reverse rape

noun

The act of a female raping a male.

Meanings

nounreverse rape (countable and uncountable, plural reverse rapes)

plural reverse rapes

  1. countableuncountableThe act of a female raping a male.

    Judith's decapitation of Holofernes is often interpreted as a kind of reverse rape, in which a woman penetrates the male body rather than allowing a man to penetrate her own.

    2012, Jacqueline Stodnick, Renée Trilling, A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies
    3 more examples

    Minutes later it was over and the victim, Doug, an advertising executive in Connecticut, had been raped by a woman. Occurrences of reverse rape have increased dramatically in recent years.

    1986, Bob Larson, Larson's Book of Family Issues, page 149

    To understand why she reacted in that way to both the social climate of rape and the rape of the woman reader in Les Liaisons, it is instructive to remember how every rape in Laclos is a staged event — simultaneously high-spirited and cruel as with Cecile, paradoxical as with Merteuil's reverse-rape of Prevan, and both theatrical and repugnantly sentimental as with Madame de Tourvel, who is permitted short-lived bliss before consigning herself to near-madness and death.

    2006, Suellen Diaconoff, Through the Reading Glass: Women, Books, and Sex in the French Enlightenment

    […] female invasive orality (and King's metaphors for the process of lifesaving revolve around a kind of reverse rape, the male author 'being raped back into life by the woman's stinking breath' (M, 7), as the text misogynistically expresses it).

    2011, John Sears, Stephen King's Gothic

Origin

So called because it is the opposite of the more common case of a man raping a woman.

Full word history & related roots →
Cite this entry
APA

reverse rape. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/reverse%20rape

MLA

“reverse rape.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/reverse%20rape. Accessed November 2, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “reverse rape,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/reverse%20rape.

Source: reverse rape on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.