I’m a male victim. My perpetrator was an ex girlfriend. It happened a long time ago and the assault itself didn’t give me much or any trauma. I’m lucky in that way. It wasn’t painful, just left me feeling confused, gross, embarrassed, and helpless. I’ve worked through that stuff. Which made me more comfortable to speak up about my experience.
But in the rare event I’ve brought it up it has always been painful due to how it’s reacted to. I sympathize with every woman who has been assaulted and understand more than you can know about not being believed or having your assault minimized… all that stuff. But let me tell you, try being a male victim. Literally nobody gives a shit.
I’ve been told to “sit down”. Pointing out something like “just because she was blackout drunk doesn’t mean she was the victim” woah boy. That one is a doozy because it was my fuckingremoved. Telling someone a SA victim has the right to defend themselves in whatever means they deem necessary? Not if you’re a man. Nope. Which is why I didn’t defend myself.
I’ve told exactly two women in my life about it. A good friend and my wife, whom I love dearly. That stupid bear or man nonsense that went around last year? Each told me, “you wouldn’t understand because you’ve never had to deal withremoved.” Independently they said this and it wasnt even necessary because i was on their side. Instantly felt like I wasn’t seen. Like I told them about one of the most serious things that ever happened to me and it wasn’t worth making a mental note of? Male victims just do not matter.
It sucks. Worse than the damned act itself.
I feel like this is the only place I can be heard.
Not a man, but I feel you. The person who did the thing to me was a woman, which instantly makes some ignorant people think it’s no big deal, or somehow less serious than if it were a man. In reality, it was for me, a quite violent and immediately traumatizing thing, despite how some idiots think women are incapable of doing such things… I sympathize with you tremendously, and I’m sorry how your experiences have been disregarded and minimized by some ignorant people <3
My mom was sexually abused by her sister, my aunt, and she kept it secret for years. I didn’t learn about it until right before she died she told me. I will never forgive my aunt for that. It ruined my mother’s life and she drank herself to death over that and her awful marriage.
It sucks. I can imagine with how society tends to diminish lesbian love and lesbian sex that has its own elements of trauma. I’m sorry it happened to you.
Yeah, it’s a terrible thing to be sure
cw: SA, abuse, deep Flakes lore
I was in a very abusive relationship back in high school
I was still very timid, very unsure of myself and my sexuality
She took advantage of that
She constantly belittled me, struck me on several occasions, and frequently threatened to kill me and herself
I was very confused, I liked having sex but everything else was awful
The worst of it came one day when she forcibly penetrated me as “a surprise”
It hurt really bad, so i started to cry and she started to laugh
I got angry, angriest I had been in a long time, I shoved her off of me, started to get dressed, told her that we were done and if she ever came near me again, she would regret it
She pulled out a knife, told me she was going to kill herself and I just told her to go ahead and do it
She didn’t, had to see her in the hallways for two more years until she moved to a different part of the city and changed schools
Tried not to think too much about her until a year ago, when I found out she OD’d on heroin and died
Didn’t make me feel better, but I don’t hurt like I used to
The ex who assaulted me left me for another man. They ended up getting married after she got pregnant. Years later they divorced and I heard through people he beat her up and was a terror. I know what you mean. It’s no justice and just made me feel bad to hear it. She didn’t deserve that regardless of what happened between us.
[CW: SA/Gender Essentialism]
I’m so sorry you had to go through this.
I was SA’d by a man when I was far more male-presenting, and I think that made me more scared to open up about it. I didn’t even open up about it until years later.
I get what you mean. I am horrified by how dismissive people can be about stuff like this, and honestly, that dismissiveness and the selfish mentality I detect within it? It does cause me even more distress like what you are going through.
Something I hated about the “man or bear” thing is that it got exploited as a part of this tendency for white women to only care about when they themselves are victims of oppression. Plenty of Black women, in response, have said they’d choose being alone with a bear in the woods over being alone with a white woman in the woods, and I have seen the mayo backlash because of this. This perfectly exemplifies my issue with mainstream feminism and why, at this point, I feel inclined to even block feminist pages that aren’t explicitly radical (but obviously non-TERF), intersectional, and/or Marxist. Essentialism runs as a rampant issue within mainstream feminism, to a point where I can casually see a woman say things like “Men are oppressive and violent because of testosterone and their SRY gene” in a liberal space, and nobody will call it out.
Misogyny is most certainly a dire concern, and that can make it feel bad to dismiss how any woman approaches feminism, but I can’t bring myself to be so uncritical about a movement that seems to just be reactionary rhetoric in progressive packaging in so many instances. I feel like even too many genuine leftists give mainstream feminism too much credence.
Denial of support for male SA victims stems from many things, e.g., patriarchal standards, weird men saying male SA victims are “lucky,” and also the tendency that usually white women exploit to avoid accountability and ignore the fact that women can also be oppressors. Being an oppressor and being oppressed are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I’d argue that oppressed people also being oppressors in some way or another is the rule, not the exception. It’s why I know that if I am to find myself in a situation where I must engage closely with a white woman or a white queer person, I better expect a shit ton of racism and never give any of them too much trust. I have even had Black lesbians tell me that they were objectified and violated by white sapphic women. Yikes.
I feel all this. It’s one of those things where like, even when you understand the causes, that knowledge and understanding doesn’t diminish how shitty it feels.
spoiler
I was groomed and assaulted by a grown woman when I was a teen. I didn’t even understand this properly due to patriarchy etc until I transitioned this year.
That sucks. My CSA was by an older half brother. I was really young. I think CSA is a different beast, has kind of fucked up me for life. I’ll forever be hypersexual even after counseling.
Something similar happened to me. Trapped in a relationship with an abuser who demanded sex and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I mostly just don’t tell people about it
I’m so sorry this happened to you. I know exactly what you mean.
I’m more traumatized by the reactions I’ve gotten by telling people about it than the act itself
I feel this so much. I think 99% of my trauma is from people reacting badly to me seizing up from trauma, 1% the actual stuff at the bottom of it.
True.
CW: SA story
spoiler
Some of the experiences told here resonate too much with mine, in my case the perpetrator was male and a close friend of mine, we were both adults. I spent years silent because I didn’t know how to explain how I was removed by another adult male and “did nothing against it” (after being unconscious I woke up and he was there, doing it). I cut contact with him. After more than 5 years I finally broke the silence and told what had happened to some of the friends we had in common, I thought it was the least I could do, this person is dangerous to other people. My “friends” acted all worried about it but the next day they ghosted me.
The physical damage was nothing in comparison with the distrust I developed. They must have seen me as a burden so they abandoned me. My priority was alerting them, I wasn’t asking for retribution or anything of the sort. Never talked about my abuser in hateful terms. For some reason I didn’t feel hate towards him, only disgust and disappointment.
Men have a lot of trouble conceiving their kind as adult victims of SA. Not only when the victim is another person, it was hard for me to come into terms with what had happened too at first. The idea that “IT COULD NEVER HAPPEN TO ME” is in our subconscious and I get it, it’s the alpha male bullshit from the patriarchal society we get fed from birth. But my friends were all leftists so I thought they would act differently. Maybe I was asking too much.
Although the event itself hurts less now it changed me, I don’t trust people so easily and my boundaries are way more stricter than before. To this day I can’t call anybody a friend, I don’t perceive basic empathy from other people and in every social interaction I feel like I’m about to get fucked(figuratively), the paranoia never goes away.
This is exactly what I mean.
Yeah. Back in the day I had long term friends ghost me over it. Some people are only for fair weather.
Everyone says they will be supportive until it happens to someone they know. Then you really see who people are.
Thank you for sharing. Its tough talking about these things even on some random forum.
Similar situation happened to me as well. Relatable that the actual assault is seemingly less harmful than the reactions/treatment that follows.
CW: SA story
spoiler
___ In my specific story my girlfriend at the time (early 20s) started actively cheating on me with a man who lied about his age but turned out to be in his mid 30s. She would have him over at our place a ton and do increasingly degrading things to me around him to get off on it.
Me, being in love and severely depressed after my cat died, didnt really voice my concerns out of fear of being left alone during a very bad time. Eventually the behavior got strictly sexually degrading, but we eventually broke up when my depression made it so she wasnt feeling empowered by taking advantage of me anymore.
When I finally came forward and told my friends/mutuals what had happened, it turned out she had already painted me as the sole abuser in the relationship and that I was going insane. So many close friends stopped talking to me and I only started to get opportunities to say my peice years later when my story hadnt changed and old friends bothered to actually hear me out
The worst aspects were bad faith interactions with women telling me that it couldnt have been SA because I was a man, or that since she was my girlfriend it couldnt have been traumatic.
People are much more understanding now when I talk about it and I’m in a much better place overall.
I completely understand. Physically I’ve never been a very attractive guy but my ex was way out of my league. I feared at the time had I gotten physical to stop her, due to the location we were in, she might have been harmed. I literally considered as it was happening what people might believe if I harmed her if she decided to say I was the aggressor to save herself from the accusation. Plus, I did love her at the time and the fucked up thing is maybe still a part of me always will. But either way I decided the odds of me being believed just weren’t in my favor. Years later when I’ve spoken up anonymously, it’s only been validated. I thought things had changed after a bunch of movements about this, but those movements didn’t do much for women, much less men. Men who are victims remain invisible and only get lip service when convenient. The moment our story challenges someone, forget it.
I’m sorry. Outside of this space the only time I see this stuff being brought up is by MRAs (really hate that term) who don’t actually care about other men.
meditations on the subject
Reading this thread is interesting and sad because in my experience it’s actually really hard to downright impossible, if you’re perceived as masculine, to be honest about a more feminine person abusing or assaulting you. It’s like the nuanced message of “believe women, making allegations is so difficult and costly that nobody would make it up” got warped into or shortened into “amabs can never be the victims of afabs” and then that shorthand short-circuits people’s brains so they don’t fucking think or care. I don’t want to go into the details but I’ve had things done to me especially in the before times when I thought of myself as just a man, by femme partners, that it took a long time to even identify as consent violations. And even then I downplayed those, felt bad but didn’t think anything of it, and tbh I still downplay those actions, and I don’t know why. But there were clearly non-negligible and deleterious impacts on me which would come out later. Although I’d say the impacts and suffering from the emotional abuses have been millions of times worse than the impacts from the actual acts of sexual consent violations, for me.
You have no idea how much this resonates. I still find it hard to describe what happened to me as Rp because of how hard it is defined in society that I’ve internalized this and instead refer to it as sexual assault. I whitewash my own Rp. If it happened similarly to a woman and her story was the same as mine “it wasn’t painful, I just felt confused, powerless, embarrassed, blah blah and gave up fighting it” I’d absolutely say it wasremoved no question. I just find it hard to jump that hurdle. The fucked up thing is I don’t even see my perpetrator as a bad person even to this day. She did a bad thing and we never talked about it and I never told anyone who it was that did it to me except my wife.
I’m sorry. That thing about not seeing her as a bad person… yeah, that feels familiar. People are complicated and I don’t know what to say. Whether someone is good or bad doesn’t change whether their actions are harmful. Harm is harm.
I fear to say too much because I don’t want to say the wrong thing.
If it is possible and you can find and afford therapist, you may benefit from talking with one about that assault, and how it impacted you and continues to impact you. I’ve gotten a lot of benefits and healing from seeing a skilled therapist.
It’s okay. It is up to the harmed to forgive those that harm them and for those that do harm to change who they are. Harm is harm but I don’t think this one event defined her. As her victim, I think I have the right to say that and I think you have the right to say and feel what you want about the person that harmed you. It’s valid as long as we aren’t forgiving assailants on behalf of other victims.
As far as therapy, I have gotten much of it at points in my life, mostly for other things. Like I said, the assault itself I have moved past. It’s the reaction I get to speaking up for victims and about my experience that is the trauma. I also have CSA that is of a different nature. I’ve spoken a lot to a therapist about this and understand it causes my hypersexuality but after much treatment I’ve resigned that it’s just something my wife and I have to live with. She’s understanding and we’ve found a balance. There are many common trauma responses to CSA that nobody talks about and I don’t dare talk about them here, either. It’s such a hairy topic that it’s best left to specialty spaces for it. There actually was a decent subreddit for it but because it dealt with people discussing their abuse it was eventually banned.
It’s valid as long as we aren’t forgiving assailants on behalf of other victims
Very well put.
I’m glad you’ve been able to get therapy. Wishing you the best!
related story
I learned not to share with potential partners the sexual assault I experienced because some people will fetishise my SA and try to recreate it if I date them. It takes a while to figure out that this is happening and it actually feels way worse as betrayal of my trust than the actual SA.
I also have experiences of SA where the perpetrator was a woman and I don’t even try to bring it up to people because I know they won’t take me seriously.
YIKES YIKES YIKES YIKES YIKES WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM?! I’m so sorry they treat you that way. That’s horrible. What the fuck.
That’s particularly heinous. Luckily the worst my wife has done is forget I told her which is bad enough but at least not actively awful. I’m sorry that you have gone through that.
