This drawing is from a photo set making the rounds on Tumblr. As forgetpolitics wrote:
For anyone who only sees gender and sex in black and white, here’s proof by the lovely humon that nature is just as fluid with representations of gender and sex as we are.
The photo set includes stylized images of various different species, along with descriptions of their reproductive behaviors. For the most part, I really like them. However, this one about the Spotted Hyena angered me. It reads:
A lot of animals turn our ideas of gender roles upside-down, but the Spotted Hyenas take it to the extreme.
Females are larger and far more aggressive than males, and even the lowest female in the hierarchy is over the highest ranking male. This hierarchy is so strong that adult males are scared of female puppies, and for good reason. Adult daughters show kindness towards their fathers by being less violent to them than to other males.
And it doesn’t stop there. Female hyenas have pseudo-penises that can get erect and are bigger and longer than the males’ penises, and make it very difficult for males to mate with females, and rape impossible. An erect penis is however seen as a sign of weakness, so males will present their erections to females to show submission the same way other animals present their throats.
Did you spot the triggering comment? Check it out, emphasis added:
Female hyenas have pseudo-penises that can get erect and are bigger and longer than the males’ penises, and make it very difficult for males to mate with females, and rape impossible.
While I won’t claim to know very much at all about Spotted Hyena mating behaviors or their culture, this photo set is clearly trying to make a point about human diversity, not hyena culture, so I feel perfectly justified in calling bullshit on this phraseology.
In fact, there are so many things wrong with this statement I hardly know where to start. Should I start by calling bullshit on the absurdity of the implication that all rapists are men—and have penises? That all rape is penetrative—a falsehood still codified into United States law as recently as three months ago? That all survivors of rape are female? (Totally untrue.)
I understand that this detail about rape is not actually the author’s intent, but I am nonetheless infuriated at the blanket assumption that, as a man, I’m inherently a rapist. And while I do understand the underlying survival trait beneath that blanket assumption, it’s nevertheless not merely an inhumane way to talk about people—and I know we can do better than that—I think it’s actually an artifact of rape culture. An artifact that has been hurting me, very personally, for a very long time.
These are surely utterly obvious things…to anyone with a penis that hasn’t used it to rape. Even though, admittedly, that’s a terrifyingly small fraction of the human population. At least, I think these things are obvious. Aren’t they…?
Update: It’s terrifying for me to have written this. It’d mean a lot to me if you also read this interpretation of my post. Excerpted:
[T]he cultural myth that all rape is committed by people with penises, that all people with penises are rapists (or potential rapists), and that rape necessarily involves inserting a penis into an orifice […] reinforces rape culture in […] major ways.
[For instance, i]t encourages us to believe that what makes someone a potential rapist is *the fact that they have a penis* rather than their personal relationship to consent. This is dangerous for many reasons […] we rarely talk about: It encourages many young cisgender men (and others) to internalize the belief that having a penis makes them a rapist NO MATTER WHAT they do – thus, they might as well just give up (either on sexual relationships entirely or on consent) and not even try.
[…]
I can’t count the number of men in my life with whom I’ve had conversations in which they express hopelessness and despair about [that] point[…]. These are the men who are choosing NOT to pursue intimate relationships (or are pursuing them only with extreme trepidation), because they either don’t trust their own grasp of consent or because potential partners perceive their grasp of consent as a lack of interest.
This conversation is heartbreaking for me[…].