Your Vagina Doesn't Render You Innocent (TW rape)

Few Fetsters remember R anymore. He’s one of an infinite list of Fetlife refugees, and who has time to remember those? I remember him, though. I remember his wit. I remember his compassion. I remember the sexual harassment that became a constant annoyance for him.

R was ripped, you see. He was a gym rat, and he was funny, too. He didn’t post dick pics or even muscle porn. Any reference to his bulging abs was incidental, but that didn’t matter to the masses. His threads became a pool of wet vagina deep enough to swim in. Women told him which body parts they wanted to lick/touch/suck/insert your favourite verb here. They told him all day every day, so R took regular breaks to get away from the harassment.

Ultimately, he left.

No comment angers me more than “Women do it, too, you know.” The trouble is women do, indeed, do it, too, you know. If I don’t present it as apologia or shove it into a conversation in bad faith, is it still whataboutism? I hope not, because in 2016, a horde of women sexually harassed a man right off the site, and that matters.

We, too, objectify men. We're not immune to the mindset, but we don’t question our behaviour because society teaches us that cis men are the only bad guys in the West. When a man harasses a woman, it’s rape culture. When women harass men, it’s cute.

We suck the evil out of the behaviour and stick a pink label on it. We do it when women assault men. We do it when women rape men. Many of my exes have been assaulted. The women in their histories have hit, scratched, and bit them because it’s all fun and games when the attacker doesn’t have a penis.

Let me scrape a few statistics together for the feminists. Lesotho has a rape rate of 82%. In the rest of the world, that rate is 27%. In my country, between 33% and 50% of women have experienced intimate partner violence. Rape culture oppresses women on an almost global scale. I don’t want to detract from the female experience. I’ve lived it myself and have been writing about it for seven years.

In comparison, only 10% of sexual assault victims are male, but that doesn’t make R’s experience any better. I recently watched a series in which a woman physically pushed a man to have sex with her. I imagined that it would be portrayed as assault.

It wasn’t. It was presented as consensual sex despite the victim’s constant refusals. This is one of the reasons women assault men: They think if his penis is cooperating, it’s consensual. It aligns with that old Fetlife fetish, “I take your wetness as consent.”

Wetness is not consent, and erections are not consent. We need to do better with this, and it starts with the way we treat men like R. It’s those conversations that cut to the quick of how we perceive men’s bodily autonomy. Sexual coercion is a crime no matter what your genitals look like. If you’ve ever pressured, tricked, or threatened a man into having sex with you, you’re guilty of coercion. If you’ve relied on alcohol, drugs, or persistence to get sex, you’re guilty of coercion or sexual assault.

Your vagina doesn’t render you innocent. Not in threads like R’s. Not in physical fights with your boyfriend, and not during a scene.