The harm of male-on-female rape: a response to David Benatar

This article attacks David Benatar's claim made in his 2012 book, The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys, that when an individual is the victim of violence it does not matter whether his or her perpetrator is of the same or a different sex. By exploring two related yet distinct phenomena, well documented in the empirical psychological literature, that I call "shattering" and "fragmentation," I argue that when a woman is raped, it does matter that her rapist is male, given that her situation as a woman under patriarchy is partly constitutive of the harm that she suffers.