So it’s one thing to tangle with evolutionary psychology as a blogger. It’s quite another to butt heads with it in person. Or, as in my case, to get verbally head-butted by it. And I’m feeling a little distressed, because a student got traumatized in the process and I didn’t manage to stop it.
Though I have friends who are trained biologists, I don’t normally have any direct dealings with people who believe the urge to rape is hard-wired and unalterable. My comfy little bubble popped a few days ago – in the university’s women’s center, of all places. I had just given an informal lunchtime talk on men in women’s studies, which was more of a discussion than a talk. (It was mostly based on material I presented last summer at the NWSA conference.) One of the attendees who spoke up was someone I’d never met before, a biologist who emphasized that she challenges budding health care workers to question their homophobia and gender stereotypes. The rest of us all made happy noises about how great it was that people were doing feminist work in the natural sciences, too.
But after the event, while people were hanging around chatting, this biologist collared me and said, “Well, I piss off a lot of the pre-meds with what I teach them. But I also piss off everyone else, because not all of what I teach is so politically correct.” Curiously, I asked what she meant (and oh, we all know what happened to the cat!). The earful I got was not just un-PC but downright triggering. (That’s your cue if you’d rather not keep reading.) And it was delivered in a loud monologue so everyone else in the women’s center got to listen along, sans trigger warning.
“You know how the college girls walk around uptown on Saturday nights with their butt cracks showing and their tits hanging out? And everyone’s drinking? It’s no surprise that they get raped. It’s bound to happen! Never in human history have young people had this much freedom. Never have they been so unsupervised, with so much access to alcohol. You’ve got these guys who are at the peak of their sexual prowess. They’re programmed to want to have sex with anything that moves. They’re animals – we all are. And men are visual. So someone is going to get raped.”
Okay, that’s not quite verbatim, but it’s also not exaggerated. She kept getting into infinite loops, especially when it came to the girls’ exposed anatomies and the boys’ uncontrollable libidos. By now there was a circle of a dozen women surrounding us. The conversation was impossible to ignore, with her haranguing me at 120 decibels and barely pausing to breathe.
Eventually I squeezed in a question: “You’re right that we’re in a historically new situation, compared to 50 years ago. But we’re not gonna go back to locking girls up. We’re not gonna veil them or seclude them. And women aren’t necessarily safe in their homes, either. So what would you do to fight rape?”
“Well, they have to stop dressing like they do. It’s like they have a bulls-eye painted on them. Then they get raped and wonder why! The boys can’t help it! It’s what they’re made to do! Girls dress like that and rape will happen. They have no one else to blame!” (Sorry about all the exclamation points. I’m actually toning her down from the ALL CAPS that would be a more faithful transcription.)
I said: “What about the boys? Can’t we teach them that no means no – that date rape is real rape and it’s against the law? Sure, we’re all animals, but aren’t boys capable of learning?” (Nods and murmurs from the crowd.)
“No! This is what young male animals do. They would rut all day and night if they could.”
I tried to get her to engage on a different level – that is, discussing with me rather than haranguing me – because I really am interested in science. When she repeated that guys are visual, I mentioned the study from last fall that showed men respond erotically to the color red but didn’t investigate at women’s responses, though the researchers suspected women would respond similarly. She said, “Oh yeah, women are visual, too!” and went right back to her auto-rant about how men’s visual orientation predisposes them to rape.
I’d chock this up as just another lesson in how inflexible some folks can be, except that a former student of mine walked out with me afterward and told me that one of the young women who was forced to listen to this had to walk out because she’d recently been raped.
I’m dismayed that my colleague’s rape-blaming opened up this student’s wounds. I don’t know the girl, and I’m not sure I’d recognize her on the street. Yet I feel that I should have seen this coming. I should have found a way put the brakes on my ev psych colleague – even though she’s way senior to me, and even though she was shouting at me rather than conversing. I didn’t have any real control over that conversation, but I feel like crap that I didn’t know how to shut it down once it was out of control.
It would be unfair to pin the failings of a whole field on a single individual. In fact, it’d be bad science to make her stand in for all of ev psych – and don’t we already have enough bad science in this realm? Still, this conversation resonated with all of the worst features of ev psych. In the discipline there’s sometimes a kind of macho swagger that goes along with claiming to have the only clear-eyed view of the world, while feminist scholars supposedly indulge in wishful thinking. There’s an unwillingness to grant authority to “fuzzier” disciplines. There’s a media filter that plays up ev psych’s most retrograde tendencies, which frustrates me no end because I like science and want to understand it with some nuance. And there’s a willingness to write off people’s moral capacities – especially men’s – which helps women not one whit. In my personal ev-psych smackdown experience, all of these traits derailed the chance at real dialogue – and retraumatized a sexual assault survivor as a special bonus.
Yes, we’re all animals. But fortunately, we’re animals with moral reasoning. Not to mention the ability to understand that laws have consequences. At The American Virgin, Trixie writes:
Helping young men understand these issues and learn to take responsibility for their actions doesn’t make women victims. We can take all the self-defense and empowerment classes we want, but unless we put the responsibility in the hands of the guys, we won’t change a thing.
That’s exactly it. Even if men’s behavior were completely resistant to change, there’d still be no reason to blame women. Men would still be morally culpable when they commit rape. But education does matter; men’s behavior is malleable. The only redeeming feature of the “men are hard-wired to rape” argument is that it pisses men off, as I’ve found in my teaching, and it puts them in a position where they want to claim a moral high ground. So maybe there’s a use for the cartoon version of ev psych, after all.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
…I tried to write a comment, but it led to a few questions, which led to a conversation with a friend, which turned into questions that would need about a dozen different major research studies to answer.
Um. Which is to say, I found this to be a terribly thought-provoking article. Thank you for writing it.
Thanks for the kind words! There have been way more major studies than that. The problem is, too many of them start out by assuming what they intend to prove – for instance, that men are more visual than women.
I’m really sorry to hear that someone got re-traumatised by hearing this conversation. How horrible for her!
Are men hardwired to rape? Perhaps. But only in the same sense that we (men and women) are hardwired to kill when sufficiently provoked; to steal when we see it as in our best interests; to assault when we feel the circumstances merit it.
But then aren’t women also (like men) hardwired to seek status and attention? And isn’t one way for young women to do this to dress provocatively? (And, as one study has shown, women appear to be hard-wired to dress even more provocatively when they are ovulating.)
Why should we expect men to give in to their wiring, but women to overcome theirs?
Evolutionary psychology is fascinating way to try to understand the broad brush strokes of human behaviour. But surely it can never do more than that. Because from a strict Darwinian point of view, if men are programmed to rape, then women must be programmed to 1) have as many children as physically possible, starting at first ovulation and stopping only at menopause; and be programmed to 2) have every single child by a different father; and be programmed to 3) make the healthiest/wealthiest/highest status father believe that he is the father of all of them.
I wonder if your colleague believes that that’s how women behave if men give them half a chance? Perhaps she thinks that men should reintroduce chastity belts in order to keep women from having 20 children to 20 different fathers (only one of whom she is married to)? Wouldn’t that be the biologically determined, hard-wired scenario that women have no ability to control?
The problem with ideology is that it ignores common sense. Our shared (societal) ideology (with which I happen to agree) is that men are 100% responsible for their actions, including and especially something like rape. Your colleague’s ideology appears to be that the opposite is the case.
The common sense reality is that both women and men are foolish to put themselves into situations where either they or those around them are likely to get out of control. A woman has every right to walk around a frat party naked and drunk, and still be confident that she would be untouched, as far as I am concerned (that’s my ideology). But common sense would suggest it is unwise. A man should be able to drink as much as he wants (ideologically speaking). But if he drinks to the point of the loss of self control, common sense says that’s unwise.
We should teach our daughters to dress attractively enough to feel good about themselves, but demurely enough to feel safe. Similarly, we should teach our sons to drink (and act) responsibly.
But this is, perhaps, a false paradigm, as my greatest concern for my daughter’s safety would no be about how she dressed, but rather with whom she associated.
Sure, victims of crime could often have done more to protect themselves. And sometimes this might include naive, young, scantily clad, drunk women. But the ultimate responsibility for an act must always rest squarely on the shoulders of the perpetrator.
To say otherwise is to, effectively, blame the victim, to disempower and dehumanise the perpetrator, and to remove society from the entire equation. It assumes that we are all back living in some sort of Hobbsian State of Nature, with war of all against all.
That might make a nice construct for the theoretical purposes of Evolutionary Psychology. But it’s simply not the world in which we live.
I do think we all have aggression in us. It goes as deep as our DNA. (I wrote another post on this, actually, spurred partly by your comment!) The question is what we do with it. Most of us learn to channel it in socially acceptable directions.
I agree there’s a gap between what’s right, and what’s sensible. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t encourage her to walk around semi-naked on a Saturday night.
But for girls it’s really hard to distinguish where our evolutionary heritage might be in play, versus the urge to follow fashion. When I was in college and went to parties, we weren’t nearly as naked as girls are today. Fashions have changed drastically since the mid-1980s.
Since I have two sons, my job is to teach them that self-control is, indeed, 100% their responsibility – both ethically and legally. Because I don’t believe we’re living in a Hobbesian state of nature any more than you do.
If it was an issue of how women dress then stranger rape would account for the majority of rape, but it doesn’t. Most women are raped by someone they know and doesn’t involve the victims face being beaten in. The scantily-clad-woman-walking-around-alone-at-night characterization of rape reveals the level of ignorance that she had when discussing the topic. If it was an issue of hard wiring then most men would be rapists, instead of the more plausible and more evidenced pattern of a single rapist claiming many many victims before being jailed.
It really bothers me when supposedly science minded folks don’t think scientifically at all. If everything she said was true then things would pan out differently, period.
There isn’t a lot to get about evolutionary psychology, the field is plagued by studies that focus on behaviors that are not cross cultural, and where there are literally infinite stories that could be made to explain the phenomenon.
Then there is the whole clusterfuck of how natural/hardwiring isn’t a destiny because we all live in extremely unnatural ways and have been conditioned to do so.
The scenario that most concerned my colleague was, actually, acquaintance rape at drunken college parties and bars. It’s true that lots of the women wear “sexy” clothes to those parties. But I have yet to see a study that shows a correlation (much less causation) between skirt length and the probability of rape.
Not only are lots of ev psych studies not crosscultural; they also often focus on a very specific subculture, American college campuses!
Thanks for stopping by, nails. I checked out your blog and I like it!
In my experience, women who engage in victim-blaming do so to reassure themselves that they’ve found the Magic Protection Spell that will ensure they never experience rape. Unfortunately, there’s no such spell – elderly women get raped, fat women get raped, women in modest clothing get raped, women who take care not to go to the Wrong Places get raped (etc, etc, etc).
I used to doubt the feminist trope that “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power,” because it seemed to me that there were cases where it was about sex – eventually I realized that, even when it’s about sex (of a sort), it’s always about power. And unless one buys into extremist (in one direction or the other) misinterpretations of Dworkin, that means the only men who are “hardwired” (and it’s not hardwiring really, more like deep coding) to rape are those who have a(n uncontrolled) need to exercise power-over.
I have as much use for the infantilizing of men by claiming they’re incapable of learning to exercise self-control, as I have for the infantilizing of women (infantilizing seems to be a theme today; see my latest post). It’s not an excuse, so much as it’s an erasure of agency, and as such ought to be profoundly offensive to men.
If I hadn’t used up so much of my rage supply for the day, I’d be outraged about the young woman who was revictimized by Ms EvPsych. I wonder if, should it happen again, you’d be more effective if you eschewed the scientific discussion part (out of character, I know) and just loudly and clearly called the offender on the victim-blaming. I imagine it’d have about the same net effect on the offender as reasoned discussion (that is, none, or annoyance), but any listeners who’ve undergone rape might feel more supported. I may be wrong, though; I haven’t walked in those shoes (just “borderline” experiences that left little real trauma).
Sunflower
Sunflower, it’s so great to have you commenting here again. You always have something perceptive to say.
I agree I should have shifted registers, and I missed the moment where that needed to happen. The conversation started out as a tete-a-tete, and I was so gobsmacked by the total lack of nuance in her comments that I wasn’t noticing the people around us; I was just trying to figure out a way to move the discussion onto a less cartoonish level. And so I didn’t immediately see that everyone else had been drawn in by her shouting.
When I did notice the crowd, that’s where I started to butt in and insist on men’s responsibility. I just did it too late because I was watching – with scientific curiosity, really – where her reasoning would take her. Nothing I could say was gonna change her mind, but as soon as I realized we weren’t on our own, I realized that there would likely be survivors in the larger group. I’m always aware of that from teaching situations anyway.
Should I have yelled back? Maybe! The irony is that the official lunchtime event revolved partly around the question of being “too nice” in the classroom – trying too hard to make everyone feel comfortable, including the men and the conservative women. I definitely do make those groups feel at home, and it’s really not my style to provoke or confront. But here I wish I’d been more forceful, even if I could never have matched her decibel for decibel.
I do think that my colleague may buy into the Magic Cloak theory. Since she’s no longer young (nor am I) we aren’t in danger; it’s only those 20-year-olds in tight low-rise jeans that we need to worry about. It’s a nice, comforting story until someone gets hurt!
[...] 19, 2009 by Sungold Following up on my last post about my run-in with a raucous proponent of ev psych, I should clarify one thing: I do believe humans are naturally aggressive. We don’t learn [...]
Jesus wept!
The vengeful, mean, nasty side to my character wants me to say that evo-psych woman should get raped and then see if she’ll say that the boys can’t help it – but that’s not the person I really am, just anger showing through.
However, as a man, I would have had a very forceful verbal response to express my anger and disgust at being described in those ways. Especially as I consider myself a survivor of a sexual assault myself!
I’m not sure what experiences she’s had. She may well be a survivor herself, making sense of what happened to her through a distancing lens. If so, she didn’t mention it. I don’t want to make any assumptions.
As I said to Sunflower, I really should have been more forceful. It was a combination of different factors, besides my native dislike of confrontation. I was in my most professional mode (I’d been the presenter at the lunchtime event). I was one of the most junior people present, apart from the students. And I was plain flummoxed at the crudity of her arguments.
[...] is bullshit. I just have a problem when their practicitions claim no role for culture – and use it as a cudgel against women, including rape survivors. I’m ready with the pooper-scooper when they’re willing to prove their [...]