Men can be rape victims too

I have always found it interesting how quickly society decides what a victim is supposed to look like.

We have become much better at talking about sexual violence, particularly when the victim is a woman and the perpetrator is a man. We talk about consent, coercion, fear and the many reasons someone may not be able to simply walk away from an unwanted sexual situation.

But change the genders, and suddenly there seems to be a collective pause.

A man says he was sexually assaulted by a woman and the questions can sound very different.

Why did he not stop her?

Why did he not leave?

Why did he not fight?

And, inevitably, someone asks the question that probably tells us more about society than the situation itself: “But he is a man.”

It is almost as though masculinity comes with a set of terms and conditions.

Men are supposed to be strong. Men are supposed to be confident. Men are supposed to want sex. Men are supposed to be capable of protecting themselves.

So, the idea of a man being sexually vulnerable does not fit very neatly into the picture we have created.

But perhaps real life was never particularly interested in fitting neatly into our stereotypes.

There have been cases around the world where courts have had to deal with men as victims of sexual violence committed by women.

In Norway in 2005, a 23-year-old woman was convicted of raping a 31-year-old man and sentenced to nine months in prison.

The man had fallen asleep on a sofa and testified that he woke to find the woman performing a sexual act on him. She maintained that the encounter was consensual, but the court rejected her account. Reports at the time said the man later suffered insomnia and lost interest in sex.

It was unusual enough to become international news.

Then, nearly two decades later, Scotland had a case that sounded remarkably similar in one important respect.

In July 2026, Ewa Nosalska was sentenced to 21 months in prison after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting a sleeping man. According to the Scottish Judiciary, the man woke during the assault, told her no and told her to stop. The judge noted that cases involving men sexually assaulting sleeping women were much more familiar, but the reversal of the genders did not make the conduct less serious.

Perhaps that is what makes these cases worth talking about.

Not because they prove that every allegation made by a man is true. They obviously do not.

They simply remind us that the scenario itself is not impossible.

Yet I suspect many people would still find it easier to imagine a woman waking up to discover a man sexually assaulting her than the other way around.

Why?

Part of the answer may be our ideas about strength.

We expect a man to fight.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable part is the expectation that a man should have physically fought his way out of an unwanted sexual situation.

Why did he not push her away? Why did he not leave? Why did he not fight?

These questions assume that everyone responds to fear in exactly the same way.

They do not.

Some people fight. Some run. Some freeze. Some try to calm the situation. Some feel pressured and simply try to get through it.

There is no universal reaction to fear. And I think we sometimes forget that when the person experiencing it happens to be a man.

We are generally willing to accept that a woman might freeze during an assault. We understand that fear can make someone unable to react in the way an outsider thinks they should.

But when a man says he froze, the reaction can be very different.

Why?

Perhaps because we have attached masculinity so closely to physical strength that we struggle to separate the two.

There is another particularly strange assumption that comes up in these conversations.

If a man had an erection, surely he wanted it.

But an involuntary physical response is not the same thing as consent. The body can react to stimulation without that reaction representing what a person actually wants.

This is basic biology, yet somehow it becomes controversial when the body belongs to a man.

And then there is Malaysia.

Our own legal framework adds another interesting layer to the discussion.

Under Section 375 of the Penal Code, rape is defined in terms of a man having sexual intercourse with a woman in circumstances including against her will or without her consent.

That means the statutory definition is gender specific.

So when people ask whether a man can be raped by a woman, there are actually two conversations taking place.

There is the ordinary human conversation about whether a man can experience unwanted sexual conduct, coercion or sexual violence.

Then there is the legal question of which offence applies to the particular circumstances.

They are not necessarily the same thing.

And perhaps that distinction is important because we tend to think of words as being interchangeable when they are not. The law has its definitions.

Human experiences are often much messier.

I am not suggesting that we throw away the legal definitions or that every accusation should simply be accepted without question. That would be unfair to everyone.

Evidence matters.

Circumstances matter.

Allegations should be investigated.

But surely we can investigate something without first deciding that it could not have happened because the victim is a man.

That is where I think the stigma becomes particularly interesting.

A man who talks about being sexually assaulted may not only have to deal with what happened to him. He may also have to deal with the embarrassment of being told that he should have been able to prevent it.

He may worry that people will laugh.

He may worry that people will question his masculinity.

He may worry that nobody will take him seriously.

And perhaps that is why some men do not talk about these experiences at all.

Not because they necessarily have nothing to say, but because they already know what some people will say back.

“You are a man.”

As if those four words somehow explain everything.

I do not think this needs to become a competition between male and female victims. There is no prize for suffering, and sexual violence is not a contest over who deserves more sympathy. Perhaps we need to stop deciding what a victim should look like before hearing the story. A woman can be strong and still be a victim. A man can be strong and still be one too.

Neither gender comes with immunity.

When a man says he was sexually assaulted, we can listen, ask what happened and let the evidence be examined without mocking his masculinity.

Being a man does not mean wanting sex all the time, being incapable of fear, physically invincible or incapable of saying no.Perhaps that is the part we still have not quite learned to accept.

The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at [email protected].