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’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.