A Coupla Things
A couple of things that have been rolling through my head.
Boys Rub Their Dicks on Things Because of NATURE, Girls Just Stand Around
The other day, I was hanging out with a friend of mine, Mickey. Mickey is better known as the purveyor of the rape joke what made me famous, though he doesn’t know that, which tickles me so. Obviously, Mickey has some problems. I’m not going to go into them too much, because this post isn’t about Mickey, or why I hang out with him, or how I manage it when he pops out with gems like nyah. I will say this by way of brief, brief summary: I think Mickey has learned to mostly stuff a sock in his mouth about gender when he’s around me, unless he’s asking me to explain something he’s ignorant about. And I think he’s learned those things through a collection of stony-ass silences, disgusted sounds, and the total and immediate ending of a night out when a bad sexist joke rolls around. I have my own thoughts on Mickey’s intentions, and how much they matter to me, and how willing I am to navigate them, but that’s a personal decision about what I do and don’t let into my life, and has nothing to do with whether or not this shit is generally cool.
So! Hanging out with Mickey. Hanging out with Mickey and reading The Dialectic of Sex, and occasionally piping up with things that I know will make him uncomfortable and perhaps think-y, because making him uncomfortable is part of the price I get for hanging out with somebody who occasionally makes me uncomfortable. I mention something about biology and evolution, and he puts out something I’m sure you’ve heard before:
“Well, you know. Evolution made men to want to spread their seed around, so it makes sense that they cheat.”
I pause. Think about this. Say, “I could believe that. I don’t know if I do, but it’s a reasonable way for nature to make a creature. But I also think evolution probably made women to want to gather up bunches of seeds, so it makes sense that they cheat.”
I got kind of a blank stare at this. Then he says, “Yeah, but men do it a lot.”
Setting aside for the moment the fact that, from what I know about Mickey, he hasn’t known many guys who cheat, if any. So, file that under Item #43560982 in ways that sexism ruins your ability to use your brain properly: all your personal experience says one thing, but everybody knows that the complete opposite is true, on a fundamental, cellular level, even. Do not look at the patriarchy behind the curtain.
I put out there, “Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But whether or not they do, I think the presumption of what evolution makes men do or not do is a bunch of bullshit used to justify bad behavior and sexual repression.”
Later, during a moment of l’esprit d’escalier, I thought of this:
If men are doing it a lot, who the fuck are they doing it with?
Unless men are all fucking each other, or fucking the ONE Lilith to whom evolution granted slutiness as a defining trait, I’m pretty sure evolution didn’t create a bunch of seed-machines without creating an equal bunch of seed-gatherers. If men have a massive evolutionary desire to spread their seed, they need to meet a creature with an equally massive evolutionary desire to collect it. You could make the argument that evolution created one sex to spread seed, and also endowed that sex with a capacity and desire for rape. Considering just how much rape goes on in the fucking world, I’d be depressed enough to buy it on occasion, though you’re not going to get me to buy the idea that evolution created women to be raped; if it did, there wouldn’t be angry little blogs like this one talking about how much rape sucks and needs to end. But unless you want to go the radical feminist route (which I don’t want to do here — feel free to take it to the Discussion board) and say that all sex between unequals is rape, I am pretty sure there is a lot of consensual fucking going on.
So, new response every time evolutionary bullshit gets brought up. Evolution created men to do blah blah blah — okay, but with whom? With what? In what capacity? Using what goddamn organ? Evolution didn’t just create men to spontaneously generate during wet dreams — it wired them to fuck a creature that is capable of reproduction (if you’re going to buy that reproduction is the only purpose of sex that evolution intended, that is). So there’s got to be an equal force on the other end of that equation, something that wants to fuck right back.
Now, before it gets brought up, that doesn’t mean I buy any degree of evolutionary bullshit. This is just an argument that takes the supposition at face value and follows the money.
Let’s Just Do What the Victim Wants, Because I Apparently Give a Magnanimous Shit
The other day, I got a little sassy with one of my higher-ups. She’s not my direct supervisor, but she could be, in a pinch, so this was a little out of line. But I think I have a good defense. We were talking about Polanski.
She said, “I can’t believe this is still going on.”
I suspected she meant, “I can’t believe they’re still going after this guy, he is just so sad and sympathetic,” but I decided to play dumb. “Yes,” I agreed. “I can’t believe they didn’t put him away a long time ago.”
“I mean,” she continued, “the victim forgave him, didn’t she? She doesn’t even want him to go to trial.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but aren’t we all mandated reporters here? Since when did what we think get in the way of following the law when it comes to abuse of children?”
“But it was so long ago.”
“He’s still a kidfucker.” PROBABLY SHOULDN’T SAY FUCK IN THE OFFICE, HARRIET, OOPS.
“Yeah, well, if that’s the case, they should have locked him up back then.”
“I agree,” I said, “that they should have locked him up back then.”
That was the end of the conversation. I didn’t care for it at all, and it made me lose a lot of respect for that particular boss and her opinions, but I could also sense that she was seeing how angry this could get me, and how willing I’d be to keep saying fuck, which would mean she’d have to reprimand me, which she didn’t want to deal with, so she just backed down and so did I.
Later I was thinking about this excuse of doing what the victim wants. She forgave him, right? So we can just drop it. Because all of a sudden, I care about victims — ignore the convenience of caring about them only when they are asking me to continue what I’m already doing (you know, not giving a shit about victims or rapists). It’s not that, really. I’m being a rape apologist for them. Because they want me to. I mean, really, shouldn’t all you anti-rape advocates be more focused on the victim like I am, right now, when her desires finally line up with what I want her to do?
That’s what sticks in my craw the most about it. The kind of people who will be the most vocal about, “Just drop it! It’s what the victim wants!” aren’t the people that I expect, five or ten years before, to have been crowing, “Just prosecute him! It’s what the victim wants!” I’m pretty sure what they’ve always been saying is, “Just drop it! That’s what I want!”, and are only too happy to recruit an apparently unimpeachable source to their side, regardless of how willing they were to trample all over her if she ever believed anything else.
Here’s the thing. I am sure that in this wide, wide world of people, there are rape victims out there who truly want nothing more than for their rapists to go free without punishment, without retribution, without justice. That’s their right. But I don’t think I’ve actually heard any of them. Instead, what I hear is, “I just want this whole thing dropped. I don’t want it prosecuted. Every time this gets brought up I get harassed.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. I don’t want to be called a slut in court.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. I could never win, I don’t have the money, and nobody would believe me.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. He would kill me. His friends would come after me.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. I can’t stand to see him every day in court.”
None of those statements can be reasonably boiled down to, “Rape victim doesn’t want her rapist to come to justice.” They can be reasonably boiled down to, “Rape victim suspects pursuit of justice will feel worse than getting raped did.” But only one of those boiled-down statements makes us, as a society, look like we’re decent and human and deserve to live. The other might point the finger squarely at you — listen, are you the reason justice is worse than rape? Is it because you are going to call her a liar, call her a whore, make her life hell, threaten her, harass her, treat her like a pariah, tell her she liked it, tell her she deserved it? Are you one of the people who lined up to stone the victim into silence, only to smarmily say later, “Well, the victim isn’t asking for justice, is she?”
You don’t get to put on your culpability hat when it’s fashionable, and take it off when it’s heavy. If you have ever said, out loud, within earshot of ANYBODY, that women deserve some degree of responsibility for their rape, or that women who go to court are lying money-grubbers, or that it wasn’t a real rape, or any amount of apologism, you bear some responsibility for the reasons women do not want to see their rapists come to justice. It’s because you have told her that she will have to go through you first, and she has decided that that might feel worse than just living with the fact that she can be legally raped. CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE.
I’ve talked before about diffused responsibility for rape. We, as a culture, put the responsibility for preventing rape entirely upon the shoulders of the one person who is least equipped to prevent a rape: the victim, at the very moment she is being victimized. There are a thousand points along the way where rape could have been prevented, bystanders who saw a situation getting out of control, or idly made a rape joke in front of a rapist, thus letting him know that he could probably rape your friends and you wouldn’t think it was that serious, since you don’t think rape is serious. When people boil down the harassment, villification, and re-victimization that victims are trying to avoid as, “Rape victim doesn’t want justice! What can you do!”, I think they’re utterly relieved to have their lack of responsibility validated. Every rape is a preventable rape. Every rapist could have been stopped. Every one of us has a chance to do so, by enforcing respect of boundaries and respect of consensual sexuality as the norm — the only norm — and every time we slip up, we have perhaps abdicated our responsibility to a rape victim somewhere down the road. How nice it would be for us, then, if that rape victim then said, “No harm, no foul. I’ve moved on. I don’t even want things made right! Just wipe that nastiness from your mind. I surely have!” How nice it would be to know that we have no responsibility to make this world a better place, because all the victims are okay with being victimized.
It would be nice to not get so bothered by Polanski, or all his fucked-up, morally dead rapists-by-proxy. I bet I wouldn’t be so bothered if I was willing to believe that abusing somebody into accepting the legality of their abuse was a legitimate form of justice. I bet I wouldn’t have to see that I am surrounded by people — real people, coworkers and acquaintances and friends — who would be willing to abuse me into accepting my rape as legal, and fighting back as morally indefensible, and that would be pretty nice thing to be blind to. I bet I wouldn’t have to think about all the times I’ve said things like, “Well, what does she expect, with those boys?”, and how maybe it was my words echoing in some girl’s head when she decided to “forgive” her rapist, because what other kind of peace or justice is she ever going to find? If I could wrangle up some rape victim to tell me that rape wasn’t so bad — wasn’t so bad that I had to care, anyway — I could feel pretty fucking smug about my complacency and utter failure to be a decent human being. And if I can’t wrangle up some rape victim to say that, I can probably wildly and purposefully misinterpret what a victim actually says — “Please stop putting me through goddamn hell” — and decide what that actually means is that rapists don’t deserve to be prosecuted for rape, and I don’t have to be one of the unenviable bastards who gets put through hell for saying that they do deserve it, always, every time, no matter what.
We should all try to respect what a victim wants. But we have to hear what she wants first. “I don’t want to be treated like a worthless whore anymore” isn’t the same thing as “I don’t want my rapist brought to justice.” That second line? That’s what rapists hear. That’s how abusers think. Don’t be surprised if you think that way, too — you grew up in the same world that brought them to legal fruition.
Believing that ceasing the torture of a torture victim is the same thing as restorative justice and amends illustrates just how much abuser you’ve got in you.
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I’m so psyched that you added the share buttons because now I can further my nefarious use of facebook to educate and/or trim my friends list (as needed).
This is a great essay about why women might back down from prosecution and has come at a handy time in my head when yet again, I am thinking about the girl I knew who slept with her sister’s rapist. What could lead someone to make that kind of choice? What might lead the raped sister to move past it in favor of keeping her abundantly abusive family together? I come to you blog and it is always a voice of reason to the chorus of whywhywhy in my head, bleating on and off for 20 years.
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This should be shouted from the rooftops and painted on the streets and everything.
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Thank you for saying that.
At the same time, I wish so, so much that people would respect the wishes of the victim/survivor if she chooses not to prosecute, no matter what her reasons. I’ve had a guy whom I didn’t tell (a drunk friend did) go crazy over the “responsibility” that this knowledge forced on him, and deciding that of course he had to tell someone “in charge”.
And all I could think was what the hell would the guy who raped me do if found out that I’d told anyone.
I live with the responsibility of not reporting my rape every single day, and it’s fucking torture. Why does some guy I barely know think that his accidental discovery of someone else’s problem is comparable with the debate I go through in my head every time I wake up, and why does he think that I am so totally unable to make that decision that he must take control?
Incidentally, the reason I didn’t report it was because I was so numb/depressed that I couldn’t even admit what had happened, and believed my rapist’s apology, in any case. By the time I could face it, I had no case.
Sorry, I usually try to avoid comments this personal; it’s just very raw right now.
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: In high school, my best friend was raped. Multiple times, now that I look back on it, but at that time, there was real rape, and then there was “that’s just how boys are.” The real rape was so undeniably a real rape that I just couldn’t contain myself. I badgered and badgered her, harassed her, yelled at her, pleaded with her, cried at her, swore at her, trying to get her to tell somebody. At one point she shouted at me, “You don’t know how this feels,” and I shouted back, “I don’t care! I know what’s right!” She did eventually tell — I had upset her so much that she couldn’t walk around stony-faced, like she’d planned — but her family reacted in such a horrifying way that I suddenly understood why she hadn’t wanted to tell. And boom, just like that, I lost my simple, uncomplicated view of rape, which was: rape is bad and everybody is in agreement on that except the rapists. Rape gets punished, because it’s so bad. Suddenly, I had to realize that rape was fucking EVIL, but there were eviler things in the world; rape apologism and facilitation were eviler, and attempting to seek justice for a rape brought you from evil land to EVILEST OF FUCKING ALL TOWER. I couldn’t blame my friend anymore, and I fell into a period of intense depression that culminated with me laying on some train tracks for about an hour.
But you know what I did? I reintegrated, read up on some shit, thought about it, talked about it, wrote about it, did my best to make amends. And now I live in a world where evil doesn’t come as a shock, where I know I’m much more equipped to navigate my way through it. And I did all that because I loved my friend so much that I couldn’t stand the thought of ever hurting her, or somebody like her, as badly as I’d done. So I owed it to her to make myself better, and learn to understand these things.
I’m a mandated reporter, which means I took an oath to report certain things, no matter what. That was a difficult oath to take because of that memory of me and my friend. But — and this was the important thing — I took that oath in regards to children. I know that children do not have the resources, safety, life experience, legal rights, or sometimes maturity to find a way out of abuse. I also know that, once brought into the system, a child will be surrounded by multiple advocates for their safety (not to say the system is perfect, but that’s a longer conversation). Adults have the benefits of resources, life experience, legal rights, and maturity, but they do not have the benefit of being protected when they are targeted for harassment or assault, especially if they’re women reporting rapes or domestic violence.
I can sympathize with that dude being all overwhelmed with the horror of it, but man, what a lot of privilege he had showing through. Wrong thing happened? Well, justice will fix it! Police, they’re the good guys! Judges, they make the right decisions! Surely a bad thing can’t go unpunished — otherwise, my entire philosophy that I have good things because I deserved and earned them by being a good person flies out the fucking window!
I think it was also a responsibility dump. I have had friends who sometimes put too much on me, and I just can’t deal with how fucked up their lives are. It’s my responsibility as a friend to own up to that deficiency within me, rather than say, “You, you are imperfect as a friend. Let me fix you so that you are acceptable to me and my value system.” Being friends with somebody means taking responsibility for the complicated shit, whether that responsibility is reflected in dealing with a revelation of rape, or admitting you can’t deal with it. You can either deal or you can’t; there’s no third option, the fake “I dealt SO HARD” that he tried by shoving you at some cops and bolting. I mean, he was basically saying, “I can’t deal with how complicated this is, but it would totally destroy my self-concept and ego to say so, so I’m going to do something that I can later describe as brave, and will force you to react in a way that I can later describe as crazy and fucked-up.” I mean, really. Now the narrative is, “My friend told me she was raped; god, I’m such a martyr,” instead of, “My friend told me she was raped; I am the kind of person who can’t deal with that.”
You are the best!
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The thing about Polanski’s victim — I hear people saying what your boss said all the time. Oh she forgave him, blah blah.
And she didn’t. What she actually said is awfully close to “I just want this whole thing dropped. I don’t want it prosecuted. Every time this gets brought up I get harassed.”
She’s married with children. One day, she had to sit down and explain to her husband, if she hadn’t already, what had happened to her when she was thirteen. One day, she had to tell her kids, all because the legal system and the media were putting it out there anyway and there was no way for her to protect them from that knowledge anymore. She’s sick of having to relive it, of having her privacy invaded, and she said so, and people — lots of people — hear that as her forgiving Polanski.
What the fucking fuck, society.
You are the best!
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Let’s Just Do What the Victim Wants, Because I Apparently Give a Magnanimous Shit
This. makes. me. frothy.
I hate it, HATE it when I hear stuff like this because HEY GUESS WHAT? RAPE IS ILLEGAL. It doesn’t matter if one person forgives the other, or hell, even if the rapist apologizes, the simple fact of the matter is RAPE IS ILLEGAL. People need to get that through their heads. When you break the law, and you are tried and found guilty in a court of law, you go to jail. [portion deleted]
Boys Rub Their Dicks on Things Because of NATURE
*chokes* Others harass socks. Seriously, if any boy chooses to believe this, I’ve got a flyer from Wal-Mart that says men’s tube socks have been marked down to $9.97/12pk.
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: I deleted a portion of your comment. Wishing rape on rapists — and treating prison rape as a legitimate part of the punitive nature of the prison system rather than a horrific abuse of it — isn’t welcome on an anti-rape blog.
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Just wanted to let you know that I read your blog every time there’s a new post. And that your writing, along with other feminists radicalized by the internet, is why I’m going to grow up and be an attorney or maybe a prosecutor and be rabidly, unquenchedly, savagely in defense of rape victims, and no matter how stunted, trashy, ugly, slutty, desperate or loud they are; and I’m going to come back to my tiny little boring flyover state, and kill myself to make it a state in which the policies and practices of the judicial system fucking. work. in protecting and serving women. Because of all the state in this damned union, I think I could make it work here. And because every trashy girl I know or know of has been held down by her cousins and fondled, or was babysat by the uncle who later got three years for raping another cousin, or was cornered in the back shed by her disgusting grandfather who all the old ladies whisper about having raped those choir girls thirty years ago, when he was a pastor. And Harriet, your writing keeps the fire lit. I value it a great deal. thanks.
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If I may go slightly off topic here:
There are also some of us who think the current legal system isn’t always the way to handle things. Now, Polanski I would like to see behind bars. My own abuser? I’m not sure. In my ideal world, I would be able to enforce counseling. Some part of me hopes, somehow, that the young man who abused me could learn that what he did was wrong. Really wrong, in a way that he doesn’t think it was. In a way that our society doesn’t think it was.
Having said that, I know perfectly well why I didn’t pursue any sort of justice, including some available options that wouldn’t have involved the criminal system. Because I didn’t want to be That Girl. That Girl being the crazy ex who had a falling out with her boyfriend and is now crying rape to get back at him.
I don’t know quite what I would want, if that weren’t there. I don’t feel that allowing it to go unpunished is the best thing. But I’m not sure if the criminal justice system (well, a system that would give more than a slap on the wrist, because, you know, non-PIV isn’t actually rape) is the right answer either.
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: I’m so sorry to hear about your friend. Your response wasn’t, I don’t think, surprising, but your ability to change it and improve it shows yet again how exceptional you are.
In fairness to this guy, I don’t think he’d ever come across the situation before and was just pretty horrified by it. Which too shows his enormous privilege.
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Boys Rub Their Dicks on Things Because of NATURE, Girls Just Stand Around
Every time i see this, i think of that uber-sexist cliche. I’m sure you’ve heard of it: “All women are prostitutes; they use sex to get what they want.”
What i have done, as i have done with a lot of really sexist bullshit, is to poke fun at that. Everytime someone mentions it, or I hear it on TV, i think or say “Wow, you guys REALLY got screwed on that deal!” And have a laugh and a giggle, so i don’t rage quite so hard.
But underneath that laugh and giggle is a bubbling pit of anger and indignation. I feel like it’s one of (many) symptoms of some really fucked up underlying shit in our society (i know, i’m getting into SUCH new ground here), Like the rampant misunderstanding of female sexuality (Sex is such a CHORE for us, we don’t do it unless we want shiny things) To how people seem to expect relationships to work ie. The woman take take take takes and every nice thing a man does is only for the purpose of getting leverage to be able to con/trick/guilt/bribe/strongarm the woman into sex. This certainly doesn’t describe any relationship i have ever been in or want to be in, nor does it reflect the relationships of many of the people i have heard say this, and yet……
But what am i saying. it MUST be true, because EVERYONE ELSE SAYS SO.
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: I agree with this, though I didn’t get into it because it’s a whole different topic. I didn’t get that far thinking about Flint, because I had a million other reasons I didn’t want to prosecute. But if I had gotten to thinking about it, yeah, I couldn’t wish American prison on him. I couldn’t wish that on almost anybody. I could wish mandatory group therapy for abusers, I could wish mandatory disclosure of the rape to potential dating partners, I could wish mandatory community service, or mandatory tithing of his paycheck for a lifetime to support rape crisis centers or domestic violence shelters. Basically, what I wish is for Flint to see himself the way I see him, because I want his mind to change. I can’t do that — nobody can, except him — so beyond that, what I wish is that he has the opportunity for better professionals to help him be less dangerous, and for him to make the world a better place instead of a worse one. Wishing that he be systematically raped and tortured for several years is such a poor substitute for anything that would actually help anybody.
I still think it falls into the same category of what I was generally trying to say. A rape victim saying, “I don’t want to prosecute because the prison-industrial complex is a horrific abuse and I don’t want to support it,” isn’t the same thing as saying, “I don’t want justice! Yep, we can all just ignore my rape as if it never happened and was a totally okay thing to have happen to me. Oh, you were already doing that! Ahead of the curve, you are!” People just seem to stop hearing everything after the “because,” and the stuff that comes after “because” is the really important shit, because jesus christ, that’s the shit that’s keeping rape legal.
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: It’s not something I really hold against myself. I still cringe when I think of it, but, you know, I was freakin’ 16. I let go of my right to retaliate against myself about it.
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:
So… who are all these prostitutes fucking? The flip side of this is, “All men are brainless walking dicks. They decide who to give shit to based on whether they put out. Guess the ladies are the smart rich ones.”
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Shoot! I didn’t realize it came across that way. My apologies to anyone who saw it beforehand. :S
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: It’s cool.
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Although I’ve definitely never heard, “I don’t want my rapist/abuser brought to justice,” I’ve definitely heard, “I don’t want to ruin his life.” This was often in the context of a private university with a not-entirely-fucked-up judicial system, where prison was not an issue; the worst punishment was that the rapist would be expelled with a note on his transcript so other universities would know what he was expelled for. I know this comment would drive the judicial administrator up the fucking wall (“He didn’t care a lot about YOUR feelings at the time, why are you protecting him??”), but I think this post has helped me better understand how even a comment that sounds like minimization of one’s own importance may still come out of a lack of faith in and compatibility with the justice system. Most (though not all) survivors who’ve talked to me about their experiences didn’t want revenge, but safety. Didn’t want to “ruin his life,” just didn’t want to see him on campus every day and live with the fear that he was doing the same thing to other women. Thank you for this post.
As for the evo-psych stuff: I studied evolutionary psychology and anthropology some in college (sorry, this comment is turning into Rape Culture & My College Days: A Retrospective), which involved a LOT of pointing out that, no, a logical reading of the evidence did not justify rape or a lot of other glorification of 21st century white middle-class American patriarchal culture, which is but a blink of an eye in the evolutionary history of the species. An excellent (very short) book on the subject is Neo-liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology, by Susan McKinnon. One of the evo-psych arguments McKinnon debunks is the serious argument, in response to your point, that some women are evolved to be sexy and sleep around, some women are evolved to be fertile and monogamous, and all men are evolved to want to have sex with the former and marry the latter. Which… um, wow, way to reify the Madonna/whore dichotomy and misread all evidence.
Science fact: although I also don’t buy that insights into other primates’ biology automatically = insights into humans–there’s just too much diversity and you can easily cherry-pick facts about one ape species to support whatever your argument about humans is–gibbons do mate primarily in monogamous pair-bonds, but it turns out there’s a lot of extra-pair copulation from both males AND females, simply due to the logic you describe. To my knowledge, that Madonna/whore thing doesn’t really exist in nature–not that it would therefore be justified and inevitable in humans if it did.
Thought-provoking post as always. Thank you.
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But I also think evolution probably made women to want to gather up bunches of seeds, so it makes sense that they cheat.
I realise this line wasn’t the main point of your story, Harriet, but f.w.i.w., there’s a book which is mostly about this, called “Sperm wars”.
It’s a long time since I read it, but back then I summarised it briefly here.
The book presents a series of (maybe about 20) fictional scenarios and then discusses the biology behind them. One of the scenarios involves rape (and I wouldn’t like to guarantee that it was entirely sensitive in its framing of that, though it certainly wasn’t as offensive as it could have been – I think it mostly steered clear of ethical judgements and evaluated it primarily as a biological strategy, & I can’t remember exactly what the disclaimer was). And one scenario discusses genuine no-cheating monogamy – a successful strategy for lots of people’s genes. But most of it is about the biology of (non-rape) non-monogamy, which is fascinating. According to the author’s research (which as far as I recall was “proper science”), only a subset of sperm is actually optimised for making babies; men also have “helper sperm” specialised for killing and impeding other men’s sperm along the way!
In other places (as well as probably in this book) I’ve seen estimated stats for how many children of supposedly-monogamous human partnerships are actually the child of a different father. I think from memory it was in the region of 10% (though I imagine it must vary somewhat from culture to culture), and in a lot of cases the official father was unaware.
So yes, it’s entirely plausible that women have some hardwiring in favour of collecting a variety of seeds. There’s a lot of subtlety in how it plays out though, because in a lot of cases, the best biological strategy is also the considered-socially-acceptable one. The “successful monogamy” scenario in that book depicts a monogamous couple who have loads of great-grandchildren, and also takes a side trip into an alternative scenario where the man had an affair early on and caught a STD which rendered him sterile. And if a partner’s cheating results in the other partner leaving, then that may not have been biologically helpful either, since it lessens the chance of raising any existing children to adulthood. So even aside from ethics and happiness, it’s only sometimes biologically “worth” taking the risk of non-monogamy. According to the theories in this book, all humans are programmed to unconsciously evaluate the pros and cons, taking social factors into account as well as biological ones.
I’m not saying this book is the be-all and end-all of its field. But for people interested in that kind of thing (or just wanting science-based facts for debunking sexist stereotypes, insofar as they’re debunkable by facts), it’s worth a read.
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: I love how much the social context of a setting doesn’t play into the theories of armchair evolutionary psychologists. Like evolution can only create genes and behavior, but not, you know, the societies we live in, which we cannot consider at all when talking about sex — there is this pile over here called BIOLOGY and this pile over here called THINGS I DON’T FEEL LIKE CONSIDERING BECAUSE THEY ARE COMPLICATED AND NUANCED.
Like, “Oh, rape, that forces babies to happen, therefore, it is a successful reproductive strategy, therefore, BIOLOGY MAKES MEN DO IT.” As if there isn’t an equally compelling, “MURDER THE GUY WHO KEEPS RAPING THE WOMEN” urge that could also be considered a product of EVOLUTION. I mean, having some guy rape all the women, causing all the women to have less chance of bearing the children of their chosen partners who worked for that privilege, isn’t exactly met with a whole lot of, “Hey, that’s just nature.” Not to mention the equally compelling, “SEEK OUT AN ABORTIFACIENT IF I DON’T WANT THIS” urge that women have had since, oh, the evolution of herbs, and the practicality of rape as a strategy to have viable offspring looks pretty unlikely.
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“Considering just how much rape goes on in the fucking world, I’d be depressed enough to buy it on occasion, though you’re not going to get me to buy the idea that evolution created women to be raped; if it did, there wouldn’t be angry little blogs like this one talking about how much rape sucks and needs to end.”
I think it’s possible that women have evolved to tolerate, in a biological sense, non-consensual sex. That is, given how inherently violent rape is, and its frequency, women whose bodies could not bear it would have become wiped out.
There was a study on sexual arousal some time ago in which the researchers were puzzled by women’s reporting that they didn’t feel aroused by certain images, yet they were aroused as measured by vaginal lubrication. The standard explanation for the discrepancy was that women must just be too inhibited to acknowledge everything that arouses them, but I think it’s more likely that women have evolved to be able to lubricate without feeling psychological arousal. For women to survive a world with so much sex they don’t want to have, they have to be able to tolerate penetration without their genitalia getting torn to the point that they bleed out or die of an infection (particularly for the thousands of years prior to antibiotics or knowledge of hygiene).
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: Or to put it in a more clinical fashion:
“[Anthropologist Kim Hill] had the Ache [hunter-gatherers Paraguay], who live much as humans did 100,000 years ago. He and two colleagues therefore calculated how rape would affect the evolutionary prospects of a 25-year-old Ache. ([b]They didn’t observe any rapes[/b], but did a what-if calculation based on measurements of, for instance, the odds that a woman is able to conceive on any given day.) The scientists were generous to the rape-as-adaptation claim, assuming that rapists target only women of reproductive age, for instance, even though in reality girls younger than 10 and women over 60 are often victims. Then they calculated rape’s fitness costs and benefits. Rape costs a man fitness points if the victim’s husband or other relatives kill him, for instance. He loses fitness points, too, if the mother refuses to raise a child of rape, and if being a known rapist (in a small hunter-gatherer tribe, rape and rapists are public knowledge) makes others less likely to help him find food. Rape increases a man’s evolutionary fitness based on the chance that a rape victim is fertile (15 percent), that she will conceive (a 7 percent chance), that she will not miscarry (90 percent) and that she will not let the baby die even though it is the child of rape (90 percent). Hill then ran the numbers on the reproductive costs and benefits of rape. It wasn’t even close: the cost exceeds the benefit by a factor of 10. “That makes the likelihood that rape is an evolved adaptation extremely low,” says Hill. “It just wouldn’t have made sense for men in the Pleistocene to use rape as a reproductive strategy, so the argument that it’s preprogrammed into us doesn’t hold up.”" (Emphasis mine)
http://www.newsweek.com/2009/06/19/why-do-we-rape-kill-and-sleep-around.html
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@ ampersandT
The other thing you have to consider is how the victims themselves are affected by rape culture. We all know it is very common for women to not immediately recognize rape for what it is. Or to be told “it was just a silly little mistake, why would you want to ruin his life over that?” While none of us are in favor of taking the choice of prosecution away from the victims, there are going to be times when the victim internalizes that societal voice of “it wasn’t that bad.”
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Thank you for this post. It also applies to sexual harassment. You hit the nail on the head perfectly and I wish your blog was compulsory reading for all judges, prosecutors, police and human rights commission staff.
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I also saw the study about conflicting psychological and physical arousal in women presented with violent scenes. To me it makes complete sense that women who did not die from rape then reproduced and that trait was carried on while the traits of women who died as a consequence of rape died with them. This is a more rational explanation than that we’re all just repressed and unwilling to admit our desires. To imply that all women secretly want to be violated like that is utterly preposterous. Though I’m sure that some women on this beautifully diverse planet are legitimately turned on by violence, I doubt very much that any woman – or any person, for that matter – desires non-consensual violence upon their body. It certainly goes against the biological imperative for survival, if not being downright unpleasant.
On another note, it’s been repeatedly argued that sex and procreation aren’t the motivating factors for rapists anyway; it’s more about power and dominance than anything else. Profiles of rapists often reveal men who are generally socially inept and have been repeatedly rejected by women or abused themselves, which would make anyone feel powerless. They then use rape to regain their perceived loss of power. Some rapists (typically the drunken fratboy type) feel that they are entitled to the pleasure derived from a woman’s body, for whatever reason, be it a general lack of respect for a woman’s autonomy or just because they think way too highly of themselves. This is also a subcategory of the power dynamic, I suppose. Possibly a similar thing could be said for the motivations of cheaters, in that sex with multiple women is perceived to elevate ‘manly’ (read: powerful) status in society and that they somehow ‘deserve’ instant gratification from multiple women’s bodies.
In my personal experience I don’t know many cheaters; in fact most of the men I know don’t even seriously consider cheating because they’re head over heels for their partners (let’s not forget that gay men aren’t exempt from the spectrum of human behavior including cheating, rape, and loving monogamous relationships).
It’s interesting/infuriating how what the media says society values and what I observe in real life are so different.
Sorry if that was kinda rambling and tangential; I didn’t get much sleep last night.
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