There was a time, long ago now, it seems, when the notion of a woman raping a man was completely and utterly unfathomable. In the present, where men have grasped that the only way to fight back against women “crying wolf” about their “alleged” abuse is to themselves shout right back about being taken advantage of, the insurgency has gained traction with the aspersion cast on Asia Argento by Jimmy Bennett, paid off to keep quiet for his trouble of gaining a little sexual experience (so, money and pussy–and he’s complaining. Women of #MeToo didn’t even get any “inconvenience fee” like that for their trauma). And with many men already not only trying to flip the switch by saying that the accused have been “punished enough” (looking at you Norm MacDonald), but also claiming themselves to have been violated or taken advantage in some way, it’s time to put that path toward logical reasoning back on track before we start entering a world of “alternative facts” in which men are victims in any way other than of what their penis “makes them” do.
If you are a man, there is, undoubtedly, even in these waning Y chromosome times, a black mark on your masculinity if you so much as even slightly infer that you aren’t a crazed, lusting with violent sexual energy being (and a black mark on it even you do; ah, the double-edged sword of having male privilege in exchange for being despised for every move you make). It’s ingrained in so much of all culture that to be truly masculine–in short, virile–you must be the aggressor, the one who would never even dream of saying no to a sexual offer of any kind from a woman. Maybe this is why the only woman to have ever been so publicly accused of rape besides Argento was Joyce McKinney in 1977. In what would become known in the tabloids as “The Manacled Mormon” incident, McKinney’s ardor for a Mormon man named Kirk Anderson reached a deranged fever pitch when she pursued him on his mission in Surrey, England, kidnapped him and then took what she wanted, quote unquote. Though, in her defense, he probably made false promises to her like “forever” before he fled the scene after their initial encounter in Utah. As the subject of Errol Morris’ 2010 documentary, Tabloid, McKinney made the argument that trying to rape a man would be like “trying to shove a marshmallow into a parking meter.” The woman has a point. While arousal of a man, and the associated erection that comes with it, can stem from more than just mere sexual desire (anger, or stimulation of any kind, really, that triggers the hormonal response that opens the arteries in the penis up completely, the free-flowing lack of constriction leading to what can either be a pleasant or embarrassing–depending on where you are–display), it’s pretty rare. And even if his erection is somehow a stress or fear response to being “raped” by a woman, it’s not as though that stiffness can last long enough for her to have her way with him, erections being so tenuous as they are (particularly these days, when the glare of all manner of screens serves to aid in the Orwellian prophecy of deadening the libido).
To add to the incongruity of the smattering of men embodied by the Jimmy Bennett case, the reason the word “dry” is so often put in front of the word rape as it conventionally pertains to women, whether the penetrating violation is happening vaginally or anally (since every man, this writer maintains, is latently gay), is because a woman, unlike a man, cannot find arousal in her anger. Well, unless she’s Maleficent, an unsung heroine to us all. So no, wetness is rarely if ever a component to the raping of a female, whereas the male iteration of wetness–hardness–cannot be experienced by force from a woman.
Even so, Bennett does his best to make the argument for all men who were sexually “taken advantage of” by someone other than Kevin Spacey by explaining, “I tried to seek justice in a way that made sense to me at the time because I was not ready to deal with the ramifications of my story becoming public. At the time I believed there was still a stigma to being in the situation as a male in our society. I didn’t think that people would understand the event that took place from the eyes of a teenage boy.” That Bennett and men like him who have had a morally ambiguous sexual encounter now realize the power–the reclaiming of power, as it were–of making #MeToo suddenly about reverse sexism in the arena of rape and assault ought to be rather transparent, most especially to women. And yet, here we are, suddenly and once more, as females, apologizing for our stories, feeling that we should give yet another thing to the male species so that they don’t feel overly threatened or, heaven forbid, marginalized.
So yeah, once upon a time, women could not rape men. Until men got wise to such a claim as a highly ingenious power play to reclaim the valor they feel has been stolen from them as an entire gender. So if they must be debased in some way, it might as well be of their own making. Stripping themselves of their own dignity to strip women away of the very movement that they started, a movement in response to the abuse of power and sexual dominance that they have suffered infinitely more from than any man. So kindly, shut the fuck up. At best, maybe men can start discussing their “oppression” in about twenty centuries, when they’ve truly comprehended what it’s like to withstand being the “weaker” sex on the same level that women have. An errant pussy boy (fit for Nicki Minaj’s “Barbie Dreams” video) here or there claiming to have been violated cannot be allowed to become contorted and distorted into the #SheDominatedMeToo or #SheTheShrew movement.
