A young woman walks into a police station in tears, finally ready to tell a story that she has tried so hard to erase from her memory.  She goes up to the first officer she sees and says, “A man raped me.”

Imagine how she would be treated from that point forward.

With respect? Sure.

With sympathy? Absolutely.

How about with laughter? No way.

Switch out that young woman with a young man, and change that male assailant to a female one. Now, laughter may not be such a farfetched reaction.

But what is the difference between these two scenarios? Just the sex of the victim and attacker? So what?

“When I first think of someone getting raped, I think of a woman, but I know that I shouldn’t do that, because rape does not discriminate,” Tamaki Sasa, a junior psychology major said.

Why should the sex of the victim matter at all when it comes to sexual assault? I don’t care if you are male, female, transgender, or anything else. It changes nothing. The reaction to and handling of these situations should be exactly the same. Right?

Unfortunately, in these situations, a female victim is met with an outpouring of support, while a male victim is met with, well, not exactly support.

In a time where we are so concerned with equality, how is this acceptable?  Equality, after all, is the equal treatment of everyone. It’s not treating a specific segment of society differently because they are different, even if that different treatment is of better quality than is showed to others.

Nonetheless, there are still social stereotypes that make people inherently unequal.

This may sound crazy, but not all men always want sex. Perhaps even more unbelievable, men don’t want to have sex with every woman they see, just as women don’t want to have sex with every man they see.

All people have the right to choose who they want and don’t want to be with. With that, everyone, regardless of physical appearance, has the right to refuse to do things they don’t want to do.

So, what I want to know is why do we think that a man can’t be sexually assaulted by a woman?

I guess it’s a question with a very logical answer, but with an answer that is hard for most to wrap their heads around.

A man can just as easily be assaulted in a state of intoxication or incapacity. Drugs don’t discriminate in their effects, and the threat of violence is still useful in making people do things they don’t want to do regardless of the sex of the perpetrator.

What I am trying to get at, is a woman is just as capable of committing assault as a man. There needs to be a change in the public perception of these acts, because it can happen to anyone, and we must be conscientious of that.