reverse rape

English

Etymology

So called because it is the opposite of the more common case of a man raping a woman.

Noun

reverse rape (countable and uncountable, plural reverse rapes)

1. The act of a female raping a male.
   • 1986, Bob Larson, Larson's Book of Family Issues, page 149:

     Minutes later it was over and the victim, Doug, an advertising executive in Connecticut, had been raped by a woman. Occurrences of reverse rape have increased dramatically in recent years.

   • 2006, Suellen Diaconoff, Through the Reading Glass: Women, Books, and Sex in the French Enlightenment:

     To understand why she reacted in that way to both the social climate of rape and the rape of the woman reader in Les Liaisons, it is instructive to remember how every rape in Laclos is a staged event — simultaneously high-spirited and cruel as with Cecile, paradoxical as with Merteuil's reverse-rape of Prevan, and both theatrical and repugnantly sentimental as with Madame de Tourvel, who is permitted short-lived bliss before consigning herself to near-madness and death.

   • 2011, John Sears, Stephen King's Gothic:

     […] female invasive orality (and King's metaphors for the process of lifesaving revolve around a kind of reverse rape, the male author 'being raped back into life by the woman's stinking breath' (M, 7), as the text misogynistically expresses it).

   • 2012, Jacqueline Stodnick, Renée Trilling, A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies:

     Judith's decapitation of Holofernes is often interpreted as a kind of reverse rape, in which a woman penetrates the male body rather than allowing a man to penetrate her own.

Usage notes

• Outside of metaphorical use, this term is often considered incorrect, sexist, or otherwise objectionable. In most contexts, it is preferable to refer to the crime as simply rape.

See also

• rape
• reverse racism

References

• “reverse rape”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.