Rape is one of the prime atrocities in the human repertoire. It combines pain, degradation, terror, trauma, the seizure of a woman's means of perpetuating life, and an intrusion into the makeup of her progeny. It is also one of the commonest of atrocities. The anthropologist Donald Brown includes rape in his list of human universals, and it has been chronicled in every age and place. The Hebrew Bible tells of an era in which the brothers of a raped woman could sell her to her rapist, soldiers were entitled by divine decree to ravish nubile captives, and kings acquired concubines by the thousands. Rape, we have seen, was also common in tribal Amazonia, Homeric Greece, medieval Europe, and England during the Hundred Years' War (in Shakespeare's account, Henry V warns a French village to surrender or else their "pure maidens [will] fall into the hand of hot and forcing violation"). Mass rape is a fixture in genocides and pogroms all over the world, including recent rampages in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also common in the aftermath of military invasions, such as by the Germans in Belgium in World War I, the Japanese in China and the Russians in Eastern Europe in World War II, and the Pakistanis in Bangladesh during its war of independence.
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To review the history of violence is to experience repeated bouts of disbelief in learning how categories of violence that we deplore today were perceived in the past. The history of rape provides one of those shocks.
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Brown notes that while rape is a human universal, so are proscriptions against rape. Yet one has to look long and hard through history and across cultures to find an acknowledgment of the harm of rape from the viewpoint of the victim. "Thou shalt not rape" is not one of the Ten Commandments, though the tenth one does reveal the status of a woman in that world: she is enumerated in a list of her husband's chattels, after his house and before his servants and livestock. Elsewhere in the Bible we learn that a married rape victim was considered guilty of adultery and could be stoned to death, a sentence that was carried over into Sharia law. Rape was seen as an offense not against the woman but against a man -- the woman's father, her husband, or in the case of a slave, her owner. Moral and legal systems all over the world codified rape in similar ways. Rape is the theft of a woman's virginity from her father, or of her fidelity from her husband. Rapists can redeem themselves by buying their victim as a wife. Women are culpable for being raped. Rape is a perquisite of a husband, seigneur, slave-owner, or harem-holder. Rape is the legitimate spoils of war.
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When medieval European governments began to nationalize criminal justice, rape shifted from a tort against a husband or father to a crime against the state, which ostensibly represented the interests of women and society but in practice tilted the scales well toward the side of the accused. The fact that a false charge of rape is easy to make and hard to defend against was used to put an insuperable burden of proof onto the prosecutrix, as a rape victim was termed in many legal codes. Judges and lawyers sometimes claimed that a woman could not be forced into sex against her will because "you can't thread a moving needle." Police often treated rape as a joke, pressing the victim for pornographic details or dismissing her with wisecracks like "Who'd want to rape you?" or "A rape victim is a prostitute that didn't get paid." In court, the woman often found herself on trial together with the defendant, having to prove that she did not entice, encourage, or consent to her rapist. In many states women were not allowed to serve on juries for sex crimes because they might be "embarrassed" by the testimony. 38
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The prevalence of rape in human history and the invisibility of the victim in the legal treatment of rape are incomprehensible from the vantage point of contemporary moral sensibilities. But they are all too comprehensible from the vantage point of the genetic interests that shaped human desires and sentiments over the course of evolution, before our sensibilities were shaped by Enlightenment humanism. A rape entangles three parties, each with a different set of interests: the rapist, the men who take a proprietary interest in the woman, and the woman herself. 39
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Evolutionary psychologists and many radical feminists agree that rape is governed by the economics of human sexuality. As the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin put it, "A man wants what a woman has -- sex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States) or own it outright (marriage in most societies)." What evolutionary psychology adds to this analysis is an explanation of the resource that backs these transactions. In any species in which one sex can reproduce at a faster rate than the other, the participation of the slower-reproducing sex will be a scarce resource over which the faster-reproducing sex competes. In mammals and many birds it is the female who reproduces more slowly, because she is committed to a lengthy period of gestation, and for mammals, lactation. Females are the more discriminating sex, and the males treat restrictions on their access to females as an obstacle to be overcome. Harassment, intimidation, and forced copulation are found in many species, including gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees. Among humans, the male may use coercion to get sex when certain risk factors line up: when he is violent, callous, and reckless by temperament; when he is a loser who cannot attract sexual partners by other means; when he is an outcast and has little fear of opprobrium from the community; and when he senses that the risks of punishment are low, such as during conquests and pogroms. Around 5 percent of rapes result in pregnancies, which suggests that rape can bring an evolutionary advantage to the rapist: whatever inclinations sometimes erupt in rape need not have been selected against in our evolutionary history, and may have been selected for. None of this, of course, implies that men are "born to rape," that rapists "can't help it," or that rape is "natural" in the sense of inevitable or excusable. But it does help explain why rape has been a scourge in all human societies.
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The second party to a rape is the woman's family, particularly her father, brothers, and husband. The human male is unusual among mammals in that he feeds, protects, and cares for his offspring and for their mother. But this investment is genetically risky. If a man's wife has a secret dalliance, he could be investing in another man's child, which is a form of evolutionary suicide. Any genes that incline him to be indifferent to the risk of cuckoldry will lose out over evolutionary time to genes that incline him to be vigilant. As always, genes don't pull the strings of behavior directly; they exert their influence by shaping the emotional repertoire of the brain, in this case, the emotion of sexual jealousy. Men are enraged at the thought of their partner's infidelity, and they take steps to foreclose that possibility. One step is to threaten her and her prospective partners and to enforce the threat when necessary to keep it credible. Another is to control her movements and her ability to use sexual signals to her advantage. Fathers too can display a proprietariness toward their daughters' sexuality that looks a lot like jealousy. In traditional societies, daughters are sold for a bride-price, and since a virgin is guaranteed not to be bearing another man's child, chastity is a selling point. Fathers, and to some extent brothers and mothers, may try to protect this valuable resource by keeping their girls chaste. The elder generation of women in a society also have an incentive to regulate the sexual competition from the younger one.
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Of course, women as well as men are jealous of their partners, as a biologist would predict from the fact that men invest in their offspring. A man's infidelity brings the risk that his investment stream will be alienated by another woman and the children he has with her, and this risk gives his partner an incentive to keep him from straying. But the costs of a partner's infidelity are different for the two sexes, and accordingly a man's jealousy has been found to be more implacable, violent, and tilted toward sexual (rather than emotional) infidelity. In no society are women and in-laws obsessed with the virginity of grooms.
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The motives shaped by evolutionary interests do not translate directly into social practices, but they can impel people to lobby for laws and customs that protect those interests. The result is the widespread legal and cultural norms by which men recognize each other's right to control the sexuality of their wives and daughters. The human mind thrives on metaphor, and in the case of women's sexuality the recurring figure of thought is property. Property is an elastic concept, and laws in various societies have recognized the ownership of intangibles such as airspace, images, melodies, phrases, electromagnetic bandwidth, and even genes. It's no surprise, then, that the concept of property has also been applied to the ultimate in unpossessability: sentient humans with interests of their own, such as children, slaves, and women.
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Men may also protect their investment by holding the woman strictly liable for any theft or damage of her sexual value. Blaming the victim forecloses any possibility of her explaining away consensual sex as rape, and it incentivizes her to stay out of risky situations and to resist a rapist regardless of the costs to her freedom and safety.
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In their article "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Chattel," Margo Wilson and Martin Daly have documented that traditional laws all over the world treat women as the property of their fathers and husbands. Property laws entitle owners to sell, exchange, and dispose of their property without encumbrance, and to expect the community to recognize their right to redress if the property is stolen or damaged by others. With the woman's interests unrepresented in this social contract, rape becomes an offense against the enfranchised men who own her. Rape was conceptualized as a tort for damaged goods, or as the theft of valuable property, as we see in the word rape itself, a cognate of ravage, rapacious, and usurp. It follows that a woman who was not under the protection of a highborn, propertied man was not covered by rape laws, and that the rape of a wife by her husband was an incoherent notion, like stealing one's own property.
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Though the more blatant tropes of the women-as-property metaphor were dismantled in the late Middle Ages, the model has persisted in laws, customs, and emotions into the recent present. Women, but not men, wear engagement rings to signal they are "taken," and many are still "given away" at their weddings by their fathers to their husbands, whereupon they change their surname accordingly. Well into the 1970s marital rape was not a crime in any state, and the legal system underweighted the interests of women in other rapes. Legal scholars who have studied jury proceedings have discovered that jurors must be disabused of the folk theory that women can be negligently liable for their own rapes -- a concept not recognized in any contemporary American code of law -- or it will creep into their deliberations. And in the realm of the emotions, husbands and boyfriends often find themselves cruelly unsympathetic to their partners after they have been raped, saying things like "Something has been taken from me. I feel cheated. She was all mine before and now she's not." It's not uncommon in the aftermath of a rape for a marriage to unravel.
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And finally we get to the third party to the rape: the victim. The same genetic calculus that predicts that men might sometimes be inclined to pressure women into sex, and that the victim's kin may experience rape as an offense against themselves, also predicts that the woman herself should resist and abhor being raped. It is in the nature of sexual reproduction that a female should evolve to exert control over her sexuality. She should choose the time, the terms, and the partner to ensure that her offspring have the fittest, most generous, and most protective father available, and that the offspring are born at the most propitious time. As always, this reproductive spreadsheet is not something that a woman calculates, either consciously or unconsciously; nor is it a chip in her brain that robotically controls her behavior. It is just the backstory of why certain emotions evolved, in this case, the determination of a woman to control her sexuality, and the agony of violation when it has been forcibly wrested from her.
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The history of rape, then, is one in which the interests of women had been zeroed out in the implicit negotiations that shaped customs, moral codes, and laws. And our current sensibilities, in which we recognize rape as a heinous crime against the woman, represent a reweighting of those interests, mandated by a humanist mindset that grounds morality in the suffering and flourishing of sentient individuals rather than in power, tradition, or religious practice. The mindset, moreover, has been sharpened into the principle of autonomy: that people have an absolute right to their bodies, which may not be treated as a common resource to be negotiated among other interested parties. 53Our current moral understanding does not seek to balance the interests of a woman not to be raped, the interests of the men who may wish to rape her, and the interests of the husband and fathers who want to monopolize her sexuality. In an upending of the traditional valuation, the woman's ownership of her body counts for everything, and the interests of all other claimants count for nothing. (The only tradeoff we recognize today is the interests of the accused in a criminal proceeding, since his autonomy is at stake too.) The principle of autonomy, recall, was also a linchpin in the abolition of slavery, despotism, debt bondage, and cruel punishments during the Enlightenment.
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The idea, seemingly obvious today, that rape is always an atrocity against the rape victim was slow in catching on. In English law there had been some rebalancing toward the interests of victims in the late Middle Ages, but only in the 18th century did the laws settle into a form that is recognizable today. Not coincidentally, it was also during that era, the age of Enlightenment, that women's rights began to be acknowledged, pretty much for the first time in history. In a 1700 essay Mary Astell took the arguments that had been leveled against despotism and slavery and extended them to the oppression of women:
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If absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State how comes it to be so in a Family? or if in a Family why not in a State? since no reason can be alleg'd for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other…
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If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves? As they must be if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slavery?
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It took another 150 years for this argument to turn into a movement. The first wave of feminism, bookended in the United States by the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, gave women the right to vote, to serve as jurors, to hold property in marriage, to divorce, and to receive an education. But it took the second wave of feminism in the 1970s to revolutionize the treatment of rape.
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Much of the credit goes to a 1975 bestseller by the scholar Susan Brownmiller called Against Our Will. Brownmiller shone a harsh light on the historical indulgence of rape in religion, law, warfare, slavery, policing, and popular culture. She presented contemporary statistics on rape and first-person accounts of what it is like to be raped and to press charges of rape. And Brownmiller showed how the nonexistence of a female vantage point in society's major institutions had created an atmosphere that made light of rape (as in the common quip "When rape is inevitable you might as well lie back and enjoy it"). She wrote at a time when the decivilizing process of the 1960s had made violence a form of romantic rebellion and the sexual revolution had made lasciviousness a sign of cultural sophistication. The two affectations are more congenial to men than to women, and in combination they made rape almost chic. Brownmiller reproduced discomfitingly heroic portrayals of rapists in middlebrow and highbrow culture, together with cringe-inducing commentaries that assumed that the reader sympathized with them. Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, for example, featured a Beethoven-loving rapscallion who amused himself by beating people senseless and by raping a woman before her husband's eyes. A reviewer from Newsweek exclaimed:
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The reviewer seemed to forget, Brownmiller remarked, that there were two sexes who watched the movie: "I am certain no woman believes that the punk with the Pinocchio nose and pair of scissors acted out her desire for instant gratification, revenge, or adventure." But the reviewer could not be accused of taking liberties with the intentions of the filmmaker. Kubrick himself used the first person plural to explain its appeal:
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At its most profound level, A Clockwork Orange is an odyssey of the human personality, a statement of what it is to be truly human… As a fantasy figure Alex appeals to something dark and primal in all of us. He acts out our desire for instant sexual gratification, for the release of our angers and repressed instincts for revenge, our need for adventure and excitement.
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Alex symbolizes man in his natural state, the way he would be if society did not impose its "civilizing" processes upon him. What we respond to subconsciously is Alex's guiltless sense of freedom to kill and rape, and to be our natural savage selves, and it is in this glimpse of the true nature of man that the power of the story derives.
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Today every level of the criminal justice system has been mandated to take sexual assaults seriously. A recent anecdote conveys the flavor of the change. One of my graduate students was walking in a working-class Boston suburb and was accosted on a sidewalk by three high school boys, one of whom grabbed her breast and, when she protested, jokingly threatened to hit her. When she reported it to the police, they assigned an undercover officer to conduct a stakeout with her, and the two of them spent three afternoons in an inconspicuous car (a 1978 salmon-colored Cadillac Seville, seized in a drug bust) until she spotted the perpetrator. The assistant district attorney met with her several times and with her consent charged him with second-degree assault, to which he pleaded guilty. Compared to the casual way that even brutal rapes had been treated in earlier decades, this mobilization of the judicial system for a relatively minor offense is a sign of the change in policies.
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Against Our Will helped put the reform of rape laws and judicial practices onto the national agenda. When the book was published, marital rape was not a crime in any American state; today it has been outlawed in all fifty, and in most of the countries of Western Europe. Rape crisis centers have eased the trauma of reporting and recovering from rape; indeed, on today's campuses one can hardly turn around without seeing an advertisement of their services. Figure 7-9 reproduces a sticker that is pasted above many bathroom sinks at Harvard, offering students no fewer than five agencies they can contact. at Today every level of the criminal justice system has been mandated to take
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Also changed beyond recognition is the treatment of rape in popular culture. Today when the film and television industries depict a rape, it is to generate sympathy for the victim and revulsion for her attacker. Popular television series like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit drive home the message that sexual attackers at all social stations are contemptible scum and that DNA evidence will inevitably bring them to justice. Most striking of all is the video gaming industry, because it is the medium of the next generation, rivaling cinema and recorded music in revenue. Video gaming is a sprawling anarchy of unregulated content, mostly developed by and for young men. Though the games overflow with violence and gender stereotypes, one activity is conspicuous by its absence. The legal scholar Francis X. Shen has performed a content analysis of video games dating back to the 1980s and discovered a taboo that was close to absolute:
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FIGURE 7-9: Rape prevention and response sticker
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But did any of these changes reduce the incidence of rape? The facts of rape are elusive, because rape is notoriously underreported, and at the same time often overreported (as in the highly publicized but ultimately disproven 2006 accusation against three Duke University lacrosse players). Junk statistics from advocacy groups are slung around and become common knowledge, such as the incredible factoid that one in four university students has been raped. (The claim was based on a commodious definition of rape that the alleged victims themselves never accepted; it included, for example, any incident in which a woman consented to sex after having had too much to drink and regretted it afterward.) An imperfect but serviceable dataset is the U. S. Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey, which since 1973 has methodically interviewed a large and stratified sample of the population to estimate crime rates without the distorting factor of how many victims report a crime to the police. The survey has several features that are designed to minimize underreporting. Ninety percent of the interviewers are women, and after the methodology was improved in 1993, adjustments were made retroactively to the estimates from earlier years to keep the data from all years commensurable. Rape was defined broadly but not too broadly; it included sexual acts coerced by verbal threats as well as by physical force, and it included rapes that were either attempted or completed, of men or of women, homosexual or heterosexual. (In fact, most rapes are man-on-woman.)
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It seems that rape may be the one thing that you can't put into a video game… Killing scores of people in a game, often brutally, or even destroying entire cities is clearly worse than rape in real life. But in a video game, allowing someone to press the X-button to rape another character is off-limits. The "it's just a game" justification seems to fall flat when it comes to rape… Even in the virtual world of Role Playing Games, rape is taboo.
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He uncovered just a handful of exceptions in his worldwide search, and each triggered instant and vehement protest.
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We learned in chapter 3 that the 1990s saw a decrease in all categories of crime, from homicide to auto theft. One might wonder whether the rape decline is just a special case of the crime decline rather than an accomplishment of the feminist effort to stamp out rape. In figure 7-10 I also plotted the murder rate (from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports), aligning the two curves at their 1973 values. The graph shows that the decline of rape is different from the decline of homicide. The murder rate meandered up and down until 1992, fell in the 1990s, and stayed put in the new millennium. The rape rate began to fall around 1979, dropped more steeply during the 1990s, and continued to bounce downward in the new millennium. By 2008 the homicide rate had hit 57 percent of its 1973 level, whereas the rape statistics bottomed out at 20 percent.
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Figure 7-10 plots the surveyed annual rate of rape over the past four decades. It shows that in thirty-five years the rate has fallen by an astonishing 80 percent, from 250 per 100,000 people over the age of twelve in 1973 to 50 per 100,000 in 2008. In fact, the decline may be even greater than that, because women have almost certainly been more willing to report being raped in recent years, when rape has been recognized as a serious crime, than they were in earlier years, when rape was often hidden and trivialized.
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FIGURE 7-10: Rape and homicide rates in the United States, 1973-2008
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Source: Data from FBI Uniform Crime Reports and National Crime Victimization Survey; U. S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009.
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If the trend in the survey data is real, the drop in rape is another major decline in violence. Yet it has gone virtually unremarked. Rather than celebrating their success, antirape organizations convey an impression that women are in more danger than ever (as in the university bathroom stickers). And though the thirty-year rape decline needs an explanation that is distinct from the seven-year homicide decline, politicians and criminologists have not jumped into the breach. There is no Broken Windows theory, no Freakonomics theory, that has tried to explain the three-decade plunge.
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Probably several causes pushed in the same direction. The portion of the downslope in the 1990s must share some causes with the general crime decline, such as better policing and fewer dangerous men on the streets. Before, during, and after that decline, feminist sensibilities had singled out rape for special attention by the police, courts, and social service agencies. Their effort was enhanced by the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, which added federal funding and oversight to rape prevention, and underwrote the use of rape kits and DNA testing, which put many first-time rapists behind bars rather than waiting for a second or third offense. Indeed, the general crime decline in the 1990s may have been as much a product of the feminist antirape campaign as the other way around. Once the crime binge of the 1960s and 1970s had reached a plateau, it was the feminist campaign against assaults on women that helped to deromanticize street violence, make public safety a right, and spur the recivilizing process of the 1990s.
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Though feminist agitation deserves credit for the measures that led to the American rape decline, the country was clearly ready for them. It was not as if anyone argued that women ought to be humiliated at police stations and courtrooms, that husbands did have the right to rape their wives, or that rapists should prey on women in apartment stairwells and parking garages. The victories came quickly, did not require boycotts or martyrs, and did not face police dogs or angry mobs. The feminists won the battle against rape partly because there were more women in positions of influence, the legacy of technological changes that loosened the age-old sexual division of labor which had shackled women to hearth and children. But they also won the battle because both sexes had become increasingly feminist.
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Despite anecdote-driven claims that women have made no progress because of a "backlash" against feminism, data show that the country's attitudes have become inexorably more progressive. The psychologist Jean Twenge has charted more than a quarter of a century of responses to a standardized questionnaire about attitudes toward women which includes items such as "It is insulting to women to have the 'obey' clause remain in the marriage service," "Women should worry less about their rights and more about becoming good wives and mothers," and "A woman should not expect to go to exactly the same places or to have quite the same freedom of action as a man." Figure 7-11 shows the average of seventy-one studies that probed the attitudes of college-age men and women from 1970 to 1995. Successive generations of students, women and men alike, had increasingly progressive attitudes toward women. In fact, the men of the early 1990s had attitudes that were more feminist than those of the women in the 1970s. Southern students were slightly less feminist than northern ones, but the trends over time were similar, as are attitudes toward women measured in other samples of Americans.
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FIGURE 7-11: Attitudes toward women in the United States, 1970-1995
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We are all feminists now. Western culture's default point of view has become increasingly unisex. The universalizing of the generic citizen's vantage point, driven by reason and analogy, was an engine of moral progress during the Humanitarian Revolution of the 18th century, and it resumed that impetus during the Rights Revolutions of the 20th. It's no coincidence that the expansion of the rights of women followed on the heels of the expansion of the rights of racial minorities, because if the true meaning of the nation's founding creed is that all men are created equal, then why not all women too? In the case of gender a superficial sign of this universalizing trend is the effort of writers toto avoid masculine pronouns such as he and him to refer to a generic human. A deeper sign is the reorienting of moral and legal systems so that they could be justified from a viewpoint that is not specific to men.
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Rapists are men; their victims are usually women. The campaign against rape got traction not only because women had muscled their way into power and rebalanced the instruments of government to serve their interests, but also, I suspect, because the presence of women changed the understanding of the men in power. A moral vantage point determines more than who benefits and who pays; it also determines how events are classified as benefits and costs to begin with. And nowhere is this gap in valuation more consequential than in the construal of sexuality by men and by women.
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Source: Graph from Twenge, 1997.
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In their book Warrior Lovers, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Donald Symons wrote, "To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes… The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children." Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. Pornography for men is visual, anatomical, impulsive, floridly promiscuous, and devoid of context and character. Erotica for women is far more likely to be verbal, psychological, reflective, serially monogamous, and rich in context and character. Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people.
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Rape is not exactly a normal part of male sexuality, but it is made possible by the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of a sexual partner and indifferent to the partner's inner life -- indeed, "object" can be a more fitting term than "partner." The difference in the sexes' conception of sex translates into a difference in how they perceive the harm of sexual aggression. A survey by the psychologist David Buss shows that men underestimate how upsetting sexual aggression is to a female victim, while women overestimate how upsetting sexual aggression is to a male victim. The sexual abyss offers a complementary explanation of the callous treatment of rape victims in traditional legal and moral codes. It may come from more than the ruthless exercise of power by males over females; it may also come from a parochial inability of men to conceive of a mind unlike theirs, a mind that finds the prospect of abrupt, unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing. A society in which men work side by side with women, and are forced to take their interests into account while justifying their own, is a society in which this thick-headed incuriosity is less likely to remain intact.
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The sexual abyss also helps to explain the politically correct ideology of rape. As we have seen, successful campaigns against violence often leave in their wake unexamined codes of etiquette, ideology, and taboo. In the case of rape, the correct belief is that rape has nothing to do with sex and only to do with power. As Brownmiller put it, "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." Rapists, she wrote, are like Myrmidons, the mythical swarm of soldiers descended from ants who fought as mercenaries for Achilles: "Police-blotter rapists in a very real sense perform a myrmidon function for all men in our society." The myrmidon theory, of course, is preposterous. Not only does it elevate rapists to altruistic troopers for a higher cause, and slander all men as beneficiaries of the rape of the women they love, but it assumes that sex is the one thing that no man will ever use violence to attain, and it is contradicted by numerous facts about the statistical distribution of rapists and their victims. Brownmiller wrote that she adapted the theory from the ideas of an old communist professor of hers, and it does fit the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups. But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate.
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Common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline of violence, and today rape centers unanimously insist that "rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust -- it's about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is domination." (To which the journalist Heather MacDonald replies: "The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it's not a reinstatement of the patriarchy.") Because of the sacred belief, rape counselors foist advice on students that no responsible parent would ever give a daughter. When MacDonald asked the associate director of an Office of Sexual Assault Prevention at a major university whether they encouraged students to exercise good judgment with guidelines like "Don't get drunk, don't get into bed with a guy, and don't take off your clothes or allow them to be removed," she replied, "I am uncomfortable with the idea. This indicates that if [female students] are raped it could be their fault -- it is never their fault -- and how one dresses does not invite rape or violence… I would never allow my staff or myself to send the message it is the victim's fault due to their dress or lack of restraint in any way."
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Fortunately, the students whom MacDonald interviewed did not let this sexual correctness get in the way of their own common sense. The party line of the campus rape bureaucracy, however interesting it may be as a topic in the sociology of belief, is a sideshow to a more significant historical development: that in recent decades, a widening of social attitudes and law enforcement to embrace the perspective of women has driven down the incidence of a major category of violence.
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The other major category of violence against women has been called wife-beating, battering, spousal abuse, intimate partner violence, and domestic violence. The man uses physical force to intimidate, assault, and in extreme cases kill a current or estranged wife or girlfriend. Usually the violence is motivated by sexual jealousy or a fear that the woman will leave him, though he may also use it to establish dominance in the relationship by punishing her for acts of insubordination, such as challenging his authority or failing to perform a domestic duty.
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Domestic violence is the backstop in a set of tactics by which men control the freedom, especially the sexual freedom, of their partners. It may be related to the biological phenomenon of mate-guarding. In many organisms in which males invest in their offspring and females have opportunities to mate with other males, the male will follow the female around, try to keep her away from rival males, and, upon seeing signs that he may have failed, attempt to copulate with her on the spot. Human practices such as veiling, chaperoning, chastity belts, claustration, segregation by sex, and female genital cutting appear to be culturally sanctioned mate-guarding tactics. As an extra layer of protection, men often contract with other men (and sometimes older female kin) to recognize their monopoly over their partners as a legal right. Legal codes in the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, the Far East, the Americas, Africa, and northern Europe spelled out almost identical corollaries of the equation of women with property. Adultery was a tort against the husband by his romantic rival, entitling him to damages, divorce (with refund of the bride-price), or violent revenge. Adultery was always defined by the marital status of the woman; the man's marital status, and the woman's own preferences in the matter, were immaterial. Well into the first decades of the 20th century, the man of the house was entitled by law to "chastise" his wife.
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In Western countries the 1970s saw the repeal of many laws that had treated women as possessions of their husbands. Divorce laws became more symmetrical. A man could no longer claim justifiable provocation when he killed his adulterous wife or her lover. A husband could no longer forcibly confine his wife or prevent her from leaving the house. And a woman's family and friends were no longer guilty of the crime of "harboring" if they gave sanctuary to a fleeing wife. Most parts of the United States now have shelters in which women can escape from an abusive partner, and the legal system has recognized their right to safety by criminalizing domestic violence. Police who used to stay out of "marital spats" are now required by the laws of a majority of states to arrest a spouse if there is probable cause of abuse. In many jurisdictions prosecutors are obligated to seek protective orders that keep a potentially abusive spouse away from his home and partner, and then to prosecute him without the option of dropping the case, whether the victim wants it to proceed or not. Originally intended to rescue women who were trapped in a cycle of abuse, apology, forgiveness, and reoffending, the policies have become so intrusive that some legal scholars, such as Jeannie Suk, have argued that they now work against the interests of women by denying them their autonomy.
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Attitudes have changed as well. For centuries wife-beating was considered a normal part of marriage, from the quip of the 17th-century playwrights Beaumont and Fletcher that "charity and beating begins at home," to the threat of the 20th-century bus driver Ralph Kramden, "One of these days, Alice… POW, right in the kisser." As recently as 1972, the respondents to a survey of the seriousness of various crimes ranked violence toward a spouse 91st in a list of 140. (Respondents in that survey also considered the selling of LSD to be a worse crime than the "forcible rape of a stranger in the park.") Readers who distrust survey data may be interested in an experiment conducted in 1974 by the social psychologists Lance Shotland and Margaret Straw. Students filling out a questionnaire overheard an argument break out between a man and a woman (in reality, actors hired by the experimenters). I will let the authors describe the experimental method:
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After approximately 15 sec of heated discussion, the man physically attacked the woman, violently shaking her while she struggled, resisting and screaming. The screams were loud piercing shrieks, interspersed with pleas to "get away from me." Along with the shrieks, one of two conditions was introduced and then repeated several times. In the Stranger Condition the woman screamed, "I don't know you," and in the Married Condition, "I don't know why I ever married you."
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Most of the students ran out of the testing room to see what the commotion was about. In the condition in which the actors played strangers, almost two-thirds of the students intervened, usually by approaching the couple slowly and hoping they would stop. But in the condition in which the actors played husband and wife, fewer than a fifth of the students intervened. Most of them did not even pick up a phone in front of them with a sticker that listed an emergency number for the campus police. When interviewed afterward, they said it was "none of their business." In 1974 violence that was considered unacceptable between strangers was considered acceptable within a marriage.
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The experiment almost certainly could not be conducted today because of federal regulations on research with human subjects, another sign of our violence-averse times. But other studies suggest that people today are less likely to think that a violent attack by a man on his wife is none of their business. In a 1995 survey more than 80 percent of the respondents deemed domestic violence a "very important social and legal issue" (more important than children in poverty and the state of the environment), 87 percent believed that intervention is necessary when a man hits his wife even if she is not injured, and 99 percent believe that legal intervention is necessary if a man injures the wife. 79 Surveys that ask the same questions in different decades show striking changes. In 1987 only half of Americans thought it was always wrong for a man to strike his wife with a belt or stick; a decade later 86 percent thought it was always wrong. Figure 7-12 shows the statistically adjusted results of four surveys that asked people whether they approved of a husband slapping a wife. Between 1968 and 1994 the level of approval fell by half, from 20 to 10 percent. Though men are more likely to condone domestic violence than women, the feminist tide carried them along as well, and the men of 1994 were less approving than the women of 1968. The decline was seen in all regions of the country and in samples of whites, blacks, and Hispanics alike.
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What about domestic violence itself? Before we look at the trends, we have to consider a surprising claim: that men commit no more domestic violence than women. The sociologist Murray Straus has conducted many confidential and anonymous surveys that asked people in relationships whether they had ever used violence against their partners, and he found no difference between the sexes. In 1978 he wrote, "The old cartoons of the wife chasing her husband with a rolling pin or throwing pots and pans are closer to reality than most (and especially those with feminist sympathies) realize." Some activists have called for greater recognition of the problem of battered men, and for a network of shelters in which men can escape from their violent wives and girlfriends. This would be quite a twist. If women were never the victims of a gendered category of violence called "wife-beating," but rather both sexes have always been equally victimized by "spouse-beating," it would be misleading to ask whether wife-beating has declined over time as a part of the campaign to end violence against women.
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To make sense of the survey findings, one has to be careful about what one means by domestic violence. It turns out that there really is a distinction between common marital spats that escalate into violence ("the conversations with the flying plates," as Rodgers and Hart put it) and the systematic intimidation and coercion of one partner by another. The sociologist Michael Johnson analyzed data on the interactions between partners in violent relationships and discovered a cluster of controlling tactics that tended to go together. In some couples, one partner threatens the other with force, controls the family finances, restricts the other's movements, redirects anger and violence against the children or pets, and strategically withholds praise and affection. Among couples with a controller, the controllers who used violence were almost exclusively men; the spouses who used violence were almost entirely women, presumably defending themselves or their children. When neither partner was a controller, violence erupted only when an argument got out of hand, and in those couples the men were just a shade more prone to using force than the women. The distinction between controllers and squabblers, then, resolves the mystery of the genderneutral violence statistics. The numbers in violence surveys are dominated by spats between noncontrolling partners, in which the women give as good as they get. But the numbers from shelter admissions, court records, emergency rooms, and police statistics are dominated by couples with a controller, usually the man intimidating the woman, and occasionally a woman defending herself. The asymmetry is even greater with estranged partners, in which it is the men who do most of the stalking, threatening, and harming. Other studies have confirmed that chronic intimidation, serious violence, and maleness tend to go together.
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FIGURE 7-12: Approval of husband slapping wife in the United States, 1968-1994
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So has anything changed over time? With the small stuff -- the mutual slapping and shoving -- perhaps not. But with violence that is severe enough to count as an assault, so that it turns up in the National Crime Victimization Survey, the rates have plunged. As with estimates of rape, the numbers from a victimization study can't be treated as exact measures of rates of domestic violence, but they are useful as a measure of trends over time, especially since the new concern over domestic violence should make the recent respondents more willing to report abuse. The Bureau of Justice provides data from 1993 to 2005, which are plotted in figure 7-13. The rate of reported violence against women by their intimate partners has fallen by almost two-thirds, and the rate against men has fallen by almost half.
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Source: Graph from Straus et al., 1997.
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The decline almost certainly began earlier. In Straus's surveys, women in 1985 reported twice the number of severe assaults by their husbands as did the women in 1992, the year the federal victimization data begin.
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FIGURE 7-13: Assaults by intimate partners in the United States, 1993-2005
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Source: Data from U. S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010.
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Once again, we see a substantial decline, though with an interesting twist: feminism has been very good for men. In the years since the ascendancy of the women's movement, the chance that a man would be killed by his wife, ex-wife, or girlfriend has fallen sixfold. Since there was no campaign to end violence against men during this period, and since women in general are the less homicidal sex, the likeliest explanation is that a woman was apt to kill an abusive husband or boyfriend when he threatened to harm her if she left him. The advent of women's shelters and restraining orders gave women an escape plan that was a bit less extreme.
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What about the most extreme form of domestic violence, uxoricide and mariticide? To a social scientist, the killing of one intimate partner by another has the great advantage that one needn't haggle over definitions or worry about reporting biases: dead is dead. Figure 7-14 shows the rates of killing of intimate partners from 1976 to 2005, expressed as a ratio per 100,000 people of the same sex.
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FIGURE 7-14: Homicides of intimate partners in the United States, 1976-2005
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Sources: Data from U. S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2011, with adjustments by the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online (http://www. albany. edu/sourcebook/csv/t31312005. csv). Population figures from the U. S. Census.
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What about the rest of the world? Unfortunately it is not easy to tell. Unlike homicide, definitions of rape and spousal abuse are all over the map, and police records are misleading because any change in the rate of violence against women can be swamped by changes in the willingness of women to report the abuse to the police. Adding to the confusion, advocacy groups tend to inflate statistics on rates of violence against women and to hide statistics on trends over time. The U. K. Home Office administers a crime victimization survey in England and Wales, but it does not present data on trends in rape or domestic violence. But when the data from separate annual reports are aggregated, as in figure 7-15, they show a dramatic decline in domestic violence, similar to the one seen in the United States. Because of differences in how domestic violence is defined and how population bases are tabulated, the numbers in this graph are not commensurable with those of figure 7-13, but the trends over time are almost the same. It is safe to guess that similar declines have taken place in other Western democracies, because domestic violence has been a concern in all of them.
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FIGURE 7-15: Domestic violence in England and Wales, 1995-2008
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Sources: Data from British Crime Survey, U. K., Home Office, 2010. Data aggregated across years by Dewar Research, 2009. Population estimates from the U. K. Office for National Statistics, 2009.
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Though the United States and other Western nations are often accused of being misogynistic patriarchies, the rest of the world is immensely worse. As I mentioned, surveys of domestic violence in the United States that are broad enough to include minor acts of shoving and slapping show no difference between men and women; the same is true of Canada, Finland, Germany, the U. K., Ireland, Israel, and Poland. But that gender neutrality is a departure from the rest of the world. The psychologist John Archer looked at sex ratios in surveys of domestic violence in sixteen countries and found that in the non-Western ones -- India, Jordan, Japan, Korea, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea -- the men do more of the hitting.
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Laws on violence against women also show a lag from the legal reforms of W estern democracies. Eighty-four percent of the countries of Western Europe have outlawed or are planning to outlaw domestic violence, and 72 percent have done so for marital rape. Here are the respective figures for other parts of the world: Eastern Europe, 57 and 39 percent; Asia and the Pacific, 51 and 19 percent; Latin America, 94 and 18 percent; sub-Saharan Africa, 35 and 12.5 percent; Arab states, 25 and 0 percent. On top of these injustices, sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southwest Asia are host to systematic atrocities against women that are rare or unheard of in the 21st-century West, including infanticide, genital mutilation, trafficking in child prostitutes and sex slaves, honor killings, attacks on disobedient or under-dowried wives with acid and burning kerosene, and mass rapes during wars, riots, and genocides.
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The World Health Organization recently published a hodgepodge of rates of serious domestic violence from forty-eight countries. Worldwide, it has been estimated that between a fifth and a half of all women have been victims of domestic violence, and they are far worse off in countries outside Western Europe and the Anglosphere. In the United States, Canada, and Australia, fewer than 3 percent of women report that their partners assaulted them in the previous year, but the reports from other countries are an order of magnitude higher: 27 percent in a Nicaraguan sample, 38 percent in a Korean sample, and 52 percent in a Palestinian sample. Attitudes toward marital violence also show striking differences. About 1 percent of New Zealanders and 4 percent of Singaporeans say that a husband has the right to beat a wife who talks back or disobeys him. But the figures are 78 percent for rural Egyptians, up to 50 percent for Indians in Uttar Pradesh, and 57 percent for Palestinians.
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Is the difference in violence against women between the West and the rest just one of the many wholesome factors that are bundled together in the Matthew Effect -- democracy, prosperity, economic freedom, education, technology, decent government? Not entirely. Korea and Japan are affluent democracies but have more domestic violence against women, and several Latin American countries that are far less developed appear to have more equal sex ratios and lower absolute rates. This leaves some statistical wiggle room to look for the differences across societies that make women safer, holding affluence constant. Archer found that countries in which women are better represented in government and the professions, and in which they earn a larger proportion of earned income, are less likely to have women at the receiving end of spousal abuse. Also, cultures that are classified as more individualistic, where people feel they are individuals with the right to pursue their own goals, have relatively less domestic violence against women than the cultures classified as collectivist, where people feel they are part of a community whose interests take precedence over their own. These correlations don't prove causation, but they are consistent with the suggestion that the decline of violence against women in the West has been pushed along by a humanist mindset that elevates the rights of individual people over the traditions of the community, and that increasingly embraces the vantage point of women.
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Though elsewhere I have been chary about making predictions, I think it's extremely likely that in the coming decades violence against women will decrease throughout the world. The pressure will come both from the top down and from the bottom up. At the top, a consensus has formed within the international community that violence against women is the most pressing human rights problem remaining in the world. There have been symbolic measures such as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (November 25) and numerous proclamations from bully pulpits such as the United Nations and its member governments. Though the measures are toothless, the history of denunciations of slavery, whaling, piracy, privateering, chemical weaponry, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing shows that international shaming campaigns can make a difference over the long run. As the head of the UN Development Fund for Women has noted, "There are now more national plans, policies, and laws in place than ever before, and momentum is also growing in the intergovernmental arena."
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Among the grassroots, attitudes all over the world will almost certainly ensure that women will gain greater economic and political representation in the coming years. A 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project of twenty-two countries found that in most of them, at least 90 percent of the respondents of both sexes believe that women should have equal rights, including the United States, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, Lebanon, and countries in Europe and Latin America. Even in Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Kenya, more than 60 percent favor equal rights; only in Nigeria does the proportion fall just short of half. Support for women being allowed to work outside the home is even higher. And recall the global Gallup survey that showed that even in Islamic countries a majority of women believe that women should be able to vote as they please, work at any job, and serve in government, and that in most of the countries, a majority of the men agreed. As this pent-up demand is released, the interests of women are bound to be given greater consideration in their countries' policies and norms. The argument that women should not be assaulted by the men in their lives is irrefutable, and as Victor Hugo noted, "There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come."
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