Men Rapped by Women?

THERE has been a sudden upsurge in the number of women who have decided to take things into their hands, and rape men!

Sounds quite strange but of late, that is if the three reported cases in the past six months are anything to go by, men, who for long have been perpetrators of rape, have found themselves on the receiving end. I remember when the story was carried in the daily paper, and when we were discussing it – whether it was true or false – a colleague said, jokingly though, that he would not mind going to Masvingo and catching a lift. All in the hope that he might get raped!
Male rape has not been discussed much and remains one of those stories you would hear in the pub, just pub talk. But that different men have reported such cases, at different times and different locations, maybe it is time to take stock. What drives a woman to rape a man? Or women, to rape a man? And is it possible that a man can be raped?
Though in the reported cases there seemed to be a streak of black magic involved, some of the male rape cases leave one puzzled as to the motive.
In the aforesaid discussion, a colleague narrated a case he had heard of, when the brother’s wife took the younger brother to the forests, under the pretext of finding firewood, only to “rape” him. But after further deliberations, we found out that it was not rape, but that the young man was seduced, into sleeping with the woman.
Which led to the most important question, what is rape?
Generally, the definition of rape is given as the crime of forcing a man/woman to submit to sexual intercourse against his/her will. The point to note is consent, that in the absence of consent, that sexual act becomes rape.
The man who was given a lift from Masvingo to Gweru was forced into sleeping with four women. That the four women slept with him against his will, against his consent, makes it rape. No questions about it. But was he raped by all four women? That has been the centre of the debate and the plausibility of his story.
If he had said that four women held him hostage and then one of them forced him to sleep with her, then his story could have held some water. Someone pointed out that maybe the concoction that he was given, that made him pass out, could also have an effect on him that enabled him to sleep with four women in a short space of time.
When it is the male perpetrating rape, I think it is very easy, since he would have psyched himself for the do. But when the male is being raped, especially when a gun is being held to the head, one wonders how the Masvingo-Gweru man, a hero indeed, could have managed to sleep with one woman, let alone four of them.
Surely, how can one man rape four women with a gun pointed to his head? The gun can easily turn off the man.The woman who lured her husband’s young brother into the woods and then seduced him, created an environment for the young man to settle his mind and one event followed another. The same cannot be said of rape, the mind will not be settled and when the mind is not in its right state, the rape of a man – especially by four women – can be, to all intents and purposes, impossible.
So if the Masvingo-Gweru man is reading this, maybe he might want to give us the story in full, the sequence of events and what actually happened on the fateful night. What we read in the papers left us with a lot of questions, that maybe he wanted to cover up for something and thought of cooking up a story. If he passed out, how come he had known, when he came to his senses, that he had been raped by four women?
Or that he had recently discovered that he was HIV-positive and wanted a scapegoat for it and decided to cook up a story, which he might use to his spouse, to explain his status. I am not trying to be tough on the guy, already a victim, but I just want us all to know what really transpired, how it was all possible and whether male rape is, in actual fact, possible.
I remember when we used to share experiences when we were still boys and how most guys told of how difficult it was to sleep with a girl on the very first encounter – how it was usually a fight throughout, with the boy ending up, most of the time, the loser. That somehow puts the issue of rape into some perspective, that it is difficult to sleep with an unwilling woman, let alone a man.
I will easily understand when a woman is gang-raped, or there is such force like a knife or a gun at the victim’s throat but some of the circumstances, need to be scrutinised.
Like the judge who asked the woman: “So at what point did you realise you had been raped?” To which the woman replied: “When the cheque bounced.” It might turn out that most of the guys who are doing time for rape, might after all, have just failed to explain themselves.
Or because of the women’s rights that are so prevalent these days, an alleged rapist is just condemned, without due regard to the circumstances. And this is not to say rape is not occurring.
So as the debate of the Masvingo-Gweru man rages, and looks like it will preoccupy us for some time to come, may the victim kindly come forward and help us understand the story. We will, as always, protect his identity.
Talking of identity, last Sunday we carried a contribution which was signed off as from Mavis Nsingo. It turned out that a friend of Mavis had “borrowed” her email account and did not mention that it was not Mavis writing or that she wanted her identity hidden.