Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2022

DOI

10.1007/s12119-022-09988-0

Publication Title

Sexuality & Culture

Volume

26

Issue

6

Pages

2122-2137

Abstract

Our commentary responds to claims made by DiMarco and colleagues in an article published in this journal that the majority of victims of rape are men and that 80% of those who rape men are women. Although we strongly believe that studying male sexual victimization is a highly important research and policy endeavour, we have concerns with the approach taken by DiMarco and colleagues to discuss these incidents. Specifically, we critique their paper by addressing the definitions of rape used by the authors, questioning their interpretation of national victim surveys, evaluating their analysis of the underreporting of male rape, and highlighting the heteronormative framework they use to outline the landscape of male sexual victimization. With this commentary, we call for a holistic, nuanced, and balanced study of male sexual victimization that recognizes the reality of both female-on-male and male-on-male violence, the experiences of survivors, and multi-layered barriers that male victims often encounter.

Rights

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Original Publication Citation

Widanaralalage, B. K., Reed, S. M., Lobo Antunes, M. J., DeJong, C., Pinchevsky, G. M., Lovell, R., & Cummings, C. E. (2022). Distorted reality: A commentary on DiMarco et al. (2022) and the question of male sexual victimization. Sexuality & Culture, 26(6), 2122-2137. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-022-09988-0

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