One thing I'm absolutely tired of seeing is the 'reversing the genders' argument. I already kinda touched on this in an earlier blog post, but I'm gonna go into more detail here since I don't think I highlighted the real issues with this philosophy. It usually goes like this: "if it were a woman doing X to a man then no one would care" or "if it were a man doing X to a woman then it'd be a national crisis". To any rational person, you'd see the flaws of this. It also gets thrown around when discussing race or religion, but I'm focusing on gender because it's never been more prominent than there.
Let me bring up the most relevant example: a couple weeks ago on American Idol, Katy Perry snuck a lip kiss onto a 19 year old man without his consent. She had promised him a cheek kiss but instead she toyed with him because he admitted he'd never kissed a girl before. On the surface it seemed like a nice gesture, because let's face it, I'm sure a lot of guys wouldn't mind doing something like kissing Katy Perry, but in this case, Ben, the victim (yes I'm calling him that for framing reasons), was clearly not on board with this, and she should've picked up on that and understood the basics of consent. Now Ben was pretty brave about it, and he claimed that whilst he was embarrassed and wanted his first kiss to be special and on his own terms, he didn't feel assaulted. Now I and a lot of other feminists infer this to be denial, since admitting to being assaulted is a rather embarrassing thing to do. Then a bunch of slacktivists on the internet quickly threw this gem out: "if an older man kissed a 19 year old girl on TV there would be World War 3".
I have a HUGE problem with this statement. The obvious being that men get away with this shit all the time. In fact, the only people I've seen criticising Katy for what she did are feminists. Everyone else is cheering her on and saying how lucky Ben is, further reinforcing this harmful idea that men should just deal with getting sexually harassed. Hell, even Luke Bryan and Lionel Richie, Katy's fellow judges, were jumping for joy. Katy had previously done a similar thing by constantly flirting with another male contestant, with Luke immediately calling him 'dreamboat' as soon as he introduces comes in. It's obvious that they think that consent doesn't apply to guys, which it does. But people act like men immediately get shot for doing this. Where was the lynch mob coming after Ray Rice when he sucker punched his fiancée in an elevator on video as it went viral? Nowhere. In fact, people were defending what he did because she hit him first. But when a woman on Facebook shares a story of her beating up a guy who was groping her, suddenly waves of idiots come out and say that she was overreacting and rushed to excessive violence. But I guess men are just allowed to be violent right? And Whoopi Goldberg's stupid arse defence that "women shouldn't expect men to respect them all the time" or whatever didn't help matters.
Plus, most men assault women in private, which is why you don't hear about it that much. Katy did it on live TV like a moron, which is why that one was a bit easier to go after. Did she think that she would've gotten away with it? Perhaps, and from the looks of it, American Idol doesn't have any intentions of dealing with her behaviour. I'm not gonna deny that people do generally get more angry at men committing sexual violence than if women do it, but at the same time let's not act like women always get away with these things. When female teachers commit statutory rape with their male students and are quickly charged with the crime and yet male rapists get anti-humourous sentences for the same crime, I fail to see the double standard against men at play here. Female victims aren't treated better than male victims, they're treated differently, to quote the Angry Feminist. Women get told that they were asking for it or are just looking for attention, men get told that they should've enjoyed it or that they are lucky. Which would you prefer? Neither is the correct answer.
There is a way to cover male victims of assault without having to throw female victims under the bus. In fact, a male victim of abuse by a woman even publicly stated that he absolutely hates it when people use the "reverse the genders" bollocks because if anything it exploits his pain for political means. Stop promoting victim competition and start promoting the deconstruction of institution that rich celebrities have created to get away with abusing people. It's a fine solution wouldn't you think?
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