Rape: seriously? We're now using science to prove it's the girl's fault?

So, I'm doing my reading for a Philosophy class, and one of the readings assigned is by Steven Pinker. It's a chapter in a book that apparently nearly won him a Pulitzer Prize, and part of a work which got him acclaim from Richard Dawkins. I'm not sure what Dawkins was smoking.

Pinker starts out by undercutting gender feminism for the same reasons I came up with last semester in my Women's Studies class as to why I'm not a feminist. Namely:

1. that the sexes are intrinsically different in more ways than genital. For instance, men tend to use violence and anger more often, while women experience emotions (except anger) more intensely than men do.

2. that gender isn't solely a product of culture. He uses the example of a boy who was surgically modified to be a girl, was raised as a girl, and later went back to being a man, since he had always felt like a boy trapped in a girl's body.

3. that equality does not have to be synonymous with being identical. This boils down to respecting the person, and accepting diversity in society.

Since he postulates all these things under the guise of being an "Equity feminist," claiming that he believes in the equality of women, but can't align with the vociferous "lunatic fringe" of feminism, a group he calls the "Gender feminists." I felt, at first, like I had finally found a definition of feminism I could relate to; one which was based on logic, rather than political hell-raising.

Maybe that's why the rest of the article stimulated such a typically male response in me: I got angry.

He starts out talking about how womens minds work differently from mens, and fits this into evolutionary psychology. Ok, I guess I can understand why more women would prefer the social sciences to engineering, as long as those who do prefer it are allowed to kick ass in their chosen field.

And then he moves on to rape. He starts out by deriding Brownmiller, a feminist who is active in raising cultural awareness of rape, and who is adament that:

1. rape is not synonymous with sex

2. girls who are raped are not at fault

3. because of the prevalence of rape, all women live in fear of rape, and live their lives in such a way as to prevent being raped.

How many women would disagree with this? How many women walk to their car with their keys out, avoid parking beside big vans, and only go out after dark in the company of friends? We all do what we can to ensure we aren't taken by surprise. And I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a woman anywhere in the world who doesn't know someone who was raped by an acquaintance. So, yeah, all women are affected by rape, whether they've been raped or not.

Pinker disagrees. Fine. He's not a woman. How's he supposed to know?

But he disagrees by twisting words. He takes Brownmiller's idea that rape's prevalence in our culture turns our culture into a stilted power struggle, where women are constantly, in one form or another, on the defense against rape by a man, and makes it ridiculous by implying that she was saying that each individual rapist is just a soldier doing his job to keep the male gender on top.

Please.

Of course, when you look at it that way, it seems ridiculous that men would rape at all. So, he gives what he thinks is a good reason: men want sex, and it's in their genes to use violence to get what they want, if it's not given willingly. According to a theory he cites from Thornhill and Palmer, the only reason rape isn't a typical mating strategy in humans is the risk of injury by the victim during the act.

Then, he turns around and says that rape isn't "natural." He says, "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."

You know, I'd like to see mosquito bites eradicated from camping life. I also know they're inevitable. Wanting something eradicated, and believing it's inevitable are two very different things.

Pinker's at his best, though, when he tries to say that girls should just dress a little less provocatively, if they don't want to be forced to have sex. Aside from the obvious problem with this--namely, that even if a girl says outright, "I want to have sex," that's no invitation to be forced--there's a big problem with this logic: where do we draw the line on provocative? Obviously, women in the Middle East wear the burkha, and I'm pretty sure they still get raped.

Now, I'm with Pinker that rape isn't fully understood, either by science or by culture. He seems to be concluding by all this that rape needs to stop being taboo, and needs to be studied. Bravo.

But then he attacks Brownmiller for pointing out that rape is a violation of rights, and as such, should ideally be eradicated from our society. He likens a girl who tries to stop after a heavy makeout session to a person who leaves their keys on the hood of their car, and then wonders why the car was stolen.

Yeah, people get stupid. They get into situations which aren't ideal. Does that make it wrong to point out violations of rights?

What if we applied his logic to the slavery problem? Well, those stupid Africans just got too close to the White people in the jungle. They should have known better. And they even sold each other to White people! So, of course, we have a right to keep them as slaves. What are they thinking, trying to ask for their freedom? They gave that right up a long time ago. Slavery is reality, so deal with it.

Seriously?