Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Bridget Jones at 80
Calorie counting and man chasing in the golden years.
By Lucinda Rosenfeld
[02/29/00]

Reviews
"Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" by Helen Fielding
She's back, she's got her weight down, she's got Mark Darcy and she's in a Thai jail on drug charges.
By Maria Russo
[02/29/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
Strangers on a train
We met in Scotland and fell in love. He never told me he lived with his mother.
By Garrison Keillor
[02/29/00]

Reviews
"The Dress Lodger" by Sheri Holman
A lurid and literary novel offers a tale of prostitution, cholera and body snatching in 19th century England.
By Marion Lignana Rosenberg
[02/28/00]

Ivory Tower
Slaves to science
For post-docs, finding a supernova is easier than finding a job.
By William Speed Weed
[02/28/00]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

As the author of a cross-cultural study on rape in 95 different tribal societies, Sanday stresses that its incidence varies wildly from culture to culture and there are many societies in which rape is rare. Far from being the norm, she says, America is one of the most rape-prone of all contemporary cultures. If the biological imperative to rape is as powerful, and as universal, as Thornhill and Palmer insist, why does its frequency vary so much from culture to culture?

Mary Cameron, an anthropologist at Auburn University, points to another flaw in Thornhill and Palmer's thesis: "It doesn't begin to account for male-male rape, or incest," neither of which confer any evolutionary advantage. If, by the authors' own admission, almost one-third of rapes are inflicted on children under 11, it is hard to see how reproductive imperatives could possibly be responsible.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, a research biologist at Brown University, questions the very foundation of Thornhill and Palmer's thesis: "If rape is about reproduction," she says, "then how many rapes end in pregnancy? I'd want to see the data on that." Such figures are notably absent from "A Natural History of Rape." And there could well be other explanations for the fact that the majority of rape victims are young women of peak child-bearing age. After all, most rapists are themselves young men and they may simply be raping within their peer group.

Particularly woolly is the authors' claim that women of child-bearing age suffer from more psychological trauma than children or elderly rape victims. In perhaps the book's most eyebrow-raising chapter the authors try to convince us that this is a proven fact, but I must say I found their "evidence" entirely underwhelming. Children who have been raped can suffer a lifetime of psychological scarring (in addition to serious physical harm), and an informal poll of my female friends suggests that for many women there are few more traumatic prospects than the thought of being raped in the heightened physical vulnerability of our old age.

Trying to quantify a human being's anguish and measure it against the suffering of another is the sort of notion that ought to make any sensible scientist run screaming from the room. It's not just that it's repugnant to say that a raped 7-year-old feels less pain than a raped 21-year-old, it's also simply daft to insist that any such "objective" comparison can be made. The whole exercise is reminiscent of medieval attempts to quantify sin.

Furthermore, while the authors are right that married rape victims may indeed fear reprisal from their husbands or relatives, the very fact that the consequences of rape are so much worse in some societies than they are in others indicates that we're talking about cultural forces here. For example, religious women in Muslim communities probably fear this more than secular women in America; it's the difference between a fundamentalist and a liberal value system -- not biology. Do the authors of "The Natural History of Rape" have any clear understanding of the distinction? Thornhill and Palmer might just as well assert that black men in the Bronx feel nervous around the NYPD because they're hard-wired to dread authority figures.

All of which raises the question of scientific standards. To quote Fausto-Sterling: "When you make a hypothesis you really need to be able to back that up with data." Yet data is just what is missing from this book. As with so many other neo-Darwinian accounts of human behavior now being offered by proponents of the new "evolutionary psychology" movement, Thornhill and Palmer's analysis of rape relies not on hard evidence, as they would have us believe, but on speculative flights of fancy. Taking a leaf from Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Jay Gould has dubbed such theories "just-so-stories." (His point being that they have not a whit more validity than Kipling's fanciful tales of how the leopard got its spots and the tiger its stripes.)

Next page | Evolutionary psychology is the new fundamentalism