This may be trivializing your experiences as well, but I think an important consideration here is that you’re a man. Many of the circumstances others in this thread are citing also involve male victims.
Men tend not to react to sexual abuse the same way that women do, and there’s no reason to expect that they would. Some of the reasons people aggressively protest that fact or attempt to have anecdotal evidence of it dismissed are:
They, male or female, genuinely would be distraught if that had happened to them, and project that strong preference onto others.
They feel it’s necessary to downplay men’s tolerance of sexual abuse as part of a general policy that says to downplay sex differences.
They feel acknowledging those differences in this specific case will reduce the ability of men who actually feel sexually violated to seek help.
It’s a bad idea to assume that, because a lot of men seem to be OK after being assaulted, or because a lot of people seem to engage in motivating reasoning about men being “secretly traumatized”, that means there are lots of women in the same situation.
I obviously disagree with the logic that says we shouldn’t talk about this, partly because it causes people like OP to become confused about their personal experiences and wonder why they’re not feeling something they think they are supposed to.
You say
From a purely objective perspective, non-violent rape doesn’t seem quite as bad as society makes it out to be.
I say we should stop playing this meta-game of attempting to assert or influence public perception of the “proper” emotional impact of events, and just take people at their word about how they feel. Subjective preferences are just that. If someone says that they were raped and that they don’t feel very shaken up about it, I will generally assume they’re telling the truth. If someone says that they were raped and that it was the worst thing that ever happened to them, I will also assume they’re telling the truth. I generally don’t have some comprehensive model of human psychology I can trust to deduce people’s basic instincts about things like aversion to sexual violation, in lieu of honest statements from that person.
I’m aware that taking people at their word about their pains more often means you’re a little more vulnerable to being manipulated for sympathy points. Personally, I’m ok with this. It seems like an acceptable tradeoff before we invent empathy links.
Not sure if a single anecdote is worth anything at all, but I am a woman, and I experienced what is legally and culturally considered rape at least twice (arguably 3x), and it really didn’t bother me very much (though I think different versions, e.g. more violent ones or one perpetrated by people I looked up to, would have been much more damaging). One of the people who technically raped me (it was a very drunken screwup with, I believe, no malevolent intent) is still a friend of mine. I feel scared about people finding this out about our friendship, mostly on his behalf.
Notably, I think it was way less traumatizing than several experiences I have had for which I’ve never been able to garner 1/10th as much sympathy; a trusted close friend failing me in a time of need, a painful and embarrassing medical experience, a pet dying.
I share the view of the OP that there’s something off here; I think the combination of a pretty wide range of disparate acts being considered rape/sexual abuse + rape/sexual abuse being considered among the worse experiences a person can have, is pretty unhealthy for the reasons described and some others. I also think it drains social energy from recognizing other kinds of trauma people can experience and helping them with it.
I am a bit surprised about one of them still being a friend of yours. Do you in a sense forgive him because I don’t know it wasn’t too painful or him being not aware of what he was doing? My intuition was kind of the amount of trauma might be about the amount of pain. If it’s really painful one can of cause get very traumatised as you also point out, it would have been diferent if it would have been very violent
This is may be trivializing your experiences as well, but I think an important consideration here is that you’re a man. Many of the circumstances others in this thread are citing also involve male victims.
Agreed, from an evolutionary standpoint rape is vastly more impactful for women than men, in a world with no abortion or contraception, rape means the removal of a woman’s procreative agency, while it’s merely very unpleasant for men, maybe on the level of being humiliated in a fist fight. The closest thing that I can think of to make myself (a man) have an emotional reaction equivalent to what I observe women having to the concept of rape, is cuckolding. A woman lying to me about the genetics of her child, and making me unknowingly raise the child, that is what elicits the white-hot, primal rage that our society seems to feel about rape. No woman that I’ve talked with has understood my reaction to cuckolding, because in the ancestral environment there was no possible doubt that the child growing in her womb was hers, just like there’s no chance of me getting pregnant from being raped. So for men, translate “raped” as “cuckolded” to elicit something like the equivalent emotional reaction.
I think this is a solid point, and that pointing out the asymmetry in evolutionary gradients is important; I would also expect different statistical distributions for men and women here. At the same time, my naive ev psych guess about how all this is likely to work out would also take into account that men and women share genes, and that creating gender-specific adaptations is actually tricky. As evidence: men have nipples, and those nipples sometimes produce drops of milk.
Once, awhile ago and outside this community, a female friend swore me to secrecy and then shared a story and hypothesis similar to the OPs (ETA: it was also a story of sexual touching, not of rape; I suspect rape is usually more traumatic). I’ve also heard stories of being pretty messed up by sexual abuse from both men and women, including at least two different men messed up by having, as teenagers, had sex with older women (in one case, one of his teachers) without violence/force, but with manipulation. My current guess is that adaptations designed for one sex typically appear with great variability in the other sex (e.g. male nipples’ milk production), and so we should expect some variability in male reactions here. Also everyone varies.
ETA: I’d like to quarrel with the use of the word “infohazardous” in the OP’s title. My best guess is that people would be better off having all the stories, including stories such as the OPs that is is currently somewhat taboo to share; my best guess is that there is a real risk of harm the OP is gesturing at, but this is significantly via the selective non-sharing of info, rather than being primarily via the sharing of info.
I’ve known several men who had sexual encounters with women that… labeling them is hard, let’s say the encounters left them unhappy, and would have been condemned if the sexes had been reversed. These men encountered a damaging amount of pushback and invalidation when they tried to discuss their feelings about those encounters. One was literally told “I hope you were grateful”, for others the invalidation was more implicit. For at least 2, me saying “that sounds fucked up” and then listening was an extremely helpful novelty. So I’m really nervous about pushing the wider cultural narrative in ways that would reduce the ability of male victims to be upset.
OTOH, one of those dudes had his complicated experiences with a same-age girlfriend, and had nothing but good things to say about losing his virginity in high school to a woman twice his age. You definitely couldn’t help him by creating and enforcing general rules about what counts as bad.
There’s probably an important distinction to be made between men who have such high sex drives/wide preferences that they’ll sleep with anybody, and men who don’t care that much about sexual violence.
I agree that this is probably a reason for the greater harm to women, but I don’t think it gets to the heart of it.
Suppose that instead of rape, our culture portrayed some benign, non-sexual experience as deeply harmful. Say, being exposed to the color orange as a kid. In that case, would you predict men or women to be more harmed by having seen orange? If you predict women (as I would), then the explanation has to be more general than evolved attitudes towards sex.
My theory is that it comes down to influenceability. When an authority figure says that something is true, a man is more likely to note that he must act like it’s true, but reserve an inner skepticism; whereas a woman is more likely to accept it wholeheartedly.
For example, it’s easier to imagine a man proactively (without outside influence)...
I know for sure that women are higher in neuroticism. I’m not sure about influenceability, are they really higher on this? In any case, it seems to me that the neuroticism difference can account for this effect all by itself, assuming that the evo-psych explanation by lc isn’t quite correct. (Personally, I feel like Anna makes good points against it but I also wouldn’t totally rule out the evo-psych explanation.)
Edit: And on influenceability, you could argue that men are influenced to feel worse about being abused because of how people think men should be (strong, in control, not victims).
Just as a short note to support this model, there was that old finding (probably from pre- replication crisis area, I wonder if it’s survived?) that women experienced stronger post-rape trauma when it happened in their reproductive age; girls and old ladies were less traumatized. Also, women who were beaten and raped felt better than those who just raped, because then they could show that they had fought back.
Myself, as a woman, I don’t intuitively feel like getting beaten as well would lower my trauma, but I haven’t tried, so I don’t know. What really feels important is the way how it is done, in details. Getting groped by a drunken friend, as described above, wouldn’t traumatize me much; getting raped by a group of soldiers who are trying to outperform each other in humiliating the victim as much as possible, that’s an event that causes me the white-hot rage just by thinking about it (not because I would fear getting pregnant, but just because of the unbearable humiliation). In some countries group rapes get punished more severely than individual endeavors, for the same particular reason probably, for it doesn’t really affect the feared outcome (getting pregnant) much.
Are you one of those people that tries to silence people based on immutable characteristics? Please write an actual argument instead of speculating about which experiences I’ve had. The truth value of the comment above doesn’t change based on the life of the writer.
No (since I’d silence specific statements, not specific people). Nevertheless, thank you for your answer.
You might want to read the relevant article on Wikipedia, and then consider if learning that your child isn’t yours would truly have the same effect on you.
I just read the parts of the wikipedia article about the psychological impacts of rape. I was wrong when I said in the comment above that “while it’s merely very unpleasant for men, maybe on the level of being humiliated in a fist fight”, I retract that, being raped as an adult man is quite a bit worse than that. However, even with this updated view I would still prefer to be raped than to find out that my child is not biologically mine. To my emotional brain cuckolding is about an order of magnitude worse than rape. It’s an unspeakably evil act (the cuckoo bird is the most evil animal that I know of), I wasn’t trying to minimize the effects of rape when I compared it to cuckolding, I was trying to make myself emotionally understand how evil rape is by comparing it to something that I find much worse. I understand that other people, women in particular, have exactly the reverse view, and that was my point in the original comment, comparing it to cuckolding is meant to help men and women sympathize with each other.
To my emotional brain cuckolding is about an order of magnitude worse than rape.
This could mean either:
a) I read about the psychological effects, and I concluded that they were one tenth as bad as I’d experience if I learned that my child isn’t mine.
or
b) Regardless of what either truly feels like, I feel the hypothetical of learning my child isn’t mine as an order of magnitude worse than the hypothetical of rape.
If you mean a), you’re probably extraordinarily sensitive, and when reading about a psychological impact on a normal person, you should multiply the estimate by a k>>1 constant to find out how it influences you. Being raped would probably break you completely.
If you mean b), it seems to me you’re not engaging with the topic, which is about the actual psychological damage, rather than our emotional estimates of it.
This may be trivializing your experiences as well, but I think an important consideration here is that you’re a man. Many of the circumstances others in this thread are citing also involve male victims.
Men tend not to react to sexual abuse the same way that women do, and there’s no reason to expect that they would. Some of the reasons people aggressively protest that fact or attempt to have anecdotal evidence of it dismissed are:
They, male or female, genuinely would be distraught if that had happened to them, and project that strong preference onto others.
They feel it’s necessary to downplay men’s tolerance of sexual abuse as part of a general policy that says to downplay sex differences.
They feel acknowledging those differences in this specific case will reduce the ability of men who actually feel sexually violated to seek help.
It’s a bad idea to assume that, because a lot of men seem to be OK after being assaulted, or because a lot of people seem to engage in motivating reasoning about men being “secretly traumatized”, that means there are lots of women in the same situation.
I obviously disagree with the logic that says we shouldn’t talk about this, partly because it causes people like OP to become confused about their personal experiences and wonder why they’re not feeling something they think they are supposed to.
You say
I say we should stop playing this meta-game of attempting to assert or influence public perception of the “proper” emotional impact of events, and just take people at their word about how they feel. Subjective preferences are just that. If someone says that they were raped and that they don’t feel very shaken up about it, I will generally assume they’re telling the truth. If someone says that they were raped and that it was the worst thing that ever happened to them, I will also assume they’re telling the truth. I generally don’t have some comprehensive model of human psychology I can trust to deduce people’s basic instincts about things like aversion to sexual violation, in lieu of honest statements from that person.
I’m aware that taking people at their word about their pains more often means you’re a little more vulnerable to being manipulated for sympathy points. Personally, I’m ok with this. It seems like an acceptable tradeoff before we invent empathy links.
Not sure if a single anecdote is worth anything at all, but I am a woman, and I experienced what is legally and culturally considered rape at least twice (arguably 3x), and it really didn’t bother me very much (though I think different versions, e.g. more violent ones or one perpetrated by people I looked up to, would have been much more damaging). One of the people who technically raped me (it was a very drunken screwup with, I believe, no malevolent intent) is still a friend of mine. I feel scared about people finding this out about our friendship, mostly on his behalf.
Notably, I think it was way less traumatizing than several experiences I have had for which I’ve never been able to garner 1/10th as much sympathy; a trusted close friend failing me in a time of need, a painful and embarrassing medical experience, a pet dying.
I share the view of the OP that there’s something off here; I think the combination of a pretty wide range of disparate acts being considered rape/sexual abuse + rape/sexual abuse being considered among the worse experiences a person can have, is pretty unhealthy for the reasons described and some others. I also think it drains social energy from recognizing other kinds of trauma people can experience and helping them with it.
I am a bit surprised about one of them still being a friend of yours. Do you in a sense forgive him because I don’t know it wasn’t too painful or him being not aware of what he was doing? My intuition was kind of the amount of trauma might be about the amount of pain. If it’s really painful one can of cause get very traumatised as you also point out, it would have been diferent if it would have been very violent
Agreed, from an evolutionary standpoint rape is vastly more impactful for women than men, in a world with no abortion or contraception, rape means the removal of a woman’s procreative agency, while it’s merely very unpleasant for men, maybe on the level of being humiliated in a fist fight. The closest thing that I can think of to make myself (a man) have an emotional reaction equivalent to what I observe women having to the concept of rape, is cuckolding. A woman lying to me about the genetics of her child, and making me unknowingly raise the child, that is what elicits the white-hot, primal rage that our society seems to feel about rape. No woman that I’ve talked with has understood my reaction to cuckolding, because in the ancestral environment there was no possible doubt that the child growing in her womb was hers, just like there’s no chance of me getting pregnant from being raped. So for men, translate “raped” as “cuckolded” to elicit something like the equivalent emotional reaction.
I think this is a solid point, and that pointing out the asymmetry in evolutionary gradients is important; I would also expect different statistical distributions for men and women here. At the same time, my naive ev psych guess about how all this is likely to work out would also take into account that men and women share genes, and that creating gender-specific adaptations is actually tricky. As evidence: men have nipples, and those nipples sometimes produce drops of milk.
Once, awhile ago and outside this community, a female friend swore me to secrecy and then shared a story and hypothesis similar to the OPs (ETA: it was also a story of sexual touching, not of rape; I suspect rape is usually more traumatic). I’ve also heard stories of being pretty messed up by sexual abuse from both men and women, including at least two different men messed up by having, as teenagers, had sex with older women (in one case, one of his teachers) without violence/force, but with manipulation. My current guess is that adaptations designed for one sex typically appear with great variability in the other sex (e.g. male nipples’ milk production), and so we should expect some variability in male reactions here. Also everyone varies.
ETA: I’d like to quarrel with the use of the word “infohazardous” in the OP’s title. My best guess is that people would be better off having all the stories, including stories such as the OPs that is is currently somewhat taboo to share; my best guess is that there is a real risk of harm the OP is gesturing at, but this is significantly via the selective non-sharing of info, rather than being primarily via the sharing of info.
I’ve known several men who had sexual encounters with women that… labeling them is hard, let’s say the encounters left them unhappy, and would have been condemned if the sexes had been reversed. These men encountered a damaging amount of pushback and invalidation when they tried to discuss their feelings about those encounters. One was literally told “I hope you were grateful”, for others the invalidation was more implicit. For at least 2, me saying “that sounds fucked up” and then listening was an extremely helpful novelty. So I’m really nervous about pushing the wider cultural narrative in ways that would reduce the ability of male victims to be upset.
OTOH, one of those dudes had his complicated experiences with a same-age girlfriend, and had nothing but good things to say about losing his virginity in high school to a woman twice his age. You definitely couldn’t help him by creating and enforcing general rules about what counts as bad.
There’s probably an important distinction to be made between men who have such high sex drives/wide preferences that they’ll sleep with anybody, and men who don’t care that much about sexual violence.
I agree that this is probably a reason for the greater harm to women, but I don’t think it gets to the heart of it.
Suppose that instead of rape, our culture portrayed some benign, non-sexual experience as deeply harmful. Say, being exposed to the color orange as a kid. In that case, would you predict men or women to be more harmed by having seen orange? If you predict women (as I would), then the explanation has to be more general than evolved attitudes towards sex.
My theory is that it comes down to influenceability. When an authority figure says that something is true, a man is more likely to note that he must act like it’s true, but reserve an inner skepticism; whereas a woman is more likely to accept it wholeheartedly.
For example, it’s easier to imagine a man proactively (without outside influence)...
doubting his religion
doubting the benefits of hand-washing
doubting that perpetual motion is impossible
I know for sure that women are higher in neuroticism. I’m not sure about influenceability, are they really higher on this? In any case, it seems to me that the neuroticism difference can account for this effect all by itself, assuming that the evo-psych explanation by lc isn’t quite correct. (Personally, I feel like Anna makes good points against it but I also wouldn’t totally rule out the evo-psych explanation.)
Edit: And on influenceability, you could argue that men are influenced to feel worse about being abused because of how people think men should be (strong, in control, not victims).
Just as a short note to support this model, there was that old finding (probably from pre- replication crisis area, I wonder if it’s survived?) that women experienced stronger post-rape trauma when it happened in their reproductive age; girls and old ladies were less traumatized. Also, women who were beaten and raped felt better than those who just raped, because then they could show that they had fought back.
Myself, as a woman, I don’t intuitively feel like getting beaten as well would lower my trauma, but I haven’t tried, so I don’t know. What really feels important is the way how it is done, in details. Getting groped by a drunken friend, as described above, wouldn’t traumatize me much; getting raped by a group of soldiers who are trying to outperform each other in humiliating the victim as much as possible, that’s an event that causes me the white-hot rage just by thinking about it (not because I would fear getting pregnant, but just because of the unbearable humiliation). In some countries group rapes get punished more severely than individual endeavors, for the same particular reason probably, for it doesn’t really affect the feared outcome (getting pregnant) much.
Are you one of the people in this thread who have never been raped, and yet write about how less-traumatizing-than-it’s-believed it would feel?
(You don’t have to respond.)
Are you one of those people that tries to silence people based on immutable characteristics? Please write an actual argument instead of speculating about which experiences I’ve had. The truth value of the comment above doesn’t change based on the life of the writer.
No (since I’d silence specific statements, not specific people). Nevertheless, thank you for your answer.
You might want to read the relevant article on Wikipedia, and then consider if learning that your child isn’t yours would truly have the same effect on you.
I just read the parts of the wikipedia article about the psychological impacts of rape. I was wrong when I said in the comment above that “while it’s merely very unpleasant for men, maybe on the level of being humiliated in a fist fight”, I retract that, being raped as an adult man is quite a bit worse than that. However, even with this updated view I would still prefer to be raped than to find out that my child is not biologically mine. To my emotional brain cuckolding is about an order of magnitude worse than rape. It’s an unspeakably evil act (the cuckoo bird is the most evil animal that I know of), I wasn’t trying to minimize the effects of rape when I compared it to cuckolding, I was trying to make myself emotionally understand how evil rape is by comparing it to something that I find much worse. I understand that other people, women in particular, have exactly the reverse view, and that was my point in the original comment, comparing it to cuckolding is meant to help men and women sympathize with each other.
This could mean either:
a) I read about the psychological effects, and I concluded that they were one tenth as bad as I’d experience if I learned that my child isn’t mine.
or
b) Regardless of what either truly feels like, I feel the hypothetical of learning my child isn’t mine as an order of magnitude worse than the hypothetical of rape.
If you mean a), you’re probably extraordinarily sensitive, and when reading about a psychological impact on a normal person, you should multiply the estimate by a k>>1 constant to find out how it influences you. Being raped would probably break you completely.
If you mean b), it seems to me you’re not engaging with the topic, which is about the actual psychological damage, rather than our emotional estimates of it.