Timothy was angry. He had been at a party the previous Saturday, had too much to drink, passed out on a bed and woke up to find Shelly trying to undo his jeans. Mike thought this was funny, but Eric didn’t. He’d had a similar experience– Shelly had tried to give him a blowjob when he was asleep.
I knew that Shelly had a habit of targeting drunk men – it was one of the reasons I was no longer friendly with her – but this was the first time I realised the truth: Shelly was a sexual predator.
I suggested that this qualified as “assault”, but neither Tim or Eric agreed. On the other hand, they accepted that had the genders been reversed it definitely would have been classified as such. Instead they preferred to regard Shelly’s behaviour as “not cool”. Maybe that’s because we were 18, or maybe it was because a pair of six foot metalheads were uncomfortable seeing themselves as victims of a five footnothing teenage girl.
Shelly was punished in one of the ways teenagers have at their disposal – public shaming and social ostracism. As a young person that’s quite a severe thing to go through, although nowhere near as severe as it might been, especially since it left her free to do the same with a brand new group of people.
Incidences of sexual assault and harassment are drastically under-reported but it is safe to say that the scale of the problem is huge. That’s true for women; and there is increasing evidence that it’s just as true for men.
Depending on where she is in the world, a woman’s chances of being raped can be as high as one in three. The Rape Crisis Network estimates that one in five women and one in five female children in Ireland have experienced some sort of sexual assault. The figures for men are equally depressing – one in ten Irish men and one in six boys.
Statistically speaking, the majority of perpetrators of sexual assault are male – or at least that’s what’s reported, because men are less likely to approach authorities if the perpetrator is female. The truth is, we just don’t know how many men have been sexually assaulted or harassed by women.
I asked a number of men about their experiences of sexual harassment by women.
I am not claiming my figures are in any way scientific as all the respondents were friends or acquaintances, but one in five reported sexual harassment, which I am defining as unwanted touching, groping or kissing. A smaller number, five percent, had experienced sexual assault by a woman.
There is a fear – genuinely founded – that any man reporting such harassment or assault would be treated as a joke. Men are supposed to be strong and fearless, and as my friend Ryan, himself a recent victim of an sexual harassment put it, “There’s the whole ‘men can’t be sexually harassed by women. Sure don’t they want all they can get’ attitude.”
That might be the attitude – but it is certainly not how it is experienced. Like women, men don’t find sexual harassment fun. They frequently find it deeply unpleasant, even if the perpetrator is a woman. The men I spoke to described feeling “frozen”, “confused” and “embarrassed.”
“Something happened when I was thirteen,” Niall told me. “A girl in my class grabbed my crotch, and rubbed it aggressively. I was stunned and felt violated and didn’t respond.
She seemed fed up with my fear and gave up. Didn’t last thirty seconds. Came out of nowhere. I haven’t ever told anybody.”
Niall has long since forgiven her. “She must have been dealing with lots of difficult, adult things in her life that I knew nothing about. That thought made me feel something human about her, and made it impossible for me to think ill of her.”
There is also the possibility that even more serious incidents of sexual harassment will never be reported to the police because men may not recognise it as such. That’s not to say that men don’t know this behaviour is wrong, but as a culture we’ve been conditioned to see sexual harassment as a male-on-female or male-on-male issue. Donal’s experience is a case in point.
“I was sexually harassed by a woman in work. This was a good few years ago. She used to tell me that it was ‘such a waste’ that I was gay, tell me in graphic detail about sexual dreams that she had about me, and grope me as I passed.
I told her not to touch me, and she did again. I told her that I couldn’t bear to be touched by anyone (a lie) and she did again. I told her to not fucking touch me under any circumstances and she did again.
“I felt weird and didn’t know what to do about it. I felt that I couldn’t say anything as a man, in some ways, as stupid as that sounds. It was only on Stephen’s Day as I burst into tears over dinner with the family that I realised something had to be done, especially after my sister said, ‘If you were a woman, and she was a man, she’d be sacked’.
“I told my boss what was happening. She suggested that the first thing to do was that one of us spoke to her again, since I didn’t want to make an official complaint just yet: I didn’t want to get her fired. I did, and with the weight of ‘I’ve just told our boss that you’ve been sexually harassing me’ and she finally stopped.”
Like Eric, Conor had experienced a more serious assault, and like everyone I spoke to, he didn’t report it to the police.
“I was at a club and this woman wouldn’t leave me alone. She kept grabbing me on the dancefloor and rubbing up against my crotch.
Later she followed me back to the table and sat on my lap. I told her to stop but she seemed to think it was a big joke. My friends thought so too, but mostly because she was drunk, and I’m not trying to be mean, but she was a very big girl. She started undoing my shirt and trying to touch my chest. I started roaring at her and the bouncer came over and threw me out.

“It wasn’t fair, but I didn’t really mind because I didn’t know how else I was going to get rid of her.
She followed me out, pushed me up against the wall and started kissing me. I pushed her off, but she was really strong and it wasn’t that easy. You’re not supposed to hit women but I felt I hadn’t much choice so I kicked her in the shins.
She started yelling and I legged it.”
In Western culture we regard women as the gatekeepers of sex, and all but deny that women have sexual agency, while men are seen as either hormonally charged beasts gagging for it night and day or as predators. In this reductive scenario, women are the supposedly ‘good’ sex, while men are ‘bad.’ This, of course, bears
little relation to the reality of most people’s sex lives or experiences.
Most women want sex, but maybe not with you; most men want sex, but again, maybe not with you.
It also means that female perpetrators of sexual assault tend to operate with impunity, or that women behaving in such ways may not see what they are doing as wrong. The legal system may agree – at least in the US, where female teachers who sexually assault teenage boys almost always get far more lenient sentences than male teachers who do the equivalent.
Sexual harassment of women is so pervasive that it is pretty close to one hundred percent, and sexual harassment of men is far more frequent than most people realise. Like women, male victims often don’t speak out, and in many ways our culture makes it even more difficult for them to do so. Incidents of more serious
sexual assault are unacceptably high for both men and women, and we rarely talk about these.
We naturally sympathise with child victims, because children are very definitely innocent, but we don’t give the same consideration to adults. Instead we victimblame: she was drunk; he was asking for it; she’s no better than a slut; he’s just making excuses.
All this does is empower the perpetrators.
Sexual harassment and assault are always wrong. If you don’t get an enthusiastic yes from a person old enough and sober enough to give you one (an enthusiastic yes, that is), it doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman, gay or straight: stop right there. If not, you’re committing a crime.