When I was 12, two men sexually assaulted me as a crowd of people watched. In this paper, I want to discuss a specific aspect of that experience: the crowd's disregard; how they did nothing while it happened; how they looked away once it ended; and how many other adults ignored it too. For in progressive academic circles in general, and progressive feminist circles in particular, there is a structurally similar phenomenon of disregard, and it is worth recognizing. It relates to the fact that I am male, and males are often assumed to have not experienced sexual violence.

The assault happened at the end of a two-week science summer camp, at a university not far from my rural Midwest town. The camp was expensive, and my parents could not afford it, so I spent $1200 of my hard-earned savings—originally collected by cleaning bathrooms, over the course of several years, for building a treehouse someday—in order to attend. The cost did not bother me; I was desperate to meet someone like myself, to hang out with people who took science seriously, to find a certain sort of like-minded friend.

A few minutes after the assault, a camp chemistry teacher learned what had happened, and came over to check on me. I remember very little of those post-assault moments, but one event is clear in my mind. As we rode the elevator, on the way back to my room, the chemistry teacher asked: “Do you think they were serious, or were they just being shitheads?” “Just being shitheads,” I said, with difficulty. That was, of course, the wrong question. And that was the wrong answer too, and I knew it at the time. But such is how reflexive instincts are often wired: even if privately, I suspect that someone has done me wrong, publicly my gut reaction is to say otherwise.

That was the extent to which the incident got addressed. Perhaps the chemistry teacher told other people about it, or perhaps not. Regardless, no one ever discussed it with me again. Those in charge of the summer camp disregarded the simple fact of what had happened to me, facts to which they had straightforward access.

Altogether, the assault was disregarded in many different ways. Two kinds of disregard are associated with events that occurred during, and after, the assault. Two other kinds of disregard are associated with events that occurred much later, when I started spending time in feminist circles. Let us discuss each of these in turn.

The response of the chemistry teacher, and of the summer camp more generally, was disregard of one kind. It derived, ultimately, from ignorance, or fear, or laziness. Either the adults in charge did not know what to do, or they knew what to do but were too afraid to do it, or they knew what to do and just could not be bothered. Most likely, it was a complicated amalgam of all three.

Another kind of disregard was, for me at least, far more striking. It happened concurrently with the assault, and in the moments that immediately followed. It was the disregard of the crowd.

Shortly before the assault occurred, many participants in the camp were hanging out in the lobby, chatting after classes had ended. There were probably about a hundred people: campers as young as me, college-aged students, some people who looked to be in their twenties, some who looked in their thirties, and some older still. I was standing alone, against the far wall.

Two men entered the lobby, across the way from me. They looked early to mid-twenties, and they were wearing custodial uniforms, perhaps to walk around campus without being stopped.Footnote ¹ They flirted with a group of female counsellors, who enjoyed it and flirted back: it seemed like they all knew each other. Then the men saw me alone. They approached, and one grabbed me by the shoulders. As he held me from the front, the other dropped a pen on the ground and said to pick it up. He smiled and laughed; so did his friend; so did the female counsellors. When I did not bend over, one man shifted his grip from my shoulders to my wrists, pulling my face towards his crotch. The other man pushed down on the base of my neck and on the middle of my back, straightening my spinal column. Then he simulated penetrating me from behind. I felt him, repeatedly, against me. After many thrusts, he shoved me into the wall, hard. I fell over from the impact. Then both of them jogged off, laughing.

All throughout, the crowd watched. They had become more than a crowd, really: they were an audience. I distinctly remember looking up—as the man was thrusting against me, liking it—and seeing a hundred faces staring in silence.

After the men ran away, the audience's gaze remained. They continued to watch me with casual disregard, as if curious about what I would do next. They consumed me, in the way that most of us consume online media, salacious news stories, gossip, drama, violence, pain. Not knowing what to do, I just stood there. And for a few long seconds, they all just looked at me. It was, among other things, awkward.

Then the audience became a crowd again, and the crowd turned away. People continued talking, either about whatever they were discussing before, or about what had just happened. I am pretty sure that no one present spoke to me. Everything after that—and before the chemistry teacher took me to the elevator—is blacked out of my memory.

Disregard: that was the crowd's collective attitude towards the whole event. They saw two men simulate raping me—raping a kid. It unfolded before their eyes. Yet no one did, or said, anything. There was just silence, curiosity, awkwardness, visual consumption, and apathy.

The crowd's behavior was an instance of the bystander effect. As many social psychology studies have shown, people are generally less inclined to help others when onlookers are present (Coker et al. Reference Coker, Cook-Craig, Williams, Fisher, Clear, Garcia and Hegge2011; Darley and Latané Reference Darley and Latané1968; Latané and Darley Reference Latané and Darley1968). In emergency situations, individuals in groups are more likely to refrain from acting than individuals who are entirely alone.

There is lots of debate over why, exactly, this is (Fischer et al. Reference Fischer, Krueger, Greitemeyer, Vogrincic, Kastenmüller, Frey, Henne, Wicher and Kainbacher2011). In the case of my experience, at least, there seemed to be several different reasons why the onlookers acted as they did. Some must not have known what to do; even though, of course, there were plenty of good options. Others must not have realized that they were witnessing a sexual assault; people often react to such unbelievable situations by becoming confused. Still others must not have cared that much: perhaps they were less worried about helping me, and more worried about the fact that, if they did something, then they too would become an object of the crowd's attention, thereby being viewed, consumed, and disregarded themselves. Finally, I suspect that the crowd enjoyed it, at least to some extent: watching war movies is entertaining; stopping war, not so much.

To this day, I am unsure of how to evaluate the severity of the assault. A certain problem arises when I try to determine how bad, exactly, the assault was. The problem stems from a conflict between (i) my intuitive evaluation of how the assault compares to other experiences of sexual violence, and (ii) the fact that male survivors often minimize their experiences. Let me explain.

Regarding (i): though the assault was awful, I feel that it was not, all things considered, nearly as bad as it could have been. The previous year, and the year after too, I was repeatedly sexually abused by an older teenage woman. Later, I was “used in forced sexual fantasies”—there is no good term for it—by another woman, in a way so atypical and yet so harmful and painful that I lack the conceptual resources to describe it; in fact, as far as I know, our community as a whole does not have the relevant conceptual resources yet.Footnote ² And of course, there are far, far worse cases of sexual violence, perpetrated every day.

Regarding (ii): I worry that my current conception of the assault—the one described above—is inaccurate. For my current conception may well be an instance of a general pattern, among male survivors, to minimize the personal impact of their experiences (Javaid Reference Javaid2017; Widanaralalage Reference Widanaralalage2022; Widanaralalage et al. 2022b). This tendency toward minimization, in turn, contributes to a phenomenon that some have described as the invisibility of male rapeFootnote ³—and of course, I do not want to contribute to that invisibility.

So ultimately, it is hard to say exactly how harmful this experience of sexual assault was. Though I personally know several survivors whose experiences were far worse, it is also true that survivors like me tend to downplay their experiences. I am torn between what seems intuitively right, and the fact that those intuitions—among male victims—are often at best misleading, and at worst simply wrong.

Regardless, in what follows, I want to discuss two other kinds of disregard that I have encountered—and which contributed to the overall harm that the sexual assault caused me. In the decades following the assault, the disregard of the teacher, summer camp, and crowd, continued in new, subtler forms. It came to be embodied by particular attitudes and assumptions, and a general way of viewing me, held by some feminist communities that I have occasionally encountered.

Here are the details. As I grew older, and learned more about sexual assault, abuse, and rape, I came to identify deeply with people who were explicitly and proudly feminist. They talked unabashedly about the sorts of harms that I had personally experienced. They took those harms seriously, and cared a great deal about addressing them. And many of them articulated their rage, regarding sexual violence, with a passion and an eloquence that I have always lacked. For those reasons, and others too, feminist communities felt like my place.

But while the explicit contents of feminist discussions benefitted me enormously, in many cases, the presuppositions implicitly underlying such discussions did not. Those discussions often presumed a fairly simplistic picture of the relationship between sex, gender, and sexual violence. That picture, briefly put, disregards the sort of sexual violence that I experienced: namely, sexual violence perpetrated against males.Footnote ⁴ And so the old kinds of disregard, from the summer camp, took new manifestations: feminist discussions of sexual violence disregard the experiences of male victims.

The reasons for the new forms of disregard are, in a sense, very understandable. In the paradigm case of sexual violence, the perpetrator is a man and the victim is a woman.Footnote ⁵ My experiences do not fit that paradigm: I was a victim of sexual violence, but I am generally perceived to be a man. Moreover, in other cases of sexual violence that I experienced, the perpetrator was a woman. So in several different ways, my life experiences violate the paradigm upon which discussions of sexual violence, in feminist communities, are often predicated. As a result, those communities generally assume that I have not been sexually abused.

Worse yet, there is another, more painful kind of disregard that often occurs in feminist discussions of sexual violence. Because men are paradigmatic perpetrators, feminist discussions of sexual violence occasionally treat perceived men as moral inferiors. The contributions of men to those discussions, if permitted at all, are not given the same consideration as the contributions of others are. Men are perpetrators, so the thought goes, and therefore, in discussions of sexual violence, men should be seen and not heard.

This causes me to experience another form of disregard. Once I am perceived to be a man, in discussions of sexual violence, I am immediately likened to the perpetrator. That is the category in which I am placed: perpetrators of sexual violence are assumed to be my kin, the people with whom I—in virtue of my apparent gender—belong. And that is a uniquely debilitating way to be disregarded. It is not simply that my own experiences, as a survivor of sexual violence, get ignored. It is that in discussions of sexual violence, I am implicitly—and sometimes even explicitly—told that my place is with my abusers. I am lumped in with them; they are taken to be more similar to me than survivors are.

Both kinds of disregard have made it difficult for me to talk about my experiences. And that is, unfortunately, quite common (Widanaralalage et al. 2022b). Numerous studies suggest that, for many different reasons, it is extremely hard for males to disclose their experiences of being sexually assaulted (Kia-Keating et al. Reference Kia-Keating, Grossman, Sorsoli and Epstein2005, 170). Boys, for instance, often do not know what rape even is (Sorsoli et al. Reference Sorsoli, Kia-Keating and Grossman2008, 340). Many report that Rape Crisis Centers are unhelpful, or even downright hostile, when contacted by male survivors (Javaid Reference Javaid2016, 285); and many report that therapists do not understand the specific needs that male survivors might have (Ellis et al. Reference Ellis, Simiola, Mackintosh, Schlaudt and Cook2020, 639). In addition, there are numerous myths concerning males, and masculinity, which disincentivize survivors from sharing their experiences (Hine et al. Reference Hine, Murphy and Churchyard2021, 1; Turchik and Edwards Reference Turchik and Edwards2012, 212). All this could be part of the reason why #UsToo—which was invoked on Twitter to discuss, and respond to, men's experiences as sexual assault survivors—was not used nearly as frequently as #MeToo.Footnote ⁶

There are many potential reasons why male survivors are often disregarded in the two ways mentioned earlier. One potential reason, which is worth discussing here, concerns a certain lack of nuance in many informal discussions of data on sexual violence. In particular, the data are subtler than is often appreciated. A lack of appreciation for that subtlety leads to misunderstanding—and ultimately, disregarding—sexual assault perpetrated against males.

In what follows, I present some data on the rates of sexual violence experienced by people of different genders. While doing so, I discuss four complications in these data that often get overlooked. Then I draw some general conclusions about how these data, and those complications, connect to the phenomenon of disregard.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) conducts one of the largest surveys on sexual violence in the United States. According to one of their surveys, while about 26.8 percent of women report experiencing completed or attempted rape at some point in their lifetimes, the percentage of men who report experiencing completed or attempted rape at some point in their lifetimes is 3.8 percent (Basile et al. Reference Basile, Smith, Kresnow, Khatiwada and Leemis2022, 4). Similarly, while about 47.6 percent of women report experiencing unwanted sexual contact at some point in their lifetimes, the percentage of men who report experiencing unwanted sexual contact at some point in their lifetimes is 23.3 percent (Basile et al. Reference Basile, Smith, Kresnow, Khatiwada and Leemis2022, 4).Footnote ⁷

In at least four ways, however, the situation is more complex than certain flat-footed interpretations of these data suggest. Here is a first complication: as discussed by Widanaralalage et al. (Reference Widanaralalage, Reed, Antunes, DeJong, Pinchevsky, Lovell and Cummings2022a, 2125–26), the CDC uses a somewhat exclusionary definition of rape.Footnote ⁸ Roughly put, the CDC defines rape as any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal, oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force or threats (Smith et al. Reference Smith, Zhang, Basile, Merrick, Wang, Kresnow and Chen2018, 1). In other words, in order to be raped, a person must be penetrated. So if a male is forced to penetrate someone—a female, another male, or anyone else—then that male's experience is not classified as rape. Instead, they are classified under an entirely separate category in the CDC's survey: the category is called being “made to penetrate” (MTP). And as the CDC data show, the percentage of men who report being MTP at some point in their lifetimes is 10.7 percent—which is, of course, much higher than the percentage of men who report being raped at some point in their lifetimes.Footnote ⁹

To be clear: there are, arguably, good reasons for keeping MTP and rape as separate categories. For instance, some studies suggest that males who experience being MTP have different health problems from males who experience rape (Smith et al. Reference Smith, Chen, Lowe and Basile2022, NP20965). So it is important to keep these categories separate when exploring how to help male survivors: the best path forward for someone who was MTP may well be different from the best path forward for someone who was raped.

Nevertheless, merely focusing on statistics concerning rape in discussions of sexual violence risks neglecting the large percentage of men who are MTP. Statistics about rates of being MTP should not be disregarded. For that is an extreme form of sexual violence that many males experience.

A second complication: there may be a discrepancy between (i) data on sexual assault that survey respondents experienced in the previous 12 months, and (ii) data on sexual assault that survey respondents experienced at some point in their lives. According to a CDC survey, for instance, about 1.6 percent of women report being raped at some point during the 12 months prior to the survey, and about 1.7 percent of men report being made to penetrate at some point during the 12 months prior to the survey (Breiding et al. Reference Breiding, Smith, Basile, Walters, Chen and Merrick2014, 5). As pointed out by Stemple and Meyer (Reference Stemple and Meyer2014, e21), it is striking that the CDC's summary of their own statistics de-emphasized this fairly surprising result —for in so doing, the CDC risked reinforcing potentially problematic gender stereotypes about victimization.Footnote ¹⁰ So while women and men seem to report more-or-less comparable rates of sexual abuse in the immediate past, it also seems to be the case that women report higher rates of sexual abuse over their lifetimes than men do. It is not clear what accounts for the discrepancy between reports about more recent abuse and reports about abuse from much earlier in life: the data about more recent abuse may be unreliable, in fact.Footnote ¹¹

For what it is worth, after my own experience in the summer camp, I basically forgot about it for nearly eight years. It was completely blocked from my memory. And I only remembered it in college, when I started noticing unhealthy, disruptive patterns in my approach to sex, relationships, and porn, and started thinking seriously about what the causes of those patterns might be. This sort of dissociation is, of course, an experience that many survivors have (Rodriguez-Srednicki Reference Rodriguez-Srednicki2001; Schauer and Elbert Reference Schauer and Elbert2010).

A third complication: there are many different definitions of the expressions “rape,” “sexual assault,” and so on (Widanaralalage et al. Reference Widanaralalage, Reed, Antunes, DeJong, Pinchevsky, Lovell and Cummings2022a). Different states define “rape” differently, for instance. Some legal bodies define rape in the way that other legal bodies define sexual assault. Many states do not explicitly criminalize forced-to-penetrate cases at all (Widanaralalage et al. Reference Widanaralalage, Reed, Antunes, DeJong, Pinchevsky, Lovell and Cummings2022a, 2125). And different surveys define rape, sexual contact, and so on, in different ways: the definitions used by the Uniform Crime Report, for instance, have been different from the definitions used by the CDC (Stemple and Meyer Reference Stemple and Meyer2014; Widanaralalage et al. Reference Widanaralalage, Reed, Antunes, DeJong, Pinchevsky, Lovell and Cummings2022a).

A fourth complication: there are far fewer data on sexual violence perpetrated against people with non-binary genders than data on sexual violence perpetrated against people with binary genders. The CDC survey, for instance, did not collect data on non-binary survivors. In addition, quite plausibly, the definitions mentioned above—of rape, MTP, and so on—were designed with only binary genders in mind. Some large-scale studies suggest that people with non-binary genders experience sexual violence at extremely high rates. So the lack of data and detailed analyses on this kind of sexual violence is disturbing.Footnote ¹²

As these four different complications indicate, the situation regarding data about sexual violence is extremely nuanced. Standard definitions of standard terms, like the CDC's definition of “rape,” are exclusionary. There seem to be discrepancies between the rates of sexual assault reported for (i) 12-month periods, and (ii) entire lifetimes. Different surveys, and different legislative bodies, define various terms differently. And there is a general lack of data about sexual assault perpetrated against people with non-binary identities.

One aspect of the relationship between these four complications concerning data about sexual assault, and the phenomenon of disregard, is straightforward: nuances, and subtlety, are apt to be disregarded. People are bad at learning, and retaining, information that contains lots of delicate distinctions. And the data on sexual violence are rife with distinctions like that. So informal discussions of data on sexual violence tend to oversimplify: people simply cannot deal with the complexities for which the data call.

That is, I suspect, one of the main reasons why male survivors are often disregarded in the two ways mentioned earlier: namely, by being ignored, and by being categorized with perpetrators. It is easier, cognitively, to think solely in terms of paradigmatic cases: and according to the sexual violence paradigm, perpetrators are men and victims are women. It is harder, cognitively, to think in terms of non-paradigmatic cases, such as what I experienced.Footnote ¹³

But it is extremely important to think outside the paradigm. For as the above statistical facts show, paradigmatic cases of sexual violence—men assaulting women—are not as paradigmatic as we generally assume. What happened to me was not some one-off, isolated incident. The sexual assault of men by men, the sexual assault of men by women, and many other kinds of sexual assault too, are more common than we tend to think. And in conversations about sexual violence that should be kept in mind.

Besides, it is extremely important to not make assumptions regarding whether someone has, or has not, been sexually abused. The urge to automatically think of men as perpetrators and women as victims should be resisted. Real harm can be done by identifying a man with the abuser rather than the abused.

Ideally, feminist discussions of sexual violence would never presuppose that this-or-that sort of person has or has not experienced assault. And ideally, no one would ever be lumped in with perpetrators of sexual violence, merely on the basis of their apparent social identities. Survivors of abuse, regardless of their gender, should not be disregarded in those ways. I hope that in the future, as more and more forms of sexual abuse come to light, we move closer to these ideals.

There is an extremely difficult question, however, about how exactly to do that. The difficult question is this: when someone is privileged in one respect, but experiences a harm that is characteristic of being oppressed in that very respect, then what is the best way to include their experiences in feminist discussions and feminist theorizing?

In particular, suppose that someone is a man; so they are extremely privileged with respect to many aspects of their gender.Footnote ¹⁴ And suppose that this man is sexually abused. Such experiences are characteristic of being oppressed with respect to gender: sexual abuse is a form of gender oppression. So how should feminist theorizing accommodate this man's experience of abuse?

My preferred answer was given by, among others, hooks (Reference hooks2015b, Reference hooks2015a).Footnote ¹⁵ As hooks argues, there is a sense in which men are oppressed by the very systems of gender privilege which ostensibly benefit them (Reference hooks2015b, 75).Footnote ¹⁶ Rather than thinking in terms of one gender sexually abusing another, hooks encourages us to think in terms of power and domination, in terms of society's fetish for materialism and consumerism, and in terms of socially sanctioned violence in general. Society celebrates violence in many different forms: violence in war is condoned, for instance, as is violence for the sake of love (hooks Reference hooks2015b, 124–27). Sexually abused men, like all those who suffer sexual abuse, are victims of society's attraction to power, domination, violence, and control.Footnote ¹⁷ And those terms—”power,” “domination,” “violence,” and “control”—are the best terms by which to understand what occurs when one person, privileged in one respect, experiences a harm that is characteristic of being oppressed in that very respect.

But I will not argue for this at length here. My present goal is more modest. I simply want to draw attention to the phenomenon of disregard, of not seeing—for whatever reason—the simple fact that sexual abuse happens quite frequently to many different sorts of people, including people like me.

Everyone stands to gain from recognizing this. Apathy towards violence—sexual or not—is a poison, mixed together with socially acceptable disregard like a capitalist, consumerist, colonialist, imperialist, militaristic cocktail. People literally die on the sidewalks of New York, Los Angeles, and other “modern” cities, for lack of a place to live; meanwhile, we walk by. Many of us support Ukraine in their war with Russia—as well we should—by posting pictures of their flag on social media; but we also focus much more on those pretty yellows and blues than on what the war actually looks like, namely, piles of dead Russians and Ukrainians, many around 18, with their faces literally blown off. Only through conscious effort can we begin to see just how deep and pervasive socially sanctioned violence runs, and just how many people are affected by it.

But that conscious effort will yield fruit. Teachers will start taking sexual abuse more seriously, and thereby react to it more effectively. Crowds will start acting, reflexively in the moment, to prevent it. And feminist discourse will become increasingly aware that more people experience sexual violence than has been appreciated.