I feel like an important thing is missed when we discuss sexual assault done on men.

Important_Gap8612 · 2026-03-30T18:39:04+00:00

It also doesn't help that all anti-dv posters are always having a women and/or child as the victim and the men as the perpetrator

And most anti-dv organisation only talk about violence against women and children and there is a extreme shortage of male shelters so even if a dv victim recognises his abuse he has no where to go and many people are distrusting towards male victims

Alternative-Tax7318 · 2026-03-30T18:46:28+00:00

Similar experience. Its actually a little absurd how little men can even recognize their own abuse. In my early twenties, I was in a relationship where I was physically beat and had items thrown at me, It hadn't even occurred to me until a year or so after that relationship I realized how abusive it was. I just... accepted it? Cause thats what men do. Dont hit back, it doesnt hurt that bad, it isnt abusive.

Ive known two men in my life who were molested or groomed when they were younger. Neither saw it for what it was because it was older women preying on them. Was one 11 and the other 16. The one who was 11 was a serial cheater, too. If it were men who had molested them, ya bet it would be seen as abuse.

Idk man. Just saying. I agree. Many men, society in general, cannot recognize abuse. They dont even see it when its happening. And it feels like society at large (or certain groups/ideologies) just brush it off. Which would help explain why its "no big deal" to men when it happens too.

VeganSumo · 2026-03-30T18:52:22+00:00

Took me years to realise… decades even. The first barrier is realising, then it’s convincing others (police, therapist or whomever you encounter while asking for help!) it is at this stage that you realise that there are structural (and rhetorical) obstacles.

It’s crazy how much I’ve heard common feminist slogans and ideas when I denounced such acts. That’s how I realised the extant of how feminisn is paradoxically very patriarcal in it’s assumptions.

SpicyMarshmellow · 2026-03-30T19:21:27+00:00

I have been through experiences that in the current zeitgeist many would consider rape or sexual assault. In some instances, I would agree, and in others I wouldn't.

Rape and sexual assault are concepts that have been rapidly expanding in the past 20 or 30 years. So I'm inclined to assume that part of what you're seeing is that maybe some men are disagreeing with your definition.

In those cases where I would agree that I have been raped or sexually assaulted, they are honestly not experiences that had a severely negative impact on me. Or rather, they are so vastly overshadowed by other negative experiences that they don't register.

Like the one instance where I would agree that there's some grounds to call what happened to me rape: My wife and I still lived together for about 2 years after it was decided and understood between us that we were getting divorced. We had been sleeping in separate beds and had not had sex for about 3 years prior to that. One night somewhere in the last year that we were living in the same house, she came home drunk one night and was very sexually aggressive with me. Just wordlessly approached and started getting physical. (Our home life was very tense and volatile around this time. She was extremely volatile. I was trying my best to navigate this separation carefully, because she had done many insane things over the years and I didn't know what new extremes she might turn to in a fight. Back to her old habit of leveraging suicide attempts? False accusations? Violence? Would neighbors call the police during one of her screaming fits, and what might a police visit situation escalate to?) I ignored her advances for a while. Simply was not responsive to her touches or attempts to remove my clothes. Got up and moved a few times, and she would just follow and continue. I sensed that she was especially unstable in that moment, and was afraid of what a horrific night could follow if I explicitly rejected her. So I relented.

I didn't want to. I didn't enjoy it. But as relates to the spectrum of bad experiences I had with that relationship, it's at the least traumatizing end of the scale. Barely registers.

I've been groped randomly by women a couple times. A woman stuck her hand in my pants unprompted and unwelcome in the workplace. As relates to the spectrum of bad experiences I've had in the workplace, it's again at the least traumatizing end of the scale. Barely registers.

I would call these things rape and sexual assault. They're things these people shouldn't have done. But I would also shrug them off, because they genuinely did not have that much impact on me. And that might also inform how the other men you're talking to are responding.

But given that context, I also 1000% believe that men are raped and sexually assaulted at far, far higher numbers than is commonly believed, and that near zero pressure is applied to women to uphold the same standards of sexual behavior that men are under a microscope for right now. Women can pretty blatantly get away with whatever sexual behavior they want with very little risk of consequence, and I think they take it so much for granted that most are not at all aware that they enjoy this privilege. And it drives me insane. Equality means everyone is held to the same standards of behavior, and faces the same consequences for violating those standards. Even if my experiences were not traumatizing to me, it is fundamentally offensive to my human dignity and relationship to society to be subject to such blatant double standards.

Global_Estimate7021 · 2026-03-30T19:38:49+00:00

It's more than SA really, as kids we're taught to deal with violence but not what to do AFTER the fact

Be it bullying, assaults, or fights, we're taught to defend ourselves and internalize responsibility, but not how to call for help, recognize ourselves as victims, or see our experience as part of something bigger (structural)

That's a discourse that needs to be broken or else boys and men are going to keep sweeping it under the rug

bodyisT · 2026-03-31T01:41:31+00:00

Men are constantly SA’d but it’s just never seen that way. If you look closely, it’s happening all the time

rump_truck · 2026-03-31T11:47:11+00:00

I've heard this referred to as epistemic injustice, or hermeneutical injustice. The idea is that people are denied the language to understand or communicate the injustice that they have experienced, and become victim to a second form of injustice when they are unable to seek help.

Once I first encountered this concept, I couldn't help but see it all over men's issues. For example, the trope of "my crazy ex". Sometimes it means "I couldn't understand her emotional needs". Sometimes it means domestic violence. The second guy was likely explicitly taught that domestic violence is only something that men do to women, so he has a very serious problem, but the only language he has for it makes it sound not serious at all. So he has to deal with the secondary injustice of trying to get help and people laughing him off.

The fundamental truth of men's issues is that we don't actually know how bad they are. Self-report surveys require victims to recognize that they are victims, and many men don't. All the numbers we have are artificially lowered by that, and we don't know by how much.

ilovecopperspoons · 2026-04-01T00:27:27+00:00

I’m sorry if I’m intruding here as a girl, but people have such a hard time identifying when women SH/SA/rape people. I was SH and SA by a creepy aunt repeatedly who would make weird comments about my boobs when they started to grow in at 12-13 and touch me. A lot of people said she was just “joking” and it was all in my head and I’m misreading the situation. I hate having to repeat myself “well if it was a man” but whenever I say “I was sexually harassed by an aunt” vs “I was sexually harassed by a family member” I get so much more empathy and people don’t say that it was all a joke. I hate it

Main-Tiger8537 · 2026-03-31T02:15:49+00:00

https://www.bka.de/DE/UnsereAufgaben/Forschung/ForschungsprojekteUndErgebnisse/Dunkelfeldforschung/LeSuBiA_EN/lesubia_EN_node.html

LeSuBiA Study Summary:

Nearly half of the women (48.7%) and 40.0% of the men have experienced psychological violence in a (former) partnership at least once in their lives. Emotional violence accounts for the largest share of the forms of psychological violence recorded in LeSuBiA, at 37.8%. Although women are more affected over the course of their lives, an analysis of the last five years shows that men are also comparatively frequently affected by psychological violence (men: 23.3%; women: 23.8%) and, in particular, by controlling violence (men: 8.7%; women: 7.1%).

16.1% have experienced physical violence in a (former) partnership at some point in their lives, and 5.7% within the last five years. Looking at the last five years, women (5.2%) and men (6.1%) experienced physical violence almost equally often.

Almost half of all respondents (45.8%) have experienced sexual harassment at some point in their lives. More than a quarter (26.5%) of those surveyed reported experiencing sexual harassment within the last five years. Over a third of women (34.7%) and about one in seven men (14.5%) were affected by sexual harassment without physical contact in the last five years. For sexual harassment involving physical contact, the figures are 14.5% for women and 4.6% for men. Perpetrators are predominantly strangers or casual acquaintances.

More than one in ten people (11.2%) have been victims of sexual assault in their lives, with 2.7% of respondents experiencing this within the last five years. Here, too, women (4.0%) are significantly more affected than men (1.4%). For women, the perpetrator was most often an ex-partner (46.5%), while for men it was a casual acquaintance (33.3%).

More than one in five people (21.2%) have been affected by stalking at some point in their lives, and 9.0% have experienced it within the last five years. Here, too, slightly higher prevalence rates are observed among women: 10.6% of women and 7.0% of men have experienced stalking within the last five years.

One in five women (20.0%) and one in seven men (13.9%) experienced digital violence in the last five years. The victims are comparatively young – over 60% of 16- to 17-year-old girls and around 33% of 16- to 17-year-old boys have been victims of digital violence in the last five years.

hub_mccann · 2026-04-01T13:25:11+00:00

It's EXTREMELY underreported. I don't think it's 50/50 but it's way closer than people admit or realize. However, if you say anything about it during a discussion on men's issues, especially in left leaning groups, you're a monster. It happened to me, I've been around when it happened to my friends, and more and more reports come out every day.

FatboySmith2000 · 2026-03-30T19:16:46+00:00

Trying to think of the 2 times it happened to me according to their reasoning

MassiveDefinition274 · 2026-04-02T01:43:19+00:00

In my early 20s, I worked in grocery stores, and several times I had women sneak up behind me, grab me (my ass, crotch), touch me (in my face, chest, arms), or say very inappropriate things to me in ways that made me uncomfortable, in a lot of cases these were women 2-3x my age.

I'd wager it probably happened somewhere in the vicinity of 5-10 times, depending on what I want to count - it was around two decades and while I can remember some of them specifically, I know it happened relatively frequently - I only worked in this industry for maybe 3 years.

I never really knew how to react to this, what to do, or really understood to consider it sexual assault and never processed it as that until years later.

I've never told anyone in my life that this happened to me, didn't report or say anything to my employer, and frankly had no idea what to do or how to understand it until years later.

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JEVOUSHAISTOUS · 2026-04-02T11:25:35+00:00

I'm torn about this.

On the one hand, yes, you are correct, men are much less likely to realize they are victim of abuse and this can be an issue in certain circumstances. It also tends to create massive bias in any statistics related to this issue.

On the other hand, I'm not a huge fan of coercing men into feeling like they are victims when they don't feel like they are. I don't think it necessarily helps people to push them into aching where they don't feel pain.

A lot of the trauma from adverse events boils down to how we subjectively experience it and if, by some luck, some or many people are able to shrug it off and move on rather than endure a lifetime of PTSD, I say let them have it, and in fact, it would be interesting to know how they achieve this and if it could be reliably reproduced.

Now, some might say that the pain is still there, only well hidden, but I remain unconvinced. This sounds mostly like psychoanalytical framework, I'm not sure it is very well backed by solid evidence. In general I'm wary of the "any healthy person is really just a sick person who doesn't know it yet" shtick.

PTSD is hell. If people are able to avoid living in literal hell, then good for them!

Low_Rich_5436 · 2026-03-31T06:51:33+00:00

I'm of two minds on this.

On the one hand, rape absolutely does happen to men, has severe mental repercussions, and is scandalously ignored.

On the other hand we need to stop inflating the notion of "assault" and over-evaluating the consequences of minor acts. Having someone put their hand on your thigh or ass, or steal a kiss or any other such fleeting moments is traumatic only if society convinces you it is. It happened to me multiple times when I was younger, from much older people. I'm good. I didn't see it as anything more than an uncomfortable moment at the time and I'm glad I didn't. Trauma can be socially conditioned and we are doing it to the younger generation.

Title	I feel like an important thing is missed when we discuss sexual assault done on men.
Author	tezen_47
Upvotes	142
Comments	55
Date	March 30, 2026 1:11 PM UTC (3 months ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/1s7q6az/i_feel_like_an_important_thing_is_missed_when_we/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/i-feel-like-an-important-thing-is-missed-when-we.1576749 https://theredarchive.com/post/1576749

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