I’d like men to really stop and think about how they would behave if false accusations of sexual assault (that are then investigated seriously) were relatively common. What if 1 in 10 or 2 in 10 men could expect to face such a situation in their lifetimes.
If a man was going on a first date with a woman he might want to meet for a daytime coffee rather than an evening drink. He might want to say goodbye in front of the coffee place in public rather than allow her to walk him home. He might want to tell his friends where he was going when going on a date and check in with them after so they knew where he was and when.
If going to a party he might always want to stick with a friend he went with and be nervous about breaking away from the people he knew to spend time with a woman he hadn’t met before. If a woman came on to him and he wasn’t interested he might register that situation as dangerous, he might try to take care of her feelings lest she retaliate.
He might feel pressure to behave in a way that convinced his family, friends, co-workers, etc., that he is not the sort of guy who is really interested in sex to make sure that people wouldn’t think that a false accusation sounded right.
In case I’ve been too subtle: A man who is truly afraid of false sexual assault complaints should probably act around women the way that women* act around men.
I want men to absorb this: If we took half the sexual harassment out there and replaced them with seriously investigated false accusations of sexual harassment and if we took half the rapes and replaced them with men being falsely imprisoned for rape, the world would not be a less just place. It’s just that the brunt of the injustice would be more equally shared between the sexes.
* #NotAllWomen
Thanks for writing this. I was very recently in a conversation on the subject of accusations of sexual assault (there’s a lot of them these days) where this was exactly the issue but I couldn’t quite articulate it. (I said something about “apportioning benefit of the doubt” which was considerably less direct)
Of course that conversation was about Spacey, so it wasn’t about a woman. But as you say, male victims face similar problems. When a man is a victim of sexual assault, he becomes an honorary member of the club. Women are members from birth.
Which makes me think about just how much power and authority we all assign to a person who commits these assaults. Our attitudes towards woman make it easy to dismiss a female victim. But the fact that we will dismiss male victims makes me feel like there is also a deference to people who commit sexual assault.
We think we hate “rapists” because we mythologize them as soulless outcasts who lurk in the shadows and overpower victims they’ve never met. We think a “rapist” is a thing we could pick out of a room. In reality, I think we have a very complicated emotional relationship with people who rape; we say they are bad, we think they are bad, but as a society we in many ways act as though they are powerful and worthy of respect.
As a person with some very serious questions about my own gender, I forgive you! 
I find men can sometimes react very badly to “believe women” or even “believe victims”. As if they think people are calling for a reversal of the burden of proof in criminal cases. It’s frustrating because as far as I know, I’m the only person in the world who is crazy enough to actually suggest going that far.
