Photo by Flickr user kharied. Used under a Creative Commons license.

One more thing about the DOJ's belated decision to remove gender of perpetrators and victims from its definition of rape.

I'd just add that there's more than a "completist" benefit to more uniform reporting and response to sexual assault and rape committed by men against women, women against men, men against men, and women against women.* One glaring problem over the last three or four decades has been that apples-to-oranges reporting has made it difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons.

A lot of the so-called "gray areas" of sexual assault and rape -- the social pressure, emotional bullying, taking advantage of the intoxicated, misuse of authority and other power gradients, domestic-partner assault and intimidation, etc. -- have been even more poorly understood in the context of male victims than of female victims.

For years women's groups have struggled to have crimes committed in these so-called "gray area" taken seriously.  It's been even harder to get similar crimes against men taken seriously.  Imbalanced records keeping have exacerbated this, with the result that the extent of the problems of sexual coercion, for both men and women, has been hard to clarify.

We understand pretty clearly that, for women, sexual assault is a lot more than strangers getting the drop on their victims and committing violent penetration (or, in some states, attempted penetration) in the canonical points of entry.  For instance it's generally (if not quite universally) understood that women can be victims of date rape and acquaintance rape, that they can be assaulted while incapacitated, that they can be peer-pressured in ways that amount to coercion.

If nothing else anti-feminists and other boys-will-be-boys apologists demonstrate sophisticated understanding when denying that these non-jump-out-of-the-bushes assaults should be considered assaults.

But outside certain parts of the law-enforcement and assault-awareness communities most people still think of sexual assaults and rape of men in terms of... strangers getting the drop on their victims and committing violent penetration of the canonical points of entry.

Even when it comes to something seemingly as clear-cut as prison assault and rape the narrative relies heavily on the "trapped in a cell with a giant prisoner... his name is 'Bubba'" narratives.

In fact in prison, as in the outside world, sexual assault of men by other men, and of women by other women, are more likely to be "gray area" assaults than the violent assaults of stereotype.  (And obviously "gray area" assaults can be as socially and psychologically as problematic for victims as violent assaults.)

This double standard has been particularly frustrating for men's activists interested in prison reform -- on the one hand they've had to confront stereotypical indifference (or juvenile-humor-like glee!) about rape in detention while simultaneously wrestling with nominal allies who dispute that so-called "gray area" rape is rape at all.

The new, revised standards should help clarify that considerably.

It should also help clarify the nominally eternal argument that sexual predators are almost exclusively male and that victims are almost exclusively either female or minor males.

I imagine that now that the major statistics-gathering institution has correctly broadened its definitions we'll see first, an increase in overall numbers of rapes and assaults and also, second, a fair amount of convergence on the numbers of male and female victims and perpetrators.

I believe these new more clear and more universal acknowledgment of the field of perpetrators and victims is important is that it'll enlarge the pool of people interested in doing something about sexual coercion.  It's been too easy to treat it like a "women's rights" issue (as if that was a bad thing) or a "prison rights" issue (as if that made it better) and into a human rights issue.  The sooner people start getting that anybody can be a victim the sooner we can seriously begin to reduce the overall rates of sexual assault and rape.

And finally, as I've often said, since shocking numbers of perpetrators turn out to themselves have previously been victims taking all forms of rape seriously will help reduce a much-overlooked pool of potential or future perpetrators.

* Recall that most trans people identify as men or women.