Ugh. I don't diary much, and I'd much rather do so about politics or economics than join the sudden flurry of "rape diaries". But I feel compelled to response, yet cannot formulate a response that is comment-length, so here I am.
First and foremost, let me make this extremely clear. Rape, by someone of any gender, against someone of any gender, in any conditions whatsoever, is unacceptable. It is a crime of power, and is often a crime intended to objectify and terrorize. It is, frequently, a hate crime in the tradition of hung nooses and burning crosses. And it is always the rapist who is responsible for the crime (except plausibly in conditions of profound mental illness, in which case perhaps no one could be said to be "responsible"; no, this doesn't mean "I was drunk so it's okay"). I reserve the right to respond with unkindness to anyone who tries to twist anything I write to imply otherwise.
But that's not remotely close to the whole issue here.
Rape is a serious, pervasive problem, and I'll get back to discussion of the crime itself in a little bit, but first I have to address the societal response: the culture of fear. In several of these diaries and many of the responses, men posting about male victimization are dismissed or marginalized because men do not have to live their lives in constant fear that some stranger will rape them.
This is much the same problem as our mis-education of children regarding "stranger danger". As of 2005, every day, 2000 children, on average, go missing at least temporarily. That's about 800,000 children who are missing for at least long enough for the police to be contacted every year. By best estimates, less than 200 of those are classical stranger abductions. Kidnappings by family members, especially in the context of custodial disputes, are overwhelmingly more common. Is educating children about personal safety a good idea? Sure. Is encouraging them to believe that every single person they don't know, and probably most of the ones they do know, secretly a pedophile, with his white panel van full of drug-tainted candy hidden just around the corner? Of course not. That gets you situations like Brennan Hawkins, a then-11-year-old who got lost during a Scouting activity and intentionally eluded rescuers, out of fear for his safety, for four days. It gets an acquaintance of mine, pulled aside and interrogated by police in a public shopping mall after shopping parents notified mall security that they suspected a pedophile stalker. Their justification for this suspicion? Their 5 year old child waved at him and he had the audacity to wave back.
Stranger rape is rare. A 2004 study* suggests that perhaps 2% of rapes are committed by strangers. Stranger rape is the most dramatic form of the crime. It is the most likely to be violent, and the most likely to be reported. Most rapes are committed by people the victim already knows: family, friends, romantic partners. While many -- far, far, inexcusably far too many -- women (and men) are victims of sexual assault, it is significantly unlikely that the guy next to you on the bus, or the guy parked next to you at the shopping mall, or even the person whose shoulder you bumped into at the bar is going to rape you.
No matter what makes the news, most child abductions are not stranger taking. Neither are most rapes stranger assaults. In both cases, we as a culture have allowed the easy false solution of a culture of fear to develop as a way to avoid dealing with the uncomfortable truths of the way things really are. Most rapists are people their victims know and at least marginally trust. They are spouses or romantic partners. They are family members. They are people in positions of trust. And no amount of worrying over the wattage of the light bulb at the back door is going to change that. But we don't like to consider that as a culture. It is harder to deal with. It means teaching people how to recognize problematic behavior rather than profiling problematic people. It means evaluating how people get into the positions of trust before they hold them. It means extracting actual trends from the murky he-said-she-said testimony of people in relationships, made all the harder by the real phenomenon of false accusations of rape (an action that, in my mind, is very nearly as reprehensible as the crime itself). And that's why rapes go under-reported. That's why would-be rapists who are in the position to commit these crimes often feel they can do so with impunity.
Rape is a crime of power. We all agree about that, I hope. It isn't about the attractiveness of the victim, or their clothing, or, often, their gender. Blaming the victim is wrong. And that holds just as true for male victims as for women. Homophobia and false conceptions about the male homosexual community mean that men who do report being the victims of rape are marginalized, unsupported and frequently blamed with as much disdain as "slutty" women who were "asking for it". Adult male victims of rape are frequently excluded from support groups, and face social stigmatization above that of even female rape victims due to still-pervasive attitudes about homosexuality. The male victim is "out of the closet now" or is a "pussy who couldn't stop it". The 1999 Crime Victimization Survey suggests that about 40% of rapes of women are probably reported, while less than 10% of rapes of men are. If those estimates are correct, then men are not the victim of 9% of rapes as the 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics reported; they are the victim of 28% of them. That doesn't even necessarily address violent prison rape, which may in fact be more common even in raw-numbers terms than violent male-female rape.**,***
One of today's recommended diaries said, in part, that "the incidence of rape is a symptom of a much larger problem. The problem is the pervasiveness of the patriarchal sense of entitlement to a woman's body in our culture." But it's not. Rape isn't about the woman's body. It is just about the fetishization of power for its own sake. Child sexual abuse abuses the power of parents, priests or teachers over their wards. Spousal (and romantic partner) rape, yes, abuses the perceived patriarchal power of the husband over the wife, or the boyfriend over the girlfriend, but that perceived patriarchy is just a contributing factor, not the root cause. Adult male-male rape is almost always about the domination of the strong over the weak, with the most transparent of scenarios being prison rape, which serves too often to establish an explicit pecking order.
The way to fix this is not extolling to women the need to never travel alone, to refuse eye contact with men, to be at the ready with the mace, the knife, the derringer. Cultures of fear and male-bashing (especially the disgustingly onerous claims I read in comments that non-rapist men tacitly approve of widespread rape because it puts them in the position to be defenders!) reinforce the perceived power differential rather than defuse it; a potential rapist reading about how all women live in constant fear and judge every action by how it would affect their chance to be a rape victim sees that as supporting his belief that he has a power that his would-be victims do not. The only solution is better and better-targeted education, better enforcement, better support mechanisms. Education needs to focus on avoiding and responding to dangerous situations, not teaching that every person we do not know is a pedophile, a rapist, a kidnapper, and a murderer. It needs to focus on a respect for bodily integrity that begins in youth, and continues in college, where unsupervised environments and alcohol lead to one of the most frequent scenarios for rape. It needs to emphasize reporting, especially of childhood sexual abuse (another of the most common forms of rape AND a common background of adult rapists). It needs organized support groups that strive for a return to normality rather than encouraging "survivorship". All of this needs to be gender-blind. A male rape victim is a victim. A female rape victim is a rape victim. A female rapist (who are almost certainly vastly more common than reported****) is a rapist. A male rapist is a rapist.
And as for me, my gender, and my personal history and that of my friends and family? Would you read this differently if I were male or female? Straight or gay? If I had been raped? If I'd had friends or family who had been? If they were male or female? I'm sure some of this could be unearthed by some comment I've made or something I said in a diary at some point. But I'm not going to. Because it shouldn't matter.
*Abbey, A., BeShears, R., Clinton-Sherrod, A. M., & McAuslan, P. (2004). Psychology of Women Quarterly, 28, 323-332."Similarities and differences in women's sexual assault experiences based on tactics used by the perpetrator"
**Human Rights Watch. (2007). No Escape: Male Rape In U.S. Prisons. Part VII. Anomaly or Epidemic: The Incidence of Prisoner-on-Prisoner Rape.
***Struckman-Johnson, Cindy and David Struckman Johnson. 2006. A Comparison of Sexual Coercion Experiences Reported by Men and Women in Prison. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Vol. 21, No. 12, 1591-1615 (2006).
****Halliday-Sumner, Linda. 1998. "Female Sex Offenders." Breaking the Silence.
EDIT 1: No real content, just cleaned up a sentence in the child abduction paragraph that I had badly mangled and missed the proofread.