Can a Man be Raped by a Woman?

(I’m hungry but I really want to write this just before I forget it. There are many samples but you can skip it to the blue bold letters if you just want to read the main point of this essay)

I found this question under my friend’s picture in his blog. A friend of him said no way, but I disagreed. I believed that it rape could happen to men either, but I didn’t have much to talk about it. So I kept thinking about it as I recalled some related experiences.

I remember watching a movie from India (probably it’s a bollywood movie, but I’m not sure) when I was in primary school. There were a group of women who had been raped by a certain man. They gathered to make revenge. One day they kidnapped the man and did a surgery to him. In the next scene, the man told his friend that he lost his penis. The women have cut it.

I can’t recall what happened next. Maybe I went to school after the scene. I was 9 or 10. I understood what had happened but I didn’t understand how critical and interesting the movie was. It wasn’t a rape, but still it is about women do something to man sexual organ.

It reminds me of a TV seri from Colombia titled Paquita. This smart beautiful woman somehow got married to a movie star—Casanova type. I said “somehow” because they didn’t seem to love each other (the film was a bit complicated). They never made love until the end of the seri.

One day the Casanova disappeared. When the Casanova came home a few days after his disappearance, he told Paquita that he’d been kidnapped by 8 women. He said that they raped him. Surely Paquita didn’t believe him. He was Casanova! Not long after, Paquita found out that the Casanova had cheated on her with an actress. So they got divorced.

I watched it when I was in the first grade of Junior High School. Even now I can’t decide whether it was a rape or not. In fact, I’m not sure that the Casanova had really been kidnapped. He might have just gone out with his girlfriend. Possibly even if he really had been “raped”, he enjoyed it. What will a greedy cat do when we give him 8 fresh fish?

Another incident crosses my mind. There was this tall handsome guy named Bryan McFadden—the most favorite member of an Irish boyband Westlife. One day as he entered his hotel room, he found two naked young women. Those women desired to make love with Bryan. But Bryan got angry and asked them to get out.

I read about it in a teenage magazine in the same year when I watched Paquita. Bryan McFadden was no Casanova. He was modest and low-profile. He even had low-esteem when he had been younger. Maybe if there were more women, it would have been a rape. Maybe.

Currently my mother told me about a new talkshow run by Desi Ratnasari. The guest was a mother and her son. Since senior high school age, the mother used to force his son to make love with her. Now the son is 26. His face showed us that he felt humiliated. In contrast, his mother showed no sign of guilt.

The mother said she had been doing it because her son reminded her of her late husband. When the son was asked why he had not run away, he said that he had been afraid to be neglected. He had been afraid that he wouldn’t be able to make his own living.

The audiences were college students. They shouted at him for being such a loser, “Even a garbage collector can make a living!” My opinion was more or less the same. He has graduated from a vocational senior high school. He could have worked in a car service and sleep there!

But then I was thinking of another possibility. The son might have been mentally weak. As in a book titled A Child Called It, it was very difficult for the child to think that her mother had been a bad person that treated him so cruelly (in fact, she had). Well, I’m not a psycholog, so it’s just a possibility.

My mother also told me about what had happened in her hometown. A junior high school boy had been forced to make love with his aunt. It had been used to happen years until he’d entered high school. He was underage—a minor. Yet the local court claimed his aunt not guilty. My mother said it was because in her village, people would listen to the older one.

I felt sick as listening to that story. What about the boy’s rights? They just didn’t notice it. As what happened in the Desy’s talkshow, no one had sympathy on the victim. Even though they were male, they were weaker. What people have in their mind is men can rape women because men are physically stronger. So it is impossible for women to rape men because men are created to be physically stronger.

Then they forget about boys—younger, weaker, and less independent than men. Then they forget about mentally weaker men. Or maybe it’s as simple as a bad woman gives a sleeping pill to a good man and then rapes him. So my answer is yes, a man can be raped by a woman. But this lack of understanding explained-above makes people less aware of what happen to men and boys around them. In consequence, such cases were revealed years after it had been started.

Finally, all I want you to bear in mind is please pay more attention to your environment, your society. It’s not impossible that something wrong is going on around you, but you don’t notice it when you should have. Men or women, boys or girls, young or old—nobody is immune to any kind of abuse, even from their closest persons. If you find anything suspicious, tell the police. Let them check it while you keep yourself unnoticed.


(I guess I’ve made many language errors. If you notice some, please tell me)