Evolutionary Psychology
Teaches Rape 101
By: Judith Shulevitz
Culturebox was not surprised to learn from the latest issue of
The Sciences that evolutionary psychologists have come up
with an answer to the question of why men rape. From the
beginning, ev psych has portrayed the war between the sexes
as both natural and inevitable: Men have to spread their genes
around by having sex promiscuously and by whatever means
necessary; women lavish their scarce reproductive resources
only on partners who'll stick around to ensure that their
children thrive. So there was nothing startling about the
arguments of Craig T. Palmer and Randy Thornhill (author of
a famous study on beauty arguing that throughout world
cultures, men and women prize symmetrical features, which
correspond to genetic health): Rape, they say, is either a
direct reproductive strategy--what men resort to when all else
fails--or the byproduct of other reproductive strategies, "such
as a strong male sex drive and the male desire to mate with a
variety of women." What was newsworthy is what the authors
suggests we should do to prevent rape.
Now, before Culturebox reveals Thornhill and Palmer's nifty
solution to this age-old problem, she has to digress a bit on
the subject of evolutionary psychology. Here's her beef with it:
Evolutionary psychology is not very good on the aspect of the
human psyche she's personally most interested in, which is
how humans are different from animals. Ev psych insists,
rightly, that we not ignore our similarities to the higher- and
lower-order creatures, but it's weak on subjectivity,
self-awareness, self-consciousness, whatever you want to call
it--on how we explain our tangled mass of hormonal impulses
to ourselves. And yet this ability to reflect on ourselves
underlies art, architecture, poetry, government, journalism,
and all the other forms of willed culture and communication
that animals don't and can't have. The new sociobiologists do
address complex social institutions--particularly ones that
require cooperation--but only in the broadest of terms. They
find ways to boil them down into high-end, unconscious
reproductive strategies.
Some evolutionary psychologists understand the limitations of
their field. They know that it has explanatory power only in
general terms, and is useless in the particular case. They know
that their account of human motivation is deliberately
reductive--designed to make it easy to grasp large patterns of
behavior--rather than a rich and accurate description of what
and who we are. Thornhill and Palmer, however, are not
among these modest evolutionary psychologists. And so they
boldly stray into efforts to modify the behaviors of individuals.
They propose a course to teach young men about rape:
Completion of such a course might be required,
say, before a young man is granted a driver's
license. The program might start by inducing the
young men to acknowledge the power of their
sexual impulses, and then explaining why human
males have evolved in that way. The young man
should learn that past Darwinian selection is the
reason that a man can get an erection just by
looking at a photo of a naked woman, why he
may be tempted to demand sex even if he
knows that his date truly doesn't want it, and
why he might mistake a woman's friendly
comment or tight blouse as an invitation to sex.
Most of all, the program should stress that a
man's evolved sexual desires offer him no excuse
whatsoever for raping a woman, and that if he
understands and resists those desires, he may be
able to prevent their manifestation in sexually
coercive behavior. The criminal penalties for
rape should also be discussed in detail.
Now, anyone who has read George Orwell or seen A
Clockwork Orange can imagine the scene: The strapping
teens slump embarrassed in their seats while evolution
instructors lay out their state-sanctioned definition of human
nature. The first message to be drilled into boys' heads is: We
believe you're genetically programmed to rape. The second
(and inevitably less impressive) message is: Oh, and by the
way, we're not going to let you do it.
Here's what Thornhill and Palmer propose for women:
Young women should be informed that, during
the evolution of human sexuality, the existence of
female choice has favored men who are quickly
aroused by signals of a female's willingness to
grant sexual access. Furthermore, women need
to realize that, because selection favored males
who had many mates, men tend to read signals
of acceptance into a woman's actions even when
no such signals are intended.
In spite of protestations to the contrary, women
should also be advised that the way they dress
can put them at risk.
In other words, Thornhill and Palmer are asking the state to
say that it believes that men are born rapists and that women
are under an obligation not to dress or act provocatively.
Culturebox can see the criminal lawyers composing their
genetic-determinist defenses already: Why, even the state
said he couldn't help himself!
Back in 1994, when journalist Robert Wright popularized the
field of evolutionary psychology with his book The Moral
Animal, he wrote an article on ev psych and feminism in
which he acknowledged that evolutionary psychology would
be used to "naturalize" sexist behavior. He thought
philandering husbands would be the ones taking advantage of
the argument about how cheating was hard to control. He did
not foresee the day when evolutionary psychologists would
call for the government to sponsor their theories in a way
virtually guaranteed to generate the very behaviors they are
supposed to prevent. But it was a foregone conclusion that
when evolutionary psychology began to focus on genetic
predispositions and majoritarian norms to the exclusion of
everything else, some literalists would in fact forget everything
else. They would forget that we are products not just of
evolution, but also of what we imagine ourselves to be. And
that if we teach our children to see themselves strictly as
beasts, they're bound to act like them.
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