This week we kicked off classes by engaging with a rather taboo or controversial, to say the least, topic: male sexual victimization. It was mentioned in class that many of us had to work through our initial eye rolls (myself included) because how many of us have been “felt up” or have had unwanted sexual advances made towards us on a Saturday night? However, as we examined Karen Weiss’ article, we were able to push past these initial reactions and extract many of the important issues raised by her study.
One thing that I found particularly interesting was the structure of the article, mainly the way that the information gathered from the interviews was presented to the audience. As I mentioned in class, in comparison to Campbell’s “From Thinking to Feeling”, the accounts felt distant and encouraged the reader to analyze them “objectively”. What I mean by this, is that there is no apparent/obvious effort on Weiss’ part to elicit a strong emotional response from the reader. By recounting the incidents through third person narrative, referring to the survivors as “respondents” and employing simple language that hinders imagery, the reader does not feel naturally compelled to sympathize as a knee jerk-reaction. Further, the content included in these accounts do not present the “feelings” of the survivors towards their experiences as a central focus.
So after reading Weiss’ article, I wondered why she would choose to frame the narrative of male victimization void of emotion? If the author wanted us to sympathize with survivors who lack visibility as victims, then why wouldn’t the accounts try to pull at the readers’ heartstrings?
It made me think that perhaps the men who had participated in Weiss’ interviews did not want their accounts to be seen as "overly emotional" or that when they were being interviewed, they emphasized mostly the events that had happened and not how it made them feel. I believe that there is a a strong resistance to exposing vulnerability for male victims because vulnerability is always at odds with expectations of masculinity. This is strongly supported by Weiss’ findings that male survivors consistently emphasized intoxication/not remembering and physical aggression/“taking care of it” on their own.
On a tangent, it actually made me think of a stand-up comedy clip about “Man Rape” by Dave Chapelle. I think there’s a sort of funny narrative within a narrative happening in this video. While Chapelle explains how men do not want to talk about the male victimization of rape, he drinks and uses humour as a vessel to communicate this message.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLWlBgj0uOc
Like you, I wondered why the survivor narratives were framed in the manner they were. Most of them were used, essentially, as a method of 'flavouring' the point Weiss was making at the moment, rather than used to illustrate the lasting emotional effects the survivors were left with.
ReplyDeleteThough part of me absolutely agrees that this is, in part, a demonstration of the need to re-institute a feeling of lost masculinity, I also wonder if this method of writing is due to the recentness of the topic -- namely that, as there isn't a significant amount of research done on male victims of sexual assault, Weiss felt it was necessary to enforce that the crime exists at all and in significant numbers rather than the emotional ramifications of the act. So much of early sexual assault and rape literature and theory that I have read is written in a similar manner -- outlining the basis of the crime and the statistics involved rather than the significant emotional responses in an effort to demonstrate a need for change within societal and legal discourse. I feel that it is a relatively recent event for sexual assault to focus on the emotional and psychological effects, and that the ability for us to focus on those things has come from the groundwork of establishing the existence of the crime (or at least have attempted to, as clearly this is still being debated [idiotically] by certain parts of society) and having the ability to use those statistics to show the significant need to invest time and money into conducting research on the damage left behind for female victims.
Ultimately, if the full transcripts of the interviews were available, I wonder if we would find that this information was not provided by the respondents (implying, as you surmise, an element of attempting to regain lost masculinity) or rather that the questions were simply not asked at all (implying the information was not the statistical data that was being collected for this study). It would be utterly disappointing to find that such information was not included in this study due to an omission of the topic, but if respondents were not able or are unwilling to discuss the information, I wish that had been included in some kind of statement by Weiss.