A recent study from researchers at the University of North Dakota offered some troubling data about the sex lives of college men. Among the respondents, a group of 73 straight male students, one in three reported that they would force a woman to have sex if they knew they could get away with it. According to the report, 31 percent of the men surveyed said they would force a woman to have sex "if nobody would ever know and there wouldn’t be any consequences."

But when researchers asked the same question, this time dropping the language of forced sex and using the word rape instead, that number dropped to 13 percent. Respondents, it seems, were comfortable with the act of rape, just not the name. The findings, that copping to sexual violence can be a strange matter of semantics, aren't all that unique, according to the researchers. Here's what the study had to say about the conclusions of similar research that dealt with perceptions about rape among men and women:

Advertisement:

Specifically, when survey items describe behaviors (i.e., ‘‘Have you ever coerced somebody to intercourse by holding them down?’’) instead of simply label them (i.e., ‘‘Have you ever raped somebody?’’), more men will admit to sexually coercive behaviors in the past and more women will self-report past victimization (Koss 1998). [...] Given that rape is defined as intercourse by use of force or threat of force against a victim’s wishes, this discrepancy suggests that at least some men who rape do not seem to classify their behaviors as such.

What the researchers, led by Sarah Edwards, an assistant professor of counseling psychology, wanted to understand through this study was the relationship between men's views about themselves and about women and their willingness to force sex.

More from the study:

Advertisement:

Results indicated that participants can be differentiated into three groups based on scores from scales on hypermasculinity and hostility toward women. High hostility toward women and callous sexual attitudes separated the no intentions group from those who endorsed either intentions to rape or those who endorses only the behavioral description of rape. The two types of offender groups were distinguishable mostly by varying levels of hostility, suggesting that men who endorse using force to obtain intercourse on survey items but deny rape on the same may not experience hostile affect in response to women, but might have dispositions more in line with benevolent sexism.

"When we talk about benevolent sexism we are talking about ... men [who] might think that women shouldn’t change the oil in their car," Edwards told me. "That’s not hostile -- it’s actually a nice thing to change a woman’s oil. But it still has a sexist component to it that believes that women shouldn’t get their hands dirty or women shouldn’t work with cars." Those normative ideas about gender might carry over to sex and beliefs about "what it means to be a man," she continued. "Those would be men who find sex as more of a way to demonstrate their manhood ... who might be more likely to believe that women are supposed to say 'no' to sex but really they mean 'yes.'"

I talked to Edwards about her research, why she believes it is significant despite its limited sample size and what she thinks her findings mean in terms of policy and current debates about addressing rape on college campuses. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

The men involved in your research were categorized into three groups. The first didn’t indicate a willingness to force sex or rape women, a second group said they would force sex but wouldn’t rape women and then a third group of men said they would commit rape. Is this accurate or too simple a breakdown?

Advertisement:

That’s accurate. We asked men for their likelihood that they might force a woman into sexual intercourse against her will or rape her and categorized them accordingly.

The study notes that the men who endorsed descriptions of forced sex but denied rape "might have dispositions more in line with benevolent sexism.” Can you talk more about what those attitudes might be and what they mean in the context of this study?

Advertisement:

Basically what we found was the men who said they would rape, that they had intentions to rape, they seemed to be more overtly hostile towards women. More angry, suspicious of women’s motives. But those men who said they have an intention to use force to have sexual intercourse but then said no to rape, they seem to be more motivated by the macho personality, hypermasculine idea.

Also, the opposite or inverse of the construct of hostility. We termed that as benevolent sexism, meaning that those are men that still have attitudes that are sexist, but they are not overtly hostile. Rather, when we talk about benevolent sexism we are talking about this concept, for example, that men might think that women shouldn’t change the oil in their car. That’s not hostile -- it’s actually a nice thing to change a woman’s oil. But it still has a sexist component to it that believes that women shouldn’t get their hands dirty or women shouldn’t work with cars.

They had very stereotypical ideas about what it means to be a man in terms of sexual encounters. Those would be men who find sex as more of a way to demonstrate their manhood, who view sex as more of a conquest, who might be more likely to believe that women are supposed to say “no” to sex but really they mean “yes.”

Advertisement:

Do you feel that force was part of how these men conceptualized their sense of sexual identity?

That is what we are thinking. Obviously, we could not ask them specifically because we do not know who endorsed that. But the answer to the personality questions about hypermasculinity, we are suspecting that this aspect of hypermasculinity that objectifies women more, that tells men to be strong and take the lead and be aggressive -- I think that part of the masculine identity exaggerated into hypermasculinity is what might have enabled them to see their acts as normal. As part of what they do, their friends do and the culture expects them to do.

Your research is acting in dialogue with a phenomenon that’s been explored in other studies as well. Individuals, it seems, struggle with defining rape and the range of circumstances that constitute sexual assault.

Advertisement:

What research has found in general is that most people are very much able to identify the prototypical rape, which is something along the lines of a woman walks down a dark alley, a strange looking guy jumps out from behind the bush, pulls her into a secluded area and violently rapes her. When you give people that sort of scenario everyone identifies that it’s rape.

But there are many other ways that people are raped in actual life, and some of these are much more grey zones where we don’t all agree where something is a rape. For example, If a woman is raped at a party where she is intoxicated and dressed provocatively. She agrees to go upstairs to a secluded room with a male friend and starts kissing him, but then stops agreeing to the sexual interaction and tries to leave. But she’s really very drunk and lands on the bed again. She passes out and the man has sex with her. Something like that, not everyone would label that as rape.

Or if there’s sexual assault in a marital relationship. It was only fairly recently that there were laws passed in the U.S. that actually recognize rape in marriage. People in society have a harder time classifying those. For us, that was interesting and we have done our own study on that topic as well, how people perceive different rape scenarios.

Researchers have known for a very long time that it really matters how we ask the question. For example, if we ask people if they rape or have rape or have been raped, you get fewer responses than if you ask people about descriptions. Like, “Have you ever forced anyone to have sexual intercourse” or “Have you ever been forced to have sexual intercourse?” You have many more people who will say yes to those questions.

Advertisement:

We really wanted to figure out what the difference in people’s minds, of the behavioral description versus the label.

There was another study that came out last year in which women and teenage girls talked about violent and coercive sexual behavior as being a normal part of sex.

I tend to explore men’s behavior more, but I am a little familiar with how women will actually have the same difficulties labeling rape as such. And even in therapy, I am a therapist as well, I often times work with young women who come in and describe experiences that, to me, clearly are rape, but they do not necessarily conceptualize them as such. They have difficulty figuring out whether or not what happened to them was rape because of, I think, the cultural norms around saying it’s a woman’s fault, that it matters how you dress, that it’s because a woman was intoxicated or because she didn’t say “no” more forcefully.

One of the interesting questions that comes out of this research is the matter of what to do with your findings. How violence prevention programs could possibly be better tailored to this middle group of men who say they would force sex but not rape. I know policy prescriptions are not part of this study, but I wonder if your team had ideas about what kind of interventions might be better suited to this category of men?

Advertisement:

Clearly we need to do more research on this area. Preliminarily, based on this study, what I am thinking is that we have to be careful in terms of how we phrase prevention programs because if we want to address that middle group of men, who do not seem to self-identify their actions as rape, that group of men might actually be very taken aback or put off by a program to prevent rape. Because in their minds they are not rapists, so they might block that message out and feel that it’s not applicable to them.

I think that we might want to consider how we can talk to these men more carefully without necessarily using this label at the outset. We can have an opportunity to engage and really learn more about their own behaviors, and what that means for them and for others.

You said earlier that this middle group held benevolent but very limited ideas about women, like in the example of the oil change. Do you think that another level of intervention might be challenging these normative assumptions about women?

That’s another area where we can do more research. I very much think that it’s very deep in this cultural notion of how women should act and how men should act. How we think about sex in general. A sizeable part of the population believes that sex should only happen in a married relationship. And now part of the population doesn’t think that. So I think there is a lot of tension going around, and in cultural norms around that.

Advertisement:

One thing I noticed while reading the study is that the research assistant who administered the survey was a man. Was that intentional? Do you think that if a woman had been the one to hand out the paperwork that it might have influenced men’s willingness to be candid in their responses?

I think so. For that type of research, I always try to have a male research assistant interact with the participants.

I read that you debriefed the men who participated after the research concluded. What were those interactions?

The research assistant debriefed them. During that process we would talk with them about what is and what isn’t rape. What is and isn’t informed consent. We would talk about things like if your date or girlfriend is passed out and too drunk to say no, how that does not mean you can have sex with her.

We challenged their notions of rape, and talked about sexual stereotypes. What people generally thought about men and women and how that affects our interactions with each other and our sexual relationships. Now, for a study like that, anonymity is very important. We did not know, nor do we know to this day, who said “I have intentions to rape” and who said they don’t. The debriefing was general prevention, and done with all of these groups.

This is a small research sample, which you acknowledge in the study itself. What do you make of criticism alleging that it's too narrow to be considered legitimate?

It’s unfortunate that people focused so much on the location. This study was not conducted with students at the University of North Dakota. But people seem to have homed into that. I think it really speaks to people’s worries about men having some intention to be sexually assaultive. I think it’s easier to want to label it as though it only happens in certain places, but my sense is, from other research, that this is pretty representative and happens all across the country in similar ways.

I really hope the study allows us to pay more attention to this middle group of men who do not identify their own actions as rape, to talk with them and reach them.

Did you feel alarmed by your findings?

Sadly, not really. I have been doing this line of research for 15 years or so, and I have consistently found similar numbers in the samples. So, no, I guess I can’t say I was surprised. But I was glad that we found the differences that we did because I think it explains more, to my mind, about why there are so many people who might have some intentions to force women to have intercourse.