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NancyLebovitz comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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I agree with you, though I'd phrase it as "men's problems should be taken more seriously" rather than "it's unfair that women's problems are taken seriously."
It's taken a lot of work (not yet complete) over a long period to get women being raped taken seriously, let alone lesser issues.
Hypotheses about why the abuse of men is barely on the agenda: There's even more prejudice against men who've been hurt than against women who've been hurt. Men aren't as good at organizing to be heard, which overlaps the first hypothesis. Women have formed an interest group on the subject which is preventing men from being heard. Other suggestions? Suggestions for action?
For what it's worth, I believe that men frequently have a worse deal than is publicly acknowledged. I've been expecting sexual abuse of men and boys by women to show up on the public agenda. No one seems to believe me.
I think this is the large picture of power balance between the sexes.
In the past, physical strength was the most important thing, therefore men got the unfair bonus points. Currently, communication is the most important thing, therefore women get the unfair bonus points.
And, that's basicly it. (You didn't expect Azathoth to care about fairness, did you?)
Of course the official narrative is different, but that's just business as usual. The ancient patriarchy also had their narrative about why women are responsible for everything bad, because Eve listened to devil and ate the apple in the garden of paradise. Plausible? Well, at the time this story was invented, it was easy to believe it; and also if you didn't, you were punished. Today we have another narrative, written for the contemporary society, about why men are responsible for everything bad, because... you know, the usual story preached in the modern equivalents of churches.
Men, learn to communicate, both as individuals and as groups. (Before it is made illegal. EDIT: Specifically, I mean: Before the male-only groups discussing men's problems from the men's point of view are forbidden, on pretext of sexism. I have read an article about a university officially forbidding an unofficial "male studies" students' group for this reason, while women studies remains part of the official curriculum. But I can't find the link now.)
EDIT: But I would still bet my money on men losing against Azathoth. And although it sucks to be on the losing side, I don't think that men being the losing side is intrinsically worse than women being the losing side. The important thing is impact on the humanity as a whole, which yet needs to be determined experimentally.
Lots of people have a hard time actually imagining a woman having sex with a man without his consent. (Seriously, every time I see a link to such a story on Facebook there are plenty of men saying stuff to the effect that they wish that happened to them.)
Japanese fiction is often way ahead of the curve in such things, for some reason. One indicator here is their erotic manga specifically, which have been featuring terrifyingly high amounts of exactly what's said in the quote in the past couple years, and in growing proportion.
(Which implies that there's a market out there in japan of tens-or-hundreds of thousands of people buying and presumably enjoying erotic manga fantasies of men being sexually abused and raped by women -- not directly that this is a common real-life thing. The question after that is, how did this market get created, and where does the inspiration for the artists come from?)
There are numbers for this?
The easier-to-get numbers are simply number of hits for specific tags.
However, yes, there are all kinds of numbers for this. Most large-scale or popular cons in japan AFAIK keep fairly accurate records of circles' sales, and number of new releases in a genre or catering to particular tastes is usually strongly correlated with how well the big names in those genres/tastes have been selling in the near past, in my observations.
As far as I know, the conventions have been racking up record growth throughout the 2000s and 2010s, so unless you've run the numbers you can't really say anything about the proportion - since everything has been increasing so much.
Well, my most important specific piece of evidence is that the ratio of scanlations tagged both "femdom" and "forced" out of all those tagged "forced" on certain databases has increased very significantly over the last three years.
I'm very reluctant to disclose my sources on this for social, signaling and personal reasons. I hope some of them are obvious. (also, in public with permanent records?)
Eh, databases. Convention records are much more convincing.
True. Now that this topic has been brought to light and I realize it's a more serious issue than I had mentally filed it as, I might actually go look at some of those (along with other stuff I would want to find numbers for first, since this isn't the most important metric by any stretch). They're pretty hard to get, though.
Comiket posted some interesting stats in http://www.comiket.co.jp/info-a/WhatIsEng080528.pdf so getting them might be as hard as asking?
Hmm. But Comiket is far from representative in this field. I'm erring on the side of: Asking a japanese convention host known for their erotic doujin content about their sales and stats, and them actually sending them to you, is going to be a bit more complicated than just and email saying "Hey, could you show me your stats and detailed sales records for the past few years?" (NTM they might not even know English)
Of course (unsurprisingly in retrospect), my "they're pretty hard to get" belief is cached and wasn't updated in quite a while, so I was probably overconfident in that statement.
It's not that sexual harassment of men by women never gets depicted, it's that it isn't seen as a problem.
Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" is what would now be seen as a textbook case of sexual harassment, but I had to do some searches to eventually find a critic (a contemporary woman, probably not by coincidence) who saw it that way. Instead, I was running into other interpretations... was it supposed to be funny? Was Adonis' refusal of Venus an example of virtuous chastity?
One possible cause of this:
Just as society (the "patriarchal" one, a feminist might say) brainwashes girls and women into thinking sex should only be done out of love for their partner, sexual things are services to men, and too many other related things to list here, men also get programmed by social expectations, the most relevant here probably being:
All men enjoy sex (at least that "given" or "obtained" from women) in any form, and always do, and are always ready and willing and desiring of it. Thus, no man can possibly logically ever be sexually harassed or raped by a woman, because all men will always in all circumstances be willing unless there's a complication factor directly attached (e.g. life threatening situations).
And even when there's a complication attached, it isn't "rape" or "sexual harassment" of any sort, it's dereliction of duty or willful distraction endangering others or some other thing directly about increasing the risk or causing whatever complication factor was attached.
The above is the most common answer I've seen; "Men can't be raped because men always want sex."
Arguably, the only form seen as a "problem" (and a very insignificant one, at that) is prison inmates bending over to pick up the soap and getting a surprise present. Just the imagery and terminology used should be representative of how little people take this seriously as a "problem" - it's usually only seen as an anecdotal deterrent against doing less-morally-damaging crimes that might still get you in jail (e.g. bank cracking or money laundering).
The way this is usually handled is asking the men stating that to imagine a very ugly/elderly/morbidly obese woman stripping them using force.
Out of six women with whom I tried this, all six responded by the social equivalent of laughing in my face. It just seems too ridiculously absurd: If a man doesn't want sex, he won't be turned on, if he's not turned on, he won't be erect, if he's not erect, no sex can ensue. In all cases, the man is (apparently) turned on and erect, therefore willing, therefore no rape.
So they assume the explanation is that some men have weird preferences and enjoy sex with ugly/elderly/morbidly obese women, which is true on its own but completely irrelevant and completely ADBOC-stuff, and that this man was one of them and is just seeking to abuse society or the legal system to get free money or attention (or both).
That's ... not how arousal works. At all. Did you tell them this?
I tried. And then something happened where I realized I had to explain stuff about arousal. And then I had to explain some biology. And then some psychology. And then they went back and destroyed 3/4 of all of that based on something a priest once told their father, sixty years ago. I gave up that approach and tried telling them "You're wrong, read this on why arousal doesn't work that way" instead. Predictably, they didn't read it.
There's so much inferential distance to cross in most cases that I think this is a reasonably serious social problem.
Edit: Also, one of them had already read quite a bit of PUA material "for fun". Which kind of explicitly includes: "Arousal is separate from wanting sex." Then again, PUA is specific towards men seducing women, and I shouldn't expect the average person to infer that this also happens to be a humanwide universal.
Like what?
I wish I remembered that example clearly enough to be reasonably confident my brain isn't just making up stuff, so I'll instead point in the general direction of what the bible says and "explains" about human reproductive biology. IIRC, she didn't actually believe the bible was reliable, but she had always accepted that particular thing as "making too much sense to be false" among other tidbits of compartmentalizing most people do.
I have found better luck by telling them to imagine the woman has toys.
In the manga, is a male being harassed by a female presented as something that it's normal for him to dislike? As funny? As sometimes a serious problem for him?
I'm using 'male' and 'female' since either partner might be an adult or might be in the boy/girl range.
A thing I've heard about Japan is that it was never a Christian country, and therefore doesn't have a background belief that people's imaginations about sex have to be controlled.
Manga.
How is this even remotely credible?
I've corrected the spelling of manga-- thanks.
A brief history of Christianity in Japan-- Between one and four percent of Japanese are Christian. Christianity was forbidden in Japan (and severely persecuted) from the late 1500s to 1853. Christianity really does have less influence there than in a great many other countries.
The part which is less certain is the influence on portrayals of sex, but it doesn't seem crazy to me that the taboos against portraying sex (for various values of sex) which are in play (much less than they used to be) in countries with a heavier Christian influence would be weaker or non-existent there.
I've modified my last sentence above to be about sex rather than imagination in general.
Not the point under question.
Christianity is not the only religion with sexual taboos. I thought this was just a thinko or something, but after reading your elucidation, I'm even more bewildered.
I think her point makes sense. Shinto( the main religion in Japan) does have a lot less taboos and is a lot more open towards sex than other religions (including Christianity). It might be the case that there is another factor responsible for the lesser inhibitions towards sex in the Japanese culture which also caused Shinto to be formed the way it is, but nonetheless unless I am missing something NancyLebovitz's point makes sense.
Reducing Japanese religious experience to Shinto is almost even more wrong than reducing it to "not really Christian."
I'm done. Anyone who cares can read what the IES has to say about the matter.
Thanks for the link.
I think it's got elements which suggest that the Japanese have been much less opposed to pornography over a longer period than what I think of as normal for western/Christian cultures, but the matter is more complex than I thought.
I can do a comment with the quotes I think are relevant, but it would be quite long, so I'm not sure of the etiquette for doing so-- is it possible to do cuts for length in comments?
But feudal/imperial japanese culture had very different attitudes on sexual matters than almost every religion with sexual taboos. Even the buddhism-branched traditions, religions and cultures didn't have the same views, even though it still resulted in practical terms in "Monks (Priests) should abstain from sex and thoughts of sex".
AFAIK throughout most of post-genpei japanese history up until slightly after the beginning of Meiji, it was perfectly acceptable (and sometimes recommended) for a woman who liked a man but could not "be with" (aka have a romantic relationship or sexual interactions) that man for social, status, etc. reasons to instead designate a "replacement" - in rude terms, a whore hired by the woman to have sex with the man as a sign of affection. This is portrayed in a very crude fashion at some point in the popular movie "Shogun", IIRC.
However, the whole thing about how this is directly related to them not being a Christian nation somewhat baffles me still.
Modern Japan has heavy taboos of all sorts on portrayals of sex (see last year's fiasco about the Tokyo ban on porn, or their stringent laws on censoring of all erotic content), but where sex is accepted, they're apparently much more liberal in which kinds can be represented or even done.
Note that the censorship was something that the US Occupation enacted, and that the Japanese government simply never repealed.
It isn't.
Yes, all of these. Will depend a lot on the author and what kind of crowd they want to reach (or just what they enjoy producing). I'm guessing at least half portray it as actually negative and something that should be prevented. A significant fraction of the other half probably don't for "people are supposed to masturbate to this!"-style reasons.
It being "normal for him to dislike" is slightly less common as far as I'm aware, but the large prevalence of oblivious male characters who don't respond well and don't have particularly strong desire for sexual interactions with females explicitly and overtly trying and wanting to have some with them (in non-erotic anime and manga especially) should serve at least as some evidence that it's at least not a completely alien concept.