Groggy from a night of drinking, that's precisely what James Landrith did.
The next morning,
Landrith -- who was 19 at the time -- woke up in a bed that he quickly
realized was not his own. As his haze lifted, he recognized the woman
who ordered him to sleep the night before as a friend of a friend.
He remembered she asked for a ride home after their mutual friend left the nightclub where they'd been partying. He remembered the woman was pregnant and bought him drinks as a thank you.
He remembered feeling
disoriented, and her suggesting a motel room to sleep it off. He even
remembered lying down with his pants on, uncomfortable taking them off
in front of a stranger, only to awaken later and find the woman
straddling him. What he didn't remember was saying "yes."
The morning after, that familiar voice told him that he could hurt the baby if he put up a fight. Then, he says, she forced herself on him again. A few minutes later it was over. One night in a motel twin bed turned into years of self-examination.
It took some time, and the help of a therapist, to get there: "I was finally able to call it what it was," he says.
spoken
out on behalf of sexual assault victims, in particular men who were
victimized by women. He didn't seek prosecution of his alleged rapist,
but he wants other victims to feel free to talk about sexual assault and
pursue justice without shame.
"I want people to
understand that it's not about how physically strong you are," he says.
"We [men] are conditioned to believe that we cannot be victimized in
such a way."
According to a 2010 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men in the United States have been
raped. The actual number is likely higher, experts say, as incidents of
sexual violence are severely underreported in the United States --
particularly among male victims.
Experts say any sexual
assault victim requires extensive emotional and psychological healing
after the incident, but male survivors have a harder time putting words
to what happened.
In 2012, the FBI's Uniform Crime Report made a significant stride by redefining rape as:
"The 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 prior definition --
"the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will" --
hadn't been changed since 1927, and sexual assault awareness groups say
it alienated victims that didn't fit the mold.
"Often, male survivors
may be less likely to identify what happened to them as abuse or assault
because of the general notion that men always want sex," says Jennifer
Marsh, the vice president for Victim Services at RAINN, an anti-sexual violence organization.
"Males have the added
burden of facing a society that doesn't believe rape can happen to them
... at all," says psychotherapist Elizabeth Donovan.
She says gender roles
dictate that males are expected to be strong and self-reliant -- men are
viewed as those who seek sexual conquests instead of those who "fend
them off."
The concept of
female-on-male sexual assault has recently gained traction on the Web
via the ever-provocative entertainer Chris Brown. Brown recently
revealed shocking details to Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian about his first sexual encounter.
"He lost his virginity
when he was 8 years old, to a local girl who was 14 or 15. Seriously?
'Yeah, really. Uh-huh.' He grins and chuckles. 'It's different in the
country.' "
Tom Hawking of FlavorWire is one of many writers who took umbrage with this particular anecdote, asking in an article, "Why Is No One Talking About the Fact That Chris Brown Was Raped?"
Trauma recovery
counselor Stephanie Baird says men who experience sexual attention as
children, as Brown did, often explain it to themselves as "I'm a stud, I
got laid by ..."
"They do this in order to feel as if they had some power and say," she says.
In addition to this
macho posturing, there's also the hot-for-teacher or -babysitter complex
that is a popular motif in modern American culture.
"Because of the culture
of 'Mrs. Robinson' it can be much more difficult for a male to even
recognize that the action is abusive or without consent," Baird says.
Consent, she says, means
"being of age, mind, sound body to make an informed decision about
whether one would like to become sexually intimate with the other
person." Children cannot consent.
The chatter over Brown comes in tandem with recent research published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics
that says nearly 1 in 10 youths between 14 and 21 years old have
reported perpetrating some type of sexual violence in their lifetime.
The study also found
that males and females carried out sexual violence at strikingly similar
rates after the age of 18 -- 52% of males and 48% of females. The
study classified sexual violence into a few categories: foresexual or
presexual contact (kissing, touching, etc. against their will), coercive
sex, attempted rape, and completed rape. Women were more likely to
instigate unwanted foresexual contact.
For male sexual assault
victims of any age, convincing others that they've been preyed upon is
difficult as well. Experts say the general disparity in physical
strength comes into play -- can't a man fight off a woman?
"It's a tough call;
people think men can't be raped and they don't understand that in the
confusion no still means no," says Curtis St. John, a representative for
MaleSurvivor, a national support group for male sexual victimization.
Further muddying the water is the fact that some men can perform sexually, even including orgasm, and still be raped.
In an article in the Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine,
Roy J. Levin and Willy Van Berlo found that even in men who have not
consented to sex, slight stimulation of the genitals or an increase in
stress can create erections "even though no speciļ¬c sexual stimulation
is present."
" 'Were you aroused?' "
is a question posed to male victims, St. John says. "You don't hear it
with female rape victims. It's an interesting question that men get
asked."
Long-term effects of
being sexually assaulted can include post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD), substance abuse, avoidance of intimacy or the stark opposite --
hyper-sexuality, says St. John.
"Some men feel a need to prove their masculinity by becoming hyper-masculine," Donovan says.
As for coping, Marsh at
RAINN says it's never too late to reach out for help. But with the
stigma attached, survivors may not feel comfortable talking to their
friends and family because the victims themselves haven't defined their
experience as assault.
For Landrith, it starts with confronting rape for what it is and sharing experiences.
"Whenever you talk about
male survivors, women have it statistically worse, but it's not a
competition -- and we each need our time to talk about it," he says.
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