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Natural Born Rapists
By
Laura Flanders
All men are natural-born rapists. This is not the sort of allegation that usually gets serious treatment in the mainstream media. But Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer have been journalistically feted from coast to coast for making just that charge. The attention has been enough to more than double the print-run of their book, A Natural History of Rape, three months before it will be released by MIT. Not bad for a couple of uncharismatic guys with a meandering theory based on bug research. The key to their success: They use their theory to criticize not rapists, but feminists. Professors of evolutionary biology at the University of New Mexico and evolutionary anthropology at the University of Colorado, respectively, Thornhill and Palmer argue that rape has given rapists a reproductive edge in the contest for genetic selection. Rape may be hard-wired into the species. At the very least, it is a product of the male breeding drive. While the writers say rape is wrong and that they are out to stop it, they contend we need to face facts. For a quarter of a century, they say, people informed by Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will have viewed rape as "unnatural behavior having nothing to do with sex." That hasn't worked. But where feminists have failed, Darwin can come to the rescue. Heaven forbid. The techniques these guys propose to stop rape sound like suggestive counseling. Just in case a young man's thoughts have not naturally drifted to sexual violence, Thornhill and Palmer advise lecturing boys on the "impulses" that are their birthright. And they caution young women that because evolution has favored men who are quickly aroused, "the way they dress can put them at risk." But in the excerpt that appears in the January-February edition of The Sciences, Thornhill and Palmer provide no data to back up the claim that the skimpily dressed are raped more often than the frumpy. Instead, much is made of a grabbing appendage on scorpionflies (insects Thornhill has studied in depth) that seems to suggest that the natural world designs for better raping. The authors point to data that they say show that most rape is not "gratuitously" violent, that most raped women are of child-bearing age, and that the most "distressed" rape victims are fertile and married. But the studies they cite are 20 years old--done before a movement helped survivors to talk openly. Clearly their sources (absent in the abstract) deserve a closer look. "It's advocacy and the science is sloppy," says Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. This is not the first time Thornhill has been accused of sloppy science. A few years back, Time dedicated its cover to a Thornhill "report" linking symmetrical features to genetic health and better sex. That too, was based on dubious data. But Coyne says half the reporters he has spoken to seem to have only the slightest idea of Thornhill and Palmer's thesis. "They've mostly read other media accounts," he says. Indeed, the media have swept the two from the dry world of science journalism to the country's most popular talk shows. Dateline and Today interviewers have swallowed their science whole. The way Melinda Penkava introduced Thornhill on NPR's Talk of the Nation was typical: "Now evolutionary science enters the picture." "Scientist" Thornhill was put up against "feminist" Brownmiller. And that's the point. There is no original research in Why Men Rape, and their theory ignores a multitude of contradictions. Stumped by homosexual rape, the rape of the old and the young, and by the impotence of many rapists, Thornhill and Palmer simply ignore assaults that make no reproductive sense. But even they know better. In an essay he co-authored in 1983, Thornhill was honest enough to point to a contemporary estimate that only "about 50 percent of rapes include ejaculation." He ignores that here. What Thornhill and Palmer are really about is advancing the cause of biology against sociology. "This is the Bell Curve of anti-feminism," says Jackson Katz, creator of a new film from the Media Education Foundation, Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis of Masculinity. "It discourages tackling the economic, social and political factors that support male violence." As Coyne--a biologist himself--puts it, "They're on a mission to swallow up social studies." That's why the first chapter of their book is dedicated not to rape, but to an attack on social scientists, who, they say, mistakenly over-emphasize social learning. "In reality, every aspect of every living thing is by definition biological," they write. Well, sure. We live and breath with quirky equipment developed over generations. But thinking and choosing and wanting and hating are hard things to explain in a laboratory. Thornhill and Palmer aren't the first to consider that maybe all men are potential rapists. Rape survivors often grapple with that thought. It occurred to Karen Pomer, who was raped in 1995 by a man who went on to rape an 83-year-old woman. But years of work on sexual violence led her to a different conclusion: "I don't think people do this if something didn't happen to them," she says. "I'm glad we're asking why men rape, but 'because it's natural' is no sort of answer." Laura Flanders is a contributing editor of In These Times.
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