Basically the question is “how would you feel about being raped?”
I have not a lot of women, but 84 women said ‘negatively’ and 61 said ‘positively.’ A lot of the women who respond to me are sex workers, so maybe that influences it? Also maybe troll men responding as women.
But 813 men said ‘positively,’ compared to only 254 who said ‘negatively.’ Out of men, 76% say they would respond positively to this rape scenario. For comparison, 42% of women would respond positively.
For disclaimer: it’s very possible a lot of people aren’t accurately able to predict their actual responses. Regardless, the gender difference is still very significant, which is my primary interest here.
I have two main thoughts here.
One, is that the “men can’t be raped” trope is based in reality. If a hot woman rapes a man he’s much more likely to like it than if a hot man rapes a woman.
Two, is that, on a very base level, the actual act is pretty similar for both parties. Mouth on genitals, sleeping, all that. There’s equivalent levels of concrete things being done. The difference in enjoyment, then, relies in how culture perceives this differently for gender. Women are conditioned to view this negatively, and men are conditioned to view this positively. The upsetness/joy is entirely in their heads, dictated by society, and is not inherently an actual harm or benefit.
(this being said, that doesn’t mean the harm or benefit felt is any less valid.)
I think this probably is very closely related to the idea that “women are gatekeepers of sex” and “men have to work to earn sex.” My question, then, is should we desire a world where nobody is a gatekeeper and everybody is joyful upon finding themselves raped, or a world where everybody is a gatekeeper and nobody enjoys rape?
Even without looking at men, I really don’t buy the notion that 42% of women would enjoy being raped. It seems much more plausible to me that the majority of respondents of either gender are answering “does this fantasy sound hot?” instead of “what do you think would actually happen?” So this could equally well be picking up on the gender-specific prevalence of rape fantasies or gender-specific (in)ability to tell fantasies from reality.
I’ve asked a lot of questions, in detail, about rape fantasies (in actual surveys, not just twitter polls) and women answer positively to this much more than men. In fact, the dominance/rape/power fantasy area is the single biggest difference in sexual preferences by gender. If the responses were getting conflated with rape fantasies, I’d expect to see a discrepancy in the opposite direction.
Honestly, my guess is that this is a matter of threateningness, and that the disparity is due to the fact that most people are cis and straight. Given that almost all cismen are physically stronger than almost all ciswomen, and you didn’t indicate that the victim was in any way restrained, I bet people of different genders would tend to have different assumptions about how much control they have over the situation.
Straight cismen would often think “OK, that’s cool, and if she does anything I’m not OK with, I can just physically shove her off of me”, while straight ciswomen think “OH MY G-D I’M TRAPPED THERE’S A HUGE PERSON ON TOP OF ME HELP”. Given that we already know the person in question is a rapist, “You will have to use physical force if you want to escape” is pretty much a given. The fact that one group of people is so shot up on naturally-produced steroids that they don’t have to worry about losing such a contest seems like enough reason for this scenario to not freak them out.
Thus, straight cismen are likely to say “negative” just when your scenario seems like an unpleasant violation, while straight ciswomen are likely to say “negative” for that reason or if they have ANY SENSE OF SELF-PRESERVATION.
(For reference, my first thought when I saw this was “Having a stranger do that sounds violating and I wouldn’t want it, but at least I can just throw that person off of me and leave the room”. If I were straight or was taking anti-androgens, I expect my response would have been quite different.)
How many straight men are assuming they brought a woman home while drunk the night before in the question, I wonder…
Also tinged by consent issues - many women may not even think about male consent issues and thus wouldn’t think of themselves as a rapist if they did this to a guy, but might stop if told to.