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A Natural History of Rape
Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer
The MIT Press
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Is rape natural? Is the impulse and the capacity to force sex on women coded into men's genes? Such is the politically explosive claim of the book A Natural History of Rape (The MIT Press, 251 pages, $28.95). Evolutionary biologists Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer do not declare rape to be ethical, any more than, were it adopted by humans, the infanticide sometimes practiced by male gorillas against offspring sired by their rivals. But such killings and rape both are comprehensible, Thornhill and Palmer argue, as strategies for favoring one's genes in the Darwinian struggle to survive.

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Thornhill and Palmer disagree as to whether there is any specific adaptations predisposing males, under some conditions, to rape. But they argue that rape depends on attributes of male sexuality that are cross-cultural and based in reproduction's sexual division of labor. Among these would be males' quickness to arousal, reliance on visual cues, a capacity to enjoy sex in the absence of emotional bonds, and a yen for erotic variety. In addition, Thornhill and Palmer show why rape would be one reasonable reproductive strategy over the long, prehistoric haul of human evolution. These topics have been well-trod in the debates that A Natural History of Rape has sparked, but not the surprising implications of Thornhill and Palmer's arguments for homosexuality and sexual freedom.

Ignored

On gay pride day in New York City last month, a 17-year-old Bronx youth was in front of a gay bar in Greenwich Village when a 250-pound man standing nearby allegedly shoved his hand down the youth's pants, fondling his ass. The teenager registered his unhappiness as this intrusion, and the man left. So did the youth-- in search of a cop. He found one nearby. New York City police have been known to gun down innocent citizens merely reaching for their wallets. In this particular case, the cop showed what many felt excessive restraint: Officer Donna Gaudino refused to take down the youth's complaint. "We can't do anything about it," she reportedly told him. "Nothing is going to happen to him anyway." The young man found two other cops, who proceeded to search for the man without success.

Officer Gaudino, a ten year veteran of the force, miscalculated. Outrage ensued. She was suspended, and may face dismissal after an inquiry. Politicians and victim advocates demonstrated on City Hall steps June 26 "to condemn the gay pride sexual assault and responding officer's inaction."

Sex short-circuited

That rape is a crime of power, not sex, is an ivied pillar of feminist thought. Rape as a tactic of terror is well known in warfare, it is pointed out, and old women and young girls are not infrequent rape victims. Whether females at the either end of the age spectrum are impossible objects of desire is questionable, but, incapable of pregnancy, they are-- in a strict sense-- asexual. Ultimately, however, rape cannot be about sex, the argument goes, because sex is intrinsically mutual-- like conversation, constituted by a shared give-and-take.

Feminist theory sought to distinguish rape from sex to prevail against the one without besmirching the other. Many of the restrictions historically imposed on women and girls-- don't wear revealing clothes, associate with unknown males, or go out-on-the-town alone-- were justified by appeal to rape's looming danger. Females who violated those strictures and got assaulted "had it coming to them," said conventional wisdom of the time, with themselves partly to blame if they were now deemed "damaged goods." Whatever the reason why rapists seek to lord it over those they attack-- anger, frustration, or low self-esteem-- rape understood as a pure imposition of power renders its victims by definition powerless, and so without complicity.

Feminism's claim that "Rape is not about sex," is twinned by another assertion also grown commonplace-- that sex is essentially about power. At its root, the claim is that any meaningful differences between males and females are not natural but imposed externally and politically-- the first human hierarchy and the model for every other. Sex is not just the basis of all other power differences, but their channeller and multiplier. Any wrong involving sex means something is a wrong taken to a higher power. The 500,000-odd Iraqis, mostly children, who have died due to the US-imposed embargo receive a tiny fraction of the media play given American youngsters criminally fondled. There may be little recourse against a colleague who makes the workplace unbearable by his rudeness or hostility, but adding sex jokes to the mix could mean winning damages in the millions.

Many feminists find the focus on sexual victimization distorting, and urge instead attending to such issues as economic equity, reproductive rights, and the dearth of childcare. Yet in fetishizing sexual victimization, feminism has enjoyed some of its greatest success, working with the grain of the American craze for law, order, and mass imprisonment. (Using hate-crime laws as its platform, the gay movement appears to be following in feminism's footsteps.)

But the equation of both sex and rape with power short-circuits the attempt of holding sex and rape mutually exclusive. Denied any connection, sex and rape end up merging bizarrely into each other. Rape traditionally meant the forced sexual intercourse by a man of a woman not his wife. It was a crime said to be easy to allege and impossible to disprove. But in the present context any sex act can constitute rape, or "sexual assault," if someone-- one of the parties, or a prosecutor-- can make the allegation stick. Rape no longer necessarily means forced sex, but the continuation of sex where one partner whispers "no" but otherwise plays along. It may be impolite for a regular sexual partner to screw you as you sleep, or it may be a delightful way to wake up in the morning-- but it could also be prosecuted as rape. Sex crimes reported in the newspapers as rape often don't involve intercourse, only touching. A sexual assault could be any sex one regrets the next day and denies consenting to, without any element of force being alleged.

With this increasing breadth of what counts legally as rape have come lower standards of proof. Advocates for sexual assault reform have pushed to eliminate both any requirement for corroborating evidence in rape cases and statutes of limitations. For cases of rape-- in the old sense–DNA tests can ID the attacker, but in the large and fuzzy realm of sexual assault, the only way you know it happened is because someone says it did, and prison sentences in cases of consensual, statutory rape often measure in the decades.

The situation bears resemblance to that of the South after the US Civil War, where not a few of the black men and boys lynched for rape had committed no such act, where all it took for a rape to be established and someone lynched was the allegation, based perhaps on a smile, a flirt, a grudge, or nothing at all. Actual rapes, some of white women by black men, of course occurred, but they were almost accidents relative to a culture that obsessively conjured their danger, and then with vicious relish slayed over and over the beast it had itself birthed.

Evolution's story

Equating sex with power abets the politicization of sex and the sexualization of politics that defines both the South in the era of lynchings and America in the age of Lewinsky. From an evolutionary standpoint, that equation misses the deeper connection between sex and biology. True, the big news of past generation has been about the disconnect of sex from reproduction-- thanks to the pill, the women's and gay movements, and the liberalization of pornography laws. Heterosexuality is now on a par with homosexuality-- practiced mainly for pleasure-- and biology isn't destiny like never before. But all this is brand new, as new relative to civilization as civilization is to the long stretch of prehistoric time in which humans, and our sexuality, evolved. Without giving up the utterly novel perspective of the last 30-odd years, say the authors of A Natural History of Rape, you miss the heart of the matter.

The basis for rape, Thornhill and Palmer argue, lies in the differing contribution to reproduction of males and females. Though human fathers and mothers both invest great effort, on average, in their children, there's no question women carry the larger burden-- pregnancy, breast feeding, and all child-care should the father disappear. At minimum, the male's investment in passing on his genes is ejaculating into a vagina.

Women's sexuality seems to have evolved to choose a "good provider" of, first, genes and then resources for their children. Cross-culturally, female sexuality shows greater selectivity, a preference for older, higher-status males, and tendencies to long-term emotional bonding with her sex partner. While males do typically settle down and tend to their children, as if to hedge its bets, male sexuality is geared toward mating as much as possible. Cross-culturally, males show greater sexual urgency, a desire for erotic variety, for younger partners, for sex without emotional commitment-- tendencies manifest themselves clearly in the homosexual context, where they face no feminine obstacle.

Rape is best explained, argue Thornhill and Palmer, as a way for a male to pass on his genes. Males alive today are the offspring of the men most successful at doing just that, so if rape was in the course of human history a viable reproductive strategy, males today should be fitted for it, or at least retain its potential. Rape may be just an opportunistic tactic-- do it when you can get away with it (some 30 percent of men say they would, according to one survey). Or rape could be a deliberate reproduction strategy for low-status males not likely to be selected by a female, or males who have lost out among their peers in competition for mates. Running through nature's menagerie, Thornhill and Palmer find examples of animals that seem to follow just such an approach, including one, the scorpion fly, with special pincers whose only purpose seems to be to immobilize an unwilling heterosexual partner.

If rape is about opportunity, the best way to combat it is to educate young males about the temptation, and raise the costs for succumbing. Thornhill and Palmer suggest harsh punishment-- long prison terms and/or castration-- but penalties imposed though with no illusion that rapists have any unusual psychology.

What's bad about rape

If an evolutionary perspective helps us see why rape could be partly natural, it also suggests, Thornhill and Palmer argue, why it is bad. Rape is bad not just because it is coercive-- many things are-- from the cell bars that constrain a murderer, to the collar that curbs a dog, to the commands that discipline an army. Whether coercion is bad or good depends on one's perspective, though one could say generally that forcing a creature to do something it doesn't want to counts as a moral negative. Rape is coercive not just abstractly, but immediately and intrusively, compounding its impact. But that in itself wouldn't make rape different than, say, a beating. Sex can transmit disease-- an additional factor making rape worse than most nonsexual assaults of similar degree. But to say that what is fundamentally bad about rape is its coercion is like saying that the essential wrong of burglary is the forced entry into a home. Certainly that's part of what's bad, but the larger issue is what's been stolen. A burglary is worse the more rreplaceable are the things of value lost. What a woman loses in rape, argue Thornhill and Palmer, is control over her reproductive life.

Evidence?

In its most surprising section, A Natural History of Rape examines how well an evolutionary perspective comports with what is known about rape: who commits it and how it is experienced by its victims. Surveying the literature, Thornhill and Palmer find that only a small minority of rapists use more force than is necessary to impose intercourse, that they markedly target young women at the height of their fertility, and that they tend to have lower social status and come from families characterized by little paternal investment. Moreover, the trauma of rape, according to a study Thornhill and Palmer cite, correlates with the degree to which reproductive choice is compromised. Young women at the height of fertility find rape more traumatic than girls or older women, and a rape involving greater force is less traumatic–within certain bounds-- than otherwise, a counterintuitive finding suggesting that unambiguous force demonstrates that the sex was not consensual. Data about rape is sketchy and incomplete, so none of these assertions are conclusive, but the evidence points in the direction of rape being about sex more than abstract power.

Supernovaed males

The traditional view recognized rape to be a bigger deal for women than men. Even before gay people made any political inroads, youthful male sexuality was cut some slack partly for this reason: there would be little policing of circle jerks or homosexual tomfoolery if it kept the burgeoning male libido out of heterosexual circulation. This provided the main zone of pre-Stonewall homosexuality-- the horny youths and frustrated sailors who anyone could pick up. These scenes served also as a school for masculine socialization. The homosexual-suffused worlds of YMCA and Boy Scouts provided role models for male investment in the young that are key if boys are to adopt a high-resource strategy toward reproduction-- sow seed in one place and tend to it-- than the low-resource strategy epitomized by rape. Yet precisely these kinds of relationships are now the most attacked in the witch-hunt atmosphere around sexual danger to the young deriving from a view of rape as essentially about power, not sex. The rise of ghetto-style macho posturing among boys throughout the West, a supernovaed masculinity, emerges from the depletion of this homosocial space, just as stars blow up and shine brightest as they deplete their fuel. This hyper-machismo ironically abets rape, for whose supposed prevention more normal male bonding has been stamped out. The cycle of fear, like the imagined danger that blacks posed to white women, serves the larger power structure-- the state, the media, the therapists-- that in a classic protection racket promotes the dangers it claims to save us from.

With the cracking of the genome, humans are likely to grow even less dependent on sex as a means of reproduction. To the peasants of yore, for whom the occasional bad harvest meant famine, a world in which almost everyone could feast as they wanted would be paradise. Americans living in that paradise today seem only to be getting more obese, from a combination of indiscipline and crass manipulation by the purveyors of fats and sweets. Does a world of virtualized and unlimited sexual choice spell freedom or invite enslavement to more effective manipulations? Who would have guessed a generation after the sexual liberation movements of the 60s burst forth and by many measures flourished, the West would show higher rates of incarceration for consensual sex than perhaps any society in history?

Gay pride assault

Such questions will loom for our civilization in many domains as technology puts us at a continual further remove from the conditions in which our beings evolved. In a matter immediately at hand, an evolutionary rather than a feminist perspective helps us see what was at stake in New York's gay pride groping. The young victim was not subject to pregnancy, and his reproductive choice was not diminished. A hand on the ass does not transmit any disease. The grope was perhaps shocking but not painful. It was an invitation to a liaison that evidently was not desired, but might have been. The intrusion was a one-off event, and did not affect the young man's social standing, except to let him know someone found him sexy. Given that the stakes were low, and that the youth could have plausibly accused any man on the street, the decision by the New York City policewoman not to take the complaint was reasonable enough.

The groper acted boorishly, demonstrating a type of behavior likely to occur at some low frequency in celebratory crowds. It adds little to understanding what happened to call it "sexual assault." It was not rape.

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com