They don't have to, society already does this for them all the time.
Pay attention to how media frames the crime when a female teacher sleeps with an underage male student versus when a male teacher rapes an underaged female student.
My word choices are deliberate here. In a vast majority of headlines and articles I've seen, if the perpetrator of a sexual crime is female, the language is much softer about the action.
And courts tend to be much softer on them as well than on the men doing the same crime.
This makes me think this kind of narrative stems more from "woke captialist" media or from people pushing the "men are always happy about sexual attention" narrative. That narrative is considered part of "toxic maskulinity" - exactly the mindset that feminists want to get rid of.
Also note that (in the US) the legal definition of rape was changed to include men no earlier than 2012 [1] (i.e. under Obama). Under the previous definition, it was fundamentally impossible to consider a man a rape victim. That previous definition was from 1927.
So the assumption that only women could be raped was the older one. The modern progressive movement was who got men included in that definition.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition...
[0]: https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rsa/...
Fully agreed here, I'm just doubting that the resistance against that really comes from the left - my impression is that it more comes from the right (or maybe press outlets who have rebranded to look "woke" on the surface but still promote mostly traditional views).
E.g., I haven't yet seen a feminist sub on reddit excuse a female rapist or deny that a male rape victim is a victim. Though I have read articles that have done exactly that.
Some examples of feminist discussion of men's issues from Reddit:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/z083j5/the_gu... While the OP is dismissive, the discussion itself is far more nuanced.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/WitchesVsPatriarchy/comments/zz535i...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/z7rsv1/mens_...
Also, I like subreddits like r/menslib which try to provide "non-tate/peterson" communities for men's issues - often arguing exactly like you did.