The misconception that men cannot be sexually abused, assaulted, or molested by women is entrenched in gender stereotypes that portray males as perpetual sexual initiators rather than potential victims.
By Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto
I remember discussing issues of molestation with an X woman I met in Lincoln, Nebraska. She told me, quite boldly, that she could not imagine a boy or a man being molested; she said she simply could not picture such a scenario in her mind. The reasons why she said this might be personal, but I found myself unsettled by her response, especially after I had shared a personal experience. I had to excuse myself because I could not fully grasp how such a limitation could still exist in this period, even after everything in the news, music, literature, and movies telling us about ourselves and our societies.
Male molestation by women, particularly involving boys, remains one of the most overlooked and misunderstood forms of sexual abuse. A common and widely known barrier to reporting is stigma. Boys and men are often socialised to believe that they are supposed to be sexually dominant and incapable of being victimised. In the occurrence of molestation or abuse, the male victim may hesitate to report it, not necessarily because he doubts the harm done, but because he fears how others will react or, in some cases, is expected to enjoy it.
On another spectrum, men are frequently seen as always willing or always in control of sexual dynamics. And that is a wrong orientation and perception. The possibility that the incident could become public may cause anxiety. He may worry that friends, peers, or even authorities will minimise his experience or mock him for being affected by it. This fear of invalidation can be strong enough to silence victims, even before they ever seek help.
The misconception that men cannot be sexually abused, assaulted, or molested by women is entrenched in gender stereotypes that portray males as perpetual sexual initiators rather than potential victims. Because of this, when a boy experiences sexual coercion or abuse from a woman, some people may interpret it as a “lucky” experience rather than a traumatic one.
Such reactions not only distort the seriousness of the violation but also exacerbate the psychological harm. Instead of receiving empathy, the victim may face disbelief or even ridicule. This response reinforces the harmful idea that consent is irrelevant when the victim is male, despite the well-established reality that sexual assault can affect individuals of any sex, gender, gender identity, or expression.
I have been thinking recently about male sexual abuse to the extent that I would like to share my story. When I was five years old, X and Y were living with our family. I cannot guess their ages, but I remember they were in secondary school at that time. One afternoon, because they made a rule that my sister and I must have our afternoon nap, I readied for bed. And keeping to that rule, I had climbed onto the bed grudgingly while they were in another bed, with my sister sleeping between them. My mother was at work, and my father was in some country doing research.
After about thirty minutes or so, X was uneasy on her side of the bed, I thought, until I realised she was actually touching herself. I watched her from my side as I pieced together the images of the naked women and men I had seen in a magazine I found carelessly hidden away in her bag. The images were raw in my head. She saw me and gestured for me to come to her. When I went over, she carried me onto herself, pulled out my penis, and touched it until my body started to surge and surge. Seeing what she had expected, she guided me into herself. She bounced me up and down on herself, each time angling herself for the best position. That was when Y awoke. Y wasn’t surprised when she saw us. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and watched us. When X was done with me, she carried me over to Y.
When everything was done, they were tired, and I, not knowing what had really happened, was smiling. It was during that smiling that X told Y that I possibly would tell my mum about the whole thing. They deliberated about this idea, unsure and sure at the same time that I would tell on them. Y stood up and came over to me and ordered me to lick their wetness off my penis. I responded with a wide-eyed gaze.
She was serious because I could see the change in her countenance as it turned stern. I, not wanting to be scolded or beaten, arched myself to lick my penis. But I couldn’t. I tried again and again. My mouth couldn’t reach my penis. X pressed down on my back, making a C with my body. It was so painful that I screamed and started crying and pleading. Y yelled and, with such anger in her voice, “Promise you wouldn’t tell your mother…” X was pressing on my back so hard that it felt like my back would break. I promised with utmost sincerity I could muster, with tears all over my face. They finally took me for my word and let me be. Just like I promised them then, I didn’t tell my mum until I was three decades old.
Memory is a stubborn thing, and it has many times pushed me to wonder whether X and Y still remember that day. I saw Y a few years back; she asked me for money for something, and I was uneasy with the request. All that was swimming in my head then was: do you remember what you did to me? I don’t know if she was playing forget or if life has happened to her that she might have suppressed that day with other days in her head. Some of my male friends have also narrated how, during their childhood, some neighbours have invited them into their rooms when no one was looking, and gave them sweets and biscuits in return to keep quiet after being touched. Some of them recounted their experiences in the light of good experiences.
In an interview titled “My Mum Doesn’t Support My Career, Wants Me To Follow Her Footsteps And Be A Pastor”, hosted by TREND CENTRL on YouTube, at 23:37 of the conversation, the interviewer refers to the artiste 6uff as a “sex symbol”. 6uff is visibly shocked by this declaration. Since 6uff agrees that he is able to attract women, what this moment exposes is something more complicated, which I think is the difference between being desired and being reduced to desire. The phrase “sex symbol” flattens the person into an object of projection, and a body onto which fantasies are placed, rather than a subject with boundaries or interiority.
Earlier in the conversation, 6uff also expresses discomfort at being called “daddy”, and there are clear reasons for his resistance. On the surface, it may sound like playful slang or admiration, but it is also about assumptions on dominance, sexual availability, and a kind of public ownership of his image. These labels—whether “daddy”, “sex symbol”, or other forms of casual sexual naming—show how male bodies are also subject to unwanted framing, even when society often assumes that only women experience objectification or sexual overreach. This can become confusing because it is frequently disguised as praise. And this is where the discussion begins to connect with other questions of molestation and even consent.
Another critical issue here is that when boys eventually disclose abuse, they may fear that their personality will be questioned. Friends who lack education about sexual violence may frame the experience as a challenge to the victim’s strength or sexual competence. These judgments can be damaging. Instead of being supported, the victim may feel emasculated or ashamed. Speaking about shame, I do not mean shame for what was done to a boy, but shame for even suggesting it affected him. A boy who identifies an experience as wrong risks being labelled weak for doing so. He risks mockery. He risks the erosion of his social standing. So he chooses endurance over exposure. This means that they are denied recognition when they speak out. The tragedy is that many grow into men who have never revisited certain memories with rectitude and honesty. Another tragedy, one would see, is that society confuses the absence of complaint with the absence of harm.
Furthermore, the internal conflict that male victims experience can be profound. A boy who has been molested by a woman may struggle to reconcile his feelings of violation with society’s expectation that he should have wanted the experience. Even when he clearly knows that the encounter was nonconsensual, he may question his own reaction. The trauma is therefore compounded; not only did the abuse violate his bodily autonomy, but the social response undermines his identity. This double harm often discourages future disclosure and prevents access to counselling or justice. If peers respond by joking or suggesting he should feel proud, the victim may begin to doubt the legitimacy of his own trauma. This is a common and documented psychological response in the sense that when victims are invalidated, they often suppress their emotions rather than process them. Over time, this suppression can lead to isolation, anxiety, depression, and difficulties forming healthy relationships.
Tender masculinity is a contemporary cultural concept that encourages men to embrace emotional openness, vulnerability, empathy, and care. These are traits traditionally coded as feminine within some gender systems. Emerging more visibly in the late 2010s, particularly between 2018 and 2020 through social media discourse, mental health advocacy, and broader critiques of toxic masculinity, it developed as part of a wider cultural reexamination of male identity.
Tender masculinity seeks to redefine strength not as dominance or emotional suppression, but as emotional intelligence, accountability, and compassion. It tends to achieve greater emotional literacy among men, encourages healthier relationships, and reduces stigma around male mental health struggles. By validating vulnerability, it challenges the long-standing belief that masculinity must be stoic, sexually assertive, or emotionally detached.
However, tender masculinity is not without limitations. Some critics argue that it can become performative, even functioning more as an aesthetic or social label than a continuous principled commitment to change. In some cases, expressions of softness may coexist with unexamined privilege or power.
Additionally, while tender masculinity promotes emotional openness, it does not automatically dismantle the social myths about male invulnerability, particularly the misconception that boys or men cannot be victims of sexual abuse by women. Although a cultural shift toward vulnerability may create a safer space for male survivors to speak, stigma surrounding female-perpetrated abuse often persists.
Furthermore, society may still trivialise or misunderstand boy molestation by women, framing it as initiation rather than violation. Thus, while tender masculinity has the potential to support male victims by legitimising emotional expression, it cannot, on its own, undo entrenched gender stereotypes that minimise male and boy victimisation. Meaningful change requires not only softer models of masculinity. It should also involve extensive structural and educational efforts that confront myths about consent, power, and abuse, regardless of gender.
Years ago, a friend of mine, while discussing boys and life at secondary school, told me that during the NECO examination (NECO stands for the National Examinations Council, a federal government-owned examination body in Nigeria established in April 1999) in his secondary school, a female teacher strode into the exam hall and said that all the boys had to be searched for “expo.” That school was an all-boys secondary school, just like the one I attended, and they were made to write exams in their boxers and singlets. They told the woman that they had all been searched by the civil defence official sent for that examination. But she insisted she must search everyone herself. There were over 100 boys in the hall, and this woman went on and started digging her hand into these boys’ shorts and boxers, frisking their penises, as she searched for expo. She touched over 100 penises of students, including minors. This friend told me that every time he remembers or thinks about this, his jaw drops.
I think about how we, little boys, gathered in secondary school and boasted about the foolery with older women. How it never occurred to us that we were victims. We were too proud to conceive that notion as being abused. And some of those who didn’t get to be with older women dabbled in masturbation.
Now, I am not saying masturbation is wrong or bad, but my concern is the angle at which some boys were introduced to it. The angle was that, because they couldn’t have this, then they could do that, and boys would gather under a tree or behind a house, especially in a very small group, and masturbate. The following day, they would laugh over it as jokes or make fun of the faces each one made during ejaculation. In the later years, in another scenario, a young adult or an adult would tell his friends that he never masturbated as a young boy and still does not do so as an adult, to which his friends would respond by cajoling him to the core, thinking he was lying.
To extend this case a little further, one begins to see how the male’s space is often formed through suspicion; his differentness is mocked or interrogated. The possibility that a boy or man might simply exist outside certain collective tropes appears unbelievable to others because how to be a male has already been framed as something that ‘must’ be publicly proven or accepted. This begs to be deconstructed because it badly affects any progressive society. In some ways, the pressure was never really about desire itself, if I am to look at it that way, but about avoiding the risk of appearing abnormal before other boys and men. And perhaps this is precisely why many boys never come to understand certain experiences as abuse at all, because society has already taught them to interpret violation as achievement, and sometimes something not to talk about.
Most men, obviously, were too proud to conceive the notion that they were abused because they were taught to do so. Ask your brothers. Ask them their stories, the stories of other boys. Ask. Please Ask. And it begs to be said that in many African contexts, the boy-child is raised inside a mythology of endurance, which I have a serious problem with. This boy would grow into a man, and he would endure a lot in his lifetime up to his death, and society would gather around his casket and sing, “He was a great man”.
A great man for a man who was not taught to be just human, a good human at that; not taught how to treat women and fellow men well, and taught not to share his emotions, and so on. And that he must not cry. He must not complain. He must not interpret discomfort as harm. To this man, from childhood, he is forced to learn and only know that strength is everything, and vulnerability is foreign. I do not think we talk enough about how male violence distorts masculinity itself. If a boy’s boundaries are crossed and he is told implicitly or explicitly that it does not count, he sees that boundaries are negotiable or not at all. So when something inappropriate happens to him, he is expected to reach first for pride. And that is utterly wrong!
Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. He is the author of The Naming and won the 2018 Castello di Duino Poesia Prize, Italy, and the 2022 Special ANMIG poetry prize, organised by the Centro Giovanni e Poesia di Truiggio, Italy. In 2023, he was a runner-up in the Sparks Poetry Competition, Memorial University, Canada and in the African and African-American Studies Program Contest hosted by UNL’s Institute for Ethnic Studies. He is the author of The Naming (Nebraska Press, 2025). His works have appeared or forthcoming in Transition Magazine, Massachusetts Review, Joyland, Oxford Poetry, and World Literature Today.