"Predatory Behavior" and the Law

Part III:   Categories of Male Oppression

Legal/Legislative

            I meet Lucas Vale at the Mississippi State Prison, just outside of Parchment, a little over two hours north of Jackson, Mississippi.  His shoulder muscles bulge under the orange jumpsuit he is required to wear.  His face is haggard and his mocha brown eyes are tired.

            "It's been a tough day," he confides. 

            Vale is twenty-seven.  One night in 2008, he ran out of cigarettes.  He walked alone to a corner store to buy a pack of Marlboro Reds.

            "It was summer," he tells me.  "I had on a pair of shorts and t-shirt.  I wasn't looking for trouble.  I just wanted some smokes."

            On his way to the corner store, he encountered a woman who was having car trouble.  "It was very simple.  She just needed to tighten the fan belt."  Vale returned home, got some tools and fixed the problem.  When they got the car working again, she gave him a ride to the store.  "I didn't touch her," he insists.  "We had a nice conversation.  She was pretty.  I was trying to be charming.  When she dropped me off at my place, I invited her in for a cup of coffee."

            That, Vale says, is when everything went wrong.  "She turned me down and forty-five minutes later, the cops were at my door."

            Arrested and charged with predatory sexual behavior, Vale spent three years fighting against the belief that he intended to rape her.  "I was just being sociable," he defends.  "I wasn't meaning for anything to happen.  I would've made the coffee and we could have drank it on the front porch.  I didn't have a motive."

            However, that is not what prosecutors believe.  Citing his past conviction for rape, prosecutors classified him as a repeat offender, which under Mississippi law meant his sentence would automatically be determined as fifteen years.

            I ask about the rape conviction.

            "Yes, it's a rape conviction, but it's fourth degree.  I was fifteen.  I lost my virginity to my girlfriend.  Her parents found out and pressed charges.  It was a couple of kids doing what kids do, but I paid the price for it."  Vale spent three years in a juvenile detention center before moving to the same prison he is in now to serve the last two years of his sentence.  "I got five years for losing my virginity."

            Vale's story is not unique.  Of the over four thousand five hundred inmates incarcerated with him, fifty-two percent are here on a conviction of rape in some degree.  "Once they have that on you, you can never escape it," he says.  "Everytime you talk with any women you're a suspect.  In a world where they throw you in prison because a woman is afraid of you, no matter how innocent you are, you end up here. " 

            The legal ramifications of the sexual oppression of men are severe.  The definition of rape as it stands in most states is limited to acts of penile, digital or oral penetration of a woman in any way without her expressed consent.  As it stands now, a man can be charged with rape in the fourth degree if he French kisses a woman against her will.  A bill currently moving through the New York State House of Representatives aims to push this definition even further, and redefine rape as any “unwanted sexual contact.”  Under this definition, if a man standing at a bar next to a woman accidentally brushes his arm against her breast, he could face criminal prosecution, which could result in a jail term ranging from five years in prison to life and in some cases would carry a mandatory punishment of chemical castration.

            Men are especially vulnerable to accusations of violence and charges of rape when they go out at night; the danger is even higher if they do so alone.  While men are still expected to initiate romantic contact, especially in the early stages of a relationship, they must do so carefully.  Men whose approach to women is aggressive or who “come on too strong” or who do not accept a rejection can be accused of stalking or “predatory behavior” a crime in all fifty states that carries a minimum of five years in behind bars and a maximum of twenty-five years.

            "This fight is beginning and long overdue," says Greg Manchet of the American Civil Liberties Union.  "Legally, we are damned if we do and, socially, damned if we don't.  And the laws are just getting worse."

            Congresswoman Maggie Franklin (R-GA) has presented a bill before the House of Representatives that seeks to criminalize any ‘non-reproductive release of semen.’  The bill, which includes nocturnal emissions under the terms of non-reproductive release, aims to end the waste of what Franklin calls, “valuable and irreplaceable biological products that the Goddess deemed for sole use of the creation of human beings.”  Under the bill, a man caught having released semen in any circumstance other than the “righteous and sacred act of male-female communion” would be forced to prove to the legal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt that he played no part in the emission of said semen or face prosecution.  Conviction under this new bill would carry a minimum sentence of life in prison.  Conviction under this new bill would require mandatory chemical castration.

            "This bill is aimed at the morality of men," Manchet argues.  "The purity of male sexual products and their sacredness to the fabric of society is a ruse.  Whenever anyone talks about morality, they’re talking about sex.  As if moral behavior was strictly limited to the bedroom.  Inevitably, whenever someone is talking about morality, they’re talking about men’s sexual behavior, men’s sexual purity.  No one ever expects a woman to be a virgin until she’s married.  No one ever sexually represses women while at the same time dividing them into good girls and bad girls, and using the bad girls to promote a male-centered pornographic industry.  Oh, no.  When the religious right starts talking about morality, chastity, the sacred unmade and unborn child, they’re always talking about men.  The underlying belief is that must be forcibly controlled lest their rabid sexual urges lead to violence against women, but women, who are considered free from any violence whatsoever are allowed to engage in any sordid, immoral, disgusting behavior you can imagine.  This law is just another attack against male sexuality, and that’s all it is.”

            The laws are even harsher for men accused of hurting children.  In most states, judges and juries have the right to levy the death penalty against a person convicted of child sexual abuse, but the sentence is disproportionately applied to men.  It is true that fewer women sexually abuse, and that when they do their actions are considered less severe because in most cases the child is not penetrated, but comparisons of cases in which female and male defendants were charged with identical crimes in the same states show that men were six times more likely to be sentenced to death than were female defendants. 

            The revealing fact is that violence against men exceeds violence against women.  Aside from sexual abuse and rape, most crimes are committed against men by both other men and women.  Because men physical dominate, there is considerable stigma against men who are the victims of violent crimes (including domestic ones) in which a woman was the perpetrator.

            While national statistics show that women are responsible for a full forty percent of all crime and the victims in less than thirty-five percent, there is very little attention paid to crimes against men.  A recent study found of all the criminal news stories run in three major daily newspapers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago for the period 1990 to 1995, eighty-seven percent involved a crime in which the victim was either a woman or a child.  The same study found that in 97.8 percent of the articles considered the perpetrator was male.  This is a reflection and reinforcement of the skewed perception that women are harmless victims of the dangerous criminal impulses of men.  Only two percent of the articles in the study reported a crime against a woman by a woman.

            "We're fighting against a system that's stacked against us," Manchet argues.  "Of the over four hundred members of the House of Representatives, a scant fifteen percent are men.  Men who meet a diagnosis of a personality disorder are heavily represented in the prison population.  They get you for predatory behavior, then incarcerate you and diagnose with you an anti-social personality disorder, and convict you for a crime that shouldn't even be a crime.  You lose from the moment you interact with a strange woman.  And men receive harsher punishments and stiffer penalties when they are convicted of even non-sexual crimes."

            Manchet continues, "The laws are written by women.  The judges are women.  The prosecuting attorneys are women.  All of these women are raised with belief that all men are predatory.  You're fighting not only against the accusations slung at you, but also against the very social construction of masculinity.  Against that, you have no defense.  The very fact that you're male means you're guilty."

            For Vale, the ramifications are clear.  "I'm here for fifteen years because I invited a woman to coffee.  I never touched her.  I never made any moves on her.  I was looking for friendship, but you can't be friends with women because no matter what you do she can always cry to the police and judges that she was afraid of you."

            "On the one hand," Manchet explains, "men are encouraged to work out, to build their muscles, to be big so that they can protect the family.  On the other, we're punished for that very size because our physical power is threatening to women.  This difficult situation puts many men behind bars for nothing.  And it's just getting worse."