Recently, You Are Here From WERS did an interesting segment on male victims of female rapists. It’s definitely worth a listen. The segment included interviews with alleged victim of a female rapist and Mary Koss, a famous and influential rape researcher in the USA.

Mary Koss’ main claim to fame is being the architect of the infamous “Ms. report” study, which supposedly found that “1 in 4 college women have been raped.” However, the study (in an apparent quest was sensational victimization numbers), counted women who claimed that had not been raped as rape victims.

Koss’ previous research was quick to label women as rape victims, her radio interview shows she does have the same opinion of male rape victims. Not only does Mary Koss deny that male victims of female rapists are similarly traumatized by their experience, but she claims that these men aren’t rape victims at all.

The interview

In the interview from WER’s You Are Here From, reporter Terresa Phung (Not sure about the spelling) looks at the plight and unique challenges of male victims of female rapists. Some of the facts were a little off and there was a lot more material that could have been included. However,its a pretty good piece on the problems male victims of female rapists face.

Phung and the people she interviews seem to hold that men can be raped by women and they face unique burdens that female victims do not. All of the people, except for Mary Koss, who responds:

Koss: “How do they react to rape. If you look at this group of men who identify themselves as rape victims, as raped by women. You’ll find that they’re shame is not similar to women, they level of injury is not similar to women and their penetration experience is not similar to what women are reporting.” (7:20)

From there, Koss seems to get defensive about her obviously insensitive statement:

Phung: “For the men would are traumatized by their experiences, because they they were forced, against their will, to vaginally penetrate a women, like…”



Koss: “How would that that happen? By force, threat of force or when the victim is unable to consent? How would that happen?”



Phung: “I’m actually speaking to someone right now. His story is that he was drugged. He was unconscious and when he awoke a women was on top of him with his penis inserted inserted inside her vagina. For him that was traumatizing.”



Koss: “Yeah.”



Phung: “If he was drugged, what would that be called?”



Koss: “What would I call it? I would call it "unwanted contact”.“



Phung: "Just "unwanted contact” period?“



Koss: "Yeah.”

There are so many things wrong with Koss’ response. First, Koss’ trauma argument is a red herring. Physically forcing someone to have sex against their will is rape. Rape is wrong and its a crime. However, under Koss’ own logic, perhaps resilient female victims of male rapists would not be allowed to file charges because they haven’t demonstrated being sufficiently traumatized.

Also, I honestly doubt Koss has done any serious research on male victims of female rapists or knows anything about their trauma (especially since so little research has been done on them). She seems to be either unclear about how it could happen or dismissive that it is possible. Has she actually asked these men about their experiences, shame or trauma? I doubt it.

I would refer Dr. Koss to the blog of James Landrith, an alleged victim of a female rapist. Landrith writes:

“In short, I was drugged, raped, threatened and had a baby used against me as a human shield. To say that experience left me messed up would be an understatement.”

Landrith claims he “buried it deep and pretended it didn’t happen, which is a common reaction for male survivors.” However, the experience caused him to be recklessly promiscuous until he finally entered therapy. Then he started to suffer “panic attacks, crying fits, sudden anger and loss of time.” He says he “felt exposed all the time, everywhere” as well as an intense fear of women and feelings of guilt.

Yep, doesn’t sound traumatic at all. I would also expect Koss, a doctor of psychology, to understand that male victims would likely express their trauma differently than female victims. This is especially true given how little support and acknowledgment there is for male victims. Many societies (in no small part thanks to people like Koss) still don’t think its possible for a women to rape a man.

This isn’t new thinking for Koss. In her 1993 article, Detecting the Scope of Rape: A Review of Prevalence Research Methods Koss wrote:

“Although consideration of male victims is within the scope of the legal statutes, it is important to restrict the term rape to instances where male victims were penetrated by offenders. It is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman.” (206-207)

Basically, Koss is saying “rape” should only be about forcibly sexually penetrating someone because…that is just the way Koss thinks it should be. Koss’ thinking makes rape a crime with exclusively male perpetrators.

Koss is using some very diabolical pseudo-logic. She doesn’t consider male victims of female rapists as rape victims. Therefore she claims they don’t exist. Therefore she claims rape is predominately a female problem.

Phung remarks, “Because Dr. Koss believes that rape happens more often to women, it should be approached as gender issue, a female one.” However, even accepting Koss’ assertion that male victims of female rapists somehow don’t count, we are still left with male victims of male rapists. According to her 1993 article, Koss does consider these men rape victims and research has suggested that male-on-male prison rape alone may make men the majority of rape victims in the USA. Certainly at least enough to make rape in the U.S. not merely a “female problem”.

Over 1,000,000 male “not-rape” victims of female “not-rapists” per year in the USA

How big is the problem of male victims of female rapists? Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of research. However, I have pointed out numerous times that the CDC NISVS found men and women are physically forced to have sex an equal yearly rate. In fact, the latest CDC NISVS study actually found men report a slightly higher rate! These male victims report the vast majority of their perpetrators were women. This all comes to well over 1,000,000 male victims of female rapists per year in the U.S.

However, just like Mary Koss, the CDC hides this shocking statistic by excluding male victims of female rapists from the definition of “rape”. In fact, they might have done so at Koss’ suggestion. Much like Koss, the CDC NISVS defines rape as forcible penetration. Male victims are instead labeled as victims of “made to penetrate” and excluded from all CDC statistics on “rape”.

According to Koss men can’t be raped, but women can’t not be raped.

Koss’ claim to fame is her study of female sexual assault victimization on American college campuses. It was published in 1987 and officially titled “The Scope of Rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Higher Education Students. However, it is often referred to as the Ms. Report, since it was reportedly commissioned by the feminist Ms. magazine or at least heavily associated with it.

The study is perhaps one of the most famous examples of bad research on female victimization. The results the study claimed were that "27.5% of college women reported experiencing[…]an act that met legal definitions of rape, which includes attempts” (15.4% completed + 12% attempted rapes) (168). However, the study also (briefly) notes that only 27% of these rapes were “acknowledged as rape by the victim” (169). An article in the Toledo Blade reveals that 42% even reported having sex with their supposed rapist at a later date (8A). In other words, the vast majority of the study’s reported rape victims weren’t rape victims at all!

Of course, this didn’t stop pundits, politicians and supposed activists from citing the “1 in 4 college women are raped” figure for years. The statistic was portrayed as showing a rape epidemic in US colleges, conveniently ignoring the fact the study measured female college student’s sexual victimizations from 14-years old to the present.

I may give more detailed thoughts on the study at a later time, but the study has been so throughly debunked by others it doesn’t seem necessary. My point is this: Koss considers women who do not think they are rape victims to be rape victims, but considers male rape victims of female rapists not to be rape victims..

Why does Koss have these ridiculous double-standards? Why would she do this?

Feminism: rape is about politics first and victims second.

I’m going to assume that Mary Koss is a feminist. She worked with Ms. magazine, she works in Gender & Women’s Studies, everything I’ve heard about her leads me to believe she is probably a feminist. More importantly, if she is a feminist, it explains everything.

Phung points out:

“Dr. Koss says rape is a word with a long history associated with the oppression of women.”

Rape is not merely a crime for feminists. Feminists believe rape is an expression of patriarchy power used to oppress women. Susan Brownmiller famously wrote:

“From prehistoric times to the present, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a continuous process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” (Against Our Will)

In reality, this is no big bad Patrichary and “all men” and not trying to “keep all women in a state of fear”. Rapists are a minority of criminals with differing motivations, just like all criminals have different motivations. However, feminism is an ideological belief system not based in reality. Putting feminists in charge of rape research is like putting young earth creationists in charge of paleontology.

This often means rape is more often about politics/ideology first and victims second for feminists. I’m not saying that no one that identifies as a feminist cares about male victims of female rapists (although I imagine these people are rare). However, for feminism in general, preserving rape’s usefulness as a political tool is more important than actually objectively understanding or preventing it.

This is why, for example, feminists decry attempts to promote common sense safety choices for women as “victim blaming”. Never mind that this “victim blaming” might actually be the most practical way to prevent women from getting raped. It doesn’t promote the feminist narrative or help feminists gain political power. Instead, modern feminists prefer: “don’t teach women not to get raped, teach men not to rape.” This ridiculous goal (most men aren’t rapists, most rapists aren’t easily taught not to rape and not all rapists are men) stokes the flames and maintains the key feminist belief that women are an oppressed class and men are the oppressor class.

Rape is also a cash cow for feminist organizations and scholars, who can use the issue to fund raise, gain government appointments and other influential positions. It also gives them a bully pulpit to spread feminist ideology and power.

So what happens if it is suddenly common knowledge in the USA that women rape men? What happens if rape isn’t a gender issue but a human issue? What if there were actually public service campaigns about male victims of female rapists? What if the U.S. president interrupted the Grammies to proclaim the CDC NISVS statistics that show men and women are victims of forced sex at a similar yearly rate and that women are often perpetrators?

This societal shift is almost too large to imagine. Just consider all of the programs funded by the $1.6 billion Violence Against Women Act that is now supposed to be gender neutral, but little goes to help male victims. How might all that change?

If a influential researcher like Koss reluctantly concedes that men can be “raped” by women, the feminist narrative starts to crack and feminism’s golden egg starts to roll away. One more layer from feminism’s already paper thin facade will fall. Many people already know feminism isn’t really about gender equality. Now many will know feminism isn’t really about helping victims.

This all certainly would explain Koss’ stubborn and obviously desperate attempt to refer to male victims of female rapists as victims of “unwanted contact”.

Koss is an example of everything wrong with rape research

If Koss was truly first-and-foremost concerned about rape victims, the interview would have gone very differently. She wouldn’t have belittled male rape victims, she would be calling for more research on them. She would have pointed out the CDC NISVS findings on the surprising prevalence of male victims of female rapists (it was one of biggest US sexual violence studies in years - I imagine she has read it). She would point out that female rapists can rape men by over-powering them (as happened with Kris Bucher ), especially when men are often socialized since birth to never hit a woman. She would point out that female rapists have the unique power to threaten their victims with false accusations of abuse or even rape. She might even note that these male victims may even be trapped in the surreal nightmare of having to pay child support to their rapists.

However, Mary Koss didn’t do any of these things. Instead, she clumsy tried to brush off the very idea that men can be raped by women. Why? Likely to protect a feminist narrative at the expense of possibly millions of male rape victims. Mary Koss embodies everything that dangerously broken with scholarship on sexual violence.

Endnotes:

A key point of the interview is spent discussing how the FBI’s definition of rape excludes male victims of female rapists. Updated in 2011, the current FBI definition is:

““Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

The previous definition was: "carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” The change was actually lauded as including male victims. However, it remains unclear whether or not the new definition includes male victims of female rapists (made-to-penetrate rape) or just covers male victims of male rapists (forced penetration).

Tamen is doing an excellent job following this. He claims someone from the FBI contacted him and said male victims of female rapists are counted. However, FBI documentation still appears very vague. The FBI uses its crime definitions to gather data for its UCR (Uniform Crime Report), which records all crime in the U.S. However, the FBI gets all UCR data from other law enforcement agencies, so it doesn’t matter what the FBI thinks its definitions mean if it isn’t clear to those other agencies.

Until the FBI very clearly states its definition includes victims of forced envelopment or being made-to-penetrate, I’m skeptical.