No More Learning

Geneticists have discovered that parents' bodies can molecularly imprint genes on the X chromosome so they become more or less active in the developing bodies and brains of their children. A Turner's syndrome girl who gets her X chromosome from her father may have genes that are evolutionarily optimized for girls (since a paternal X always ends up in a daughter). A Turner's girl who gets her X from her mother may have genes that are evolutionarily optimized for boys (since a maternal X, though it can end up in either sex, will act unopposed only in a son, who has no counterpart to the X genes on his puny {350} Y chromosome). And in fact Turner's girls do differ psychologically depending on which parent gave them their X. The ones with an X from their father (which is destined for a girl) were better at interpreting body language, reading emotions, recognizing faces, handling words, and getting along with other people compared to the ones with an X from their mother (which is fully active only in a boy). 54
? Contrary to popular belief, parents in contemporary America do not treat their sons and daughters very differently. 55 A recent assessment of 172 studies involving 28,000 children found that boys and
girls are given similar amounts of encouragement, warmth, nurturance, restrictiveness, discipline, and clarity of communication. The only substantial difference was that about two-thirds of the boys were discouraged from playing with dolls, especially by their fathers, out of a fear that they would become gay. (Boys who prefer girls' toys often do turn out gay, but forbidding them the toys does not change the outcome. ) Nor do differences between boys and girls depend on their observing masculine behavior in their fathers and feminine behavior in their mothers. When Hunter has two mommies, he acts just as much like a boy as if he had a mommy and a daddy.
Things are not looking good for the theory that boys and girls are born identical except for their genitalia, with all other differences coming from the way society treats them. If that were true, it would be an amazing coincidence that in every society the coin flip that assigns each sex to one set of roles would land the same way (or that one fateful flip at the dawn of the species should have been maintained without interruption across all the upheavals of the past hundred thousand years). It would be just as amazing that, time and again, society's arbitrary assignments matched the predictions that a Martian biologist would make for our species based on our anatomy and the distribution of our genes. It would seem odd that the hormones that make us male and female in the first place also modulate the characteristically male and female mental traits, both decisively in early brain development and in smaller degrees throughout our lives. It would be all the more odd that a second genetic mechanism differentiating the sexes (genomic imprinting) also installs characteristic male and female talents. Finally, two key predictions of the social construction theory -- that boys treated as girls will grow up with girls' minds, and that differences between boys and girls can be traced to differences in how their parents treat them -- have gone down in flames.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? Of course, just because many sex differences are rooted in biology does not mean that one sex is superior, that the differences will emerge for all {351} people in all circumstances, that discrimination against a person based on sex is justified, or that people should be coerced into doing things typical of their sex. But neither are the differences without consequences.
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By now many people are happy to say what was unsayable in polite company a few years ago: that males and females do not have interchangeable minds. Even the comic pages have commented on the shift in the debate, as we see in this dialogue between the free-associating, junkfood-loving Zippy and the cartoonist's alter ego Griffy:
? ? But among many professional women the existence of sex differences is still a source of discomfort. As one colleague said to me, "Look, I know that males and females are not identical. I see it in my kids, I see it in myself, I know about the research. I can't explain it, but when I read claims about sex differences, steam comes out of my ears". The most likely cause of her disquiet is captured in a recent editorial by Betty Friedan, the cofounder of the National Organization for Women and the author of the 1963 book The Feminine Mystique:
Though the women's movement has begun to achieve equality for women on many economic and political measures, the victory remains incomplete. To take two of the simplest and most obvious indicators: women still earn no more than 72 cents for every dollar that men earn, and we are nowhere near equality in numbers at the very top of decision making in business, government, or the professions. 56
Like Friedan, many people believe that the gender gap in wages and a "glass ceiling" that keeps women from rising to the uppermost levels of power are the two main injustices facing women in the West today. In his 1999 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton said, "We can be proud of this progress, but 75 cents on the dollar is still only three- quarters of the way there, and Americans {352} can't be satisfied until we're all the way there. " The gender gap and the glass ceiling have inspired lawsuits against companies that have too few women in the top positions, pressure on the government to regulate all salaries so men and women are paid according to the "comparable worth" of their jobs, and aggressive measures to change girls' attitudes to the professions, such as the annual Take Our Daughters to Work Day.
Scientists and engineers face the issue in the form of the "leaky pipeline. " Though women make up almost 60 percent of university students and about half of the students majoring in many fields of science, the proportion advancing to the next career stage diminishes as they go from being undergraduates to graduate students to postdoctoral fellows to junior professors to tenured professors. Women make up less than 20 percent of the workforce in science, engineering, and technology development, and only 9 percent of the workforce in engineering. 57 Readers of the flagship journals Science and Nature have seen two decades of headlines such as "Diversity: Easier Said Than Done" and "Efforts to Boost Diversity Face Persistent Problems. "58 A typical story, commenting on the many national commissions set up to investigate the problem, said, "These activities are meant to continue chipping away at a problem that, experts say, begins with negative messages in elementary school, continues through undergraduate and graduate programs that erect barriers -- financial, academic, and cultural -- to all but the best candidates, and persists into the workplace. "59 A meeting in 2001 of the presidents of nine elite American universities called for "significant changes," such as setting aside grants and fellowships for women faculty, giving them the best parking
? ? ? ? ? spaces on campus, and ensuring that the percentage of women faculty equals the percentage of women students. 60
But there is something odd in these stories about negative messages, hidden barriers, and gender prejudices. The way of science is to lay out every hypothesis that could account for a phenomenon and to eliminate all but the correct one. Scientists prize the ability to think up alternative explanations, and proponents of a hypothesis are expected to refute even the unlikely ones. Nonetheless, discussions of the leaky pipeline in science rarely even mention an alternative to the theory of barriers and bias. One of the rare exceptions was a sidebar to a 2000 story in Science, which quoted from a presentation at the National Academy of Engineering by the social scientist Patti Hausman:
The question of why more women don't choose careers in engineering has a rather obvious answer: Because they don't want to. Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks. Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works. 61 {353}
An eminent woman engineer in the audience immediately denounced her analysis as "pseudoscience. " But Linda Gottfredson, an expert in the literature on vocational preferences, pointed out that Hausman had the data on her side: "On average, women are more interested in dealing with people and men with things. " Vocational tests also show that boys are more interested in "realistic," "theoretical," and "investigative" pursuits, and girls more interested in "artistic" and "social" pursuits.
Hausman and Gottfredson are lonely voices, because the gender gap is almost always analyzed in the following way. Any imbalance between men and women in their occupations or earnings is direct proof of gender bias -- if not in the form of overt discrimination, then in the form of discouraging messages and hidden barriers. The possibility that men and women might differ from each other in ways that affect what jobs they hold or how much they get paid may never be mentioned in public, because it will set back the cause of equity in the workplace and harm the interests of women. It is this conviction that led Friedan and Clinton, for example, to say that we will not have attained gender equity until earnings and representation in the professions are identical for men and women. In a 1998 television interview, Gloria Steinem and the congresswoman Bella Abzug called the very idea of sex differences "poppycock" and "anti-American crazy thinking," and when Abzug was asked whether gender equality meant equal numbers in every field, she replied, "Fifty-fifty -- absolutely. "62 This analysis of the gender gap has also become the official position of universities. That the presidents of the nation's elite universities are happy to accuse their colleagues of shameful prejudice without even considering alternative explanations (whether or not they would end up accepting them) shows how deeply rooted the taboo is.
The problem with this analysis is that inequality of outcome cannot be used as proof of inequality of opportunity unless the groups being compared are identical in all of their psychological traits, which is likely to be true only if we are blank slates. But the suggestion that the gender gap may arise, even in part, from differences between the sexes can be fightin' words. Anyone bringing it up is certain to be accused of "wanting to keep women in their place" or "justifying the status quo. " This makes about as much sense as saying that a scientist who studies why women live longer than men "wants old men to die. " And far from being a ploy by self-serving men, analyses exposing the flaws of the glass-ceiling theory have largely come from women, including Hausman, Gottfredson, Judith Kleinfeld, Karen Lehrman, Cathy Young, and Camilla Benbow, the economists Jennifer Roback, Felice Schwartz, Diana Furchtgott- Roth, and Christine Stolba, the legal scholar Jennifer Braceras, and, more guardedly, the economist Claudia Goldin and the legal scholar Susan Estrich. 63
I believe these writers have given us a better understanding of the gender gap than the standard one, for a number of reasons. Their analysis is not afraid {354} of the possibility that the sexes might differ, and therefore does not force us to choose between scientific findings on human nature and the fair treatment of women. It offers a more sophisticated understanding of the causes of the gender gap, one that is consistent with our best social science. It takes a more respectful view of women and their choices. And ultimately it promises more humane and effective remedies for gender inequities in the workplace.
Before presenting the new analysis of the gender gap from equity feminists, let me reiterate three points that are not in dispute. First, discouraging women from pursuing their ambitions, and discriminating against them on the basis of their sex, are injustices that should be stopped wherever they are discovered.
Second, there is no doubt that women faced widespread discrimination in the past and continue to face it in some sectors today. This cannot be proven by showing that men earn more than women or that the sex ratio departs from fifty-fifty, but it can be proven in other ways. Experimenters can send out fake resumes or grant proposals that are identical in all ways except the sex of the applicant and see whether they are treated differently. Economists can do a regression analysis that takes measures of people's qualifications and interests and determines whether the men and the women earn different amounts, or are promoted at different rates, when their qualifications and interests are statistically held constant. The point that differences in outcome don't show discrimination unless one has equated for other relevant traits is elementary social science (not to mention common sense), and is accepted by all economists
? ? ? ? ? ? when they analyze data sets looking for evidence of wage discrimination. 64
Third, there is no question of whether women are "qualified" to be scientists, CEOs, leaders of nations, or elite professionals of any other kind. That was decisively answered years ago: some are and some aren't, just as some men are qualified and some aren't. The only question is whether the proportions of qualified men and women must be identical.
As in many other topics related to human nature, people's unwillingness to think in statistical terms has led to pointless false dichotomies. Here is how to think about gender distributions in the professions without having to choose between the extremes of "women are unqualified" and "fifty-fifty absolutely," or between "there is no discrimination" and "there is nothing but discrimination. "
In a free and unprejudiced labor market, people will be hired and paid according to the match between their traits and the demands of the job. A given job requires some mixture of cognitive talents (such as mathematical or linguistic skill), personality traits (such as risk taking or cooperation), and tolerance of lifestyle demands (rigid schedules, relocations, updating job skills). And it offers some mixture of personal rewards: people, gadgets, ideas, the {355} outdoors, pride in workmanship. The salary is influenced, among other things, by supply and demand: how many people want the job, how many can do it, and how many the employer can pay to do it. Readily filled jobs may pay less; difficult-to-fill jobs may pay more.
People vary in the traits relevant to employment. Most people can think logically, work with people, tolerate conflict or unpleasant surroundings, and so on, but not to an identical extent; everyone has a unique profile of strengths and tastes. Given all the evidence for sex differences (some biological, some cultural, some both), the statistical distributions for men and women in these strengths and tastes are unlikely to be identical. If one now matches the distribution of traits for men and for women with the distribution of the demands of the jobs in the economy, the chance that the proportion of men and of women in each profession will be identical, or that the mean salary of men and of women will be identical, is very close to zero -- even if there were no barriers or discrimination.
None of this implies that women will end up with the short end of the stick. It depends on the menu of opportunities that a given society makes available. If there are more high-paying jobs that call for typical male strengths (say, willingness to put oneself in physical danger, or an interest in machines), men may do better on average; if there are more that call for typical female strengths (say, a proficiency with language, or an interest in people), women may do better on average. In either case, members of both sexes will be found in both kinds of jobs, just in different numbers. That is why some relatively prestigious professions are dominated by women. An example is my own field, the study of language development in children, in which women outnumber men by a large margin. 65 In her book The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World, the anthropologist Helen Fisher speculates that the culture of business in our knowledge-driven, globalized economy will soon favor women. Women are more articulate and cooperative, are not as obsessed with rank, and are better able to negotiate win-win outcomes. The workplaces of the new century, she predicts, will increasingly demand these talents, and women may surpass men in status and earnings.
In today's world, of course, the gap favors men. Some of the gap is caused by discrimination. Employers may underestimate the skills of women, or assume that an all-male workplace is more efficient, or worry that their male employees will resent female supervisors, or fear resistance from prejudiced customers and clients. But the evidence suggests that not all sex differences in the professions are caused by these barriers. 66 It is unlikely, for example, that among academics the mathematicians are unusually biased against women, the developmental psycholinguists are unusually biased against men, and the evolutionary psychologists are unusually free of bias.
In a few professions, differences in ability may play some role. The fact that {356} more men than women have exceptional abilities in mathematical reasoning and in mentally manipulating 3-D objects is enough to explain a departure from a fifty-fifty sex ratio among engineers, physicists, organic chemists, and professors in some branches of mathematics (though of course it does not mean that the proportion of women should be anywhere near zero).
In most professions, average differences in ability are irrelevant, but average differences in preferences may set the sexes on different paths. The most dramatic example comes from an analysis by David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow of a sample of mathematically precocious seventh-graders selected in a nationwide talent search. 67 The teenagers were born during the second wave of feminism, were encouraged by their parents to develop their talents (all were sent to summer programs in math and science), and were fully aware of their ability to achieve. But the gifted girls told the researchers that they were more interested in people, "social values," and humanitarian and altruistic goals, whereas the gifted boys said they were more interested in things, "theoretical values," and abstract intellectual inquiry. In college, the young women chose a broad range of courses in the humanities, arts, and sciences, whereas the boys were geeks who stuck to math and science. And sure enough, fewer than 1 percent of the young women pursued doctorates in math, physical sciences, or engineering, whereas 8 percent of the young men did. The women went into medicine, law, the humanities, and biology instead.
? ? ? ? ? ? This asymmetry is writ large in massive surveys of job-related values and career choices, another kind of study in which men and women actually say what they want rather than having activists speak for them. 68 On average, men's self-esteem is more highly tied to their status, salary, and wealth, and so is their attractiveness as a sexual partner and marriage partner, as revealed in studies of what people look for in the opposite sex. 69 Not surprisingly, men say they are more keen to work longer hours and to sacrifice other parts of their lives -- to live in a less attractive city, or to leave friends and family when they relocate -- in order to climb the corporate ladder or achieve notoriety in their fields. Men, on average, are also more willing to undergo physical discomfort and danger, and thus are more likely to be found in grungy but relatively lucrative jobs such as repairing factory equipment, working on oil rigs, and jack- hammering sludge from the inside of oil tanks. Women, on average, are more likely to choose administrative support jobs that offer lower pay in air-conditioned offices. Men are greater risk takers, and that is reflected in their career paths even when qualifications are held constant. Men prefer to work for corporations, women for government agencies and nonprofit organizations. Male doctors are more likely to specialize and to open up private practices; female doctors are more likely to be general practitioners on salary in hospitals and clinics. Men are more likely to be managers in factories, women more likely to be managers in human resources or corporate communications. {357} Mothers are more attached to their children, on average, than are fathers. That is true in societies all over the world and probably has been true of our lineage since the first mammals evolved some two hundred million years ago.
As Susan Estrich puts it, "Waiting for the connection between gender and parenting to be broken is waiting for Godot. " This does not mean that women in any society have ever been uninterested in work; among hunter-gatherers, women do most of the gathering and some of the hunting, especially when it involves nets rather than rocks and spears. 70 Nor does it mean that men in any society are indifferent to their children; male parental investment is a conspicuous and zoologically unusual feature of Homo sapiens. But it does mean that the biologically ubiquitous tradeoff between investing in a child and working to stay healthy (ultimately to beget or invest in other children) may be balanced at different points by males and females. Not only are women the sex who nurse, but women are more attentive to their babies' well-being and, in surveys, place a higher value on spending time with their children. 71
So even if both sexes value work and both sexes value children, the different weightings may lead women, more often than men, to make career choices that allow them to spend more time with their children -- shorter or more flexible hours, fewer relocations, skills that don't become obsolete as quickly -- in exchange for lower wages or prestige. As the economist Jennifer Roback points out, "Once we observe that people sacrifice money income for other pleasurable things we can infer next to nothing by comparing the income of one person with another's. "72 The economist Gary Becker has shown that marriage can magnify the effects of sex differences, even if they are small to begin with, because of what economists call the law of comparative advantage. In couples where the husband can earn a bit more than the wife, but the wife is a somewhat better parent than the husband, they might rationally decide they are both better off if she works less than he does. 73
To repeat: none of this means that sex discrimination has vanished, or that it is justified when it occurs. The point is only that gender gaps by themselves say nothing about discrimination unless the slates of men and women are blank, which they are not. The only way to establish discrimination is to compare their jobs or wages when choices and qualifications are equalized. And in fact a recent study of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that childless women between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-three earn 98 cents to men's dollar. 74 Even to people who are cynical about the motivations of American employers, this should come as no shock. In a cutthroat market, any company stupid enough to overlook qualified women or to overpay unqualified men would be driven out of business by a more meritocratic competitor.
Now, there is nothing in science or social science that would rule out policies implementing a fifty-fifty distribution of wages and jobs between the sexes, {358} if a democracy decided that this was an inherently worthy goal. What the findings do say is that such policies will come with costs as well as benefits. The obvious benefit of equality-of- outcome policies is that they might neutralize the remaining discrimination against women. But if men and women are not interchangeable, the costs have to be considered as well.
Some costs would be borne by men or by both sexes. The two most obvious are the possibility of reverse discrimination against men and of a false presumption of sexism among the men and women who make decisions about hiring and salary today. Another cost borne by both sexes is the inefficiency that could result if employment decisions were based on factors other than the best match between the demands of a job and the traits of the person. But many of the costs of equality-of-outcome policies would be borne by women. Many women scientists are opposed to hard gender preferences in science, such as designated faculty positions for women, or the policy (advocated by one activist) in which federal research grants would be awarded in exact proportion to the number of men and women who apply for them. The problem with these well-meaning policies is that they can plant seeds of doubt in people's minds about the excellence of the beneficiaries. As the astronomer Lynne Hillenbrand said, "If you're given an opportunity for the reason of being female, it doesn't do anyone any favors; it makes people question
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? why you're there. "75
Certainly there are institutional barriers to the advancement of women. People are mammals, and we should think through the ethical implications of the fact that it is women who bear, nurse, and disproportionately raise children. One ought not to assume that the default human being is a man and that children are an indulgence or an accident that strikes a deviant subset. Sex differences therefore can be used to justify, rather than endanger, woman-friendly policies such as parental leave, subsidized childcare, flexible hours, and stoppages of the tenure clock or the elimination of tenure altogether (a possibility recently broached by the biologist and Princeton University president Shirley Tilghman).
Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and these policies are also decisions -- perhaps justifiable ones -- to penalize men and women who are childless, have grown children, or choose to stay at home with their children. But even when it comes to weighing these tradeoffs, thinking about human nature can raise deep new questions that could ultimately improve the lot of working women. Which of the onerous job demands that deter women really contribute to economic efficiency, and which are obstacle courses in which men compete for alpha status? In reasoning about fairness in the workplace, should we consider people as isolated individuals, or should we consider them as members of families who probably will have children at some point in their lives and who probably will care for aging parents at some point in their lives? {359} If we trade off some economic efficiency for more pleasant working conditions in all jobs, might there be a net increase in happiness? I don't have answers, but the questions are well worth asking. There is one more reason that acknowledging sex differences can be more humane than denying them. It is men and women, not the male gender and the female gender, who prosper or suffer, and those men and women are endowed with brains -- perhaps not identical brains -- that give them values and an ability to make choices. Those choices should be respected. A regular feature of the lifestyle pages is the story about women who are made to feel ashamed about staying at home with their children. As they always say, "I thought feminism was supposed to be about choices. " The same should apply to women who do choose to work but also to trade off some income in order to "have a life" (and, of course, to men who make that choice). It is not obviously progressive to insist that equal numbers of men and women work eighty-hour weeks in a corporate law firm or leave their families for months at a time to dodge steel pipes on a frigid oil platform. And it is grotesque to demand (as advocates of gender parity did in the pages of Science) that more young women "be conditioned to choose engineering," as if they were rats in a Skinner box. 76
Gottfredson points out, "If you insist on using gender parity as your measure of social justice, it means you will have to keep many men and women out of the work they like best and push them into work they don't like. "77 She is echoed by Kleinfeld on the leaky pipeline in science: "We should not be sending [gifted] women the messages that they are less worthy human beings, less valuable to our civilization, lazy or low in status, if they choose to be teachers rather than mathematicians, journalists rather than physicists, lawyers rather than engineers. "78 These are not hypothetical worries: a recent survey by the National Science Foundation found that many more women than men say they majored in science, mathematics, or engineering under pressure from teachers or family members rather than to pursue their own aspirations -- and that many eventually switched out for that reason.
79 I will give the final word to Margaret Mead, who, despite being wrong in her early career about the malleability of gender, was surely right when she said, "If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place. "
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Other than the gender gap, the most combustible recent issue surrounding the sexes has been the nature and causes of rape. When the biologist Randy Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig Palmer published A Natural History of Rape in 2000, they threatened a consensus that had held firm in intellectual life for a quarter of a century, and they brought down more condemnation on evolutionary psychology than any issue had in years. 80 Rape is a painful issue {360} to write about, but also an unavoidable one. Nowhere else in modern intellectual life is the denial of human nature more passionately insisted upon, and nowhere else is the alternative more deeply misunderstood. Clarifying these issues, I believe, would go a long way toward reconciling three ideals that have needlessly been put into conflict: women's rights, a biologically informed understanding of human nature, and common sense.
The horror of rape gives it a special gravity in our understanding of the psychology of men and women. There is an overriding moral imperative in the study of rape: to reduce its occurrence. Any scientist who illuminates the causes of rape deserves our admiration, like a medical researcher who illuminates the cause of a disease, because understanding an affliction is the first step toward eliminating it. And since no one acquires the truth by divine revelation, we must also respect those who explore theories that may turn out to be incorrect. Moral criticism would seem to be in order only for those who would enforce dogmas, ignore evidence, or shut down research, because they would be protecting
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? their reputations at the expense of victims of rapes that might not have occurred if we understood the phenomenon better.
Current sensibilities, unfortunately, are very different. In modern intellectual life the overriding moral imperative in analyzing rape is to proclaim that rape has nothing to do with sex. The mantra must be repeated whenever the subject comes up. "Rape is an abuse of power and control in which the rapist seeks to humiliate, shame, embarrass, degrade, and terrify the victim," the United Nations declared in 1993. "The primary objective is to exercise power and control over another person. "81 This was echoed in a 2001 Boston Globe op-ed piece that said, "Rape is not about sex; it is about violence and the use of sex to exert power and control. . . . Domestic violence and sexual assault are manifestations of the same powerful social forces: sexism and the glorification of violence. "82 When an iconoclastic columnist wrote a dissenting article on rape and battering, a reader responded:
As a man who has been actively engaged for more than a decade as an educator and a counselor to help men to stop their violence against women, I find Cathy Young's Oct. 15 column disturbing and discouraging. She confuses issues by failing to acknowledge that men are socialized in a patriarchal culture that still supports their violence against women if they choose it. 83
So steeped in the prevailing ideology was this counselor that he didn't notice that Young was arguing against the dogma he took as self-evidently true, not "failing to acknowledge" it. And his wording -- "men are socialized in a patriarchal culture" -- reproduces a numbingly familiar slogan. {361}
The official theory of rape originated in an important 1975 book, Against Our Will, by the gender feminist Susan Brownmiller. The book became an emblem of a revolution in our handling of rape that is one of second-wave feminism's greatest accomplishments. Until the 1970s, rape was often treated by the legal system and popular culture with scant attention to the interests of women. Victims had to prove they resisted their attackers to within an inch of their lives or else they were seen as having consented. Their style of dress was seen as a mitigating factor, as if men couldn't control themselves when an attractive woman walked by. Also mitigating was the woman's sexual history, as if choosing to have sex with one man on one occasion were the same as agreeing to have sex with any man on any occasion. Standards of proof that were not required for other violent crimes, such as eyewitness corroboration, were imposed on charges of rape. Women's consent was often treated lightly in the popular media. It was not uncommon in movies for a reluctant woman to be handled roughly by a man and then melt into his arms. The suffering of rape victims was treated lightly as well; I remember teenage girls, in the wake of the sexual revolution in the early 1970s, joking to one another, "If a rape is inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it. " Marital rape was not a crime, date rape was not a concept, and rape during wartime was left out of the history books. These affronts to humanity are gone or on the wane in Western democracies, and feminism deserves credit for this moral advance.
But Brownmiller's theory went well beyond the moral principle that women have a right not to be sexually assaulted. It said that rape had nothing to do with an individual man's desire for sex but was a tactic by which the entire male gender oppressed the entire female gender. In her famous words:
Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function . . . it is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. 84
This grew into the modern catechism: rape is not about sex, our culture socializes men to rape, it glorifies violence against women. The analysis comes right out of the gender-feminist theory of human nature: people are blank slates (who must be trained or socialized to want things); the only significant human motive is power (so sexual desire is irrelevant); and all motives and interests must be located in groups (such as the male sex and the female sex) rather than in individual people.
The Brownmiller theory is appealing even to people who are not gender {362} feminists because of the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Since the 1960s most educated people have come to believe that sex should be thought of as natural, not shameful or dirty. Sex is good because sex is natural and natural things are good. But rape is bad; therefore, rape is not about sex. The motive to rape must come from social institutions, not from anything in human nature.
The violence-not-sex slogan is right about two things. Both parts are absolutely true for the victim: a woman who is raped experiences it as a violent assault, not as a sexual act. And the part about violence is true for the perpetrator by definition: if there is no violence or coercion, we do not call it rape. But the fact that rape has something to do with violence does not mean it has nothing to do with sex, any more than the fact that armed robbery has something to do with violence means it has nothing to do with greed. Evil men may use violence to get sex, just as they use violence to get other things they want.
? ? ? ? ? ? I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.
Think about it. First obvious fact: Men often want to have sex with women who don't want to have sex with them. They use every tactic that one human being uses to affect the behavior of another: wooing, seducing, flattering, deceiving, sulking, and paying. Second obvious fact: Some men use violence to get what they want, indifferent to the suffering they cause. Men have been known to kidnap children for ransom (sometimes sending their parents an ear or finger to show they mean business), blind the victim of a mugging so the victim can't identify them in court, shoot out the kneecaps of an associate as punishment for ratting to the police or invading their territory, and kill a stranger for his brand-name athletic footwear. It would be an extraordinary fact, contradicting everything else we know about people, if some men didn't use violence to get sex.
Let's also apply common sense to the doctrine that men rape to further the interests of their gender. A rapist always risks injury at the hands of the woman defending herself. In a traditional society, he risks torture, mutilation, and death at the hands of her relatives. In a modern society, he risks a long prison term. Are rapists really assuming these risks as an altruistic sacrifice to benefit the billions of strangers that make up the male gender? The idea becomes even less credible when we remember that rapists tend to be losers and nobodies, while presumably the main beneficiaries of the patriarchy are the rich and powerful. Men do sacrifice themselves for the greater good in wartime, of course, but they are either conscripted against their will or promised public adulation when their exploits are made public. But rapists usually {363} commit their acts in private and try to keep them secret. And in most times and places, a man who rapes a woman in his community is treated as scum. The idea that all men are engaged in brutal warfare against all women clashes with the elementary fact that men have mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives, whom they care for more than they care for most other men. To put the same point in biological terms, every person's genes are carried in the bodies of other people, half of whom are of the opposite sex.
Yes, we must deplore the sometimes casual treatment of women's autonomy in popular culture. But can anyone believe that our culture literally "teaches men to rape" or "glorifies the rapist"? Even the callous treatment of rape victims in the judicial system of yesteryear has a simpler explanation than that all men benefit by rape. Until recently jurors in rape cases were given a warning from the seventeenth-century jurist Lord Matthew Hale that they should evaluate a woman's testimony with caution, because a rape charge is "easily made and difficult to defend against, even if the accused is innocent. "85 The principle is consistent with the presumption of innocence built into our judicial system and with its preference to let ten guilty people go free rather than jail one innocent. Even so, let's suppose that the men who applied this policy to rape did tilt it toward their own collective interests. Let's suppose that they leaned on the scales of justice to minimize their own chances of ever being falsely accused of rape (or accused under ambiguous circumstances) and that they placed insufficient value on the injustice endured by women who would not see their assailants put behind bars. That would indeed be unjust, but it is still not the same thing as encouraging rape as a conscious tactic to keep women down. If that were men's tactic, why would they have made rape a crime in the first place?
As for the morality of believing the not-sex theory, there is none. If we have to acknowledge that sexuality can be a source of conflict and not just wholesome mutual pleasure, we will have rediscovered a truth that observers of the human condition have noted throughout history. And if a man rapes for sex, that does not mean that he "just can't help it" or that we have to excuse him, any more than we have to excuse the man who shoots the owner of a liquor store to raid the cash register or who bashes a driver over the head to steal his BMW. The great contribution of feminism to the morality of rape is to put issues of consent and coercion at center stage. The ultimate motives of the rapist are irrelevant.
Finally, think about the humanity of the picture that the gender-feminist theory has painted. As the equity feminist Wendy McElroy points out, the theory holds that "even the most loving and gentle husband, father, and son is a beneficiary of the rape of women they love. No ideology that makes such vicious accusations against men as a class can heal any wounds. It can only provoke hostility in return. "86 {364}
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Does one need scientific methodology in order to conclude that the anti-female propaganda that permeates our nation's cultural output promotes a climate in which acts of sexual hostility directed against women are not only tolerated but ideologically encouraged?
? ? ? ? Brownmiller asked a revealing rhetorical question:
McElroy responded: "The answer is a clear and simple 'yes. ' One needs scientific methodology to verify any
empirical claim. " And she called attention to the consequences of Brownmiller's attitude: "One of the casualties of the new dogma on rape has been research. It is no longer 'sexually correct' to conduct studies on the causes of rape, because -- as any right-thinking person knows -- there is only one cause: patriarchy. Decades ago, during the heyday of liberal feminism and sexual curiosity, the approach to research was more sophisticated. "87 McElroy's suspicions are borne out by a survey of published "studies" of rape that found that fewer than one in ten tested hypotheses or used scientific methods. 88
Scientific research on rape and its connections to human nature was thrown into the spotlight in 2000 with the publication of A Natural History of Rape. Thornhill and Palmer began with a basic observation: a rape can result in a conception, which could propagate the genes of the rapist, including any genes that had made him likely to rape. Therefore, a male psychology that included a capacity to rape would not have been selected against, and could have been selected for. Thornhill and Palmer argued that rape is unlikely to be a typical mating strategy because of the risk of injury at the hands of the victim and her relatives and the risk of ostracism from the community. But it could be an opportunistic tactic, becoming more likely when the man is unable to win the consent of women, alienated from a community (and thus undeterred by ostracism), and safe from detection and punishment (such as in wartime or pogroms). Thornhill and Palmer then outlined two theories. Opportunistic rape could be a Darwinian adaptation that was specifically selected for, as in certain insects that have an appendage with no function other than restraining a female during forced copulation. Or rape could be a by-product of two other features of the male mind: a desire for sex and a capacity to engage in opportunistic violence in pursuit of a goal. The two authors disagreed on which hypothesis was better supported by the data, and they left that issue unresolved.
No honest reader could conclude that the authors think rape is "natural" in the vernacular sense of being welcome or unavoidable. The first words of the book are, "As scientists who would like to see rape eradicated from human
life . . . ," which are certainly not the words of people who think it is inevitable. Thornhill and Palmer discuss the environmental circumstances that {365} affect the likelihood of rape, and they offer suggestions on how to reduce it. The idea that most men have the capacity to rape works, if anything, in the interests of women, because it calls for vigilance against acquaintance rape, marital rape, and rape during societal breakdowns. Indeed, the analysis jibes with Brownmiller's own data that ordinary men, including "nice" American boys in Vietnam, may rape in wartime. For that matter, Thornhill and Palmer's hypothesis that rape is on a continuum with the rest of male sexuality makes them strange allies with the most radical gender feminists, such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who said that "seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine. "89
Most important, the book focuses in equal part on the pain of the victims. (Its draft title was Why Men Rape, Why Women Suffer. ) Thornhill and Palmer explain in Darwinian terms why females throughout the animal kingdom resist being forced into sex, and argue that the agony that rape victims feel is deeply rooted in women's nature. Rape subverts female choice, the core of the ubiquitous mechanism of sexual selection. By choosing the male and the circumstances for sex, a female can maximize the chances that her offspring will be fathered by a male with good genes, a willingness and ability to share the responsibility of rearing the offspring, or both. As John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have put it, this ultimate (evolutionary) calculus explains why women evolved "to exert control over their own sexuality, over the terms of their relationships, and over the choice of which men are to be the fathers of their children. " They resist being raped, and they suffer when their resistance fails, because "control over their sexual choices and relationships was wrested from them. "90
Thornhill and Palmer's theory reinforces many points of an equity-feminist analysis. It predicts that from the woman's point of view, rape and consensual sex are completely different. It affirms that women's repugnance toward rape is not a symptom of neurotic repression, nor is it a social construct that could easily be the reverse in a different culture. It predicts that the suffering caused by rape is deeper than the suffering caused by other physical traumas or body violations. That justifies our working harder to prevent rape, and punishing the perpetrators more severely, than we do for other kinds of assault. Compare this analysis with the dubious claim by two gender feminists that an aversion to rape has to be pounded into women by every social influence they can think of:
Female fear. . . [results] not only from women's personal backgrounds but from what women as a group have imbibed from history, religion, culture, social institutions, and everyday social interactions. Learned early in life, female fear is continually reinforced by such {366} social institutions as the school, the church, the law, and the press. Much is also learned from parents, siblings, teachers, and friends. 91
But despite the congeniality of their analysis to women's interests, Thornhill and Palmer had broken a taboo, and the response was familiar: there were demonstrations, disruptions of lectures, and invective that would curdle your hair, as the popular malaprop has it. "Latest nauseating scientific theory" was a typical reaction, and radical scientists
? ? ? ? ? ? ? applied their usual standards of accuracy to denounce it. Hilary Rose, discussing a presentation of the theory by another biologist, wrote, "The sociobiologist David Barash's appeal in defense of his misogynist claims that men are naturally predisposed to rape, 'If Nature is sexist don't blame her sons,' can no longer plug into the old deference to science as the view from nowhere. "92 Barash, of course, had said no such thing; he had referred to rapists as criminals who should be punished. The science writer Margaret Wertheim began her review of Thornhill and Palmer's book by calling attention to a recent epidemic of rape in South Africa. 93 Pitting the theory that rape is "a byproduct of social conditioning and chaos" against the theory that rape has evolutionary and genetic origins, she sarcastically wrote that if the latter were true, "South Africa must be a hothouse for such genes. " Two slurs for the price of one: the statement puts Thornhill and Palmer on the simplistic side of a false dichotomy (in fact, they devote many pages to the social conditions fostering rape) and slips in the innuendo that their theory is racist, too. The psychologist Geoffrey Miller, in his own mixed review of the book, diagnosed the popular reaction:
The Natural History of Rape has already suffered the worst possible fate for a popular science book. Like The Descent of Man and The Bell Curve, it has become an ideological touchstone. People who wish to demonstrate their sympathy for rape victims and women in general have already learned that they must dismiss this book as sexist, reactionary pseudo-science. News stories that treat the book as a symptom of chauvinist cultural decay have greatly outnumbered reviews that assess it as science. Viewed sociologically, turning books into ideological touchstones can be useful. People can efficiently sort themselves out into like-minded cliques without bothering to read or think. However, there can be more to human discourse than ideological self-advertisement. 94
It's unfortunate that Thornhill and Palmer themselves set up a dichotomy between the theory that rape is an adaptation (a specifically selected sexual strategy) and the theory that it is a by-product (a consequence of using violence in general), because it diverted attention from the more basic claim that rape has something to do with sex. I think their dichotomy is drawn too {367} sharply. Male sexuality may have evolved in a world in which women were more discriminating than men about partners and occasions for sex. That would have led men to treat female reluctance as an obstacle to be overcome. (Another way to put it is that one can imagine a species in which the male could become sexually interested only if he detected reciprocal signs of interest on the part of the female, but that humans do not appear to be such a species. ) How the woman's reluctance is overcome depends on the rest of the man's psychology and on his assessment of the circumstances. His usual tactics may include being kind, persuading the woman of his good intentions, and offering the proverbial bottle of wine, but may become increasingly coercive as certain risk factors are multiplied in: the man is a psychopath (hence insensitive to the suffering of others), an outcast (hence immune to ostracism), a loser (with no other means to get sex), or a soldier or ethnic rioter who considers an enemy subhuman and thinks he can get away with it. Certainly most men in ordinary circumstances do not harbor a desire to rape. According to surveys, violent rape is unusual in pornography and sexual fantasies, and according to laboratory studies of men's sexual arousal, depictions of actual violence toward a woman or signs of her pain and humiliation are a turnoff. 95
What about the more basic question of whether the motives of rapists include sex? The gender-feminist argument that they do not points to the rapists who target older, infertile women, those who suffer from sexual dysfunction during the rape, those who coerce nonreproductive sexual acts, and those who use a condom. The argument is unconvincing for two reasons. First, these examples make up a minority of rapes, so the argument could be turned around to show that most rapes do have a sexual motive. And all these phenomena occur with consensual sex, too, so the argument leads to the absurdity that sex itself has nothing to do with sex. And date rape is a particularly problematic case for the not-sex theory. Most people agree that women have the right to say no at any point during sexual activity, and that if the man persists he is a rapist -- but should we also believe that his motive has instantaneously changed from wanting sex to oppressing women?
On the other side there is an impressive body of evidence (reviewed more thoroughly by the legal scholar Owen Jones than by Thornhill and Palmer) that the motives for rape overlap with the motives for sex:96
? Coerced copulation is widespread among species in the animal kingdom, suggesting that it is not selected against and may sometimes be selected for. It is found in many species of insects, birds, and mammals, including our relatives the orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees.
? Rape is found in all human societies.
? Rapists generally apply as much force as is needed to coerce the victim into sex. They rarely inflict a serious or fatal injury, which would preclude {368} conception and birth.