I’ve noticed as a response to the historic trend of male victims of abuse and SA being ignored, a lot of well-intentioned voices have shifted to the idea that men who don’t want to talk about their experiences or tell everyone about their emotional states are downplaying, minimizing, or compartmentalizing their experiences.

This sort of mindset is putting a new set of barriers on male victims and allows judgement for trauma response from an entirely different angle. All injury or emotion a SA victim experiences from the moment they talk about their SA is exclusively related to that SA.

Just as an example, Wolfe Glick, a Pokemon professional, recently announced that he was going to stop attending tournaments. He mentioned one of the reasons was that he was experiencing sexual harassment at tournaments, but that it was one of the more minor reasons he was done.

The rest of the video talks about how he feels dehumanized due to how people gawk at him like a zoo animal, stare, and generally treat him like a mascot instead of a human being. But instead of his SA experiences being a symptom of this dehumanization, the dehumanization became a symptom of the SA to the commenters.

The comments both on Reddit and on YouTube are filled with people discussing the groping aspect, talking about how he is downplaying it, or how he has serious trauma as a result of it. Less comments talk about the harm he focused on the rest of the video. It almost feels like people are crediting the whole of his suffering to one specific piece of the puzzle, and that feels really unfair to him.