screaming and struggling counts as rape when the victim is a woman are treating any unwanted sexual touching as rape to claim more men are raped! If we’re counting any unwanted sexual touching (which maybe we should), the number of women raped in the U.S. jumps into what, the hundreds of millions every year? And that’s just the beginning. Well worth the click to see all the ways the MRAs number is bullshit.
scienceavenger:
It matters because if one group is victimized more than another, that might help us figure out the risk factors involved, might tell us about victimizers and what to do to stop them, and may not only give us an idea of what the most vulnerable groups are and how we should protect them, but it also might necessitate special protections for disproportionately victimized groups because blanket interventions that would help all groups might not work as well to completely alleviate the problem for that group.
Of course, those are only the generalized reasons I can think of off the top of my head.
@3 Good points all, for those of us concerned about reducing rape. I could see why someone like you might raise the point. Why the MRAs would still mystifies.
more men are raped than women in the US
By … men?
So are they own-goaling by saying that men sexually assaulting people is an even bigger problem? Way to go, MRAs!
They would have scored an own goal if they hadn’t shot themselves in the feet first.
scienceavenger: As far as I can tell, they only bring it up to confuse, mock, and dismiss. They don’t actually care, they just really hate feminism and see this as one of their many routes to undermining it. The fact that it involves outright lying is just par for the fucking course with these assholes.
MRA 1: “Oh my god! Did you know that more men are actually raped than women!!??”
MRA 2: “What are we going to do about this?!?!!”
MRA 1: “Let’s tweet out pics of feminists heads photoshopped onto the bodies of horses!”
MRA 2: “If anything will stop the scourge of male rape, Operation #amandahorsecotte will!!!”
Marcus @ 5 & nich @ 8
In other words, “Men rape! Aren’t women terrible?”
nich: Is that photoshopped heads on horses actually a thing? Because if it isn’t, kudos on the parody, because that definitely sounds like something they would do!
The 90,479 number is almost certainly from the 2008 FBI’s Crime in the United States since the number matches exactly. The FBI’s number there uses the old definition of ‘forcible rape,’ which excludes men and many kinds of sex offenses, though it does include attempts.
Thus the blog post is absolutely correct that the Daily Mail article compared survey data on sexual victimization in with reports of a narrow class of sexual victimization to police departments. It should surprise no one that the Daily Mail was wrong.
Unfortunately, not even the worst MRA lie I’ve read about this morning:
Men’s Rights Group Masquerades as Fake Domestic Violence Campaign to Confuse Donors
Yeah, I’m not buying any kind of goodwill by the abuser’s lobby.
@8,
Precisely.
Men are raped and this is a legitimate problem, one in which should get more coverage. The problem is MRA’s do not seek solutions to this they only accept it and blame women for speaking out against women being raped.
Theoretically, rape is a topic MRA’s and feminists should be working together to prevent. Men are victimized by rape like women are, though women more frequently. MRA’s need to ask their brethren to stop assaulting men and women..
qwints
Rape apologists don’t care. As I learned recently, first-hand, “credible source” is just a myth to so very many people. And rape apologists are certainly the dishonest kind of people who will absolutely thrive on exploiting that little cognitive pitfall.
To do something about prison rape would be to do something about racism, classism, police brutality, prison reform, minors tried as adults, the school to prison pipeline, access to mental health care, ending the War on Drugs, shitty popular attitudes toward imprisoned people, homophbia, transphobia and last but not least, misogyny and toxic masculinity.
Raped, imprisoned men are called b*tches for a reason. They are being reduced to the status of mere women and the men who rape them are asserting their dominance/masculinity. Rape jokes being OK means prison rape jokes are OK. Pretending that rape is sometimes justified condones the actions of rapists of men and women.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for MRAs to start concerning themselves with any of that, though. They’ll just keep sending threats and going on about how much women deserve disrespect, abuse and rape and how men and women who say they do not are the real bigots. They hate social justice warriors, but want to pretend to care about social justice.
They are no more for men’s rights that forced birthers are pro-life.
#14 Geral
ISTM one of the “rights” MRAs are fighing for is the right to rape women without getting punished for it, so your theory has a big problem.
When asked why MRAs do not try to draw attention to Stop and Frisk, the response was, “What’s Stop and Frisk”.
They don’t care about men’s rights if those men are not white, straight and cis.
Men who are undocumented workers?
Nothing
Transmen’s rights and safety?
Nope.
Same sex marriage rights and violence toward the LGBT community?
Not their concern.
MRAs complaints boil down to them wanting to silence raped, harassed and abused women. They want women to live in shame and fear. They want women powerless. They want them to be a servant class. They don’t want women to be able to leave a marriage they do not want to be in or for men to have to pay child support.
None of that makes men safer.
It does help men who like to abuse women to continue to do so without consequences. That’s their only real goal. That and getting their jollies by sharing violent fantasies with other men and terrorizing women via the internet.
They’re scum.
Yeah, those stats were making there way through the Popehat comments. Anyone with any familiarity with contemporary rape statistics could spot that they were comparing survey responses to self reporting.
That doesn’t appear to be actually true. Most penetrative rapes are men doing it, yes, but including all cases of sex without consent, the majority of perpetrators against men are women.
Jackie:
Big related factor as well: Bullshit “tough on crime” attitudes or political posturing, and widespread social acceptance of cruel, brutal vengeance as suitable “justice”.
QFT.
Even the stuff seems innocuous, their fucking whining shit about men dying in war more, or getting custody of children less isn’t about making shit better for men: It is about wanting things to get WORSE for women. They want to deny privileges they already have and then invent privileges that women have in order to justify taking even more away from them. It’s misogyny all the way fucking down.
Jacob Schmidt @ 19
Do you have a source on that? The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey says otherwise, at least for the USA:
Male victims of stalking primarily had female perpetrators, but sexual predation was from predominantly male perpetrators.
Found an additional useful data point:
According to correctional authorities, there were only 8,763 reports to authorities of sexual victimization in 2011 ( “Sexual Victimization Reported By Adult Correctional Authorities, 2009–11”. That’s the equivalent reporting process to the UCR, and it includes inmates of all genders and sexual victimization of all kinds. The most recent survey estimated that they were 80,600 victims. “Sexual Victimization in Prisons and
Jails Reported by Inmates, 2011-12”
Similarly, according to police departments, there were 83,425 to authorities of rape (using a much narrower definition) in 2011. Crime in the US 2011. According to survey data, there were 346,830 rapes or sexual assaults in 2012Criminal Vicimization, 2013
*headdesk*
Blockquote fixed:
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This is the area where I’d trust self-reporting the least. Lots of men, and lots of women, still believe in . On top of that, toxic masculinity heaps derision on any man who can’t defend himself against a woman.
Of course it’s not like I had actual numbers – and it’s not like the Morally Repugnant Assholes had any numbers, or any estimates with confidence intervals, or anything not pulled out of their asses. Few of them have said anything against toxic masculinity; many have said the opposite, .
I cannot blockquote today. I give up. :-(
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Absolutely and I don’t think it is a stretch to say that those attitudes are also a product of toxic masculinity.
David Marjanović @ 24
Researchers who focus on male victims generally argue the opposite: that there is greater stigma attached to being assaulted by a male, due to homophobia. This stigma and the perceived loss of masculinity is often cited as a motivation in and of itself.
Male survivors of sexual assault:
There’s a lot of sexual abuse that goes unreported and I imagine that societal ideas about masculinity and femininity are to blame for a lot of that, but I don’t see a compelling reason to cast doubt on the observed general trend.
re: tough on crime sentencing
Pharyngulites who are eligible to vote in California next month, can take a look at Proposition 47, which reduces some previously harsh sentencing which mostly came in under the “three strikes” law. (After two felony convictions, a subsequent misdemeanor conviction leads to a heavy sentence.)
I was naively shocked to find out (radio source, likely NPR) that 47% of the people jailed in California under that three strikes law are African-American. That is grossly disproportionate to the percentage of the population represented by that demographic.
I tried to read the popehat gamergate article. Unfortunately, since it was written by Clark aka Mr. Unexamined Privilege, it bears no resemblance to reality, is a pathetic attempt to portray it as a ‘both sides are right and wrong’ thing, skews libertarian, goes meandering off on various tangents, and I have the sneaking suspicion that the man is under the delusion that he’s funny.
Unfortunately, Echidne of the Snakes makes an erroneous claim. I’m reposting what I posted there.
This is not correct, as can be shown using some made-up figures. Suppose there were 100,100 men and 105,000 women outside prison, and rates of assault were 1% for men and 2% for women. That’s 1001 men, 2100 women. Suppose 5,000 men and 100 women in prison, with assault rates of 50% men and 60% women. That’s 2,500 men, 60 women. So the totals would be 3,501 men, 2160 women. More generally, if the disparity between numbers of the two genders in prison, and betweeen rates of assault in and out of prison are high enough, the total for men can be higher than that for women, even though in each sub-population (in or out of prison), the rate for women is higher.
I don’t know whether the Daily Fail‘s headline claim is correct, although your absolute numbers calculation says not. I do know the neither that “newspaper”, nor the MRAs who will cite its claim, are in the least concerned with reducing the number of men raped in American prisons.
MM
I’m looking. It was either found within the CDC full report for sexual violence, not intimate partner violence, for 2010, or similar. I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to look properly until late this evening.
Nevermind, I found it:
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf
Page 34
Thank you for finding this for me, Jacob Schmidt. Expanding the context in that document for those who can’t make it through that entire section:
That is a good challenge to old assumptions about sexual violence against men and boys. Definitely something to consider.
It has been said many times by those wiser than we, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
We wish we could say we were surprised, but we’ve come to expect these kind of shenanigans and intellectual dishonesty from those trying to defend the indefensible. Manipulation of information (aka propaganda) is one of their primary tactics.
moarscienceplz wrote:
I interpreted Geral as meaning, if MRAs actually cared about the issues they claim to care about, then they should be working with feminists on this. It’s plainly obvious that they don’t actually care about the issues except insofar as they can be used as weapons against feminists or other women, which highlights that their concern for those victims is entirely feigned.
This is right up there with the claim that women commit half of all acts of domestic violence. (Because, apparently, fighting to get away and survive is totally the same as trying to fucking kill your partner.)
By now the statistics about male victims I’ve seen (even when the methodology seems sound) are so plain contradictory that the only conclusion I can draw is that we need better tools and that the phenomonon is probably MUCH bigger than previously thought.
But that doesn’t detract from the overall point.
What do MRAs do about prison rape?
1. Joke about it
2. Shout at feminists “Why haven’t you stopped prison rape yet? Misandry!!!”
Point taken, thank you.
The Mellow Monkey @35:
Do these numbers include men who were raped/abused/assaulted as children? or as adults? I don’t see an explicit declaration as to whether all age cohorts were included.
Ogvorbis
Those numbers are for adults. However, that section is for sexual abuse over their entire lifetime, so it would include sexual abuse as a child. The report doesn’t break down the gender of the perpetrator by the age of the victim at the time of the assault.
Jacob:
Thank you. Surveyed as adults but includes all life experience. That is good.
I wonder why the gender of the rapist was not correlated with the age at the time of the assault? Not an accusation against the people who have put in the hard work, just, well, my perspective is skewed, so, s backing out before I ramble somewhere I don’t want to go today.