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Thursday, August 5, 2010

Sexual assault illustrated for the less empathetic? Or not?

Popular Guy is a good friend of Unpopular Guy. At a fairly wild party, Popular Guy convinces A Girl to have sex with him. They do it in the same room as Unpopular Guy. With A Girl drunk and not clear on what's happening, Popular Guy convinces Unpopular Guy that it'll be fine if he takes a turn. Unpopular Guy knows penis-in-vagina is wrong but handles her genitals.

A Girl has been sexually assaulted by Unpopular Guy with Popular Guy as an accessory. A Girl is likely not to say anything out of embarrassment. Popular and Unpopular Guy probably don't see this as having been a crime, and may even brag about it.

Now what's weird is that I just read a similar story, claimed to be true, on Literotica. Popular Guy tells the story, and is amused by the horrified expression on A Girl's face when she notices what happened.

Except A Girl (Aaron) is a man, Popular Guy (Venus) is a girl, and Unpopular Guy (Jay) is unattractive to A Girl (Aaron) because Jay's a gay man.

The story is here.

Reading this I wasn't as horrified for Aaron as I might be, because it's a story bragging about sex, which proclaims itself true, on the Internet. I don't have all that much fear that it is true. Instead I read this and thought, "what a perfect illustration of a sexual assault scenario with the genders twisted around." The perps who don't realize they did anything wrong, stretching the victim's boundaries before the attack, the horrified victim too ashamed to speak up. If men didn't get it when a woman was the victim, I thought, this story would make it clear.

Except the commenters don't seem to notice anything wrong with the story, they are all approving. I don't know what to think. Am I seeing this all wrong somehow?

1 comment:

  1. No. It's just that you actually do think about what constitutes assault and respect and boundaries outside of gender-labeled boxes. It was an assault.

    There is a very strong popular belief that is impossible for a woman to sexually molest a man in any fashion short of tying him down and shoving something up his ass, and even then people seem to think that's more funny than anything. I once read an article bringing the topic up in which the situation was clear-cut rape, and the bulk of the commenters- who seemed to be mostly male- told the victim to stop whining and that he must have enjoyed it and if he'd wanted to he could have just beaten her down.

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