A feminist reflection on male victims of conflict-related sexual violence

Introduction

Within the world of development and humanitarian response, there appears to be a preferencing and counter-preferencing of different forms of violence. Arguments are made for prioritizing certain kinds of violence, or indeed types of victim, for intervention. ¹ For example, in the case of sexual violence it might be said that it is most prevalent against women and girls (Saunders, 2015), or that sexual violence against men and boys is the least disclosed (Holmes et al., 1997), or that sexual violence in the form of hate crimes against LGBTI+ persons is the most violent (Egale Canada Human Rights Trust, 2012). Betraying a tendency to hierarchize different targets of sexual violence, journal articles, policy briefs, press publications, websites, funding calls, and (more dramatically) some conferences, have revealed how one kind or class of victim tends to be championed, and those championing another are often viewed with suspicion. The distrust can translate into outright hostility – particularly when women and men victims are pitted against each other – with the motivations, practices and impact of focusing on other victims being questioned (e.g. Dolan, 2014).

A major reason why these debates are so heated is that they have decidedly practical implications, of which the issues of funding and public visibility have arguably been the most contested. The Coalition of Feminists for Social Change, amongst others, argues that the space for women-focused programming in response to sexual violence is shrinking because of current budgeting trends that prioritize male-focused programming (COFEM, 2017a). Fearing a renewed privileging of male needs and experiences at the expense of women, many feminists express concern about these developments. Feminist scholars and groups have been accused by some of wilfully ensuring the neglect of male victimization through a reductionist focus on women (Jones and Del Zotto, 2002: 3), while others have explained it as a result of CRSV having first been brought to public attention by feminists focusing on female victimization (Gorris, 2015: 413). In fact, some commentators go so far as to say that in response to the war in the former Yugoslavia, the international women’s movement through a series of world conferences made sexual violence against women (SVAW) the ‘centerpiece of women’s human rights’ (Merry, 2006: 2). For our purposes, the main point is that these concerns are pronounced and are having an impact on praxis.

We frame our discussion of the broader question of sexual violence victim hierarchies within the context of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), and here focus primarily on men as victims of sexual violence. We do so because together, the conflict setting and the sexual nature of the attack yield a number of dimensions that speak pertinently to the phenomenon of victim hierarchization. First, this is a field in which victim hierarchies have already become a volatile issue, with the controversy centred on the (lack of) recognition of male victims. Second, we hold that CRSV is the setting in which the underlying ideology ² and function of sexual violence are arguably most clearly revealed in a heightened or intensified fashion. ³ Thus, while our analysis focuses on CRSV, it also speaks to and informs sexual violence victimization more broadly. In line with the specific functions and meanings of CRSV, we show in the third place that there are important overlaps in the subjective experiences and public meanings of CRSV aimed against women and against men, and that these overlaps militate against essentialist distinctions drawn between gendered victims. Moreover, in the fourth place, the sexualized nature of the attack at the same time underlies and informs the volatility and controversy surrounding victim hierarchization in this context, as we will explain.

Fifth, we show that the acknowledgement that men count amongst the victims of CRSV in no way threatens feminists’ hard-won understandings of how patriarchal gendering practices ⁴ drive the phenomenon overall. Rather, feminist recognition of male victims helps clarify the mechanisms and harms of patriarchal sexual attack. At the same time, we show that the feminist apprehension about inclusion of male victims in CRSV policies and responses is not baseless. The greatest risk is that the ideology-critical feminist understanding of sexual violation may get lost in the details of exactly how male victims of CRSV are included into the analytic framework. Sixth, and crucially, we are concerned that the relative lack of recognition of male victims of CRSV constitutes a serious injustice toward these victims, which a principled feminist politics should urgently address.

Gender analysis in CRSV: an overview

Over the past two decades, the attention being paid to CRSV has increased considerably (Campbell, 2018: 469; Skjelsbaek, 2018: 498; Zalewski et al., 2018: 2). As several researchers have discussed the main points of contention within the field (e.g. Boesten, 2017; Campbell, 2018; Skjelsbaek, 2018), we only briefly unpack the debate on the role of gender analysis in CRSV research, because it prepares the way for our own analysis.

It was feminists who first drew attention to CRSV, seeing gender analysis as crucial to understanding it. Gendered structural inequalities, institutions and identities play a key role in the complex pattern of drivers of CRSV (Davies and True, 2015: 507; Meger, 2016: 150). Furthermore, feminist analysis positioned CRSV as an extension or intensification of the various forms of violence that women experience during times of peace. Feminist pioneers thus initially framed the historically neglected phenomenon of CRSV as just one more way in which women’s exploitation remained under the radar. A good example here is Catharine MacKinnon, who wrote in response to the sexual violence in the Yugoslavian war, that the human rights neglect of sexual violence in war and peace is happening ‘because the victims are women and what was done to them smells of sex’ (MacKinnon, 1994: 5). Writing against a tradition in which CRSV had been viewed as a regrettable but inevitable result of the combination of natural male sexuality and the chaos of war, these feminists insisted that SVAW neither in war nor in peace was due to uncontrolled sexual urges. Instead, in both war and peace, it should be understood as a more or less deliberately deployed mechanism for ensuring gender inequality by denigrating women and empowering men.

Early feminist analysis of CRSV thus strove to denaturalize the phenomenon and to illuminate its power-political nature and function. In order to do this, a critical gender analysis that placed the distribution of power between women and men at the centre, and that emphasized its continuity through war and peace, was indispensable. This clearly implied that CRSV could not be viewed as a stand-alone war-related issue. Rather, as manifestation of the broader gendered power inequalities present within pre- and postwar society, its prevention in this line of thinking would always require transformation of those peacetime social dynamics (Davies and True, 2015: 507; Meger, 2016: 150).

While this feminist engagement with CRSV was crucial to the issue receiving growing international attention, later scholars subsequently started to critique what they viewed as the inability of straightforward gender analysis to fully explain why and how CRSV happens (Campbell, 2018: 475; Davies and True, 2015: 496; Wood, 2015: 6). There was a sense that the continuities between sexual violence in war and peace had been overstated and that specific instances of CRSV needed context-specific explanations. This line of research moved away from being critical and qualitative, to a positivist approach focusing on the particularities of the context of the conflict, aiming to determine where and when CRSV is likely to happen, as well as the likely perpetrators and victims (Campbell, 2018: 473; Cohen and Nordas, 2014; Skjelsbaek, 2018: 502–503).

Such studies spoke to a ‘rhetoric of exceptionalism’ (Skjelsbaek, 2018: 503), where CRSV is approached as a stand-alone issue that is independent of the social relations of its production (Meger, 2016: 151) and can be ended with the use of the right policy tools and evidence (Boesten, 2017: 515). With this understanding, CRSV is an exceptional phenomenon rather than a continuation or intensification of the sexual violence present in the same society before and after armed conflict. An example of this exceptionalizing approach is the ending impunity narrative. Houge and Lohne (2017: 757) argue that the ‘end impunity mantra’ currently dominates debates, policies and responses to CRSV. Without any kind of critical engagement with why criminal law would be the primary and most meaningful response, this approach simplistically explains CRSV as the result of the absence of criminal accountability and thus an issue that can be solved fairly easily (Houge and Lohne, 2017: 779).

It is clear that feminist gender analysis disappears from view in these currently dominant policy and academic approaches. Simultaneously, we see an implicit return to the idea that men rape during conflict because they can. That is, to the idea that CRSV follows naturally from the combination of the ‘essential nature’ of male sexuality and the absence of effective restraints during armed conflict. This means the erasure of the feminist insight that sexual attack is a primary means of distributing power within societies rather than a phenomenon driven by sexual desire or lust. Moreover, the exceptionalizing approach leaves policy-makers with the impression that they can successfully respond to CRSV while leaving social gender intact. Unfortunately, current policy favours the positivist approach and displays little awareness of these debates and limitations, continuing to prefer interpreting CRSV as a stand-alone issue and refraining from incorporating a gender analysis. This allows policy to be directed at a supposedly clearly defined problem and to be supported by evidence.

Quantitative approaches devoid of feminist gender analysis seem to fare no better than the early feminists at acknowledging male victims of CRSV (Grey and Shepherd, 2012). The same goes for the currently dominant policy frameworks. UN Resolution 2106 of 2013, the first Women, Peace and Security Resolution to mention male victimization and to use gender-inclusive language, has led to a number of high-level policy documents doing the same, yet, even these ‘inclusive’ policies still position male victimization as exceptional. They mention women victims most frequently and position male experiences of sexual victimization as secondary to those of women (Gorris, 2015: 418). There is thus a slippage in the gender-inclusive terminology of mainstream documents and policies, with male victims often disappearing from the scene altogether or remaining in a secondary, marginal position.

Grey and Shepherd (2012: 116) identify this treatment of male victimization as a ‘seemingly paradoxical lack of attention paid to gender’, seeing that a narrow focus on only female victimization (and male perpetration) (Gorris, 2015; Grey and Shepherd, 2012; Zalewski et al., 2018) has led to a partial understanding of exactly how gender is relevant to CRSV. We thus see that the critical feminist responses initially marginalized male victims (and female perpetrators) in the way they framed their gender analysis, while the more positivist policy positions seem to have the same effect, although this is due to their lack of gender analysis altogether. We contend therefore that it is not merely the presence or absence of gender analysis per se that is leading to this persistent bias against male victims in CRSV. Rather, the right kind of gender analysis is needed to address this problem.

However, this is not yet the full story. Recent scholarship has shown a marked increase in attention to how male experiences of sexual victimization in conflict settings are silenced, ignored or neglected (e.g. Carpenter, 2006; Dolan, 2014; Piccard, 2011). During the same time, research on several high-profile conflicts has affirmed widespread CRSV against men (cf. Christian et al., 2011; Ferrales et al., 2016; Žarkov, 2007). Taken together, these studies call for a clearer policy response to the sexual violence perpetrated against men, grounded in a more nuanced gender analysis of the phenomenon (Christian et al., 2011: 228).

The recent growth in recognition of male victims of CRSV (Gorris, 2015: 417) led to an increase in male-focused protection programming, as distinct from prevention programming which focuses on males as potential perpetrators rather than victims (COFEM, 2017a; Erdström, 2014). Yet our contention is that once again, this kind of programming and the negative responses to it are characterized by insufficiently nuanced feminist gender analysis. For example, many feminist activists are concerned that men’s and boys’ experiences of sexual violence in conflict compete with and crowd out women’s and girls’ experiences of the same and that this results in the prioritizing of ‘male points of view that insert the needs and concerns of males into women-specific spaces’ (COFEM, 2017b). Clearly then, in response to an initial preference for female victims of CRSV, an unambiguous preference for male victims is anticipated/resisted/promoted, thus framing the whole in terms of a zero-sum contest.

However, such feminist reluctance to engage with male victims out of fear of a zero-sum game is in fact complicit in upholding the patriarchal meanings of sexual violation instead of contesting them, and serves to exceptionalize and marginalize male victims. Yet it does not have to be this way. As we discuss in the next section, the right kind of feminist gender analysis of CRSV not only highlights the continuities between sexual violence during conflict and times of peace, but also between female and male victimization. In the remainder of the article we start to respond to the need for renewed feminist gender analysis of CRSV as identified by several scholars (Baaz and Stern, 2018; Houge and Lohne, 2017; Meger, 2016). As Grey and Shepherd (2012: 119) put it succinctly:

. . . a feminist research agenda also involves an exploration of the silences, the gaps and the margins of any constellation of power, even (or perhaps especially) when that might make us uncomfortable as feminist researchers.

Rethinking the harms of sexual violence

Grey and Shepherd (2012: 119) helpfully distinguish two ways in which CRSV discourses tend to invisibilize male victims. First, the ‘vast majority’ logic, which assumes that in a context of resource scarcity and humanitarian urgency, the male minority should best be ignored, and secondly, the ‘absent presence’ logic where sexually violated male bodies are at first included but then gradually erased from the frame. The authors analyse the website of UN ACTION to illustrate how the literature envisions the victim’s body as female and the politics of violence in terms of the female victim (Grey and Shepherd, 2012: 119). Houge and Lohne (2017) explain that simplistic scripts such as brutal male soldier perpetrators versus innocent female civilian victims result from attempts to give a sense of urgency to CRSV and gain popular support for the direction of vast sums of funding as well as political attention to the problem. The figure of the male victim seems to trouble this simplistic picture.

Baaz and Stern (2018: 297) in turn argue that the currently dominant framing of rape as a weapon of war has moreover erased its sexual nature, enabling problematic clear-cut distinctions between peacetime rape (as not political) and wartime rape (as not sexual), in order to justify the steadily increasing gap in attention given to the two phenomena. ⁵ We thus see that the attempt to place CRSV centre stage has led to the severance of sexual violence in war from sexual violence in peacetime, and thus to what Meger (2016: 149) calls the decontextualization and ‘fetishization’ of CRSV. The weapon of war narrative ‘obscures from the agenda the many forms of gender-based violence and the multiple categories that victims and perpetrators fall into’ (Meger, 2016: 150).

Male victims have therefore importantly not been the only ones whose experiences of sexual violence have been systematically invisibilized through these processes and approaches. The question must arise to what extent all this frenzied activity really has the aim of ending sexual violence, rather than for example extending the scope and strength of international criminal law, or serving international security concerns, or a variety of other interests. These newly dominant understandings of CRSV were cut off from feminist analyses of sexual violence which emphasized ‘the sexual as produced and productive, shifting and multiple and therewith refuse[d] the confines of a sex/violence binary’ (Baaz and Stern, 2018: 301) and in the process seem to get ever further removed from the actual victim experience of CRSV.

In this section we thus investigate once again some of the harms of CRSV, in relation to both men and women victims. As Baaz and Stern (2018: 297) also underscore, ignoring the sexual aspect of sexual violence results in a lack of understanding of a dimension of the phenomenon which is central to how perpetrators say they harm, and victims say they experience harm (Bourke, 2007: 7; Heberle and Grace, 2009). When we return to the scene of sexual harm, we need to use an inclusive lens. The Rome Statute of 1998 has a comprehensive, gender-neutral list of sexual violence crimes in war. It also provides for when male victims are forced to penetrate another victim or the perpetrator (see Grey and Shepherd, 2012: 127), who could be either male or female. The Statute thus recognizes that the penetrator is not necessarily the perpetrator.

This gender-inclusive approach resonates with the evidence contained in CRSV reports. When one for instance compares male and female experiences of sexual violence in the Human Rights Watch report We Will Teach You a Lesson (2013), on sexual violence perpetrated by Sri Lankan security forces against political detainees, there are many overlaps in female and male experiences. ⁶ The reported harms of shame and stigma are for both genders centrally tied to the sexual nature of the violation (HRW, 2013: 7). Internalized feelings of shame, the wish to avoid social stigma and judgemental reactions from others, and fear of potential reprisals, provide strong reasons for self-censorship and silence. Many women described feelings of guilt, self-blame and disgust after being raped (HRW, 2013: 92). A number of male prisoners also refer to their deep sense of shame at what happened, inhibiting their ability to disclose to others (HRW, 2013: 90).

A particularly valuable aspect of the report in relation to our question is that it situates sexual violence within the broader context of torture practices used against both female and male activists (see De Zoysa and Fernando, 2007). It thereby invites insights into the underlying political purpose and significance of the rapes in ways that Elaine Scarry (1985) and others have explored in relation to torture practices. Scarry’s work supports the feminist insight that sexual violence functions as an expression of political power, intuitively understood by both victims and perpetrators. As the title of the HRW report suggests, the primary purpose of the sexual violence was to enact a powerful message about domination. Understood in this way, the rapes and other sexual violation conveyed humiliation, subjugation, political impotence, and loss of agency for both women and men. More specifically, these sexualized forms of humiliation inscribed a similar message of exposure, vulnerability, shame and denigration on and in the bodies of both women and men alike. For both women and men rape was often one element in a wider sequence of degrading and abusive mistreatments, including stripping and forced nakedness.

The latter were forms of sexual violation in their own right, and served as a constant reminder of vulnerability, helpless passivity and threat of rape. What bears emphasizing here is that the inclusion of male victims in our understanding and imagining of CRSV helps us to see more clearly how sexual violation in such a context serves the same primary function for male and female detainees, namely to cause long-term damage to their self-regard. When played out between male bodies, the power-political function seemingly becomes clearer because we are less tempted to see the sexual violence as an expression of (‘natural’, i.e. heteronormative, male) perpetrator lust. ⁷ Moreover, the inclusion of sexual violation in an arsenal of torture techniques vividly counters social tendencies to trivialize and depoliticize the phenomenon and its social and political effects, and to frame it as a ‘women’s issue’.

There are thus important similarities in how women and men respectively experience CRSV, and in the messages of domination and (self-)worth that it sends regarding the perpetrators and victims. This is because the template or logic of CRSV when used against men is the same as that against women. These similarities constitute an important aspect of a proper feminist gender analysis of CRSV, because they help to clarify the meanings that are manipulated in the deployment of CRSV, and in sexual violence more generally. In what follows, we first briefly explain the hard-won feminist understanding of the power-political function and meaning of sexual violence. Then we show how the very same template used to politically subjugate women as inferior to men under ‘normal’, peacetime, patriarchal conditions, is also used to subjugate some individual men as subordinates under specific conditions such as armed conflict (also pervasively in prisons ⁸ ). We also illustrate how the inclusion of male victims of CRSV and sexual violence helps to strengthen our analysis.

As stated, feminists have historically described sexual violence as at once an expression and a means of patriarchal power and control. When Brownmiller (1975) famously argued that ‘rape is violence not sex’, the realization took hold that widespread sexual violence was either deliberately used or negligently allowed, in order to uphold patriarchal power relations (cf. Nedelsky, 2011). Feminists opposed the pervasive and historically embedded idea that sexual violence was the inevitable result of natural sexual difference, and driven by male (heterosexual) lust. These ideas received further nuance with Carole Pateman’s (1988) framing of sexual violence within the modern western notion of social contract. Underlying or preceding the notion of social contract, as the basis of the civic order, she argued, was a more original ‘sexual contract’, which subjugated women to men and which allowed the men alone to enter into universal bonds of equal restraint and freedom with one another, i.e. to become citizens of the liberal order. Fundamentally, women were precluded from entering the social contract of fraternal democracy, and the sexual contract meant that men had guaranteed right to women’s sexed bodies – called ‘male sex right’ (Pateman, 1988: 2).

What was particularly pernicious about this political fiction was that women’s sexual subjugation to men and their concomitant exclusion from the polis was located within the pre-political realm, in the so-called ‘state of nature’. This order was thus framed as a natural given rather than the constitutive political arrangement that it is. Therefore, also in this understanding, the sexual violence that we see is not an aberration but rather an expression of modern democracy, and is what upholds male sex right. The impunity with which men can access women’s sexualized bodies under normal circumstances (MacKenzie, 2010: 206) thus functions powerfully as a symbol of women’s exclusion from political, civil status. It is moreover a very apt symbolism, because sexual violation strips the (woman) victim of personhood, dignity and a voice that matters. This happens through the enforced sexualization, which is at the same time an animalization, of her body as essentially pre-political and pre-civil. The shaming effect – loss of dignity – so centrally associated with sexual violation makes sense in this light.

Pervasive SVAW therefore cannot be divorced from women’s second-class citizenship, and sexual violence cannot be addressed without the dismantling of patriarchy, which depends for its justification on the naturalization of sexual domination. In this sense, one may view sexual violence as a pervasive system for patrolling the boundaries of the masculine-patriarchal political sphere. This is why the decidedly political, denaturalizing understanding of sexual violence forms the cornerstone of the critical feminist framework. It is this fragile, yet naturalized sexual hierarchy between men and women which is concretely staged in every man-on-woman sexual violation, and which gives the act its lasting meaning (cf. Du Toit, 2009). The very pervasiveness of sexual violation and rape thus paradoxically provides evidence of the instability of a symbolic for whose ideological maintenance such performances are needed.

This is also why, under patriarchy, sexual vulnerability becomes ideologically gendered (cf. Bergoffen, 2016). Even though, as part of the human condition, all humans are ontologically equally vulnerable, under patriarchy, women and their bodies are designated as naturally sexually vulnerable, and men and their bodies, as inherently sexually invulnerable, to the point of being naturally sexually dangerous to female others. This is a gross distortion of the fundamentally ambiguous human condition (Bergoffen, 2016: 137).

Briefly, what patriarchy does is to generally reserve for men the impossible position of pure subject and centre of the universe, and for women the impossible position of pure object-for-others. This distorted socio-symbolic positioning is inextricably intertwined with women’s second-class citizenship and disqualification as fully-fledged subjects. The patriarchal lie that naturalizes sexual violence by men against women and thereby hides its political function, is thus built on the deeper deception that designates men as subjects and women as objects for others. It denies that the masculine subject is also always and at the same time a decentred object for others in the world, and that the feminine subject is also always and at the same time a subject for herself and at the centre of her own perceivable universe, to which she brings unique value and meaning. This is the symbolic logic, which gives sexual violation its particularly devastating meanings.

It is against this rich feminist understanding of sexual violence that the sexual violation of men must also be understood. When men are sexually violated, they are put in the social position of women more generally – they are performatively told that they, too, in spite of their ostensible masculinity (and thus full humanity), do not make the cut and may be reduced to the status of mere sexualized objects for others; that they may be reduced to a shamefully naturalized, pre-civil creature whose voice, actions and perspectives count for nothing. Given the enduring symbolic power of women’s social subjugation expressed in pervasive sexual violence against them (perpetrated with impunity, institutionally embedded), it is not surprising that men are sometimes degraded and othered through this exact same template. To violate a man sexually, is to enact his social denigration, which under patriarchy automatically means he is designated as female because sexually vulnerable; he is symbolically castrated. However, we have already seen how the exclusive attribution of sexual vulnerability to women serves an ideological purpose. As women live under the constant threat of sexual appropriation because of how patriarchy distributes sexual vulnerability, men live under the constant threat of being demoted to the feminine. This is one of the primary ways in which unruly men are either disciplined into, or otherwise expelled from, the privileged patriarchal masculine.

Since men are most severely degraded in their humanity, when the template of feminine degradation (sexual humiliation) is deployed, it is not surprising to see many similarities in female and male experiences of sexual violence. We have seen in the HRW report how both sexes experience and internalize sexual violation as an enduring ‘lesson in powerlessness’, as deeply shaming and stigmatizing, and as embedded in a larger context of domination and torture. For both sexes, the experiences of sexual violation robbed them of any sense of power and agency in the world. Victims of both sexes typically afterwards remained silent about what had happened to them, presumably not only because of the danger of reliving the degradation, but also, crucially, because of how their testimonies would be received by a larger world. The realistic fear is that the wider symbolic order will reinforce and amplify the message of degradation. Because of how sexual violation positions all of its victims as degradingly feminized, we can safely conclude that sexual violation against both women and men draws for its power on the same basic political-ideological function. The explicit acknowledgement of the sexual violation of men helps to clarify this point.

Sexual difference in CRSV

By now, it should be clear that women and men under patriarchal conditions are never exactly symmetrically positioned vis-à-vis CRSV. Therefore, the conflation of interventions for male and female victims, and a fully gender-neutral approach, would not make sense. At the same time, the degradation of men through sexual violation depends for its symbolic and psychological efficacy upon the prior systematic degradation of women. Thus, to view male victims of CRSV as more seriously injured than women victims (because men are less used to being demeaned through sexualization?) would be to risk reinscribing the patriarchal ideology which positions women as always already or naturally sexually degraded. It would reinforce the logic that women have less (sexual) dignity to lose to start with, and thereby repeat the fundamental injustice of Pateman’s ‘sexual contract’ (1988: 2).

The relative invisibility of male victims of CRSV cannot be explained merely with reference to the glib assumption that the stigma or injury is somehow greater for men who therefore cannot report. The greater invisibility rather has to do with how male victims are positioned within patriarchy. For example, in the case of the former Yugoslavia, both international and local media paid a vastly disproportionate amount of attention to female victims of sexual violence, and male victims of torture and murder, in comparison to male victims of sexual violence (Žarkov, 2007: 156). Academics tended to follow suit. The UN Commission of Experts Final Report (ICTY) showed that ‘testimony about sexual violence against men came mainly from witnesses and not from victims themselves’ (Žarkov, 2007: 155), and thus that victims added their personal silencing to multiple other layers of erasure. Recall that Sri Lankan women victims also remained silent for much the same kinds of reasons as the men. We must therefore ask critical questions about the wider social cover-up of male sexual victimization.

With the growing body of evidence of male sexual victimization in armed conflict, as well as in institutions such as prisons, churches and in the military itself, how should we understand this multilayered resistance to the recognition of male victims? Žarkov (2007: 160) sees the heteronormativity of dominant patriarchal masculinity as playing an important role in repressing media reports and public discourse on the sexual violation of men specifically. Men sexually violating other men as part of war has the potential to demean both perpetrators and victims – the former as bestial and the latter as feminized and homo-sexualized. Žarkov thus shows that when we acknowledge male CRSV victims, the sexuality of the soldier-perpetrators suddenly receives more and anxious scrutiny. Gone is the dependable figure of the ‘natural’, lustful, heterosexual rapist. The phenomenon of male rape was systematically ignored in her context because it would disrupt the idealized male body’s permanence, wholeness and unity (Žarkov, 2007: 163), especially of course that of the ‘male ethnic Self’. Or, alternatively, it was very selectively publicized only when it could serve to ‘other’ the ‘male ethnic Other’ as either bestial/demonic rapist of men or feminized and symbolically (and often literally) castrated victim of rape. Because of the investment of the patriarchal symbolic order in the supposedly sexually-invulnerable-sexually-dangerous-and-thus-powerful male body as representative of the collective and of the polis, the volatile meanings released when male bodies get sexually violated need to be carefully controlled and channelled for the violation to have the desired political effect. This contrasts with the relative ‘normality’ of the male sexual violation of female bodies.

Patriarchal anxiety around male sexuality is amplified in the figure of the soldier. For example, the American ideal of military masculinity ‘has been predicated on a rejection of the unmasculine’ (Belkin, 2012: 6). ⁹ At the same time, there is generally far more policing of rape victims’ speech than of rape (Alcoff, 2018: 17). This control is likely especially intense when it involves male victims of CRSV, where very specific meanings are aimed at, and all other, counterproductive, meanings that may taint soldiers must be effectively erased. Thus, we cannot simply assume that the relative invisibility of male victims stems from their relatively greater sense of shame, and then translate this assumption into a victim hierarchy favouring male victims. We must consider the larger structural forces that are complicit in this absence.

Since the sexually invulnerable, virile masculinity of the soldier is central to both the nation and to the logic of war (while the unmasculine or feminine is positioned as the ‘other of war’; Sjoberg, 2013: 215), the image of the sexually violated male body is potentially deeply disruptive of patriarchy. That is, it is disruptive if we are called upon to consider our ‘own men’ in this way. The other side of the coin is the clichéd image of the enemy as emasculated. The figure of the virile male soldier emphasizes how covertly central sex and gender are to nationhood, warfare and imaginaries of conquest. Belkin (2012: 7ff.) demonstrates many American leaders tried to assert their masculinity and thus their suitability for (peacetime) leadership through evoking associations with the military. The impossibly sexually invulnerable figure of the soldier thus also haunts peacetime constructs of the nation.

However, Belkin’s larger project is to show that, despite the ideal of military masculinity being predicated on the rejection of the unmasculine, there is nevertheless a set of ‘structuring contradictions’ (Belkin, 2012: 5) present in the figure of the soldier. This figure is fundamentally ambivalent in that the soldier must, on the one hand, exhibit the characteristics of a fearless aggressor, and on the other, exhibit the (unmasculine) characteristics of obedience, submission, docility, loyalty and self-sacrifice. Both sadism and masochism thus feature in the making of the soldier (Belkin, 2012: 10). The military produces and owns the virile body of the soldier. Military assessment and training procedures typically include moments of nudity and vulnerability, and of the evocation of feminized sexual subjugation under the ‘penetrating gaze of authority’ that communicates to the trainee that his body, inclusive of its sexuality, no longer belongs to himself (Belkin, 2012: 11). These insights raise the disturbing question of the extent to which the militarization of men involves and even requires their prior sexual subjugation, their being placed existentially in the position of the female rape victim. The focus on male victims of CRSV thus inexorably seems to lead us to focus on the sexuality of the masculine soldier/perpetrator as it is instrumentalized for war purposes. This difficult question likely lurks beneath much of the resistance to the acknowledgement of male rape victims and the construct of male soldier perpetrators who rape because they can.

Conclusion

It would seem that scholars agree that, in order to get a good grasp of CRSV as a phenomenon, we need fresh gender analyses that include the sexual violation of male victims as well as the prior sexual dehumanization of male perpetrators. We thus underscore Lara Stemple’s (2009) position that proper acknowledgement of male victims of sexual violence, while it may mean a sharing of resources in the short term, will benefit female victims in the end. As long as the volatile emotions and affects associated with human sexuality remain at the unacknowledged centre of both nationhood and warfare, sexual violence will remain a central feature of armed conflict. There is no way that the decontextualized, and sanitized versions of CRSV produced by the international security industry and the international criminal law machinery can effectively address the phenomenon if the deeper contradictions of military culture and of the sexualized figure of the soldier are not incorporated.

We suggest we must confront and dismantle the enduring figure of the natural rapist, by directing attention to the laborious and violent processes of becoming-soldier, which apparently cannot be meaningfully divorced from processes of becoming-rapist. We thus open up a very necessary but very tentative gap between the man (or masculinized woman) and the perpetrator of CRSV. We do this by suggesting, based on phenomenological analysis, that the sexual aggression in soldiers is cultivated through encouraging in them a fearful flight from their own sexual vulnerability.