Real Men Get Raped? Really?

I think the London Underground is what’s called an advert rich environment. Most of them are pretty innocuous. Shows I’m not going to see and ads for charities I probably wont donate to. Of course, there are other ads that stand out.

Cosmetic surgery seems pretty common and those ads always annoy. Their only benefit is that you occasionally get to see them defaced with a sticker saying “You are normal, this is not” which is great. Obviously.

However, today I saw an ad that made my stomach lurch.

As the escalator rolled its way down I glanced across and double taked. The headline screams “Real men get raped” and goes with the picture of a ball pierced with a nail roughly driven into its skin.

The escalator took me passed it before I could fully absorb what I’d seen. I spent the rest of the journey looking out for it again, to check I’d seen what I’d seen – sadly I had.

The rugby ball is to go with the Six Nations and is a deliberate choice apparently.

“We’ve chosen to use an alpha male sport in our advertising to challenge assumptions about the type of men who get raped” Michael May, spokesman for Survivors UK, is quoted as saying. “It’s just as likely to be a rugby player as a librarian, a suited city banker as a hooded gang member. And we hope that by challenging our innate assumptions about the identity of male victims, we can make it even fractionally easier for a male rape victim to ask for help.”

The campaign appears to be getting a largely positive response and, clearly, there are good intentions behind the whole thing.

It’s true that male rape is both under reported and leaves a social stigma that being the victim of a (non-sexual) assault does not. It’s also true that male victims, both gay and straight, can feel guilt and shame that somehow they did something to attract rape. That somehow the rape undermines, or says something about, who they are as men. These ideas need addressing.

So, without wanting to be too critical, I’m not happy about the campaign. It’s a worthy cause but what’s the concept of “real men” got to do with anything? What would have been so wrong with the phrase “men get raped too”, for example?

Is rape only bad (or simply more bad) when it happens to a real man? Perhaps rape is less bad when the victim is gay, who must be used to it a bit? Is it in some way comforting to discover that rugby players (who we’re told are “alpha males”, a concept worth binning in itself) are raped if you are somehow not “real” in your manliness?

I have to say my first reading of the ad was that it was saying that you can’t be a real man unless you’ve been raped (which is actually what the phrase means without the word “too” on it). It came across almost as if this would be a sick rite of passage. I want to be relaxed about the badly written phrase – but this is an ad about rape not washing powder and if it’s not done sensitively then it shouldn’t be done at all.

In recent years we’ve seen a progressive move that ads aimed at women don’t blame the victim or imply that anyone is at fault except the rapist themselves. This is good but there’s been no such discussion around male rape, partly because there are so rarely ad campaigns around it.

The concept of the “real man” here is disturbing no matter what the good intentions behind the ad. The concept of “alpha males” where aggression is seen as a male virtue is a problem. It has no role to play in holding out a hand of friendship to those who’ve been hurt or victimised in the past.

We should do everything we can to help those men who have been the victim of rape. We should raise consciousness around these issues that so often degenerate into sniggers, innuendo or minimisation. However, we should  do that carefully and the shock ad approach just isn’t appropriate, the topic is shocking enough in itself.