Though it sickens me, it doesn’t exactly surprise me that Todd Jackson holds the views that he does. Men who come forward with stories of sexual assault are often met with disbelief, derision and mockery. So are women, to be certain, but this challenges our society’s notions of power and gender and how these are indelibly linked in a way that the rape of a woman does not.
Which is really fucked up!
A man who is raped doesn’t somehow become less of a man, nor is his rape less real because of his anatomy.
Rape is not a laughing matter.
And yet it’s the subject of countless jokes and, apparently, even video games.
Consider this scene from Alpha Protocol:
In this game, the femme fatale is SIE, who embodies pretty much every stereotype about German women — she’s muscular, she’s aggressive, she has a ludicrous accent, and she likes killing. Late in the game, we find Michael tied to a bed in a facility run by the bad guys, utterly helpless. If you’ve played your cards wrong (or right, depending on what you’re into) SIE will wander in, and Michael is not enthused by her appearance, as if he somehow doesn’t know where this is going. SIE takes the opportunity to declare a “certain fondness” for you, because in a video game, this is the perfect time and place to express such sentiments. Her dialogue gets increasingly suggestive, and if you make the right conversation choices, she says, “I will let you go … in a moment,” before dropping her pants, to which Michael groans in dismay. At that point, she straight up mounts Mr. Thorton, who has the choice between saying “No Way In Hell” or the less-than-enthusiastic, “Might As Well.” So there’s a “consent” option, but even that is dubious, considering her response is, “I thought I would have to work hard for this,” which prompts the reply, “You would, if I wasn’t tied down.” Note that this is said while she reaches down to grab his/your unwilling erection. To be fair, she does back off if you tell her to. But considering that she appears to be your only way out of an otherwise deadly situation, telling the aggressive and violent German lady with a giant gun “no” is a little bit different than telling your girlfriend you have a headache. Or, even better, imagine the exact same scene with the genders reversed, including the part where the armed male soldier reaches into the female captive’s pants to see how aroused she is. It seems like that might possibly have generated some complaints.
While this may be a grey area here in modern America, the ancient Athenians took a pretty firm stance against it, as Susan Guettel Cole discusses in Greek Sanctions Against Sexual Assault:
A man who had been raped or the kyrios of a female or a boy who had been raped could bring a δίκη βιαίων (a charge of assault) against the offender. Such a suit was not restricted to cases of sexual assault, however, and the penalty was only monetary. Because the suit was private, the damages would have been paid to the victim himself, if he were a male adult, or to the kyrios, if the victim were a female or a boy. Another suit that could be brought in cases of sexual assault was a γραφή ΰβρεως. Because a graphe was a public and not a private suit, action could have been brought by someone other than a victim or a victim’s kyrios. Hybris against a free man, woman, child, or slave was actionable (Aeschin. 1.15; Dem. 21. 45-50). Hybris as a legal term is not strictly defined, but it appears that it was felt to involve a kind of arrogant attitude accompanying excessively violent acts meant to bring shame or dishonor to a victim.
Tagged: greece, hellenismos
