Sexual Correctness

I see that the noted rape apologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer is being brought to my town next week, to speak at a Sex Salon hosted by a professor and sex researcher associated with the Kinsey Institute.  I wonder if her views on rape and consent will come up, so to speak.  I will be working that evening, so I can't pony up the $10 admission fee.  I'm asking some people I know with relevant interests and connections about it, though.

Something like this is a perfect opportunity to address "Political Correctness," I think.  I do not think that Westheimer should not be allowed to speak in Bloomington; quite the contrary.  I do think she should have to talk about and defend her absurd and indeed false statements about rape.  For those who don't know or have forgotten, about a year ago Westheimer told a TV interviewer:

I am very worried about college campuses saying that a woman and a man—or two men or two women, but I talk right now about women and men—can be in bed together, Diane, and at one time, naked, and at one time he or she, most of the time they think she, can say “I changed my mind.”

No such thing is possible. In the Talmud, in the Jewish tradition, it says when that part of the male anatomy is aroused and there’s an erection, the brain flies out of that and we have to take that very seriously, so I don’t agree with that.

As I showed in the post I wrote about Westheimer at the time, she was alluding to a proverb that is not in the Talmud.  Some rabbis and scholars, whom I quoted, claimed that the Talmud's stance on consent was opposed to Westheimer's and agreed with modern feminism, but that wasn't true either.  Not that it matters, because neither folklore nor the Talmud has any authority on this subject, except for observant Jews who give them authority.  And perhaps not for them either, because the Talmud is an archive of debate and dissent and a springboard for more debate and dissent by experts in its tradition, not a final authority.  As another proverb says, Two Jews, three opinions.

Lest anyone suggest that this was a long time ago (over a year!) and who cares, it should be obvious that a lot of people do care; that rape, sexual assault, and consent are still hot issues; and that Westheimer did her best to bury the controversy when it first came up.  She should not be allowed to do so.  The Salon will take place off-campus, but it's connected to the University through the faculty who run it, and Westheimer specifically blamed colleges for fostering what she considered a bad, impossible point of view.  She's a doctor, a celebrity, and a public figure, so she really must be prepared to defend her position.  The attempt to shut down debate and silence disagreement (in this case, by an appeal to authority) is hers, not mine.  If she's changed her opinion since last year, that would be good to know too. 

In this I'm in complete agreement with the University of Chicago's official position, which I am sure Indiana University also holds.  Debating questions like this, rather than settling them by fiat, is (however ironically) what real Political Correctness is supposed to be about.  But if you want to talk about Political Correctness as it's universally caricatured, Westheimer's position is a paradigm case, which is all the more reason she needs to be challenged on it.

Some of My Best Friends Are Putzes

Dr. Ruth Westheimer got some attention a few days ago by saying some stupid things about rape and consent in a TV interview.  Amanda Marcotte was one of many online pundits who gave her a good dressing-down.

Here's a partial transcription of Westheimer's remarks:

I am very worried about college campuses saying that a woman and a man—or two men or two women, but I talk right now about women and men—can be in bed together, Diane, and at one time, naked, and at one time he or she, most of the time they think she, can say “I changed my mind.”

No such thing is possible. In the Talmud, in the Jewish tradition, it says when that part of the male anatomy is aroused and there’s an erection, the brain flies out of that and we have to take that very seriously, so I don’t agree with that.

It sounds like Westheimer's trying to be a kosher Camille Paglia.  I'm not going to address her remarks about consent, because Marcotte and others have done that more or less ably, including some of Marcotte's commenters, who referred to their own experience for counterexamples.  But I noticed an annoying tendency among the commenters to dismiss the Talmud, though they clearly had no idea what it is.  Well, I mean, like, who cares what a bunch of dead white men said like millions of years ago?  We're modern enlightened people and we have science, which totally proves that you can get naked with someone and they can't rape you, so there!  We don't need your Stone Age Talmud!

I'm not a Talmudist, not even Jewish.  I'm a goyisher atheist, but I have picked up some shiny bits of information in my reading about the human heritage.  The Talmud is not the Jewish Bible -- that would be what Christians call the Old Testament.  The Talmud is a huge, complex text made up of Mishnah and Gemara.  The Mishnah was compiled around 200 CE; according to tradition it preserves in writing the Oral Torah, the discussions of Jewish scholars and authorities from the time of Moses down to, roughly, the destruction of the Second Temple around 70 CE.  This is probably not true, any more than the written Torah was written by Moses, or the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek by seventy scholars in seventy days, or the New Testament gospels were written by some of Jesus' original followers.  The Gemara is commentary on the Mishnah, which accumulated over three or four centuries.  To add to the complexity, there are two Talmuds, the Jerusalem and the Babylonian, but the Babylonian one has priority for most use by rabbis and scholars.

Overall, the Talmud is an archive of "legal" debate among scholars.  I put "legal" in quotes because there's a tradition among Christian apologists to see rabbinic Judaism as a system of cold, soulless legalism, abetted by the fact that the Torah (which means "instruction," somewhat euphemistically) is referred to as nomos, or "Law," in the Greek of the New Testament.  To oversimplify so we can move along here, rabbinic Judaism is a system of warm, soulful legalism.  It is, like any legal or religious system, thoroughly human in its origins, implementation, and function.  As you might guess, then, it's usually inaccurate to treat the Talmud as a monolithic authority, as Westheimer did.  There's an old joking proverb: Two Jews, three opinions.  The Talmud is, like law or philosophy or theology or literary criticism, or science for that matter, a record of dissent and debate.  My first suspicion when I read Westheimer's claim was that if I looked at the text in its context, it would be a lot less direct and clear than she wanted people to believe.

One of Marcotte's commenters referred to the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism as "primitive."  No, it's not.  In a previous post I quoted a technical definition of "primitive" from the sociologist and Hindu monk Agehananda Bharati's book, The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism (Ross-Erikson, 1976).

"A primitive society, by anthropological criteria, is a small, band-like society structured entirely on kinship lines, which does not deploy fulltime specialists for anything" (142).  Two things about this: 1) it's not derogatory or racist to use the word "primitive" in this way, just as there is probably a definition of "tribal" that isn't derogatory or racist, but either word can be used to put down what one doesn't like in one's own allegedly "advanced" culture, just as "childish" can be; 2) by Bharati's definition there are still "primitive" aspects of modern Western society, but these are not necessarily bad: friendship, kinship, taking care of others as amateurs rather than as specialists, without expecting cash payment for doing so.

I remarked to the commenter that he might as well have referred to the Talmud as fat or gay as call it "primitive."  He countered that the Talmud isn't fat or gay, but it is primitive, so there.  If you use "primitive" to mean "something I don't like," then yes, the Talmud is primitive.  If you're using the word in anything like the anthropological sense, however, it's not.  (There are other valid uses of "primitive," as in the arts, but he didn't mean those either.)  Ancient Judaism -- the much older Hebrew Bible, I mean, as well as the Talmud -- was the product of a literate society with fulltime specialists such as priests, scribes, and teachers.  You could call it "primitive" to mean that it was a long time ago and didn't have printing or telescopes or cell phones, but then the Greece of Plato and Aristotle, or the Roman Empire, or the sages of Vedic Hinduism, or the Buddha would be primitive too, and I doubt the commenter had them in mind.

On attitudes to women and sex, and rape in particular, the modern, enlightened West would also have to be referred to as "primitive."  Modern Western science has been -- well, I'll be nice and just call it "terrible" on these matters.  Think of the brilliant scientists (both male, of course, but aided and abetted by female colleagues) who, based on their evidence-based research, recommended that young men be required to take rape-prevention classes before they were issued driver's licenses and young women be advised not to wear tight sweaters.  Steven Pinker was embarrassed by the stupidity of the recommendation but still defended Thornhill and Palmer in The Blank Slate (page 371) -- they were so not justifying rape! -- by adducing the authority of Camille Paglia.  Then remember Michael Ruse -- philosopher of science, champion of Darwin against the Bible-thumpers -- showing his complete inability to grasp the difference between rape and consensual sex, or between rape and crapping on your boss's Persian rug.  There must be male scientists who are better than this, but I don't know of any.  Advances in thinking about rape came from man-hating, hairy-legged feminists, not from Science.

Some of the commenters pointed out that women were forbidden to study Talmud until recently.  The determined resistance by male scientists to letting women work in the sciences must not be forgotten either.  (Especially since there is still a drive to erase the achievements of women scientists from the history, sometimes by tokenizing them.)  It's not really that hard to remember, since it is still with us, if slightly less virulent.  Yes, even now in the primitive times of the twenty-first century, male scientists are trying to explain away the lesser numbers of women in the sciences by blaming it on women's supposed innate lack of interest in science, or their supposed lack of compulsive competitiveness, or even because their brains aren't organized to do science like men's are.  You can condemn religious traditions for male chauvinism and misogyny, and you should; but you must also be aware of the same tendencies in Science.

Also relevant here is current scientific thought on homosexuality, which incorporates conceptions of gender and sexuality that could perhaps be called "primitive"; certainly they are descended from concepts that are ancient. As I've said before, where but on sex/gender do the primitive myths and misconceptions of the masses get respect from enlightened scientists, who seem to be under the impression that they invented them themselves?

But I digress.  When I read about Westheimer's statements I began wondering almost immediately: Did the Talmud say what she said it says, that "when that part of the male anatomy is aroused and there’s an erection, the brain flies out of that and we have to take that very seriously"?  I thought I recognized a Yiddish proverb invoked by Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint:  Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd -- When the prick stands up, the sense (or judgment) lies down in the ground.  This is of course an alibi made by men themselves, and has no scientific standing.  For one thing, the putz doesn't have a brain, as Westheimer implies: sexual desire is mostly in the brain a couple of feet above the gonads.  For another, sexual desire can impair judgment, but it doesn't destroy it altogether; an aroused person can still hear the words "No" and "Stop."  If a person is taught that he (or she) is not responsible for what he does when aroused, he will not even try to behave responsibly.  As Marcotte pointed out after Westheimer protested that she wasn't defending rape, "no rape apologist in the history of rape apologies has ever admitted to rape apologizing."

But did Ashkenazi folklore take this proverb from the Talmud?  I realized I'd better try to find out, and it turned out to be easier than I expected.  The writer of this helpful article tried to ask Westheimer for a reference for her Talmudic wisdom, but the Doctor was out.  The writer then talked to some rabbis, who recognized the proverb but didn't think it came from the Talmud.  Indeed, they said, that the Talmud is extremely anti-rape and pro-consent.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whose books about sex and Judaism include “Kosher Sex,” “Kosher Adultery” and “Kosher Lust,” said, “I know Dr. Ruth and very much like her, but anyone in the Jewish community should strongly object to what she said. Consent is offered by a woman, and it can be withdrawn at any moment."

“The idea that men are ravaging beasts who are controlled by their hormones and can’t stop themselves is a Neanderthal view that Judaism would never embrace. It’s a shockingly frightening excuse for rape.”

Rabbi Dov Linzer, head of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a liberal Orthodox rabbinical school, and co-host of “The Joy of Text” monthly podcast on Judaism and sexuality, agreed with Ruttenberg and Boteach. Linzer pointed to the passages they cited and also noted a passage in Berachot 62A saying that even when a man and his wife are naked together in bed, it is incumbent upon him to make sure she desires to have sex before beginning the act.

Although known for its conflicting opinions and arguments, the Talmud is notably consistent about sexual consent, Linzer said, adding that he could not think of any passage that forgives or condones sex without full consent and that “the whole issue of responsibility and culpability is a major theme in the Talmud.

This sounded very impressive. Why, the Talmud is completely in accord with modern feminism!    (Notice, however, Boteach's reference to "Neanderthal" brutishness.  We don't in fact know anything about the sexual behavior or manners of the Neanderthals.  The word has the same function here that "primitive" did for the commenter I mentioned earlier.  If the Neanderthals were contemptuous of consent, though, that would mean they weren't primitive but as modern as Dr. Ruth or Michael Ruse.)  English translations of the Talmud are available online, so I decided to find these passages if I could, and see how the rabbis expressed these modern ideas so many centuries ago.  I began with Berachot 62A online, and I cannot find anything about the necessity of a husband's ascertaining his wife's willingness to copulate there, in or out of bed.  The section is mostly a discussion of outhouse etiquette between men, mainly rabbis.  For example:

Our Rabbis taught: Who is a modest man? One who eases himself by night in the place where he eased himself by day.  Is that so? Has not Rab Judah said in the name of Rab: A man should always accustom himself [to consult nature] in the early morning and in the evening so that he may have no need to go a long distance? And again, in the day-time Raba used to go as far as a mile, but at night he said to his attendant, Clear me a spot in the street of the town, and so too R. Zera said to his attendant, See if there is anyone behind the Seminary as I wish to ease myself? — Do not read 'in the place', but read, 'in the same way as he eases himself by day'  R. Ashi said, You may even retain the reading 'place', the reference being to a private corner.

Kinky, but not relevant to rape or consent in the marital bed.  I checked other passages cited in the article.   Nedarim 20A says nothing I could find about connubial drunkenness ruling out consent, though it does contain some familiar folklore about children being marked by their parents' behavior during and after conception:

R. Johanan b. Dahabai said: The Ministering Angels told me four things: People are born lame because they [sc. their parents] overturned their table [i.e., practised unnatural cohabitation]; dumb, because they kiss 'that place'; deaf, because they converse during cohabitation; blind, because they look at 'that place'. But this contradicts the following: Imma Shalom was asked: Why are thy children so exceedingly beautiful? She replied: [Because] he [my husband] 'converses' with me neither at the beginning nor at the end of the night, but [only] at midnight; and when he 'converses', he uncovers a handbreadth and covers a hand breadth, and is as though he were compelled by a demon. And when I asked him, What is the reason for this [for choosing midnight], he replied, So that I may not think of another woman, lest my children be as bastards. — There is no difficulty: this refers to conjugal matters;  the other refers to other matters. 

There follows some discussion of anal penetration of the wife, which the rabbis generally accept because

R. Johanan said: The above is the view of R. Johanan b. Dahabai; but our Sages said: The halachah is not as R. Johanan b. Dahabai, but a man may do whatever he pleases with his wife [at intercourse]: A parable; Meat which comes from the abattoir, may be eaten salted, roasted, cooked or seethed; so with fish from the fishmonger.

Only 37A came within a country mile of R. Boteach's account: "Ye maintain that a menstruant woman is permitted yihud [privacy] with her husband: can fire be near tow without singeing it?"  This seems to me far from "the man has to prop himself up on his elbows and subside," however, and it seems to imply that the proximity even of a menstruating wife will "singe" her husband with desire.  Or maybe not.  But on the basis of these scholars' references, I can't see that the Talmud is particularly humane or enlightened about women, copulation, consent, or reproduction.  That, however, is more because it's the work of male scholars, than because it's religious or "primitive."

Oh, How Can You Say Such Awful Things?

I'm reading Gary C. Thomas's essay "'Was George Frederic Handel Gay?': On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics" in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, & Gary C. Thomas; 2nd edition, Routledge, 2006).  Thomas does a beautiful job showing how Handel's virtue has been defended fiercely by his biographers for the past three centuries, without any evidence to support a claim of heterosexuality.  Often they have simply made stuff up: Thomas quotes a late twentieth century biographer who confidently asserts that Handel wasn't homosexual because "in an eighteenth-century context the vagabond life of musicians made marriage a distinct hindrance" (170).  You mean like Haydn?  Or Mozart?  (Even if marriage was a hindrance to musicians, it doesn't seem to have deterred them from marrying.)  Oddly, Thomas counters this claim by pointing out that "gay men from Handel's time through Stonewall (but especially in the eighteenth century) married more often than not, and for a variety of reasons"; a really determined apologist would use that as evidence that Handel wasn't gay, or he would have married.  More germane, and Thomas spends a good deal more space showing this, is that the evidence we have (including from his contemporaries) is that Handel didn't have any erotic liaisons with women at all, unlike many of his artistic bachelor contemporaries.  That's not proof that he was gay either; but it argues against any confident assertion that he was heterosexual.

But I'm digressing; what got me started on this post was Thomas's partly rhetorical question on the same page: "Why in an enlightened age wouldn't the possibility of a gay Handel be greeted if not with enthusiasm, then with a 'modicum of dispassionate objectivity'?"  It's understandable why Handel's contemporaries would have reacted with horror to the suggestion that the great man was a Sodomite; but not in our supposedly "enlightened age," when we know that earthquakes aren't caused by buggery.  One of the virtues of the first edition of Queering the Pitch (1994) was that the more intemperate reactions to it cast doubt on the widespread fantasy that the world of classical music is a tolerant, accepting, even welcoming haven for homos.  If the suggestion that Handel (or Schubert, or whoever) may have liked men is so absurd, why not simply refute it with evidence and reason?  Why do so many highly educated and worldly people react instead with illogic and fantasy?

I can now segue to the main topic of this post, namely Todd Akin, the Republican candidate for the US Senate from Missouri who uttered these now-notorious words in an interview on a St. Louis TV station:

First of all, from what I understand from doctors, (pregnancy from rape) is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

Akin's claim is ludicrous, of course, but people reacted to it almost as ludicrously.  This Kansas City Star article, for example, quotes an emergency-room doctor as saying, "To try to be able to say that anyone’s going to respond in a consistent pattern that’s going to limit their probability of becoming pregnant is ridiculous."  The doctor seems to be thinking in terms of medical procedures, like a morning-after pill or a medical abortion; what Akin evidently had in mind was an automatic physiological response of a woman's body to forced copulation.  I'm referring to the Star article because it explains where Akin probably got his belief:

But Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association — a nonprofit that describes itself as a pro-family organization — told The Star on Monday that “fair-minded people” know what Akin really meant by his statement. Wildmon speculated that Akin was differentiating between forcible rape and statutory rape, which can be consensual.

“What I read from some medical sources, when a woman is raped, her body shuts down in some respects that may prevent her from getting pregnant,” Wildmon said.

Wildmon referred to an article by physician John Willke, president of the Life Issues Institute — a nonprofit anti-abortion group — and former president of the National Right to Life Committee. In that article, titled “Rape Pregnancies are Rare” and published in April 1999, Willke wrote that one of the most important factors to consider is that a rape victim’s hormone production during such trauma may be “upset,” resulting in a possible pregnancy being compromised.

“There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape,” the article reads. “This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy.”

Leading experts on reproductive health, however, dismissed this logic...

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy

(Newsweek's Michele Goldberg, on Democracy Now yesterday, also cited Willke.)  This is what I'd consider the proper response to someone like Akin: Oh, really?  Which doctors?  Can you point me to a source?  What do most doctors say about this?  The struggle for women's reproductive autonomy has been going on for quite some time now, much like the struggle for racial equality or the struggle for the equality of sexual minorities.  Yet every time some bigoted fool says something absurd, the typical liberal response is to freak out (Oh, how can you say such awful things?) and vilify the person rather than his or her words, despite the liberal claim that liberals and especially liberal Democrats are sane rational people while conservative Republicans are irrational wackjobs.  Which isn't to say that Akin shouldn't be vilified, but so should many Democrats.  People who haven't learn to think or debate rationally are not people I trust with a movement for social justice.

The focus has been on Akin's fantasy about the wonderful, no doubt God-given, powers of the female body to protect itself against invasion.  (While he was at it, he should have mentioned the tiny but sharp little teeth that come out of the vagina to chomp up the membrum virile of a dirty rapist, praise Jesus!  That would be a fantasy too, but why stick with half-measures when you're talking about a serious issue?  The more serious, the more important it is to make stuff up.  It's okay, because it's in a good cause.)  I can't help wondering, though: if a woman's body blocks pregnancy after a rape, isn't that like natural abortion?  Should a woman be allowed to punish a zygote, or even a sperm cell, just because she was raped?  That is, I hope you noticed, Akin's rationale for disallowing a medical abortion in cases of rape: punish the rapist, not the "baby" -- once the sperm is in the vagina, it's a potential baby.

It isn't actually irrational to believe that women's bodies could reject unwanted sperm.  Such things happen in nature.  Among zebra finches, females do not conceive after forced copulations, and females of some other species have been observed ejecting sperm after copulation; see Marlene Zuk, Sexual Selections [California. 2002], 84-85.  Women aren't birds, unfortunately, and if Todd Akin wants to build social policy on the assumption that they are, he needs better evidence than one speculative paper by one anti-choice doctor.

Fussing about the definition of rape, as many of Akin's liberal critics have been doing, is really beside the point.  Some have looked past it, pointing out that his fantasy about women's power is an attempt to justify his denial of an exception for abortion in the case of rape, which is the current Republican Party stance on abortion.  The issue is not the definition of rape, but that women's right to make decisions about their own bodies has been whittled away that far.  Roe v. Wade asserted a woman's freedom to decide whether to have an abortion without qualification in the first trimester of pregnancy, whether she has been raped or not.  But focusing on the definition of rape allowed President Obama, for example, to pontificate:

Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me. So, what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making healthcare decisions on behalf of women.

Obama's own record, however, is dodgier than these tough words would suggest.  As this blogger points out, the Affordable Care Act (conforming with the Hyde Amendment) forbids the use of federal funds for abortion, "except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered," as well as other amendments which "prohibit discrimination" (!) against health care providers whose religious "conscience" forbids them to provide abortion services.  Sounds like male politicians making healthcare decisions on behalf of women to me.

It's worth looking at Akin's "apology," too.  Does he apologize for his determined, longstanding opposition to women's reproductive freedom?  Of course not:

I’ve really made a couple of serious mistakes here that were just wrong, and I need to apologize for those. First, I might say that I’ve always been committed to pro-life, and it was because I didn’t want to harm the most vulnerable. But likewise, I care deeply, you know, for the victims of people who have been raped, and they’re equally vulnerable. And a rape is equally tragic. And I made that statement in error. Let me be clear: rape is never legitimate. It’s an evil act that’s committed by violent predators. I used the wrong words in the wrong way. What I said was ill-conceived, and it was wrong. And for that, I apologize.

It's a typical politician's apology.  Which is why rape survivor and author of the Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler missed the point in her HuffPost response to Akin.  Ensler invited Akin to imagine a violent, stinking stranger breaking into his house in the night and forcing him to submit to his vile appetites -- but stranger rape, preferably by unwashed derelicts of color, is the paradigm of rape that the Religious Right accepts.  (At least in theory: in practice, the victim had better be a white blonde virgin, whose flimsy feminine garments are rent by the brute's grubby paws, and even then they'll never quite believe she didn't ask for it.)  The Republican National Committee didn't cut off their funding of Akin, nor did Romney denounce him and call for him to withdraw from the race, because they've suddenly become pro-choice.  (As usual, the Onion got it right.)

I got into a verbal tussle with the blogger Vast Left on Facebook yesterday, because he blamed Akin's view on the Bible, and invited his commenters to cite cases from the Bible where rape resulted in pregnancy.  His own example was that of Lot and his daughters.  Faithful Bible readers will recall that after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which also resulted in Lot's wife looking back and being turned into a pillar of salt, Lot's daughters got him drunk on successive nights and copulated with him in turn.  They both became pregnant as a result.  I pointed out that if anyone was raped in this story, it was Lot; Akin's fantasy wouldn't apply to him.  Vast Left didn't seem bothered by the distinction, but of course we're going after Republicans here, and Christians to boot, so all's fair.  More cases were mentioned, such as slaves being used sexually (which, as I've pointed out, doesn't seem to bother gay Christians as long as master and slave are both male), of concubinage and the like.  I pointed out that in the Hebrew Bible, brides were routinely purchased, so it would seem that all Biblical women were raped (except possibly Ruth).  The concept of "consent," so important in liberal discourse on sex, is a legal fiction: in America in the recent past, white women could not consent to copulate with non-white males, wives could not withhold consent to copulate with their husbands ("I do" amounting to consent while the marriage continued), and of course no one of either sex could consent to be penetrated anally.  Legal consent, enshrined in the cliche "consenting adults," is very different from commonsense notions of consent, which have their own problems.

Vast Left offered a nice platitude: Sexual attitudes in the past sucked, and so do some today, but consent is important.  And religion is okay as long as believers extract whatever good they can from it.  Who gets to decide that what is extracted is good? I asked.  Atheists haven't done better than theists where ethics and morality are concerned, as far as I can tell, particularly on questions of sex and gender.

Wherever Akin and Willke got their fantasy about the abortifacient powers of the womb, they didn't get it from the Bible.  Indeed, Willke is a doctor, and they were both appealing to the authority of science, not religion.  Where consent is concerned, atheists -- especially male ones -- have not distinguished themselves.  Remember the proudly atheist and pro-science philosopher Michael Ruse, who confused sex with a woman and defecating on a Persian rug: his rationalist exploration of rape delved into whether he should clear a potential copulation with another male, and the woman's opinion didn't enter into it at all.  (He did lament that human females don't go into heat, because then rape somehow wouldn't be an issue, but again, he was addressing other men's judgment of his behavior, not the woman's wishes.)  "Scientific" discussions of rape have been no better, such as Thornhill and Palmer's recommendation that teenagers be required to take classes on rape prevention before being issued a driver's license: boys would learn the evolutionary issues involved, while girls would be taught not to dress "provocatively" -- any Taliban mullah would surely agree.  Or the whole "evolutionary psychology" approach: rape is awful, terrible, horrible, and maybe someday we'll find a way to alter the genome so men won't do it, without losing their manliness.  Meanwhile, according to the evolutionary psychologists, women will just have to learn not to blame Nature if her sons are sexist; it's nobody's fault.

This is one reason I don't blame religion for bad things in human society (or give religion credit for the good things).  People use religion to ratify what they already want or believe, which is why when many people reject religion, they tend to keep the teachings they like.  Sex and gender are topics that seem especially tenacious.  But again, all this is a distraction from the crucial issue of women's right to make decisions over their own bodies.

That was all I had in mind to say, but just now another friend posted a meme on Facebook to the effect that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn't be having this conversation.  It's a familiar gag; one version went, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."  The point is a good one, but I don't think I agree.  Patriarchy regulates men's sexual behavior pretty strictly too: consider the story of Onan (Genesis 38), struck dead by Yahweh for spilling his semen on the ground instead of siring a child on his widowed sister-in-law.  Masturbation, called onanism, was ginned up into a major source of hysteria by the medical profession, more than it ever had been by religion.  Men are supposed to respect each other's property rights over women, though of course they constantly cheat.  And male homosexuality, conflated with the regulation of styles of manhood, is a major arena of anxiety and discipline; men who fail to conform pay a heavy price.  Which brings me full circle to the question at the beginning of this post, and good night.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy

Playing the Victim Card

Ex-IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, accused of trying to rape a hotel maid in New York City, was granted granted bail today. The amount is high, and the conditions are stringent, which seems only fair considering that he'd already tried to bolt the country once. His attorney, according to the BBC, answered the prosecution's objections thusly: "The prospect of Mr Strauss-Kahn teleporting himself to France and living there as an accused sex offender, fugitive, is ludicrous." Of course! Who would do such such a ludicrous thing?

Even worse than the other attempts to make Strauss-Kahn seem a victim is this vile story from the New York Post:

The IMF chief's alleged sex-assault victim lives in a Bronx apartment rented exclusively for adults with HIV or AIDS, The Post has learned. ...

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control: "It is possible for either partner to become infected with HIV through performing or receiving oral sex."...

The humiliated, 62-year-old suspect was ordered held without bail Monday and placed under suicide watch at Rikers Island -- reduced to wearing shoes without laces and a medical device to make sure he's breathing.

True, it is remotely possible to contract HIV from the act of fellatio, but the receptive partner is much more at risk than the insertor. And there's something outrageously funny about a rapist, even a "humiliated, 62-year-old" one, worrying that he might, you know, catch something from his victim. Someone like Strauss-Kahn, who appears to have quite a sexual history of his own, is more likely to put his partners at risk. There's no indication in any of the stories I've seen that he showed any interest in condom use when he assaulted the woman. If, as Strauss-Kahn's attorneys allege, the encounter was "a consensual romp," then surely an experienced married man having an extramarital fling would have the prudence to protect himself (to say nothing of his wife) with a latex barrier, right? So there's nothing to worry about, except that swill like this will keep turning up in the trial process.

To the Sweden Station

Damn, this guy is smart. Richard Seymour has written the single best piece I've seen on the Swedish sex allegations against Julian Assange, and the discussion in comments is worth looking over too: in addition to Seymour's debates with some of his readers, it contains a lot of useful links. (And for Cthulhu's sake, will people stop confusing Naomi Wolf with Naomi Klein?) Now I don't have to try to write about it; he's said what I would have, and done it better.

Though I want to mention also this post from the FAIR blog, in which the Washington Post's insufferable Obama flack Dana Milbank functions as metonym for every media fool who has assumed that Julian Assange is Wikileaks, and that his personality is the important thing -- that by calling him an egoist or an egomaniac, they've discredited all the material that Wikileaks has published. (I hope to spend more time later on a fatuous article by sf writer Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks, Assange, and accused leaker Bradley Manning, though it has been pretty well shredded just in its own comments.)

That Persian Rug Was Just Sitting There, Your Honor

Looking back over the previous post, I'm not sure my argument was as focused as I wanted it to be. So let me return to Michael Ruse's discussion of rape, and what I take to be the core of his argument:

I am simply saying that if women did go into heat, then even if we had the same moral principles -- treat others fairly, etc. -- it would simply not make sense to condemn someone for fucking the female if he got the chance. Having to take a shit is a physical adaptation, and it makes silly the moral claim that you ought never shit -- although it does not affect the claim that it is wrong to go to your supervisor's home for supper and end the evening by crapping on his Persian rug.

I think this remarkable passage makes it quite clear that Ruse hasn't got the foggiest idea what the fuss over rape is all about. Rape does not mean a man "fucking the female if he got the chance." It is not comparable to going "to your supervisor's home for supper and end the evening by crapping on his Persian rug." (But what if the rug was in heat? What if it was begging to be crapped on? What if it had a sign on it, saying, "Take a crap on me or I'll die"?) Most tellingly, the prohibition of rape is not analogous to "the moral claim that you ought never shit", because, as Ruse concedes, no one would make such a moral claim; a closer analogy would be a moral claim that you ought never to have sex at all, which is of course an ideal in numerous moral traditions. Ruse's is closer to the claim that you oughtn't shit on your supervisor's Persian rug unless he gives you permission, but even here the analogy breaks down, because a Persian rug is not a sentient being and a woman is, and what counts in sexual intercourse is the woman's (or partner's) consent, not that of her putative owner.

As shown by the Biblical examples I quoted at the end of the previous post, though, traditional prohibitions of rape are based on the assumption that women are chattel, owned by men. Ruse's argument works only in that context, and that may be why he falls prey to the confusion that so many straight men can't seem to escape: between sex in general, and forced sex. Women going into heat, or not, is irrelevant.

Even in species that have rutting season, females are selective about which males they'll accept. (Here's an interesting, prize-winning, undergraduate student paper on the subject, with references. How can a clear-headed Darwinian like Ruse exhibit such amazing ignorance? Could it be wishful thinking?) There's no reason to assume women in heat would be any different. As things are, even when a human female is consciously interested in sex, and goes out looking for a sexual partner, she is looking for one she wants, not just any. I've known a number of young-ish straight males who can't understand why women will turn them down when they promise that the woman will get an orgasm too; they can't get it into their heads that, regardless of their erotic competence, those women don't want to have orgasms with them. It's sad, but it happens. One kid told me he believed that as a straight male, he had the right to give women pleasure. (Of course, he didn't plan to achieve this by jumping in a lake, wearing a paper bag over his head, or taking vows of chastity.) He did have that right, I suppose, but they equally have the right to decline his offers. This seems to be extremely difficult for many men to grasp.

Ruse seems to assume that estrous females take on any and all comers. Since they don't, his thought experiment is worthless from the start. He also assumes that males, including human males, are helpless in the presence of available estrous females, and they just have to throw themselves at them. But this assumption already animates many if not most of the excuses for rape in the human world. It's not the woman's consent that concerns rapists or their defenders. For that matter, even men are selective, though they often pretend otherwise. Still, it might be worth pointing out that obese women are raped, "ugly" women are raped, old women are raped, six-month-old infants are raped; being in heat simply has nothing to do with it, though the rapists defend themselves by claiming that the victims needed it, wanted it, begged for it, should thank them for it. It took years of feminist agitation to get police, prosecutors, and courts to stop thinking in terms simply of male craving and need, and to start seeing rape as a crime with a (usually) female victim. And yet, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a professional philosopher of some distinction still sees rape as the unfortunate consequence of the fact that women don't go into heat. We haven't come a very long way, baby.

If Anything Is True, Nothing Is Permitted

Back to A Very Bad Wizard. The first discussion that caught my attention was with Michael Ruse, a prolific writer on philosophical topics whose Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry (Blackwell, 1988) I read but remember nothing much about. He's written several books defending Darwinian theory against Creationism (and testified in the famous Arkansas "creation science" trial of 1981). His interest for Tamler Sommers lies in his attempts to connect evolution to ethics.

Starting on page 96:

TS: So it's not morality itself, but this feeling of objectivity in morality that is the illusion -- right? But doesn't that mean that as clearheaded Darwinians, we have to say that there are no objective moral facts? And therefore that it is not an objective fact that rape is wrong?

MR: Within the system, of course, rape is objectively wrong -- just like three strikes and you're out in baseball. But I'm a nonrealist, so ultimately there is no objective right and wrong for me. Having said that, I am part of the system and cannot escape. The truth does not necessarily make you free.

TS: The truth here being that there is no real right and wrong.

MR: Yes, but knowing that it is all subjective doesn't necessarily mean that I can become a Nietzschean superman and ignore it. I take very seriously Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky points out that even if we have these beliefs that there is no right and wrong, we can't necessarily act on them. And, you know, I see no real reason to get out of the system, either. If I rape, I am going to feel badly, apart from the consequences if I get caught. And the reciprocation -- I don't want my wife and daughters raped. But even rape is relative in a sense to our biology. If women went into heat, would rape be a crime/sin? I wrote about this once in the context of extraterrestrials -- is rape wrong on Andromeda?

I disagree with Ruse here, because I disagree with Dostoevsky. It's hard to prove a case in fiction, and I wasn't convinced by Crime and Punishment, where the protagonist Raskolnikov tries to prove his superiority to religious morality by robbing and killing an old woman. He botches the job, and eventually turns himself in -- just as the police are closing in on him anyway. Within the terms of the novel and the problem it poses, this only shows that Raskolnikov isn't a superior being after all; old-fashioned "slave morality" is good enough for the likes of him, and you, and me. There are other objections to Dostoevsky's argument, such as the fact that he considered the state qualified to do things (like killing people) that are immoral for individual citizens, so he had at least a two-tiered morality, and of course God's ways are not our ways, etc. But they aren't pertinent here.

TS: I'm not sure what you mean by "within the system, it is objectively wrong." Do you mean that because we have laws and norms against rape, then rape is wrong? Or do you mean that for our species, given our biology, rape is objectively wrong? If it's the latter, aren't you violating Hume's Law, too?

(Hume's Law is the dictum that you can't infer "ought" from "is", values from facts.)

MR: ... There is no ultimate truth about morality. It is an invention -- an invention of the genes rather than of humans, and we cannot change games at will, as one might change from baseball if one went to England and played cricket. Within the system, the human moral system, it is objectively true that rape is wrong. That follows from the principles of morality and from human nature. If human females went into heat, it would not necessarily be objectively wrong to rape -- in fact, I doubt we would have the concept of rape at all. So, within the system, I doubt that we would have the concept of rape at all. So, within the system, I could justify it. But I deny that human morality at the highest level -- love your neighbor as yourself, etc. -- is justifiable. That is why I am not deriving is from ought, in the illicit sense of justification. I am deriving it in the sense of explaining why we have moral sentiments, but that is a different matter. As an analyst I can explain why you hate your father, but that doesn't mean your hatred is justified.

TS: So then by analogy, Darwinian theory can explain why we have moral sentiments and beliefs, right? So let's get into the details. Why was it adaptive to have this moral sense? Why did our genes invent morality?

MS: I am an individual selectionist all the way. Natural selection has given us selfish/self-centered thoughts. It had to. If I meet a pretty girl and at once say to Bob Brandon [the philosopher of biology at Duke University], "You go first," I am going to lose in the struggle for existence. But at the same time we are social animals. It's a good thing to be, we can work together. ...

TS: I wanted to ask this before -- what is it about human females not going into heat that leads us to be moral?

MR: Human females not going into heat does not make us moral or immoral -- but it is an important fact of our sociality and it is an important fact when we are making moral judgments (which are always matters of fact plus moral principles). I am simply saying that if women did go into heat, then even if we had the same moral principles -- treat others fairly, etc. -- it would simply not make sense to condemn someone for fucking the female if he got the chance. Having to take a shit is a physical adaptation, and it makes silly the moral claim that you ought never shit -- although it does not affect the claim that it is wrong to go to your supervisor's home for supper and end the evening by crapping on his Persian rug.

TS: That's what I meant -- why would it not make sense to condemn someone for raping a human female, if human females went into heat?

MR: Look, in my view, as a naturalist, I think epistemology and ethics are dependent on the best modern science. Look at Descartes and Locke and Hume and Kant. The point is that if women went into heat, then biology really would take over and we would lose our freedom. ... The point is that ought implies a choice, and if women went into heat then there would be no choice. I wouldn't have a hell of a lot of choice even though they also wouldn't. So it's not that we are always moral -- we certainly aren't -- but we have the urge to be moral as one of the package of human adaptations.

TS: Okay, I see why selection has given us selfish thoughts. A trait that leads you to give up the girl to Brandon every time is not going to get passed on to the next generation. Because you need a woman to pass on traits of any kind. At least for now, with the cloning ban. ...

Sorry for the long quotation, but I wanted to do Ruse's argument justice, and there's plenty more where this came from.

It seems to me that both Ruse and Sommers are unclear about what rape is; I want to argue that whether human females go into heat is irrelevant to the moral question Ruse is talking about.

What got my attention as I read this dialogue was that as Ruse frames the issue, rape is a moral issue between men. Women barely feature in it, as is typical of both adaptationist-oriented discussions and traditional moral and legal codes down to very nearly the present. (Yes, Ruse says that he wouldn't want his wife or daughters to be raped; while laudable, it still means in context that he's concerned about the safety of "his" women, and more important, he puts it in terms of "reciprocation", where males try to agree to leave each other's women alone. Not to spare the women's feelings, which are curiously absent from the field, but to spare other men's feelings.) This relates to some previous posts I've written on the subject, from Thornhill and Palmer's Natural History of Rape to other sociobiological grappling with male rut.

Since Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape it's been a cliche in pop-evolutionary talk about sex that, unlike many other species, women don't go into heat -- they're always potentially sexually receptive. Maybe the ethological knowledge has been refined somewhat since then (I found a couple of articles referring to research which indicated that women might be more sexually receptive when they're ovulating, and send out pheromones that bring all the horndogs running; seems to be mostly boyish wishful thinking though), but as I recall, even in species where females do go into heat / estrous / season, they are not totally indiscriminate in accepting males, and males may struggle ("compete") to keep other males away from a female they want to inseminate. The "sexual selection" so touted by evolutionary psychologists really has more to do with women's choices about the men they accept than men's selectivity about the women they pursue; women constitute a reproductive bottleneck in this scenario, since once they're fertilized they won't be available for further breeding for several years, a troublesome obstacle for males who seek to maximize their reproductive success. And blah blah blah -- this is old hat.

In Homo Sapiens sapiens, that's certainly the case: men try to hoard women, preventing other men from getting access to them, and the morality of "rape" is more about keeping women secure and intact from other males than about respecting women's wishes or decisions. I've been annoyed, in the "evolutionary" discussions of rape I've seen so far, by their careful avoidance of the fact that in the real world, rape is not considered such a bad thing after all, that women are presumed be wanting it secretly, and that men are constantly trying to construct scenarios in which a woman forfeits her right to say No. (For example, by saying, "I do" -- once a woman says Yes, she can never again say No.) Indeed, women are regarded in traditional discourse as untrustworthy, devious, wandering critters who'll jump the fence if they can, then blame an innocent feller who didn't even get his wick wet. Did he really force her, or did she lead him on? Did she struggle, did she yell, did she prefer to kill herself than receive his embrace, or was she really willing all along? Why was she walking alone at night in that part of town, dressed that way? Did she have her fingers crossed behind her back?

So Ruse's distinction is probably bogus to begin with, since women's potential approachability has nothing to do with the state of their ovaries, neither does the morality of rape have anything to do with it, partly since he takes for granted that men are always "in heat." It's noteworthy that he throws in that little joke about deferring to a colleague; the "pretty girl" is not consulted, and "I am simply saying that if women did go into heat, then even if we had the same moral principles -- treat others fairly, etc. -- it would simply not make sense to condemn someone for fucking the female if he got the chance." But that is the rationale of rapists in the actual state of human biology. "What could I do, Your Honor? The bitch was out there all by herself, without a chaperone or an armed male escort. A woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can run with his pants down, haw haw haw. She didn't rip my throat out with her teeth, so I could tell she wanted it. How can you condemn a man for fucking the female if he gets the chance, especially a chance like that? Besides, she's ugly as all get out, she should thank me. She wanted it, she wanted it, I could tell she wanted it."

And so on. Pardon the offensive litany of rapists' excuses; I thought it necessary to spell them out since they are a routine part of male culture and therefore of our evolutionary heritage, and yet the evolutionary psychologists' discussions proceed by pretending that they don't exist. (Except when Thornhill and Palmer, for example, drop trou and prescribe classes to teach young women to avoid rape by not dressing "provocatively.") I'm not saying that Michael Ruse would accept them, either; I'm sure that as an educated Western moral philosopher he would reject them in high moral dudgeon. It's just that his discussion never does consider women as full human subjects in the matter; as I said, he frames it solely in terms of men, and ignores the actual moral/legal approach to rape in the real world, in which a woman's consent is secondary to the primary question of whether the man had licit access to her.

Look at Deuteronomy 22, where the disposition of rape cases depends on the circumstances. If a bethrothed virgin is raped out "in the field", the rapist is to be executed and the victim spared, because she "cried, and there was none to save her" (vv. 25-27). If a betrothed virgin is raped in the city, she is to be stoned to death along with her rapist, because she didn't cry out (vv. 23-24). If the victim was not betrothed, the rapist must pay a fine to her father and marry her (vv. 28-29). Rape in the Bible is a crime between men, against each other's property, not a crime against a woman. Ruse's discussion is just as male-centered. That's clearheaded Darwin-informed moral philosophy in the 21st century for you, after forty years of feminist agitation.

Surrender the Pink(er)

Another commenter at WhoIsIOZ challenged me to explain why I’d said that Steven Pinker’s quoting Camille Paglia on rape discredited him. The commenter helpfully posted the quotation itself:

For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, "Rape is a crime of violence but not sex." This sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class....

These girls say, "Well, I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening." And I say, "Oh, really? And when you drive your car to New York City, do you leave your keys on the hood?" My point is that if your car is stolen after you do something like that, yes, the police should pursue the thief and he should be punished. But at the same time, the police---and I---have the right to say to you, "You stupid idiot, what the hell were you thinking?"

That first paragraph is a stunning non sequitur. What’s the connection between rape as a crime of violence and rape as a crime committed by nice boys from good homes? None that I can see. Nor do I see where she gets “sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense”. (P.S. Maybe she thinks that nice boys won't commit crimes of violence, but will commit crimes of sex?)

The second sentence of that paragraph is not only false, it’s the opposite of the truth. Since the 1970s at least, feminists have been arguing (with evidence from empirical studies) that most rapists are not dark-skinned brutes leaping from the bushes to ravish white virgins, but ordinary men like any others, and that most women are raped by people they know, not by strangers. Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975) argued the point at length, as I recall (it’s been close to 30 years since I read it).

Feminists were vilified for supposedly sowing discord between the sexes, for allegedly teaching young women to regard every nice young man as a potential if not actual rapist. Paglia herself attacked the concept of “date rape,” not on the ground that rape is rape regardless of the status of the rapist, but … well, I admit I’m not sure. Maybe because if a girl goes out with a boy, she should expect to put out? Paglia is not known for the coherence of her thought.

As for the second paragraph, it’s not even clear that those girls actually do get drunk at fraternity parties and go to guys’ rooms “without anything happening.” What they seem to be saying is that going to a guy’s room does not, in itself, constitute consent to intercourse, whether the girl is drunk or sober, let alone passed out. This is a less controversial doctrine than it would have been, say, forty years ago. But at the university where I work, female students are advised not to drink excessively, to be careful where they go and with whom, to stay alert and aware. Male students are advised that a woman’s presence in their room, drunk or sober, is not in itself consent to sex.

That’s not to say that idiotic things don’t get said at times. One earnest male student, working under the head counselor at the dorm where I work (notorious on campus for its “political correctness”), put together an alarmist information sheet which advised that since most rape is acquaintance rape, you shouldn’t go on a date with someone you don’t know well. How, I wondered, would one get to know another person well, if not by spending time in their company? The student evidently interpreted “acquaintance” to mean “someone to whom you’ve been introduced but don’t yet know intimately,” as though women weren’t raped by boyfriends and husbands too.

I wouldn’t put an absolute divide between rape as violence and rape as sex: I would expect that rapists are no more consistent in their motives than anyone else. But I can’t understand how anyone could deny that men do sometimes rape women (or men, for that matter) as punishment (for being in the “wrong” place, for daring to say No to their importunings, and so on), not just because they’re overwhelmed by lust and have to have an outlet. The use of words like “violation” for forced sex is itself an indication that it is traditionally seen as an act of aggression, even to the exclusion of desire.

Consider this passage from chapter 16 of the book of the prophet Ezekiel, in the Authorized (King James) Version. Yahweh is addressing Jerusalem metaphorically as a “harlot”:

³⁶Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness discovered through thy whoredoms with thy lovers, and with all the idols of thy abominations, and by the blood of thy children, which thou didst give unto them;

³⁷Behold, therefore I will gather all thy lovers, with whom thou hast taken pleasure, and all them that thou hast loved, with all them that thou hast hated; I will even gather them round about against thee, and will discover thy nakedness unto them, that they may see all thy nakedness.

³⁸And I will judge thee, as women that break wedlock and shed blood are judged; and I will give thee blood in fury and jealousy.

³⁹And I will also give thee into their hand, and they shall throw down thine eminent place, and shall break down thy high places: they shall strip thee also of thy clothes, and shall take thy fair jewels, and leave thee naked and bare.

Uncovering nakedness in the Hebrew Bible is often a euphemism for copulation, as in the prohibitions of uncovering the nakedness of near relatives in Leviticus 18:6-7. This passage, like others in the Bible, is a maelstrom of sexual violence. Yahweh does not propose to strip Jerusalem naked before her lovers out of erotic desire, but to shame and punish her. Similar fantasies appear in Hosea chapter 2, and in the New Testament Revelation 17, and they recur in later Western literature. Feminists didn’t invent the conflation of sex and violence – men did. Considering that Paglia made her name as a literary critic, she can hardly be unaware of this.

Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer purported to have shown that rape is not at all an act of violence. When I get back to the US, I plan to read the rest of their Natural History of Rape, to see just how they manage to do it.

We Must, We Must, We Must Work On Our Bust!

I’ve read the first fifty pages of Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape (MIT Press, 2000), and already some interesting themes have begun to emerge. The book attracted a lot of attention on publication, partly because of the authors’ media blitz (appearances on CNN, NPR, NBC, etc.), and because of their recommendation that rape could be curtailed if boys had to take classes on rape prevention before they got their driver’s license, and if girls would stop wearing tight sweaters. Why am I not surprised that with wisdom like that, the first printing of 10,000 sold out in a month?

A Natural History of Rape begins with Thornhill and Palmer hiding behind the skirts of evolutionary psychologist Margo Wilson, who assures the reader solemnly:

Rape is horrific for women. The mere thought of rape arouses anxiety, revulsion, and anger, so it is not surprising that women are very ambivalent about subjecting rape to scientific scrutiny….

The authors of A Natural History of Rape are familiar with various expressions of such ambivalence, and they understand why women are so anxious. As scientists, they value knowledge and assume that trying to understand why rape occurs is far more beneficial for women in the long term even if the scientific inquiry inspires anxiety and revulsion. …

They passionately embrace the scientific method … [ix-x]

…but, I feel certain, only with the scientific method’s full and informed consent. On the next page, Thornhill and Palmer (henceforth T&P) chime in with the Boy Scout Oath, clean, thrifty, brave, reverent, and hairy-palmed:

As scientists who would like to see rape eradicated from human life, we hold that the ability to accomplish such a change is directly correlated with how much is known about the causes of human behavior. In contrast, mistaken notions about what causes rape are almost guaranteed to hinder its prevention.

Unfortunately, there is, as the zoologist Patricia Gowaty (1997, 1) puts it, a “troublesome antipathy of modern society, including many feminists, to science and scientific discourse.” [xi]

It’s not clear why the authors must dwell on the supposed “troublesome antipathy … to science and scientific discourse” in “modern society.” After all, there is a troublesome antipathy to feminism, and to women in general, in modern society. While American science no longer enjoys the almost unquestioned access to money that it did during the Cold War, it is still extremely prestigious and very well funded, compared to education or other social services that directly benefit the bulk of the US population. Even pseudoscientists try to dress themselves up in the trappings of science – the white coats, the mathematical formulas, the test tubes and other instruments. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, not antipathy, and one might say the same of Western science’s historical appropriation of the forms of magic and religion to bolster its own claims to authority.

But anyway. After the breastbeating over the lack of respect science gets nowadays, A Natural History of Rape proceeds to a basic explanation of evolutionary psychology. T&P stress that there’s no simple dichotomy between genes and environment, nature and culture.

The interaction of genes and environment in development is too intimate to be separated into “genes” and “environment.” Not only is it meaningless to suggest that any trait of an individual is environmentally or genetically “determined”; it is not even valid to talk of a trait as “primarily” genetic or environmental. However, since “biological” actually means “of or pertaining to life,” it is quite valid to claim that any phenotypic trait of an organism is biologically, or evolutionarily, determined…. Genes per se are not evaluated by selection. Instead, it is the interaction of genes and environment that selection evaluates. … Both the environmental and the genetic causes reflect evolutionary history, and equally so [21].

So far so good. As I read this, though, I realized that it was familiar. I had first learned about the inseparability of genes and environment by reading people like Ruth Hubbard and Richard Lewontin – distinguished biologists who are sharply critical of evolutionary psychology and its near relative sociobiology. While they differ in their interpretation of the evidence, they can hardly be accused of “antipathy … to science and scientific discourse.” This doesn’t stop Thornhill and Palmer from referring to every scientist who takes a different tack from theirs as “non-evolutionary” or even “anti-evolutionary,” though this leads to problems, as here:

Claims that cultural inheritance is independent of biological inheritance, whether made by non-evolutionary social scientists or by evolutionary biologists (Dawkins 1976 [The Selfish Gene!]… ), are erroneous. Culture is not the “superorganic” force that some social scientists have claimed it to be. Nor, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett (1995) has pointed out, does culture consist of ideas (called memes) that parasitize minds independent of psychological (biological) adaptation, as certain biologists have claimed [27].

If even arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins is guilty of ignoring the universal power of biology, then perhaps T&P should cut some slack to those supposedly “non-evolutionary social scientists.” Critics of evolutionary psychology have also criticized meme theory, and that second sentence is clumsy, to say the least. It seems to say that Daniel Dennett is among the critics of meme theory, but as far as I can tell he’s one of its advocates. And if “certain biologists” regard culture as somehow independent of biology, then again, we’re dealing not with a division between pro- or anti-science, but with disagreements within science.

T&P point out the difference between evolutionary adaptations and “by-products.” The red color of blood, for example, is not thought to be the result of natural selection; it’s due to the “chemistry of hemoglobin in blood, and human color vision.” They insist that “When one is considering any feature of living things, whether evolution applies is never a question. The only legitimate question is how to apply evolutionary principles. This is the case for all human behaviors – even for such by-products as cosmetic surgery, the content of movies, legal systems, and fashion trends” (11). Hmmmm. This seems reasonable enough, though their choice of examples is telling. It’s no less true that feminism, abortion, contraception, the social sciences, “the Left,” and anti-science “ideology” are by-products of evolution. Though our boys T&P, like so many scientists, like to imagine that they are free of “ideology,” their pure untrammeled science displays a certain pro-male bias: what men do is just natural, thanks perhaps to our “human evolutionary history of stronger sexual selection acting on males than on females” (11), while what women do is ideological – but then ideology too, on T&P’s assumptions, is ultimately biological.

It seems to me that T&P rely very heavily on an ambiguity in the writing of their targets:

Is the socially learned behavior known as culture still biological and subject to the only general biological theory – evolution by selection? A common justification for rejecting evolutionary explanations of human behavior is that it is not, and that hence it requires an entirely different approach. This view was expressed recently by the feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling …: “I have found it useful to try to separate discussions of sociobiological approaches to the study of animal behavior from the application of such approaches to human behavior. I do this, not because I believe in a special, non-evolutionary creation for humans. Rather, I think that the evolution of culture has enormously complicated the task of understanding human behavior and development” [24].

Now, “feminist biologist” Fausto-Sterling’s disavowal of belief in a “special, non-evolutionary creation for humans” might be as disingenuous as T&P’s disavowal of ideology, but I don’t think it is. Even T&P acknowledge that not every feature of culture is the result of adaptation:

At one extreme are certain cultural behaviors, such as an individual’s adoption of a new hairstyle, that show no evidence of design by natural selection. Although a hairstyle is a by-product of numerous underlying psychological adaptations (perhaps concerning status, mate preferences, and/or visual acuity), a particular new hairstyle in itself cannot be considered an adaptation. At the other extreme are cultural behaviors that may have been copied for hundreds or even thousands of generations, thus implying the replication of both the genes involved and the environmental influence of the behavior of other individuals in each generation. In addition to language, such extremely traditional cultural behaviors include aspects of child care (feeding and caring), systems of kinship identification (kin terms, descent names, clan markings [!?]), techniques for manufacturing stone tools, hunting strategies, religious rituals, mating practices, and systems of punishment [27-28].

If a hostile critic were to yank sentences out of their context in this passage, they could be made to suggest that T&P believe culture is independent of biology. I think they are confused, however, on what is involved here. For example, I accept that the human capacity for language is a biological adaptation, but the fact that I speak English and not (say) Chinese is not the result of biological differences between me and a Chinese speaker, and it’s fair to say that it’s the result of forces that can reasonably be called “purely cultural”: when and where I was born, and the language I heard in early childhood. Those cultural forces can be said to rest on a biological substrate, and so aren’t “independent” of biology in that sense, but for purposes of analysis, scholars and scientists often (usually? always?) separate things that aren’t really separable: consider the range of medical specialties that focus on different systems of the human body as if they were independent of each other, though hopefully the specialists are aware on some level that they are all linked together. It’s possible that someday biologists will be able to explain the variety of human languages in biological terms, but if I want to understand Chinese, I don’t need to change my biology, I start studying Chinese.

I think Fausto-Sterling understands this distinction; it’s interesting that T&P apparently can’t. While their inability might be due to biology, I think it’s the result of ideology, the belief that the only meaningful explanations of differences among human beings must be biological – or to put it another way, they focus their inquiry on the biological “extreme” of the continuum they posit in that last quotation. That’s not necessarily a bad thing unless it causes them to forget the cultural extreme whose reality they concede – but it does cause them to do so, and to project their own ideological blindness onto their opponents.

There’s a reason for what scientists like Wilson, Gowaty, Thornhill and Palmer call an antipathy to science and scientific discourse in modern society: it’s the fact that scientists have so often claimed to know more than they do, and to make recommendations for social policy on the basis of that knowledge, only to have their “knowledge” crumble under further examination. Books like Not in Our Genes (Pantheon, 1984), by Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin, or Fausto-Sterling’s Myths of Gender (expanded edition, Harper, 1992), have exposed some of these bogus claims, much to the fury of biological reductionists. Steven Pinker, for example, has said that the very title of Not in Our Genes is proof that its authors believe that human beings are “blank slates.” Here Pinker’s just falling again into the either-or trap, assuming that a rejection of false claims about human biology is a rejection of all claims. Given the history of biological reductionism, I think it’s not unfair to urge that the burden of proof lies on its advocates. But given the ideology that science is self-correcting and that scientists’ claims should be subjected to criticism by their peers, it’s probably not surprising that biological reductionists should prefer to attack their critics’ supposed ideology, rather than answer the criticism. After all, their scientific forefathers did the same.

The embarrassing history of eugenics in the 20^th century is a prime example of this pattern. Each succeeding generation of biologists tries to distance itself from its predecessors, often simply by changing the name of their research program while leaving the substance untouched. They deplore their predecessors’ ideological blind spots, while assuring the public that this time they are free of such biases, unlike their wishful-thinking critics who are afraid to face the findings of true science. They have no biases or ideology; if you don’t like what they have to say, it’s because of your anti-scientific ideology, blah blah blah – all very familiar from the last turn of the wheel. Since so many of the targets of these biologists are other biologists, it’s fair to presume that the disputes are not between ideology and fact, or between science and anti-science, but between differing interpretations of the evidence by scientists themselves. That Thornhill and Palmer deliberately chose to frame the debate as an ideological one doesn’t inspire confidence in their work.

I Like A Girl With Spirit!

There’s a story I’ve been hearing for some time now, from Golda Meir’s days in the Israeli cabinet, before she became Prime Minister. I haven’t had much luck tracking it down, but I have found this direct quotation (unfortunately unsourced):

Once in the Cabinet we had to deal with the fact that there had been an outbreak of assaults on women at night. One minister (a member of an extreme religious party) suggested a curfew. Women should stay at home after dark. I said: "but it's the men attacking the women. If there's to be a curfew, let the men stay at home, not the women."

Of course the proposed curfew was not enacted; contrary to what most people who tell this story seem to think, I wonder if it had a chance to begin with, since Meir singles out the minister who suggested it as “a member of an extreme religious party” (this was the 1950s, when the ultraorthodox were not the force they are today in Israeli politics). But everyone loves Meir’s comeback, because despite her general anti-feminism, she put her finger on the key issue: why should women, but not men, have to adjust their behavior?

Remember that one result of such a curfew would be that any woman who was raped after curfew would be legally assumed to be “asking for it,” thus letting off the rapist. (I’m not just speculating; such blaming the victim has been traditional in American practice, unquestioned until feminists fought it.) This would also be a consequence of Thornhill and Palmer’s suggestion, in A Natural History of Rape, that girls be taught not to dress provocatively, which is not just stupid and malevolent, it’s regressive. (The same is true, by the way, for their suggestion of mandatory rape-prevention classes for boys, teaching them that they are biologically prone to sexual assault. You don’t have to be a professional psychologist to know that such teaching would encourage rape, not discourage it. But Thornhill and Palmer are scientists, so they must know what they’re talking about.)

Martha McCaughey, in The Caveman Mystique, page 94, quotes two more guys who

remind readers that they do not mean to imply that women should begin to forgive sexual harassers:

It is simply our hope that the more we understand about the evolution of human psychology, the closer we will be to developing appropriate and effective solutions for such unfortunate and deplorable side effects of human nature and behavior as sexual harassment.

Their solution involves changing

the structure of the organizational environment which would reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances, and allow women more freedom to change jobs or change their working environment, as they feel is necessary.
Allowing harassers more “freedom” to get fired is not mentioned as a solution, nor is equal pay, although earlier the authors state that women’s economic position relative to men’s makes this male strategy surface (the way lots of gardening makes calluses come out). …

Notice the pious beginning, followed by the assumption that “the organizational environment” should be rearranged around men’s immutable “evolved” obnoxiousness, and that women should be freer to “change jobs” or, in some unspecified way, “their working environment.” (Certainly not in any way that would inconvenience the men.) It’s never clear in such discussions how we – that is, evolutionary psychologists -- know that women are so malleable, so flexible, compared to men’s “evolved” rigidity, which will go all limp if it’s not given free rein. I suspect that malleability is simply assumed, on the male-supremacist postulate that women exist to give service to men; not merely sexual and domestic service, but emotional service as well. (There are echoes of behaviorism in McCaughey’s targets: they want to structure the work environment so as to “reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances,” which is right out of Skinner.)

Richard Dawkins exploded (he tends to explode a lot) in a 1997 interview quoted by McCaughey (122f):

[T]he opponents of sociobiology are too stupid to understand the distinction between what one says about the way the world is, scientifically, and the way it ought to be politically. They look at what we say about natural selection, as a scientific theory for what is, and they assume that anybody who says that so and so is the case, must therefore be advocating that it ought to be the case in human politics. They cannot see that it is possible to separate one’s scientific beliefs about what is the case in nature from one’s political beliefs about what ought to be in human society.

It is, however, Dawkins who is clearly too stupid to understand the difference he harps on. In his bestseller The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976, p 126) he wrote:

Since we humans do not want to return to the old selfish ways where we let the children of too-large families starve to death, we have abolished the family as a unit of economic self-sufficiency, and substituted the state. But the privilege of guaranteed support for children should not be abused. … Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.

I found this bit of old-fashioned scientific racism (the Pope is ordering the stinking Irish to breed like rabbits so he can take over England!) quoted in Not in Our Genes (Pantheon, 1984) by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In its original context it’s even worse, deranged in fact: to start with, Dawkins believes that there is a gene “for having too many children”, which makes no sense. Evolutionary theory is based on the assumption that all animals have “too many children”: “All species overproduce offspring, not all of which can survive to reproduce in their turn. Thus, there is inevitable competition among the individuals of each species for the means to survive and reproduce, and any inherited advantage in this competition will be naturally selected” (Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, quoted in McCaughey, p. 27). Further, “the family” is not the “unit of economic self-sufficiency”, communities are, and “the old selfish ways” are a figment of Dawkin’s imagination: societies have always made provision for people who need help, and adults limited the size of their families long before modern contraception. Infanticide, especially, is very old, both as a means of culling and as a means of redistributing children to parents who can and want to support them. (Exposed children didn’t always die, as exemplified by the fictional but realistic case of Oedipus.) I’ve often observed that people who like to think of themselves as hard-headed realists tend to be soft-headed fantasists, and Dawkins fits the mold.

“Men must stop prostrating themselves to science,” McCaughey says (136), but “hiding behind” might express it better. It seems to be typical for evolutionary psychologists to begin their sermons by deploring the amorality of “nature.” (They also tend to personify “nature” and “evolution,” but that’s a topic for another day.) They think that doing so proves they don’t justify rape or male promiscuity, and they get very self-righteous when their magic shield doesn’t work. Considering that they have no real evidence that all men are genetically predisposed to abuse women, they shouldn’t be so surprised when feminists (and not only feminists) suspect that they aren’t as disinterested as they’d like to think. When your conclusions aren’t supported by your evidence, it is only reasonable to suspect that you have a personal investment in your conclusions. As Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote over thirty years ago in her brilliant (though, I admit, uneven) book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976, 215ff):

I have seen on the faces of some men who are on the whole quite likable a certain smile that I confess I find deeply unattractive: a helpless smile of self-congratulation when some female disadvantage is referred to. And I have heard in their voices a tone that (in the context of what women put up with) is equally unattractive: a tone of self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement when some male disadvantage becomes obvious. This sense of being put upon that many men feel in the fact of evidence that the adult balance of power is not at every point by a safe margin in their favor seems based on the implicit axiom that to make life minimally bearable, to keep their very chins above water, to offset some outrageous burden that they carry, they must at least feel that they are clearly luckier and mightier than women are.

I detect just that kind of smirk in David Barash’s complaint, “If Nature is sexist don’t blame her sons,” quoted by Hilary Rose in Alas Poor Darwin (Harmony Books, 2000, 139). Notice first the personification of “nature”; Nature is not a person and cannot be sexist. But “her sons” can be, and often are; hiding behind Mother’s skirts won’t help them.