When Women Rape Men

The story of Potiphar's wife from Genesis 39 is fairly well-known by Christians.  Potiphar's wife found herself sexually attracted to her husband's servant Joseph, contrary to evangelical myths about female sexuality, because she thought he had a beautiful body.  Instead of handling her sexual attraction in a Biblically legitimate way--like having sex with her husband, masturbating [1], or simply experiencing or enjoying her feelings for Joseph while never desiring to commit a sexual sin--she persistently demanded that Joseph commit adultery with her.

Eventually she caught him alone, seized his clothing, and repeated her demand before Joseph fled.  She then accused Joseph of trying to rape her, when perhaps the opposite was the case.  At the very least, she sexually harassed Joseph despite him clarifying that he had no interest in her advances (the belief that these rejections were a struggle for Joseph is just a fallacious and usually sexist assumption).  She may have even intended to rape him if he would not sleep with her.  Some might ask themselves, But how can a woman actually rape a man?

I can think of several obvious scenarios.  A woman could exploit an intoxicated man (as Lot's daughters exploited his state of drunkenness), hold him at gunpoint, or blackmail him, to list just three situations where a woman could have sex with a man against his will or without his consent.  If a man sleeps with an intoxicated woman, my culture would react in an uproar, and rightly so; but if a text as familiar to Christians as the Bible can contain such a clear example of a woman sleeping with an intoxicated man without the readers condemning this just as strongly, then any Christians who overlook this are guilty of egregious sexism.  The mockery some direct towards male victims of female sexual harassment is just as much of a moral abomination as the trivialization of sexual harassment inflicted upon women by men.  All rape, including rape of men by women, deserves death [2].

The Bible also contains a story of women succeeding in raping a man, and not merely attempting to.  In Genesis 19, before the story of Potiphar's wife, one can read of Lot's daughters getting him drunk with the explicit intention to have sex with him so that they could become pregnant.  Why is the fact that women raped a man dismissed or ignored?  It's not because the text is ambiguous, because it is not.  It is because the abuse of men by women is often denied, trivialized, or met with apathy.

To say that women cannot rape men betrays a laughable ignorance of logic.  The Bible itself plainly denies such a myth just by offering the stories that it does, although somehow the ramifications of these stories go unmentioned by almost everyone.  The fact that many theologians ignore these ramifications is not because they are not obvious in the text.  It is because erroneous stereotypes (all stereotypes are irrational by nature) are embraced by evangelical Christendom that these aspects of the stories are not commonly taught.

I have mentioned in a different post that if I were to retell the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife without providing the genders of the figures, many people would likely assume that the aggressor was a man, and that the victim was a woman.  This is because of the willingness of most people to make assumptions, not because reality actually stands behind them!  The idea that a sin is gender-specific, whether that sin is rape or something else, is as destructive as it is stupid.  The Bible describes at least one example of a female-male rape and one example of a woman sexually harassing a man, maybe going so far as to attempt to rape him.  Basic exegesis illuminates these facts.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.


[1].  Though logic easily shows that masturbation does not have to be accompanied by thoughts of a specific person or of anyone at all, there is still nothing sinful about thinking of a certain person while masturbating.  Masturbation and sexual attraction, regardless of one's marital status and the marital status of the person the attraction is experienced for, are not sinful on their own, so the combination of them cannot be sinful (Deuteronomy 4:2), even if in masturbating a person intentionally focuses on the fact that the attraction is to someone who is not his or her spouse.  Sexual attraction is not lust, as I have proven elsewhere multiple times.  Besides, it is impossible for a person to lust after a single person because of the way the Bible defines lust, and Joseph was single.

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/06/misunderstanding-bible-on-rape.html