Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NB04Df03.html

From sex to shame, a guru's legacy

By Sudha Ramachandran

BANGALORE - Spiritual guru Acharya Rajneesh's message of harmonious living appears to have been lost on his followers. A longstanding battle over his legacy among members of the Osho commune has escalated in recent months, with a section of followers challenging the transferring of prime land by trustees of the Osho International Foundation (OIF) to a little known trust in Delhi.

Trustees of the OIF are allegedly in the process of gifting land worth around 350 million rupees (US$7.1 million) in a "dubious manner" to Darshan Trust in New Delhi. "Applications to this end have been filed before the Charity Commissioner in Mumbai," Swami Premgeet, an Osho disciple revealed to the media recently.

Premgeet has alleged that three persons - Michael O'Byrne (Swami Jayesh), George Meredith (Swami Amrito) and Darcy O'Byrne (Swami Yogendra), who took control over the OIF following Rajneesh's death in 1990, are behind the move to "gift" the "excess land" to the Darshan Trust. Incidentally, two former OIF trustees Vidya Khubchandani and Anandkumar Awasti are now part of the Darshan Trust.

The Osho ashram (hermitage) or Osho International Meditation Resort as it is known today sits on 35 acres (14.1 hectares) of land at Koregaon Park, an upmarket locality in Pune in India. It was set up by Rajneesh in the mid-1970s.

Addressed by his followers as acharya (spiritual teacher), then bhagavan (supreme being) and finally osho (oceanic), Rajneesh introduced them to an array of "active meditations", some of which were cathartic and involved jumping up and down and vigorous dancing or shaking, before relaxing into silence and stillness. He was bitterly critical of established religions, priests and politicians. His teachings were syncretic and bought together the East and the West, spirituality and materialism, the old and the new.

The path to knowing your spirituality, Rajneesh said, was through exploring your sexuality. His propagation of a "sex to super-consciousness" path and of tantra as a way to the sublime as well as his advocacy of "free sex" earned him the sobriquet of a "sex guru".

By the end of the 1970s, tens of thousands of Europeans and Americans were trooping into his Pune ashram. Reports of sex orgies and drugs abounded. Threatened with punitive action by the Indian government, Rajneesh and his flock shifted base to the United States.

In 1981, a commune called Rajneeshpuram was set up on a 64,000-acre ranch in Oregon. During this period, Rajneesh withdrew from public life and his new secretary, Sheela Siverman or "Ma Anand Sheela" ran the show. It was during this time that Rajneesh acquired a collection of 365 Rolls Royce cars and came to be known as the "Rolls Royce guru".

Involvement of Rajneesh, "Ma Anand Sheela" and others in various crimes, including a bio-terrorism attack, violation of immigration laws, etc eventually led to Rajneesh's arrest and deportation back to India in 1985.

If during Rajneesh's lifetime, the commune was mired in intrigues, these power struggles grew exponentially following his death or the end of his "Earth visit", as his followers describe it, in 1990.

Rajneesh left behind a colossal amount of philosophical work as well as assets worth millions of dollars, including movable and immovable properties, intellectual property rights, etc. Fierce battles over this legacy have been fought over the past two decades resulting in several followers leaving the Osho commune to begin their own in various parts of the world.

Battles have been waged over rights to royalties for Rajneesh's writings, leading to unease among followers over the "commercialization of Osho's wisdom". There has been a systematic attempt too at ridding the Pune ashram of its "Osho baggage".

Over the years, it has transformed from an ashram to a spa and a luxury meditation resort; hence the name change to Osho International Mediation Resort. Access to this resort is restricted by the levy of exorbitant entrance fees and charges for use of mandatory robes and other facilities. Even foreigners are unable to afford these fees, resulting in a sharp dip in visitors.

"They [the OIF trustees] don't want visitors anymore - they have sinister plans," Premgeet and other petitioners are saying. They point out that the trust has taken massive loans by mortgaging various assets on the Pune property, raising fears over the possibility of funds being siphoned off.

Oshoites were known once for their very public display of love. Today there is little love lost among them. The love-fest has been replaced by a slug-fest.

But they are not alone in warring or worrying over materialist issues. The Bangalore and Mumbai branches of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) have locked horns over a decade-long property dispute that has wound its way up several courts.

The turf war over land in Bangalore erupted in fisticuffs in June last year when ISKCON members beat each other up in front of the Krishna temple and drowned out the chiming of temple bells and chanting with their abuse and foul language.

India's Supreme Court is expected to give its ruling on that dispute in a fortnight from now. It will decide whether ISKCON Bangalore is a legal entity and has rights over the disputed property.

While ISKCON members slug it out on the streets and in the courts, the fate of ISKCON-Bangalore's flagship project, the funding of a midday meal scheme for over a million poor school students in Bangalore and other cities through the Akshaya Patra Foundation is hanging in the balance.

Unlike the Indian gurus and spiritual masters of the past, who led spartan lifestyles and focused on spirituality, many of the new "godmen" lead luxurious lifestyles, wield political power and run multinational spirituality businesses that would give corporates a run for their money.

And they have built businesses worth millions of dollars. Maharishi Mahesh yogi, the guru of the Beatles and five million others, who introduced the West to Transcendental Meditation (TM) built an empire that included prime real estate and for-profit organizations worth billions of dollars. He defended this aggressive acquisition of assets as necessary to fund his work and to spread the TM message around.

But these spiritual masters seem to have not learned themselves the most basic of life's lessons - that human greed and excessive acquisitiveness lie beneath discontent and strife.

If there was no prime land to fight over, ISKCON's members and Osho's followers would have been forced to think of things more sublime. Their very public quarrels have made them a spectacle now. Worse, it has put in jeopardy ISKCON's excellent work in tackling India's hunger problem.



Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore. She can be reached at sudha98@hotmail.com

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned From Disney...

[American Dream]

Teleflora Super Bowl Ad - Adriana Lima 2012

[American Dream]

http://boingboing.net/2012/02/06/sex-is ... exism.html

Sex is Fun podcast: How sexism affects your sex life
By Maggie Koerth-Baker, Monday, Feb 6




I've been doing periodic appearances on Sex is Fun, a sex-positive podcast aimed at providing fun, informative sex ed. for grown-ups. Last time I was on the show, we talked about some funny animal sex studiesand what they can and can't teach you about human sexual behavior. This time around, we talked about a couple of recent studies focusing on sociology and sex.

In particular, we focused on a study from last fall that surveyed students at the University of Kansas to find out how men's and women's internalized sexism affect their relationships with each other. If you've ever watched one of those shows about so-called "pick up artists" and wondered, "Who the hell are the women falling for this crap!?", then this is the show to listen to.


Check out the podcast at the Sex is Fun site!

[American Dream]

http://www.lauraagustin.com/sex-on-sund ... rvice-work

Sex as work: a story




Do you think doing sex is work (at least sometimes) whether you are a sex worker or not? Consider a story told amongst women in southern Poland, which I was lucky enough to hear from Agnieszka Pasieka at a conference on gender and religion:

A woman asks her husband to fix a leaking tap in the kitchen.

-Am I a plumber? he says.

The next day the man comes home and sees the tap has been fixed. Yes, his wife explains, a neighbour man said he would fix it if she sang him a song or made love to him.

-What song did you sing for him? asks the husband.

-Am I a singer? answers the wife.


This story neatly accomplishes several things:

* Makes fun of professional categories as the basis for identity
* Shows how sex can be traded in non-professional situations
* Adjusts the power in a small domestic contretemps


Take that, identity politics!

[American Dream]

http://www.lauraagustin.com/man-eating- ... stant-past

Man-eating women from the not-so-distant past

17 August 2011 in sundaysex by laura agustin




As everyone knows, I hate and oppose the current proliferation of images and narratives implying that women are weak, passive and vulnerable by nature. Not long ago I wrote about anatomical fundamentalism, illustrated with a nice anime of a spider woman who may not have a penis but she is certainly scary. Now as a mid-August doldrums celebration, I offer these images from a not-so-far-off past, not to say that man-eating is better but to remind us all that our present zeitgeist is only that and will pass. It’s proof that the idea that we are always progressing is wrong.



































In the 1950s even girl children could be powerful!





None of these accuse women of deadliness on account of carrying disease – that collection is marvellous for different reasons.








–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

[American Dream]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... mpaign-ad/

RON PAUL DOUBLES DOWN ON HIS POPULARITY AMONG YOUNG MEN
by Lisa Wade, Jan 26, 2012



In an interesting article at Slate, Libby Copeland observes that Ron Paul has disproportionate support from young people and men. Why? She cites political scientists explaining that young people, on average, think in more black-and-white terms than older people:

…age and newness to politics predispose young voters to a less nuanced view of the political world. They’re less likely to take the long view, less likely to have patience, less likely to spin out the implications of their political theories.

Ron Paul does, indeed, articulate a straightforward ideology, especially compared to the other candidates.

Copeland doesn’t do as good of a job of explaining why men tend to like him more than women. I wonder, though, if it maybe has something, just a little bit, to do with his branding. Consider this ad:



This ad is a clear adoption of masculinity and a strong rejection of femininity (symbolized by the Shih-Tsu and its supposed weakness). In this sense, his ad is centrally in the genre of ads designed to associate products with MEN, partly by the deliberate exclusion of women and mocking of anything feminine. Compare it, for example, to this commercial for the Ford F-150:





It seems to me that Paul has decided to double down on his appeal, focusing on the market that he thinks is most likely to support him, and throwing everyone else out along with the social programs.

[American Dream]

[Hammer of Los]

...

I love this thread.

You know I'm a hard working house husband dishwasher plumber painter and decorator personal shopper cook cleaner childcarer teacher laundryman etc etc, don't you?

It's a wonder I ever get any time to Philosophise, never mind post here or cast any spells.

I shop for fresh food every day because I only have a tiny freezer.

I walk or sometimes run to the shops and back.

And I don't have an electric dishwasher either.

I do have running hot and cold water. That is a Godsend of the modern age.

I like to wash the dishes in the sink and meditate.

I observe the as above so below.

But its the as within so without that's the real kicker.

I loved that post above about man-eating women.

Don't think I didn't notice you slipped in a picture of Catwoman!

I loved this title too;

"The Unholy Wife!
HALF ANGEL!
HALF DEVIL!
She made him
HALF-A-MAN!"

And personally I rather liked the Devil Gurls.

Not to mention the Man Hungry Hussy.

But then I'm just a poor confused lesbian in a man's body.

I gotta stop evoking that testosterone though.

My pheromones will be driving the women crazy.

Probably the men too.





...

[American Dream]

...
I love this thread.

You know I'm a hard working house husband dishwasher plumber painter and decorator personal shopper cook cleaner childcarer teacher laundryman etc etc, don't you?

Don't think your efforts to feed the positive vibe here have gone unnoticed, HoL!

This one's for you!

MASCULINIZING HOUSEWORK: “THE HOUSEHUSBANDS OF HOLLYWOOD”
by Gwen Sharp, Jul 31, 2009

Tracey of Unapologetically Female let us know about Fox Reality Channel’s new show, The Househusbands of Hollywood. The show will document the trials and tribulations of several men who will “defy traditional marital roles by staying home to run the household while their wives head to work” (notice how that phrase includes the common definition of “work” as tasks done outside the home, while “running a household” is something else?). An image from the website:





The website also masculinizes housework by providing “survival” tips that associate cleaning with tools, cars, and guns (or possibly video games, I guess):










There’s also an interesting class element. All of the men appear to be married to women with very successful careers–one woman is a “prominent psychologist,” another is “a high-powered attorney,” and a third is a makeup artist for “A-list celebrities.” Most of the men are aspiring actors/screenwriters, and it appears they’re househusbands mostly because they haven’t gotten their big breaks yet. Quotes from a couple of the husbands’ bios:

The pair…made a deal as newlyweds that she would bring home the paycheck so he could focus on his acting career…Katherine emails Danny a daily to-do list…

Tempestt and Darryl don’t have any children, but they have plenty of responsibilities and Darryl finds it difficult to make time to hang out with his buddies.

Poor Grant has to fit in auditions while “attempting to keep up with Jillian’s high maintenance lifestyle.” And finally, we have Charlie:

…Charlie gets regular phone calls from his stressed-out wife, who often thinks he’s home changing diapers, grocery shopping and pounding out another script when he’s really at the gym with his best friend, actor Ryan O’Neal.

So apparently, though Charlie is a househusband, he is “often” able to leave the childcare (and possibly housework/chores) to someone else to do while he hangs out with his friend (his Important Actor friend! So we know he’s cool!).

It’s interesting that at least a couple of these bios include some of the elements that are often present in stereotypes of housewives as lazy women who have it easy–they’re really hanging out with friends or complaining about how much work they have to do even though they don’t have children. My mom stayed home after she was injured in an accident at the sheet-metal factory where she worked (the manager took the safety guard off a machine so workers would waste a few seconds putting it up and down; Mom was 22 and naively signed the the waiver of liability form because the supervisor said he wouldn’t take her to the hospital until she did. We’re now big fans of OSHA in my family.). I recall on more than one occasion hearing other family members sincerely state that she must really enjoy all the leisure time she had at home (with two kids, and farmwork) and that it must be like a permanent vacation. I wonder if these househusbands will be portrayed in a similarly negative fashion as housewives (particularly wealthy ones) often are.

[American Dream]

PORN FOR NEW MOMS: CULTURAL IDEAS ABOUT WHAT DAD’S DON’T DO

Text: “I told my boss I have to leave at 3:00 every afternoon so I can come home and give you a break.”




Text: “…and in just eight more hours, we can wake up mommy!”




Text: “Every time I see a cute, young coed these days, all I can think is, ‘potential babysitter.’”


So apparently fathers who take care of the child so moms can get some sleep, deprioritize their work, give moms a “break,” or stay faithful are unrealistic… even a “fantasy.” Confirming this, a quote on the back cover reads: “Finally, there’s erotica that’s guaranteed to fulfill every woman’s fantasy.”

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... s-dont-do/

[American Dream]

“I LOVE IT WHEN YOU TALK CLEAN TO ME”
by Gwen Sharp, Jan 14, 2008

Here is a link to a book called I Love It When You Talk Clean to Me: Porn for Women, published by the Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative.










Text: “Ooh look, the NFL playoffs are today.
I bet we’ll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair.”





Text: “As soon as I finish the laundry, I’ll do the grocery shopping.
And I’ll take the kids with me so you can relax.”






Text: “Why don’t I get a minivan, love, so you can drive something fun.”


http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... ean-to-me/

[American Dream]

“IF ONLY WOMEN SPENT LESS TIME COOKING”
by Lisa Wade, Mar 10, 2008

This ad “liberates” women from the kitchen through technology and capitalism… but not, alas, through true partnerships with men. Women should spend less time cooking, but it’s still HER job.




Oh, also, the reason women haven’t achieved greatness in the United States is because she’s too busy to be bothered. It has absolutely nothing to do with sexism and institutional constraints.


This ad, from the 1970s (I think), has the exact same message: “For women with more exciting things to do than scrub floors: ‘One-step floor care.’” Congratulations women, now you can scrub floors faster… but don’t think you can get out of scrubbing floors.




And this one, from the 1950s (I think) is extra creepy. Like the other ads, it replaces “women’s work” with a technological solution. And that solution a gift from her husband. The text:

The one gift that quietly ends garbage ‘trudgery’ — frees the little woman from disagreeable trips to the garbage can… She’ll thank you every time she uses it…

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... e-cooking/

[Allegro]

.
The Rape of Men | Sexual violence is one of the most horrific weapons of war, an instrument of terror used against women. Yet huge numbers of men are also victims. In this harrowing report, Will Storr travels to Uganda to meet traumatised survivors, and reveals how male rape is endemic in many of the world's conflicts.
— Will Storr | The Observer, Saturday 16 July 2011

Of all the secrets of war, there is one that is so well kept that it exists mostly as a rumour. It is usually denied by the perpetrator and his victim. Governments, aid agencies and human rights defenders at the UN barely acknowledge its possibility. Yet every now and then someone gathers the courage to tell of it. This is just what happened on an ordinary afternoon in the office of a kind and careful counsellor in Kampala, Uganda. For four years Eunice Owiny had been employed by Makerere University's Refugee Law Project (RLP) to help displaced people from all over Africa work through their traumas. This particular case, though, was a puzzle. A female client was having marital difficulties. "My husband can't have sex," she complained. "He feels very bad about this. I'm sure there's something he's keeping from me."

Owiny invited the husband in. For a while they got nowhere. Then Owiny asked the wife to leave. The man then murmured cryptically: "It happened to me." Owiny frowned. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an old sanitary pad. "Mama Eunice," he said. "I am in pain. I have to use this."

Laying the pus-covered pad on the desk in front of him, he gave up his secret. During his escape from the civil war in neighbouring Congo, he had been separated from his wife and taken by rebels. His captors raped him, three times a day, every day for three years. And he wasn't the only one. He watched as man after man was taken and raped. The wounds of one were so grievous that he died in the cell in front of him.

"That was hard for me to take," Owiny tells me today. "There are certain things you just don't believe can happen to a man, you get me? But I know now that sexual violence against men is a huge problem. Everybody has heard the women's stories. But nobody has heard the men's."

It's not just in East Africa that these stories remain unheard. One of the few academics to have looked into the issue in any detail is Lara Stemple, of the University of California's Health and Human Rights Law Project. Her study Male Rape and Human Rights notes incidents of male sexual violence as a weapon of wartime or political aggression in countries such as Chile, Greece, Croatia, Iran, Kuwait, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. Twenty-one per cent of Sri Lankan males who were seen at a London torture treatment centre reported sexual abuse while in detention. In El Salvador, 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in the 1980s described at least one incidence of sexual torture. A study of 6,000 concentration-camp inmates in Sarajevo found that 80% of men reported having been raped.

I've come to Kampala to hear the stories of the few brave men who have agreed to speak to me: a rare opportunity to find out about a controversial and deeply taboo issue. In Uganda, survivors are at risk of arrest by police, as they are likely to assume that they're gay – a crime in this country and in 38 of the 53 African nations. They will probably be ostracised by friends, rejected by family and turned away by the UN and the myriad international NGOs that are equipped, trained and ready to help women. They are wounded, isolated and in danger. In the words of Owiny: "They are despised."

But they are willing to talk, thanks largely to the RLP's British director, Dr Chris Dolan. Dolan first heard of wartime sexual violence against men in the late 1990s while researching his PhD in northern Uganda, and he sensed that the problem might be dramatically underestimated. Keen to gain a fuller grasp of its depth and nature, he put up posters throughout Kampala in June 2009 announcing a "workshop" on the issue in a local school. On the day, 150 men arrived. In a burst of candour, one attendee admitted: "It's happened to all of us here." It soon became known among Uganda's 200,000-strong refugee population that the RLP were helping men who had been raped during conflict. Slowly, more victims began to come forward.

I meet Jean Paul on the hot, dusty roof of the RLP's HQ in Old Kampala. He wears a scarlet high-buttoned shirt and holds himself with his neck lowered, his eyes cast towards the ground, as if in apology for his impressive height. He has a prominent upper lip that shakes continually – a nervous condition that makes him appear as if he's on the verge of tears.

Jean Paul was at university in Congo, studying electronic engineering, when his father – a wealthy businessman – was accused by the army of aiding the enemy and shot dead. Jean Paul fled in January 2009, only to be abducted by rebels. Along with six other men and six women he was marched to a forest in the Virunga National Park.

Later that day, the rebels and their prisoners met up with their cohorts who were camped out in the woods. Small camp fires could be seen here and there between the shadowy ranks of trees. While the women were sent off to prepare food and coffee, 12 armed fighters surrounded the men. From his place on the ground, Jean Paul looked up to see the commander leaning over them. In his 50s, he was bald, fat and in military uniform. He wore a red bandana around his neck and had strings of leaves tied around his elbows.

"You are all spies," the commander said. "I will show you how we punish spies." He pointed to Jean Paul. "Remove your clothes and take a position like a Muslim man."

Jean Paul thought he was joking. He shook his head and said: "I cannot do these things."

The commander called a rebel over. Jean Paul could see that he was only about nine years old. He was told, "Beat this man and remove this clothes." The boy attacked him with his gun butt. Eventually, Jean Paul begged: "Okay, okay. I will take off my clothes." Once naked, two rebels held him in a kneeling position with his head pushed towards the earth.

At this point, Jean Paul breaks off. The shaking in his lip more pronounced than ever, he lowers his head a little further and says: "I am sorry for the things I am going to say now." The commander put his left hand on the back of his skull and used his right to beat him on the backside "like a horse". Singing a witch doctor song, and with everybody watching, the commander then began. The moment he started, Jean Paul vomited.

Eleven rebels waited in a queue and raped Jean Paul in turn. When he was too exhausted to hold himself up, the next attacker would wrap his arm under Jean Paul's hips and lift him by the stomach. He bled freely: "Many, many, many bleeding," he says, "I could feel it like water." Each of the male prisoners was raped 11 times that night and every night that followed.

On the ninth day, they were looking for firewood when Jean Paul spotted a huge tree with roots that formed a small grotto of shadows. Seizing his moment, he crawled in and watched, trembling, as the rebel guards searched for him. After five hours of watching their feet as they hunted for him, he listened as they came up with a plan: they would let off a round of gunfire and tell the commander that Jean Paul had been killed. Eventually he emerged, weak from his ordeal and his diet of only two bananas per day during his captivity. Dressed only in his underpants, he crawled through the undergrowth "slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, like a snake" back into town.

Today, despite his hospital treatment, Jean Paul still bleeds when he walks. Like many victims, the wounds are such that he's supposed to restrict his diet to soft foods such as bananas, which are expensive, and Jean Paul can only afford maize and millet. His brother keeps asking what's wrong with him. "I don't want to tell him," says Jean Paul. "I fear he will say: 'Now, my brother is not a man.'"

It is for this reason that both perpetrator and victim enter a conspiracy of silence and why male survivors often find, once their story is discovered, that they lose the support and comfort of those around them. In the patriarchal societies found in many developing countries, gender roles are strictly defined.

"In Africa no man is allowed to be vulnerable," says RLP's gender officer Salome Atim. "You have to be masculine, strong. You should never break down or cry. A man must be a leader and provide for the whole family. When he fails to reach that set standard, society perceives that there is something wrong."

Often, she says, wives who discover their husbands have been raped decide to leave them. "They ask me: 'So now how am I going to live with him? As what? Is this still a husband? Is it a wife?' They ask, 'If he can be raped, who is protecting me?' There's one family I have been working closely with in which the husband has been raped twice. When his wife discovered this, she went home, packed her belongings, picked up their child and left. Of course that brought down this man's heart."

Back at RLP I'm told about the other ways in which their clients have been made to suffer. Men aren't simply raped, they are forced to penetrate holes in banana trees that run with acidic sap, to sit with their genitals over a fire, to drag rocks tied to their penis, to give oral sex to queues of soldiers, to be penetrated with screwdrivers and sticks. Atim has now seen so many male survivors that, frequently, she can spot them the moment they sit down. "They tend to lean forward and will often sit on one buttock," she tells me. "When they cough, they grab their lower regions. At times, they will stand up and there's blood on the chair. And they often have some kind of smell."

Because there has been so little research into the rape of men during war, it's not possible to say with any certainty why it happens or even how common it is – although a rare 2010 survey, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 22% of men and 30% of women in Eastern Congo reported conflict-related sexual violence. As for Atim, she says: "Our staff are overwhelmed by the cases we've got, but in terms of actual numbers? This is the tip of the iceberg."

Later on I speak with Dr Angella Ntinda, who treats referrals from the RLP. She tells me: "Eight out of 10 patients from RLP will be talking about some sort of sexual abuse."

"Eight out of 10 men?" I clarify.

"No. Men and women," she says.

"What about men?"

"I think all the men."

I am aghast.

"All of them?" I say.

"Yes," she says. "All the men."

The research by Lara Stemple at the University of California doesn't only show that male sexual violence is a component of wars all over the world, it also suggests that international aid organisations are failing male victims. Her study cites a review of 4,076 NGOs that have addressed wartime sexual violence. Only 3% of them mentioned the experience of men in their literature. "Typically," Stemple says, "as a passing reference."

On my last night I arrive at the house of Chris Dolan. We're high on a hill, watching the sun go down over the neighbourhoods of Salama Road and Luwafu, with Lake Victoria in the far distance. As the air turns from blue to mauve to black, a muddled galaxy of white, green and orange bulbs flickers on; a pointillist accident spilled over distant valleys and hills. A magnificent hubbub rises from it all. Babies screaming, children playing, cicadas, chickens, songbirds, cows, televisions and, floating above it all, the call to prayer at a distant mosque.

Stemple's findings on the failure of aid agencies is no surprise to Dolan. "The organisations working on sexual and gender-based violence don't talk about it," he says. "It's systematically silenced. If you're very, very lucky they'll give it a tangential mention at the end of a report. You might get five seconds of: 'Oh and men can also be the victims of sexual violence.' But there's no data, no discussion."

As part of an attempt to correct this, the RLP produced a documentary in 2010 called Gender Against Men. When it was screened, Dolan says that attempts were made to stop him. "Were these attempts by people in well-known, international aid agencies?" I ask.

"Yes," he replies. "There's a fear among them that this is a zero-sum game; that there's a pre-defined cake and if you start talking about men, you're going to somehow eat a chunk of this cake that's taken them a long time to bake." Dolan points to a November 2006 UN report that followed an international conference on sexual violence in this area of East Africa.

"I know for a fact that the people behind the report insisted the definition of rape be restricted to women," he says, adding that one of the RLP's donors, Dutch Oxfam, refused to provide any more funding unless he'd promise that 70% of his client base was female. He also recalls a man whose case was "particularly bad" and was referred to the UN's refugee agency, the UNHCR. "They told him: 'We have a programme for vulnerable women, but not men.'"

It reminds me of a scene described by Eunice Owiny: "There is a married couple," she said. "The man has been raped, the woman has been raped. Disclosure is easy for the woman. She gets the medical treatment, she gets the attention, she's supported by so many organisations. But the man is inside, dying."

"In a nutshell, that's exactly what happens," Dolan agrees. "Part of the activism around women's rights is: 'Let's prove that women are as good as men.' But the other side is you should look at the fact that men can be weak and vulnerable."

Margot Wallström, the UN special representative of the secretary-general for sexual violence in conflict, insists in a statement that the UNHCR extends its services to refugees of both genders. But she concedes that the "great stigma" men face suggests that the real number of survivors is higher than that reported. Wallström says the focus remains on women because they are "overwhelmingly" the victims. Nevertheless, she adds, "we do know of many cases of men and boys being raped."

But when I contact Stemple by email, she describes a "constant drum beat that women are the rape victims" and a milieu in which men are treated as a "monolithic perpetrator class".

"International human rights law leaves out men in nearly all instruments designed to address sexual violence," she continues. "The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 treats wartime sexual violence as something that only impacts on women and girls… Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced $44m to implement this resolution. Because of its entirely exclusive focus on female victims, it seems unlikely that any of these new funds will reach the thousands of men and boys who suffer from this kind of abuse. Ignoring male rape not only neglects men, it also harms women by reinforcing a viewpoint that equates 'female' with 'victim', thus hampering our ability to see women as strong and empowered. In the same way, silence about male victims reinforces unhealthy expectations about men and their supposed invulnerability."

Considering Dolan's finding that "female rape is significantly underreported and male rape almost never", I ask Stemple if, following her research, she believes it might be a hitherto unimagined part of all wars. "No one knows, but I do think it's safe to say that it's likely that it's been a part of many wars throughout history and that taboo has played a part in the silence."

As I leave Uganda, there's a detail of a story that I can't forget. Before receiving help from the RLP, one man went to see his local doctor. He told him he had been raped four times, that he was injured and depressed and his wife had threatened to leave him. The doctor gave him a Panadol.

Survivors' names have been changed and identities hidden for their protection. The Refugee Law Project is a partner organisation of Christian Aid (christianaid.org.uk)