Social Construction of Gender Roles

                           While reading Monday’s article regarding Male Sexual Victimization by Karen Weiss, I immediately thought of a video I stumbled upon on Tumblr, which brought me to tears.   In this short 30 second video, a young African-American male describes his sexual assault experience to his friend who is video taping the conversation.

*Disclaimer: This video includes profanity*

Guys Also Need to Give Consent

           Seeing this young man describe his experience just made me despise society a little more than I already do. It just baffles me how rape is still happening because I can’t grasp the fact that people do not understand consent and having control over no one else’s body but your own. Secondly, how the patriarchal society has constructed specific gender roles that are attributed to men and women every day of their lives. As Weiss mentioned, “social definitions of (hetero)masculine sexuality expect men to be the pur- suers of sex and women to be the pursued”(292). This is prevalent in this video as the reaction towards his statement was absurd. I believe that if this was two women telling the same story, no one would be laughing and it would be taken remarkably differently.  

It is difficult to obtain a lot of information about this incident through this 30 video but it is enough to recognize that sexual violence against men is a joke in society. 

     What I observed was a very emotionally distressed, traumatized young man confiding in his friend regarding an act of sexual assault towards him. While recounting the assault, he cannot even make eye contact with the camera and has tears strolling down his face uncontrollably. Yet, his friend had the audacity to not only video tape this confession (by means of entertainment) but to laugh throughout the video. This can be an example of how men are shamed and embarrassed in relation to sexual assault which deters them from reporting it to the authorities. This is evident in Weiss’ article as “references to shame and embarrassment are evident in several NCVS narratives, mostly in response to why victims did not report their incidents to the police” (291). It is a never ending cycle in which feminism gets blamed for the absence of "male sexual violence" in statistics and is subsequently assumed that feminism only fights for women rights. 

     On a side note,  I showed this video to my older brother to see if a man's reaction would differ. I was relieved to see that he reacted the same way that I did and he said that "nobody should be taken this video in the context of entertainment. Rape is rape, no matter who it happens to".

Rape is rape, no matter who it happens to.