Ampersand, raising a giant whopping WTF, says that under Federal crime-reporting standards men legally can't be raped.  Turns out that in the 1920s, when the reporting standards were generated, weren't exactly a bastion of progressive, feminist-influenced gender neutrality.

For [Uniform Crime] reporting purposes, can a male be raped?

No. The UCR Program defines forcible rape as “The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will” (p. 19). In addition, “By definition, sexual attacks on males are excluded from the rape category and must be classified as assaults or other sex offenses depending on the nature of the crime and the extent of injury”

Source: Alas, a blog

Lest Men's Rights Activists cry conspiracy about how it's all a femininisister plot to exclude male victims entirely, under more recent guidelines from the 1980s rape of men by women is legally recognized but...

[I]n the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) ... at least one offender must be of a different sex than the victim for the event to be classified as a forcible rape. For example, a female can rape a male, or in the case of multiple offenders, a female and male can rape a male. However, a male cannot rape another male, or in the case of multiple offenders, two males cannot rape a male.

To complete the FBI's gender-bound definitions, men can rape women, women can rape men, but men can't rape other men and women can't rape women.

But let's stop for a moment and reflect on the pace of progress: in the 1920s the law in the U.S. was almost entirely based on already centuries-old English Common Law adopted wholesale during Colonial times.  That not only defined rape as something that could happen exclusively to women, it was also defined as a property crime.  Where the legal victim was considered to be the woman's father, husband, or other custodial male who's "property" was "damaged!"

Fast forward 50 years to the 1980s when the NIBRS was established.  Society vaguely recognized that in order "to be fair" language had to be less narrowly gender specific.  Thus the inclusion of the possibility that women can rape men.  But based on my own recollection of the culture of the day I'm pretty sure that was a mere formality.  In the early 1980s they were just getting around to registering gay people as statistically relevant.  They were just getting around to recognizing the idea that there was more kinds of rape than jumping out of the bushes.  They were just barely getting around to accepting the idea that husbands could rape their wives.  Heck, they'd only barely just stated noticing all the "drop the soap" jokes about prison rape!

Fast forward 30 more years and... well... there's still quite a way to go but at least...

Advocates question the rape statistics because, they note, the federal government is using a 1929 definition of the crime that excludes male victims, statutory rapes and those committed without force.

Using such an antiquated, narrow definition is a harmful disservice to countless victims, according to Carol Tracy, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Women’s Law Project. Specter agreed, saying the definition is not “inclusive like it should be.”

Men account for roughly 10 percent of victims in the United States, said Scott Berkowitz, head of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

The adoption of broader rape statistics is critical to the recovery process for male victims, added Dr. Richard Gartner, a spokesman for the group Male Survivor.

Interestingly, the FBI’s man in charge of the UCR is quoted saying he’s open to changing the definitions.

Compared to the 1189 A.D. English Common Law, or the 1920s UCR, or the 1980s NIBRS, and you can actually detect some progress.

And, at least compared to 1189 A.D. it seems to be accelerating!

If they're not able to acknowledge that anybody can be raped, just as much as anybody can be a rapist, though, they're still stuck in the middle ages.

Something else to agitate for (and be agitated about.)

Amanda Marcotte says of Jesse Bering's giddy claim that women are just chock-full of evolved defenses against rape.  (Especially, what a surprise, rape by African American men.)  After nicely dismantling Bering's more credulous claims she digs into what I think is the real reason anti-feminists are so enthusiastic about this kind of stuff.

Think about the perceived benefits to many if rape is programmed into men, and a function of horniness and biology and not of violence and misogyny.  Just right off the bat, it means that they can throw up their hands in the air, treating rape like it’s an inevitable problem and there’s nothing they can do about it.  But more importantly, they get an excuse to support the main benefit they perceive in rape culture, which is that it puts all responsibility for rape in the hands of the victims, and therefore used to shame and control female sexuality.  After all, the argument here is that men are naturally disposed to rape and women are naturally disposed to protect themselves.  Therefore, the responsibility is shifted towards women, the only gender who has been given any control.  This, in turn, can be used as an excuse to restrict women’s movements and choices, and to, a la Naomi Wolf, say they had it coming if they engage in casual sex.  It also gives men cover to do a lot of abusive things that fall short of rape, saying they can’t help themselves, a freedom a lot of men would like to reserve for themselves.  (Such as, say, cheating while reserving the right not to be cheated on.) Of course, a lot of men aren’t willing to be portrayed as out-of-control beasts, but clearly some figure that’s a reasonable price to pay to get these benefits.

Source: Pandagon

I think that's about right.  On the one hand the paradigm that drives these assessments puts the responsibility for rape, and consequently the blame, on victims rather than perpetrators.  Which sucks for them in self-evidently bitter, heartless, and unfair ways.

I'd just add that this whole idea of men being reflexively (and now allegedly genetically!) uncontrollable beasts is pretty new.  Prior to  maybe 250 years ago (coinciding roughly with the Protestant Revolution) and going back at least as far as Hammurabi most of Indo-European civilization believed that men were naturally moral and even chaste while women's child-hungry wombs made them amoral, promiscuous, sexually aggressive.  And in much of the world this is still considered true.  For instance if evolutionary psychology had emerged in Darwin's Day, or if he'd written in India, China, or, say, Egypt, Iran, or eastern Europe or western Asia Evolutionary Psychologists almost certainly would drawn different (though probably no less topical and gender-constructed) conclusions about women's and men's behavior.

Call it just one more indication of the bankruptcy of contemporary patriarchy. And while you're at it call it an important caveat for some of the more... enthusiastic proclamations by evolutionary psychologists. Or at least of those who merely think they're evolutionary psychology.

Via Mark Liberman of Language Log, it turns out that occasional slut-shaming feminist Naomi Wolf has what with just a little editing makes a really, really good point about the international manhunt and eventual arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.  Some of what she says sounds a bit like more slut-shaming, which is... well... a shame since it distracts from the genuinely good stuff.  So with those caveats in mind here's my heavily edited excerpt of her original Huffington Post piece.

Dear Interpol:

As a longtime feminist activist, I have been overjoyed to discover your new commitment to engaging in global manhunts to arrest and prosecute men who behave like narcissistic jerks to women they are dating.

...

Thank you again, Interpol. I know you will now prioritize the global manhunt for 1.3 million guys I have heard similar complaints about personally in the US alone — there is an entire fraternity at the University of Texas you need to arrest immediately.

Source: Language Log

There's more, of course.  The rest is kind of crap.  But the above is actually quite good.

Interpol, of course, objects strenuously that they take every case of even non-violent non-consensual sexas seriously as they take international-secrets-divulging webmasters.

And while, yeah, they're probably lying it's still nice to imagine somebody holding a law enforcement agencys feet to the fire.  Probably shouldn't be Wolf herself, since she might have just been wringing it for rhetorical snark.  But it shouldn't be left on the table either.  It really would be good if they took it seriously.

For discussion of the... less effective elements of Wolf's post see also

• Jill Filipovic
• Jacyln Friedman
• Ampersand

Thomas of Yes Means Yes says that if you come home and find your door broken and your stereo missing you’ll generally immediately tell people your house had just been robbed.

From the standpoint of the law in most places it’s only robbery if your stereo is taken by force or threat of force during a face-to-face confrontation. When in fact if you weren’t home then technically you weren’t robbed at all.

You were burgled.

If someone broke into your house and stole all your shit while none of the occupants were home, in most places and for many reporting purposes, you got burgled. But you’ll say you got robbed, because that’s what people say. And if you say, “I got robbed,” if you actually got burgled, nobody will call you a liar. Because you’re not lying. You’re just using the word in its ordinary nontechnical sense.

Nobody says, “he was manslaughtered.” People say “murdered” all the time, but whether that’s how the charge will read depends on state laws with different definitions. We don’t cross-examine a man who says, “my son was murdered,” in case his son was actually manslaughtered. That would be not only silly but inhuman. The word has an ordinary meaning.

But as soon as you say “rape”, some asshole shows up arguing that you need the right legal definition, a conviction, a note from your doctor and a notarized affidavit from the county clerk.

It’s bullshit, and fuck that noise, and that’s all I have to say about it.

He said it here.

Earlier this morning I was reading an interview with Andrea Dworkin from 1992 and she made a point that I’m not going to get into directly but which first of all was hugely overlooked and second of all is entirely germane to the incredibly squirrely avoidance strategies you encounter when trying to talk directly about the problem of rape.

The upshot was that if you’re mired up to your ass in Rule #1 of the bogus Two Rules of Desire (“it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire”) and Rule #2 (“it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired”) then you’re going to have it somewhere in the back of your mind that absent some form of guile, intoxication, or outright force straight men could never get laid. And so you’re going to be really, really defensive about it.

The trick, as Dworkin pointed out, is that she wasn’t the one saying men could never get laid. And in fact she wasn’t saying that at all. Instead it was her (male) interviewer who was saying it. And he pretty much was.

Dworkin was perfectly aware that women can very much enjoy sex in general and intercourse in particular. And if the joke hadn’t grown so old for her, and if the consequences weren’t so terrible, she might have been amused that her interviewer didn’t seem to get it.

Point being that, as I like to say over and over, anti-feminists hate men worse than anybody. And feminists definitely aren’t the ones most likely to believe all men are rapists!

Update: I mean… Sweet Mother of Pearl, what’s in it for you that makes it worth insisting that 99% of all rape accusations are false?