Shame, and Those Who Guard the Silence
On shame, masculinity, and who is allowed to speak
My husband speaks publicly about being sexually abused as a child and a teenager. For clarity, I’m not outing him here. He has spoken publicly about this for years, including in his book Hey White Boy: Conversations of Redemption.
Most of the responses online are what you’d hope for. Compassionate. Supportive. Grateful. People thanking him for his honesty, for saying out loud what so many have never been able to say themselves.
But a small percentage are not like that.
They are almost always from men.
I would never let that happen to me.
You must have liked it.
You are so gay.
Of the 5 men, which was your favorite?
You must have been a cute kid.
He doesn’t take these comments personally. He rarely responds. He has done enough work and lived enough life to understand that they are not really about him.
Intellectually, I understand that too. Emotionally, I don’t.
Some of the comments raise my hackles. They make me want to respond — to correct, to push back, to defend. I don’t. Not because they don’t matter, but because engagement rarely changes anything. What does matter is that they appear often enough for me to stop dismissing them as noise and start asking what they are meant to do.
Not because I’m worried about the man who receives them—but because of the men and boys who are watching quietly from the edges, deciding whether it is safe to speak at all.
When we talk about sexual abuse and assault in our culture, the focus most often falls on women and girls — and with good reason, given the prevalence and severity of that harm. But the data makes another point that should give us pause: at least one in six men in the United States has experienced sexual abuse or assault, including during childhood, and that number is likely a conservative estimate because so many experiences go unreported.
And yet while this fact is widely cited in research on sexual violence, it remains largely absent from public conversation. That absence matters. It shapes not only who we listen to — but who feels safe enough to speak at all.
I also find myself wondering something else. I wonder whether the same men would say these things to a woman who had been sexually abused.
You must have liked it.
I would never let that happen to me.
The sentences feel immediately wrong in that context. Not because women are spared cruelty—they absolutely are not—but because the form of punishment changes. When women speak about sexual abuse, the response often arrives as doubt or minimization. When men speak about it, the response more often arrives as mockery.
With men, the aim is not to question the story, but to question the person. The punishment is not disbelief. It is degradation.
This is not a claim about who suffers more, but about how suffering is policed differently. That distinction matters because it reveals what is being defended.
From what I’ve observed, there is a particular cruelty reserved for male victims in the form of toughness, bravado, or certainty. The language varies, but the message is consistent: real men are not victims. If something happened to you, you must have allowed it. Wanted it. Failed to stop it.
This logic is not accidental. It serves a purpose.
For some men, masculinity is built on the belief that strength protects you — that danger can always be avoided if you are vigilant enough, aggressive enough, dominant enough. Researchers often describe this as hegemonic masculinity: a model of manhood that prizes emotional control and toughness.
A man who says, plainly and publicly, this happened to me fractures that illusion.
So, the response becomes dismissal and mockery.
If the men responding this way can convince themselves that he is different—weak, complicit, other—then they do not have to imagine that vulnerability could belong to them too.
The comments themselves are rarely sophisticated. They don’t argue facts or seek to understand. They go straight for identity.
I would never let that happen to me is not a statement about reality. It is a declaration of belief.
You must have liked it collapses violence into desire, as though abuse were simply another form of choice.
“You’re so gay” attempts to convert trauma into sexuality, as if labeling it removes its threat — drawing on a long-standing and deeply inaccurate cultural impulse to conflate male victimhood with homosexuality, and to mistake abuse for desire.
These are not responses to a story of harm. They are ways of pushing it away.
Because if boys and men can be victims, then safety is not guaranteed. Strength does not guarantee protection. And the body—male bodies included—can be overpowered, violated, taken.
I imagine that for some men, this is an unbearable thought.
Every public act of shaming does double work. It targets the speaker, yes—but more importantly, it sends a signal outward. It teaches others what will happen if they follow.
It may be tempting to ask whether the men who respond this way are themselves carrying something unresolved. But the origin of the reaction matters less than its effect. Whatever its source, shame functions the same way: it closes the door behind the person who dared to speak.
Shame doesn’t need to be widespread to be effective. It only needs to be loud enough to be noticed by—
A boy scrolling quietly late at night.
A man who has never told his partner.
Someone who has spent decades arranging his life around silence.
This is why the conversation about male victimhood stalls so easily.
Not because the facts are unclear. Not because the data is insufficient. But because acknowledging it requires rethinking some deeply held stories about power, control, and masculinity.
It asks uncomfortable questions.
What does strength mean if it doesn’t prevent harm?What does manhood look like when vulnerability is unavoidable?What happens when the idea of being untouchable falls apart?
It appears that for many men, these questions are destabilizing. They are avoided — not through silence alone, but through ridicule. Shame becomes a way to restore order.
As a wife, my perspective is not clinical or theoretical. It is observational.
I see how often the comments come from men who insist they would have fought back, stopped it, prevented it. I notice how rarely they ask what it costs to survive something like that as a child. I notice the absence of curiosity.
I also notice something else: how quickly the conversation becomes about them.
Their strength. Their imagined response. Their certainty.
It is easier to declare immunity than to sit with vulnerability.
But abuse does not discriminate based on bravado. It does not announce itself in advance. And it does not require consent, weakness, or desire.
It requires opportunity.
That is the part shame tries hardest to obscure.
There is a persistent misunderstanding that speaking about trauma is an act of fragility.
In reality, silence is often the more fragile position. It requires constant maintenance. Constant vigilance. Constant emotional accounting.
Speaking, by contrast, tends to come after survival.
My husband does not speak because he is stuck in the past. He speaks because he has integrated it. Because he has lived long enough on the other side to know that silence does not protect anyone.
The men who shame him imagine they are asserting strength. What they are actually defending is a story—one that keeps too many people isolated inside their own experience.
What troubles me most is not the cruelty of the comments themselves. It is how easily they are dismissed as irrelevant because he is fine.
He is. But others are not.
Shame rarely stops the person who has already decided to speak. It stops the person who hasn’t.
That is its real function.
It narrows the range of acceptable stories. It determines which forms of pain can be acknowledged and which must remain hidden. It decides who is granted complexity and who is flattened by stereotype.
Men are taught—explicitly and implicitly—that their bodies are weapons or shields, not sites of vulnerability. That to be overpowered is to be unmanly. That being harmed is indistinguishable from being weak.
When that belief system is threatened, shame rushes in to stabilize it.
If there is a way forward, it begins with letting go of the idea that strength and victimhood are opposites.
Being harmed does not strip someone of power.
Surviving does not erase injury.
Speaking does not diminish masculinity.
And shaming someone for what was done to them does not make anyone safer. It only ensures that the next person stays quiet.
We do not protect boys and men by teaching them that silence equals strength. We protect them by making it clear that harm does not define them—and that speaking will not exile them from belonging.
From where I stand, as someone who loves a man who has chosen honesty over concealment, the question is not why some men shame him.
That part is, by now, tragically clear.
The more urgent question is whether we are willing to notice what that shaming does—to the culture, to other men, to the boys who are still learning what kind of world they are growing into.
Because every time shame is used to police vulnerability, it succeeds only in one way: it keeps the silence intact.
And silence, for victims of any gender, has never been a neutral choice.
Notes
Prevalence data referenced in this essay draws from research summarized by 1in6, a U.S.-based organization focused on male survivors of sexual abuse. Estimates suggest that at least 1 in 6 men in the United States have experienced sexual abuse or assault, including during childhood, and that this figure is likely conservative due to underreporting.
Source:
1in6. The Facts.https://1in6.org/get-information/the-1-in-6-statistic/
Hegemonic masculinity refers to culturally dominant ideals of male behavior — such as strength, assertiveness, and emotional control — that shape social expectations and norms around masculinity.
