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Some thoughts in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein's scandal, where this powerful movie producer preyed on starlets eager for an opportunity in the business. (Photo: Weinstein at a typical Hollywood party.)- There is no doubt that some powerful men sometimes victimize people around them, both men and women.
- But beyond Hollywood and the big corporations, there is the world that you and I are more familiar with.
- Women in the workplace flirt with men. This is often done in a good-natured way, but sometimes as a means to obtain favorable treatment. It's not that most women want to go beyond the flirting, but they do it.
- It's no surprising then that male co-workers will take flirting as a signal, and they may act in inappropriate ways. Unfortunately some men are too stupid to stop when rebuffed, and then the situation escalates and gets toxic.
- Often women are completely innocent of attracting unwanted attention. But that's not always the case.
- In a few instances women encourage inappropriate attention from key executives, and when men respond, the targeted woman launches a sexual harassment lawsuit that gets settled to their financial advantage. An easy way to make thousands of dollars.
- This reminds us of another ploy meant to harm men. A young woman gets affectionate with her date, a university student, for example, drinks a lot, ends up in the bedroom, and then claims to have been raped. It's her word against his, so he gets expelled from school, and maybe even goes to jail. A life is ruined.
- Women are outraged by the Weinstein scandal and are loudly denouncing what they call men's culture of sexual harassment. It's the new moral crusade.
- Those same women, however, are most likely fierce defenders of abortion, including the one done in the last weeks of pregnancy, where an innocent baby is cut to pieces in the womb. No moral outrage about that.
- There is also media silence about the epidemic of physical and mental abuse of men by women.
- Scientific American just posted the following article about women harassing and raping men. The magazine was unaware of the looming Hollywood scandal, so it offers interesting statistics of another side of the problem.
- We should keep in mind that the statistics of female-to-male sexual and violent abuse most likely do not reflect the true extent of this crime, since men are too ashamed to report these situations to authorities.
Scene from the film DISCLOSURE with Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. Here the female boss is the sexual predator, and the man employee her unwilling prey.
Sexual Victimization of Men by Women Is More Common Than Previously Known
A new study gives a portrait of female perpetrators
The results were surprising. For example, the CDC’s nationally representative data revealed that over one year, men and women were equally likely to experience nonconsensual sex, and most male victims reported female perpetrators.- We also pooled four years of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data and found that 35 percent of male victims who experienced rape or sexual assault reported at least one female perpetrator.
Scientific American, October 10, 2017
Ilan H. Meyer is a Williams Distinguished Senior Scholar for Public Policy at the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA School of Law.
Take a moment and picture an image of a rapist. Without a doubt, you are thinking about a man. Given our pervasive cultural understanding that perpetrators of sexual violence are nearly always men, this makes sense.
But this assumption belies the reality, revealed in our study of large-scale federal agency surveys, that women are also often perpetrators of sexual victimization.
In 2014, we published a study on the sexual victimization of men, finding that men were much more likely to be victims of sexual abuse than was thought.
To understand who was committing the abuse, we next analyzed four surveys conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to glean an overall picture of how frequently women were committing sexual victimization.
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