Content warning: This story mentions rape and sexual assault.
In late September, Twitch streamer Reggie Travers posted a tearful video in which he alleged that his brother sexually abused him as a child. “You had me questioning myself my whole life,” he said. The clip spread across social media, and then, as these things do, the conversation splintered. Within days it had turned into a feud involving other creators, leaked messages, denials, and threats of legal action. Those other creators have denied the claims made about them and no criminal charges have been reported, so this piece isn’t about weighing that dispute. It’s about the conversation sitting underneath it, the one the internet keeps starting and then abandoning: what happens when a man says this happened to him? Researchers estimate that about 1 in 6 men experience abusive sexual encounters before the age of 18, about as many as the men who go on to develop prostate cancer, according to Dr. Jim Hopper’s comparison. Most of us can name far more public conversations about the second than the first. Travers’ video didn’t create that silence — it just made it loud enough to hear. Whatever you think about the rest of the drama, the reaction to a man saying “this happened to me” is worth taking seriously on its own terms, because how we respond to it decides whether the next man says anything at all.
The silence is measurable. Research on adult men with histories of childhood sexual abuse suggests it takes an average of about 21 years for men to disclose it. One often-cited study found that only 16% of men with documented abuse histories considered themselves to have been sexually abused, compared with 64% of women in the same study. Boys are socialized to see themselves as tough and self-sufficient, and when men do speak up, they’re frequently met with disbelief. Many don’t even use the word for what happened to them, because the word feels like it belongs to someone else.
Travers’ own words point at a second layer of shame that rarely gets named. “You made me think I was gay” describes a specific fear many male survivors report: that what happened to them says something about who they are. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) is direct on this point: sexual abuse or assault doesn’t determine anyone’s sexual orientation, and a person’s orientation can’t be caused by it. But the idea persists, and in communities where masculinity is policed hard, it can keep a boy quiet for decades. Common, who has spoken publicly about his own abuse, has said he hoped to help break down the stigma around Black men opening up about it.
The other piece worth saying out loud is who these people usually are. Research on the sexual abuse of boys finds that abusers are most often someone the child already knows, which is exactly why it’s so hard to talk about. It’s often a family friend, a neighbor, an older kid, sometimes a relative, someone whose absence from the group chat or the holiday table would be noticed. Disclosing means risking the family. Staying quiet means carrying it alone. A lot of men have been making that calculation since they were children.
That’s what makes the way the internet handles moments like this matter so much. When a disclosure turns into a storyline with sides, clips, and reaction videos, the person at the center slowly becomes a character, and it gets harder to remember there’s a real person on the other side of it. But that isn’t the whole picture of what’s happening online. Separately from Travers’ video, I came across a TikTok whose caption said that having to tell people you were sexually assaulted as a man was about the most embarrassing thing imaginable. The comments were full of men agreeing, and a lot of them admitted, under a stranger’s video, that it had happened to them too — that it made them feel like less of a man. A comment section isn’t a support group, but plenty of men were using it as one, which tells you how few other places feel safe enough to say it out loud. The moment is real and it could open something.
What a man says about what was done to him isn’t a take to rebut or a clip to dissect. It’s a person telling you something that may have taken years to say. The only useful response is to make it a little safer for the next man to say it, because the men in those comments are watching how we respond, and deciding whether they ever will. On average, male survivors wait about 21 years to say it out loud. What happened in the seconds after is on us.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit hotline.rainn.org.