Summary: Comments to my earlier post, Time for MRAs and other Men’s Movement Activists to Speak Out on Catholic and Other Institutional Sexual Abuses of Boys, have been cool enough, and thought-provoking enough to warrant a separate post about why sexual abuse of boys should be a specific MRA/Men’s-Movement issue.
I’m not at all suggesting in that post or anywhere else that there is or was no abuse of girls. And goodness knows there’s not just covert abuse of minor girls in other denominations but active encouragement to enter marriage (or its, um, equivalents) early. Sometimes (FLDS, Branch Davidians) egregiously early!
There are instead three other reasons I’m focusing on the currently-visible issue of sexual assault on boys.
1) Possibly because of avoidance due to bogus Rule of Desire #2, or perhaps just because boys don’t have hymens and/or hymen-related “resale” value in marriage, or maybe just from the sheer inertia of tradition the emphasis of the impact has been on anger and sense of betrayal at the perpetrators rather than consideration of the impact of sexual assault on boys. In other words the emphasis is that it’s been priests, who really shouldn’t have been committing these crimes, not on the minors who shouldn’t have been victims regardless of who the perpetrators are or were.
2) When rape of children has been addressed at all it’s tended to be addressed in a sort of dog-leg version of traditional gender divisions: children are women’s work, plus children are lumped in with women as traditional dependents of men, and so dealing with sexual assault on children has fallen to women in general, and feminists in particular. That’s actually fine in a way — women, children, and men have received blanket protection thanks to the heartfelt, sometimes aggressive, and often unwelcome-by-antifeminist efforts of feminism. The end result, however, has been to leave men off the hook — not only for taking action against predation on children but also, and very importantly in my estimation, off the hook for being out about their own current and prior roles as victims.
3) And finally the MRA issue: Over the years a number of so-called “hard core” feminists ranging from Mary Daly to Twisty Faster have expressed, um, dissatisfaction with men’s efforts to include rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment of men in feminist anti-rape discourse. (I can’t find the quote at the moment but I remember Twisty saying approximately that if men wanted to so something about male victims they should, but the issue was otherwise of no interest to her.) Beyond the asshole-ishness of the sentiment it’s a legitimate point: When one is serious about challenging gender stereotypes and destygmatizing one’s own sex you’re not really going to make it very far by focusing only on whatever wrongs, even legitimate ones, perpetrated by one’s opposite sex. The issue of (by definition, convention, and as of 1995 Papally-approved infallability) all-male Priests abusing male children, matched with the issue of male children being identified as systematic victims over decades and perhaps centuries, is just about as tailor-made an issue for anything even remotely identifiable as a men’s movement to involve itself in.
For those three reasons, even though I’m pretty sure comparable institutional abuse of girls will eventually come to light, I think it’s a good idea to draw attention to the issue as an issue by and about, men because it is therefore for men to affirmatively rather than passively address.
And, incidentally, I also happen to strongly suspect that just as boys and men have gained protection from feminist activism against rape, girls and women will similarly benefit from from men’s activism to prevent abuse of men and boys.
