USA Today: Gibt es eine Epidemie von Vergewaltigungen – durch Frauen?

Die USA Today, nach dem Wall Street Journal die auflagenstärkste Tageszeitung der USA, ist auf den Artikel der männerfreundlichen Feministin Cathy Young im ebenfalls auflagestarken Nachrichtenmagazin "Time" angesprungen, dem zufolge sexueller Gewalt häufig auch Männer zum Opfer fallen. Der Juraprofessor Glenn Harlan Reynolds kommentiert:

According to a recent study from the University of Missouri, published by the American Psychological Association, male victims of sexual assault are often victimized by women: "A total of 43% of high school boys and young college men reported they had an unwanted sexual experience and of those, 95% said a female acquaintance was the aggressor, according to a study published online in the APA journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity."

This shouldn't be so surprising. Back in the old days, when talk of "rape" or "sexual assault" generally meant forcible penetration at the hands of a stranger, rape was unsurprisingly pretty much a male-committed crime.

But feminists pushed for a broader definition of rape, going beyond what Susan Estrich, in a very influential book, derisively called Real Rape, to encompass other forms of sexual coercion and intimidation. And so now the term "rape" as it is commonly used encompasses things like "date rape," sex while a partner is intoxicated, sex without prior verbal consent and even — at Ohio State University, at least — sex where both partners consent, but for different reasons.

Unsurprisingly, when the definition of rape — or, as it's often now called in order to provide less clarity, "sexual assault" — expands to include a lot more than behavior distinguished by superior physical strength, the incidence of rape goes up, and behavior engaged in by women is more likely to be included in the definition. (At juvenile detention centers nine out of 10 reporters of sexual assault are males victimized by female staffers.)

Thus, as Young points out, the CDC finds that men make up over a third of the victims of "sexual coercion," which can include such things as "lies or false promises, threats to end a relationship or spread negative gossip, or 'making repeated requests' for sex and expressing unhappiness at being turned down."

Critics tend to dismiss these as trivial, suggesting that the men involved should just "man up." But, of course, there's no reason to think that such coercion is any more trivial where men are concerned than where women are concerned, unless you believe that women are such fragile flowers that they cannot possibly withstand things that men are supposed to ignore.

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