Pinker on Rape
If there’s one thing at Bill Maher is right about it’s sex. Men want sex and attempting to ignore this fact will only lead to heartbreak. Thus the assertion by women that rape is not about sex but only power, is just plain wrong. Here is cognitive scientist Steven Pinker:
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 the second-wave feminism’s greatest accomplishments. Until the 1970s, rape was often treated y the legal system and popular culture with scant attention to the interests of women. Victims had to prove they resisted their attackers to win 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 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 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 are 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.
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 movie 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 feminists because of the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Since the 1960s most educated people have come to believe that sex should be though as of natural, not shameful or dirty. Sex is good because sex is natural and natural things 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 pared experiences it as a violent assault, not 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 mean 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 do 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 use 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 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.
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As for the morality of believing the non-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 should 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 bashed 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.
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 361-362.