vijayjohn wrote:Thanks! I find that people don't talk much about men abusing women, but they talk about that more than about men abusing other men.[...] I get the impression that people talk especially rarely about women abusing men, I think even more than about abusive gay relationships.
I think there's a lot of interaction with how either masculinity or homosexuality is discussed in a society.
Talking about adult men abusing male minors is the only "easy" discussion. Everyone, within a rounding error, agrees that's abuse and wrong. Unfortunately, the same is not the case if the victim is a female minor, going by the reactions in recent such cases in Cyprus. A girl is always "a little slut pretending to be an adult and got what's coming from her", this was never said for a raped boy in all the years I follow the news.
If traditional gender roles dominate in a society though, a man raped by a woman is only sympathetic in the "stolen sperm" case. More generally, an abused man is sympathetic if they suffer material exploitation by a woman - exploitation through alimony/child support is the only issue men associations bring up in Cyprus. Other than this abuse of a man's role as a provider, I don't remember any other form of abuse going public that doesn't result to ridicule of victim.
As for gay domestic abuse, I think I have more insight as to why we rarely talk about it. Even 10 years after we stopped being invisible in Cyprus, we still feel like we have to conform to extremely more stringent standards than the wider society, because we "have" to prove we are not all monsters. When "some of us" are abusers, we are afraid of reporting it because homophobes will go "We told you so!". I don't even know how complaints will be treated by investigators if they are made. The fixation on penetration and the belief that the one who penetrates by definition wants to be doing it is pervasive.