Meh, I admit I shrug more and more when I see these sorts of pieces with these gender nagging titles. It doesn’t feel like you’re comparing apples to apples when we talk about things like gender discrimination / issues, in many cases, and the article doesn’t really address the potential bias in the data.
eg. Ask men if they’ve ever been woken up by a BJ from a partner. You’ll likely find it a very common experience most have likely had, if they’re sexually active. Then ask them if they’ve ever been raped. Remind them that if they had a partner initiate sex while they were sleeping, they couldn’t consent, so it’d be rape. Few will actually register it, and fewer still would bother reporting it. Or take something like workplace inappropriate touching. I’ve known women in every office I’ve worked in over the past ~15 years, who were “huggers”, or who felt it perfectly fine to touch guys biceps etc. Men shrug and don’t report it, but swap the genders and it gets reported to HR pretty quick.
For another easy example of workplace discrimination targeting men/benefiting women – it’s incredibly common for women in an office to have things like women-only chat groups, and women-only networking outside of work. Fit bit groups, yoga/after work exercise, etc. Men aren’t invited/included, nor given that opportunity to network. Any man who’s worked in such an office, and has been excluded/overlooked for those groups, has been the victim of workplace gender discrimination.
Women are often in victim bubbles, that train them continuously to find fault with men’s actions, and to credit it as gender discrimination, and that most of their faults/mistakes are the result of biased systems which everyone else needs to fix. Men are in bubbles that say they’re lucky/doin good if they have any neutral/positive interaction with other people, and that all the man’s faults/mistakes are their own doing, that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And we see articles/studies like this one, feeding into that pattern.
IMO you and your partner should always communicate prior about whether it would be okay to wake each other up with sex, and not doing so is irresponsible.
I don’t think being woken up with a sexual act you couldn’t consent to is a good way to define rape. A good definition is whether the act was wanted or unwanted. There’s a subtle difference here.
If being woken with a BJ was wanted, then it’s not rape. But it could have been rape if it was unwanted. It’s extremely irresponsible to pray and hope that the contact was wanted without establishing anything prior. Basically: it’s possible to consent to something during/after the fact. But it’s dangerous, and why risk being a rapist by doing it that way when you can simply have a conversation about whether it would be okay?
The point is more that if men were viewing themselves as “most likely victims” because they’ve been told repeatedly that men get raped a bunch, and that acts such as wakeup BJs count as rape in the eyes of the narrative, then they’d be mass reporting themselves as being raped for an act that, at present, most guys shrug at. It’s the societal ‘norm’ that says “all men should always want sex” that underpins it in a way, in that men almost never consider themselves victims in this regard – that, paired with the norm that men’s bodies are completely disposable. And it’s partially the societal norm that women’s bodies are inherently desired/wanted/to be protected, that makes them view a lot more scenarios as ‘rape’ – and allows them to decide if its rape years after the event even, if they later realise they felt some sort of pressure to go through with it. Much different measurement methods for the same concept, so it seems really disingenuous to compare them directly.
Similarly, women have been told repeatedly that they’re discriminated against at work. If they see a group of guys going out after work to a pub, and they don’t get invited, they’d likely report that as gender discrimination – it’s networking opportunities that they’re being denied. I’ve even heard COO women on Freakonomics before commenting about how the choice of activities/conversation topics, being not the ones that women typically do/talk about, isolates/discriminates against them. Meanwhile guys, seeing a group of girls going to the girl only gym, are not meant to see that as gender discrimination / not ‘trained’ to view it as gender discrimination. When a group of women is discussing women-centric topics, men aren’t trained to see that as isolating. So when you later ask both groups if they’ve been discriminated against, “Surrpise!” the women will claim it more regularly, while the guys will be oblivious / nonchalant about it.
Meh, I admit I shrug more and more when I see these sorts of pieces with these gender nagging titles. It doesn’t feel like you’re comparing apples to apples when we talk about things like gender discrimination / issues, in many cases, and the article doesn’t really address the potential bias in the data.
eg. Ask men if they’ve ever been woken up by a BJ from a partner. You’ll likely find it a very common experience most have likely had, if they’re sexually active. Then ask them if they’ve ever been raped. Remind them that if they had a partner initiate sex while they were sleeping, they couldn’t consent, so it’d be rape. Few will actually register it, and fewer still would bother reporting it. Or take something like workplace inappropriate touching. I’ve known women in every office I’ve worked in over the past ~15 years, who were “huggers”, or who felt it perfectly fine to touch guys biceps etc. Men shrug and don’t report it, but swap the genders and it gets reported to HR pretty quick.
For another easy example of workplace discrimination targeting men/benefiting women – it’s incredibly common for women in an office to have things like women-only chat groups, and women-only networking outside of work. Fit bit groups, yoga/after work exercise, etc. Men aren’t invited/included, nor given that opportunity to network. Any man who’s worked in such an office, and has been excluded/overlooked for those groups, has been the victim of workplace gender discrimination.
Women are often in victim bubbles, that train them continuously to find fault with men’s actions, and to credit it as gender discrimination, and that most of their faults/mistakes are the result of biased systems which everyone else needs to fix. Men are in bubbles that say they’re lucky/doin good if they have any neutral/positive interaction with other people, and that all the man’s faults/mistakes are their own doing, that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And we see articles/studies like this one, feeding into that pattern.
IMO you and your partner should always communicate prior about whether it would be okay to wake each other up with sex, and not doing so is irresponsible.
I don’t think being woken up with a sexual act you couldn’t consent to is a good way to define rape. A good definition is whether the act was wanted or unwanted. There’s a subtle difference here.
If being woken with a BJ was wanted, then it’s not rape. But it could have been rape if it was unwanted. It’s extremely irresponsible to pray and hope that the contact was wanted without establishing anything prior. Basically: it’s possible to consent to something during/after the fact. But it’s dangerous, and why risk being a rapist by doing it that way when you can simply have a conversation about whether it would be okay?
Yes, you should communicate before, etc.
The point is more that if men were viewing themselves as “most likely victims” because they’ve been told repeatedly that men get raped a bunch, and that acts such as wakeup BJs count as rape in the eyes of the narrative, then they’d be mass reporting themselves as being raped for an act that, at present, most guys shrug at. It’s the societal ‘norm’ that says “all men should always want sex” that underpins it in a way, in that men almost never consider themselves victims in this regard – that, paired with the norm that men’s bodies are completely disposable. And it’s partially the societal norm that women’s bodies are inherently desired/wanted/to be protected, that makes them view a lot more scenarios as ‘rape’ – and allows them to decide if its rape years after the event even, if they later realise they felt some sort of pressure to go through with it. Much different measurement methods for the same concept, so it seems really disingenuous to compare them directly.
Similarly, women have been told repeatedly that they’re discriminated against at work. If they see a group of guys going out after work to a pub, and they don’t get invited, they’d likely report that as gender discrimination – it’s networking opportunities that they’re being denied. I’ve even heard COO women on Freakonomics before commenting about how the choice of activities/conversation topics, being not the ones that women typically do/talk about, isolates/discriminates against them. Meanwhile guys, seeing a group of girls going to the girl only gym, are not meant to see that as gender discrimination / not ‘trained’ to view it as gender discrimination. When a group of women is discussing women-centric topics, men aren’t trained to see that as isolating. So when you later ask both groups if they’ve been discriminated against, “Surrpise!” the women will claim it more regularly, while the guys will be oblivious / nonchalant about it.