Male survivors of sexual violence cannot support the group’s social organization any longer, and the attack on their masculinity equates with a destruction of the group’s power structures. In this perspective, sexual violence is particularly efficient on civilian men, who don’t have a status of combatant to help them uphold their masculine status. Turning them into victims, incapable of protecting themselves or their relatives, deprives them of their claim to masculinity (Myrttinen 2003, 42). As we will discuss in the chapter on male survivors, stories of men being ostracized by their own families and wives after their “unfortunate experience” became known are, for instance, very common in sub-Saharan Africa, and many of them are henceforth excluded from communal activities. In that sense, patriarchy multiplies the effects of sexual violence against men so that affects not only the survivor and his close relatives but also the whole community, which is left humiliated, unprotected and disempowered. These men cannot be men any longer, they cannot embody the dominant model of masculinity anymore. As a result, the communities to which they belong lose their ethnicity, they symbolically become communities of “women”, of “homosexuals”, symbolically and psychologically deprived of any ability to regenerate and perpetuate themselves.
In very patriarchal societies, where sexuality remains extremely taboo, and where male power and invulnerability constitute a core organizing principle, sexual violence against men seems to embody the ultimate transgression, the one that will underline the omnipotence of the transgressor, while depriving the victim of the means and the will to revolt. If sexual violence against women admittedly gives to armed groups and armies a sense of power and control, then sexual violence against men cannot but be seen as the ultimate form of control over populations, as well as over territory and resources, which local men usually “own”. By sexually “owning” men, perpetrators of male sexual brutalization symbolically appropriate what these men used to own, power, territories, wealth, women, and so on. Sexual violence against men can thus be interpreted as an expression of territoriality for the group of perpetrators, whereby the symbolic possession of (mostly civilian) populations is achieved through the possession and breaking of their males. It is a form of territorial domination that is inscribed in bodies, and that builds on the destruction of core social links. Communities and individuals alike are broken, and thus more malleable and less likely to revolt against those armed groups or armies, who try to assert their rule over them. Interestingly, even the potentiality of sexual violence against men can be used as an element of propaganda against the other side in an ethnic conflict context. In Serbia and Kosovo, for instance, Kosovo Albanians were accused by Serbs and Kosovo Serbs of using rape, including male rape, to terrorize Kosovo Serbs and force them to emigrate (Bracewell 2000).
The other important feature from which wartime sexual violence against men can draw and increase its effectiveness is patrilineality. In patrilineal societies, descent and ethnic (and sometimes also national) belonging are traced through the male line. This grants men the power to allow groups to reproduce and perpetuate themselves. But what is crucial to understand is that patrogenesis, the fact that only men are considered generative persons for a given ethnic or national group, is a source of both strength and vulnerability for concerned men, as “males alone possess the ability to bequeath to their offspring certain identity categories, or what might be called ‘social ontology’, such as membership in a family, tribe, or religious, ethnic, or other group” (King and Stone 2010, 330). In such settings, attacking men by raping, castrating or sexually humiliating them stems from a similar strategy to that of raping women: an ethnic cleansing one (see, for instance, Carlson 2006, 20; Carpenter 2006, 89). In societies where ethnicity is seen as being transmitted by males only, it is indeed a very efficient way to target specifically the bearer of ethnicity and hence to destroy his own capacity to perpetuate his ethnic group. Attacks on sexual organs, especially castration and mutilation, directly target the ethnic group’s capacity to reproduce itself in the future. As detailed by Sivakumaran (2007), in ethnic conflict settings perpetrators of wartime sexual violence against men seem to pursue three effects: emasculation/feminization, homosexualization and prevention of procreation, thus simultaneously resorting to the masculine/feminine dichotomy, the heterosexual norm and patriarchal principles. In the former Yugoslavia, for instance, men’s genitals were beaten or even destroyed in what can be understood as an attempt to annihilate their reproductive functioning and to guarantee that they would not be able to produce ethnic minority children in the future. But sexually assaulting men of the “other” ethnic group also ensures the shattering of the social and cultural order, by using heteronormativity in order to instill confusion about the masculinity of those who are supposed to sustain patrilineality. This strategy often proves effective since, as we will see in chapter 4, most male survivors I have met feel confused about their gender identity, or have the feeling of having been “homosexualized”, of having been deprived of their masculinity and of their capacity to support their relatives and community.
By contrast, the figure of combatant that is enforced through these practices is that of a strong, fearless and extremely violent individual, often male, who exerts absolute physical and psychological domination on others, both men and women. There is ethnographic evidence that patrilineality favors a “strong masculine identity” (Paige and Paige 1981, 10), which might feed hegemonic and dominant masculinity models by increasing competition between fraternity groups, and by rendering women “as, at most, nurturers and containers but not cogenerators-genitors of life” (King and Stone 2010, 331). It is, therefore, interesting to see that patrilineal systems also come to reinforce the feminization/subjugation and masculinization/domination effects of sexual violence, by underscoring the empowered status of victorious males. In these circumstances, assaulting or castrating men from the “enemy” group entails the symbolic appropriation of this group’s masculinity. It demonstrates its weakness, and underscores its subordinate status (Zarkov 2001, 78).
It is also important to observe that the effectiveness of sexual violence against men is enhanced by the synergy existing in the way ethnic belonging and gender function. As Cynthia Cockburn has observed (2004a, 30), both are exclusionary and serve to produce “others”: “There are both similarities and differences between gender and ethnicity in the processes they involve and in the effects they produce. They are alike in tending towards an ‘othering’ process in which a non-self is defined and excluded in the very process of defining the self”. Both produce a certain societal structuring (creating hierarchies, differences, etc.) and function as legitimization resources for particular cultural, social, economic, political or military actors. Both also operate as cognitive shortcuts for making sense of the world, by creating simple dichotomies around which societies operate: masculinity is opposed to femininity, and in-group to out-group. In that perspective, wartime sexual violence against men performs a double othering on survivors, who are subjugated through both feminization, and ethnic domination (or annihilation). In other words, their masculinity is doubly negated: as males, and as patrilineal agents. This is what Chodorow (2002, 256), referring to genocidal situations, describes: “Challenges to ethnicity and nation threaten individual and collective selfhood, and the close developmental and experiential interlinking of selfhood and gender mean that masculinity is also threatened. Humiliation from men (the man-boy dichotomy) becomes linked with fears of feminization (the male-female dichotomy)”.