Male Sexual Violence and the Terror of Submission
Men’s sexual violence against women often stems from a fragile masculine identity that equates dominance with worth. When a man feels powerless in broader life—economically, socially, or emotionally—he may compulsively assert control over a woman via abuse tactics to reclaim the sensation of potency. Rape becomes a desperate ritual to prove “I am not the one who can be penetrated, violated, or reduced”; in other words, the terror of being dominated himself is displaced onto her. The erect phallus weaponizes the very vulnerability he refuses to feel.
This dynamic reveals a hidden homoerotic panic at the core of patriarchal violence: the male perpetrator unconsciously fears that without absolute supremacy over women, he risks occupying the “feminized” position of the dominated. Sexual violation is therefore less about desire for the woman than about terror of becoming her—of being entered, owned, or erased. By violating her boundaries, he symbolically castrates his own dread of submission, yet the act only deepens the cycle of shame and compensatory brutality. True liberation for men lies not in dominating others, but in tolerating the vulnerability that dominance was meant to obliterate.
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic framework links sexual violence to unresolved Oedipal conflicts and primal aggression. In Totem and Taboo (1913), he posits that patriarchal societies originate from sons’ murderous rivalry with the father, culminating in guilt-driven totemism. Applied to rape, the perpetrator reenacts this parricide symbolically: violating a woman displaces castrating anxiety onto her, warding off the father’s imagined retribution.
