The writer isn't saying that men can't be victims of sexual assault, nor is she pronouncing on what actually happened in the Shia LeBeouf case. You can believe Shia or any man who says he was assaulted by a woman, if you like. But there is no obligation on the part of feminists to believe men who claim they have been victimised by women, and declining to do so certainly does not invalidate the feminist analysis of men's sexual violence against women.
She's responding specifically to all those articles and comments that claimed feminists were obliged to believe Shia (or at least make a formal show of 'believing' him) or stand condemned as hypocrites. This view arises from a liberal gender equality framework, as expressed by meditrina above:
'Victims need to be believed. The person at fault is the rapist. The sex, race, and age of the victim do not reduce 'victimhood'.
This is technically true but disappears the entire material and social context in which rape occurs. Men and women aren't equivalent sexual actors - they are not interchangeable physically or socially. If they were, we would see societies where women used rape to control men, and then blamed them for it. Rape and violence are wielded by men against women on a large scale: men are biologically and hence socially empowered to use their penises and fists to control women in ways that women could never (and have never) done to them. Pretending that this isn't relevant to the feminist analysis of rape (of all things), and taking the position instead that we should simply 'believe everyone' strikes me as a spectacular own goal for women.
To those who, like meditrina, think it is most useful to analyse rape and sexual assault within a gender-neutral framework, what is your response to this part of the piece?
rape – aka penile penetration – is used by men to control the free movement and behaviour of women in every single society on earth. The converse scenario where women oppress men as a group with the act of “forced envelopment” has literally never happened, and it never could. Can we envisage a world where men are hasty to get home before dark, lest a woman force him to fuck her? Do we think a society has ever existed where men’s typical concern when left alone with a woman has ever been that he is vulnerable to being “enveloped” by her? If not, why not? Do we think a woman who has been raped while drunk by a drunk man technically “raped him too”? If not, why not?
NB: meditrina I started this thread because I think the writer hits on a crucial point for feminists that goes way beyond the Shia LeBeouf farago. The liberal framework that positions men and women as equivalent sexual actors makes feminist analysis of sex-based oppression essentially impossible. It trips us up on so many issues (domestic violence, porn, prostitution, sexual pleasure, even things like child custody) and allows men to perpetrate these weird reversals whenever it seems like women are making any headway on them.