Old Testament Accounts Of Sexual Assault

The book of Genesis is known for many things, including the Biblical creation narrative, the description of the first human sin, and the great flood of chapters 6-9.  What few associate Genesis with, however, is stories involving women who sexually assault men.  It is far easier to find people who are aware of Old Testament stories where women are sexually victimized by men, to the point where the stories about male victims of female perpetrators are not even properly identified as stories of sexual assault.

While these accounts of female-male sexual assault are heinously dismissed or ignored by the vast majority of all Christians, plenty of attention is given to the Old Testament accounts of male-female sexual assault.  In fact, the increasing popularity of the idea that David rapes Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11 shows that many Christians are even willing to misrepresent certain Biblical stories in an effort to address male-female rape.  There is no indication in the the text that Bathsheba was coerced into sex with David.  In fact, it is apparent upon reading 2 Samuel 11 that Bathsheba was not a victim of sexual assault--but Lot and Joseph certainly were.

Even if the Old Testament account of the affair between David and Bathsheba did actually imply that David raped Bathsheba (as an aside, how many people who hold to this baseless theory would actually say that rape was involved if the genders were reversed?), it would be far from obvious upon reading the text, whereas the fact that Lot's daughters had sex with him while he was drunk and the fact that Potiphar's wife repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances at Joseph plainly mean that these two men were sexually assaulted by women.  Many who pretend to endorse Biblical gender equality will enormously exaggerate the severity of David's offense while completely ignoring the multiple blatant female-male sexual assaults in the book of Genesis.

In light of this, that alleged Christian feminists choose to rally around a false or weak understanding of David's sexual encounter with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11 while ignoring Genesis 19 and 39 reveals that they are not genuine feminists.  After all, genuine feminism, as opposed to the distortions championed by one class of imbeciles and mistaken for actual feminism by another, is synonymous with egalitarianism: it is the ideology of complete gender equality in a legal, social, moral, and metaphysical sense.  Just as anyone who distorts Biblical Christianity cannot be a legitimate representative of the Bible, anyone who only condemns or is concerned with the injustices facing one gender cannot be a feminist.

A true egalitatian would not try to use the systematic discrimination against one gender as a basis for trivializing or ignoring the systematic discrimination against the other gender.  Biblical accounts of male-female rape are important and deserve attention, although the Bible does not say that David raped Bathsheba; however, just as important (and far more deserving of emphasis at the present time) are the Biblical accounts of female-male sexual assault, which have been neglected for far longer than the other sexual assaults in the Bible have been.  There are fewer barriers for female victims of sexual assault in the West than before, but very few of the barriers for male victims of sexual assault--especially when women are the aggressors--have been removed.  All true egalitarians will recognize this and react accordingly.