This world can be a very dangerous place for women. I think nearly all of us have known women who have been raped and brutalized. Many of them have been harmed by men who are supposed to love them--fathers, brothers, boyfriends, husbands. There are so-called honor killings, girls are shot for wanting an education, women’s bodies are mutilated to prevent them from enjoying sex, women are subjected to corrective and punitive rape. It’s horrific and frightening, and we should pay attention to these things. We should try to prevent them if possible. Understanding the dynamics involved may help.

But I’ve noticed that sometimes our concern for the safety of women is expressed in such a way that we subtly and sometimes overtly imply that we need not concern ourselves with the safety of men. And yet every day men are regularly assaulted, raped, brutalized, and murdered. Every day. All the time. All around the world. The world can be a very dangerous place for women, to be sure, but it’s often no cakewalk for men either.

When I was young, I regularly heard people say that it is wrong for a man to hit a woman. But rarely did I hear anyone say it was wrong it hit a man or a boy, and yet I regularly saw men and boys beaten up and threatened. I was regularly threatened, intimidated and bullied myself. I remember being terrified of going into the boys room and locker room at school because those places were totally unsupervised. School in general was a very scary place for me. And I got of easy compared to some.

I’ve noticed how many act differently when a boy is attacked. People show sympathy when a girl is hit. But when I was young, boys were asked if they held their own or if they hit back. When I was bullied, few defended me. And when the incident was over, people would come up to me and tell me how I should have punched that guy. Well, that just wasn’t in me. Did that make the bullying, the threats, the name calling, the shoves, the smacks, the intimidation okay? When I was in middle school, a sixteen or seventeen-year-old boy came up to me while I was waiting on the school bus and punched me hard in the middle of my chest for no reason. I was told I should have hit him back. I was twelve, and I wasn’t a fighter. A sixteen-year-old girl kicked me in the nuts at that same bus stop and everyone laughed.

I thought when I went away to college, I could finally put all that behind me. But I soon found out that gay boys were regularly assaulted when they left the local gay bar. Luckily, no one every physically attacked me, but I was threatened and intimidated several times. Several boys on my dorm floor that year were beaten up. They’d show up for dinner with black eyes, and they’d tell everyone how they were jumped for no reason at all while walking back to the dorm after a night class.

Right before finals my freshman year, I went home with a boy I met at the gay bar. Even though he was drunk and sullen, I actually thought of myself as lucky because I thought he was sexy. I let him top me even though he was rather large. He wasn’t careful, and he began to hurt me. I told him to stop, and he did stop for a minute. He looked down at me and asked me if it was because his dick was so big. I said yes. That’s when an evil smile appeared on his face and he started fucking me again, only harder. He had me pinned. My knees were up beside my ears. I couldn’t throw him off. I just had to endure it until he was finished. While I was getting dressed, he actually had the nerve to ask me to come back the next night.

I was very sore for days, and I also bled. That really scared me because I was afraid I would have to go to the doctor and explain that I had allowed a boy to fuck me. I was afraid my parents would find out. And because men aren’t supposed to allow themselves to be victims, it was years before I put what happened in the proper framework inside my head. That man sexually assaulted me. And I was in my thirties before I told anyone what happened. No means no even when the person saying it is a man. And it’s never okay to force someone to have sex with you. I cringe when I hear people joke about men being raped in prison or claim that it’s okay because they’re criminals. I sometimes think about how awful it would be to be a prisoner, to be subjected to physical and sexual abuse and to have virtually no one care.

The summer after my freshman year, I went home and I got my old job back at McDonald’s. I often worked in the kitchen with a homophobe who was openly hostile toward me. He would point out young men who were waiting in line at the counter and say things like, “Hey, Cottle, why don’t you go ask that guy if you can suck his dick. You know you want to.” He would say these things in front of coworkers and even in front of managers sometimes, and no one ever told him to stop.

I went to the restroom once, and while I was peeing at the urinal, he came out of one of the stalls. When he saw me, he grinned, pulled his dick out of his pants and told me I should do him a favor before he started his shift. I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

He was fired not long after that. He was allowed to treat me any way he wanted, but showing up late and not working fast enough wasn’t tolerated. I assumed I would never have to deal with him again. But one night I was asked to clean up the dinning room. We were about to close and no one was around, and when I went over to the area that was out of sight of the counter and the kitchen, my former coworker came in with a friend. When he saw me, he came right up to me, and before I could think of what to do, he grabbed me and shoved my face into his crotch. He called me all kinds of homophobic names as he held my face between his legs. And his friend laughed. I wasn’t strong enough to push him off. I just had to wait until he was tired of humiliating me.

I didn’t have a car, so my father came to get me when I worked at night. Thankfully, he had not arrived yet. If he had, he would have seen everything. He always parked right outside those windows on that side of the building. I seriously doubt he would have tried to stop those boys. Instead he would have asked me why I hadn’t defended myself.

That’s the way they got you when I was young. If you were a boy, you were fair game. And if you couldn’t defend yourself, that meant you deserved it.

I know that I didn’t have it as bad as some. I know a lot of people, male and female, have gotten it a lot worse than I ever did. A lot worse. But I don’t think it’s any more okay to brutalize men and boys than it’s okay to brutalize girls and women. And I think in a world where it’s okay in threaten and inflict violence on men, women aren’t going to be safe either. I don’t think you can protect one sex and not the other.