Had I Known

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  How “Natural” Is Rape?

  Time, 2000

  It was cute the first time around: when the president lost his head over Monica’s thong undies, that is, and the evolutionary psychologists declared that he was just following the innate biological urge to, tee-hee, spread his seed. Natural selection favors the reproductively gifted, right? But the latest daffy Darwinist attempt to explain male bad behavior is not quite so amusing. Rape, according to evolutionary theorists Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, represents just another seed-spreading technique favored by natural selection. Sure it’s nasty, brutish, and short on foreplay. But it gets the job done.

  Thornhill and Palmer aren’t endorsing rape, of course. In their article in the latest issue of the Sciences—which is already generating a high volume of buzz although their book, A Natural History of Rape, won’t be out until April—they say they just want to correct the feminist fallacy that “rape is not about sex,” it’s about violence and domination. The authors argue, among other things, that since the majority of victims are women of childbearing age, the motive must be lust and the intent, however unconscious, must be to impregnate. Hence rape is not an act of pathology, but a venerable old strategy for procreation. What’s “natural” isn’t always nice.

  Now, there are people who reject any attempt to apply evolutionary theory to human behavior, and, as far as I’m concerned, they can go back to composing their annual letters to Santa Claus. Obviously, humans have been shaped by natural selection (though it’s not always so obvious how). We are not the descendants of the kindest or wisest of hominids—only of those who managed, by cunning or luck, to produce a few living offspring. But is rape really an effective strategy for guys who, deep down in their genes, just want to be fruitful and multiply?

  There are plenty of evolutionary psychologists who would answer with a resounding no. They emphasize the evolutionary value of the human male’s “parental investment”—his tendency to stick around after the act of impregnation and help out with the kids. Prehistoric dads may not have read many bedtime stories, but, in this account, they very likely brought home the occasional antelope haunch, and they almost certainly played a major role in defending the family from four-legged predators. In contrast, the rapist generally operates on a hit-and-run basis—which may be all right for stocking sperm banks, but is not quite so effective if the goal is to produce offspring who will survive in a challenging environment. The children of guys who raped-and-ran must have been a scrawny lot and doomed to end up on some leopard’s lunch menu.

  There’s another problem with rape—again, from a strictly Darwinian perspective. Even if it isn’t “about violence,” as feminists have claimed, it almost always involves violence or at least the threat thereof; otherwise, it isn’t rape. Thornhill and Palmer downplay the amount of physical violence accompanying rape, claiming that no more than 22 percent of victims suffer any “gratuitous” violence beyond that necessary to subdue them. But we are still talking about appalling levels of damage to the mother of the rapist’s prospective offspring. Most rape victims suffer long-term emotional consequences—like depression and memory loss—that are hardly conducive to successful motherhood. It’s a pretty dumb Darwinian specimen who can’t plant his seed without breaking the “vessel” in the process.

  Thornhill and Palmer’s insistence that the rapist isn’t a psychopath, just an ordinary fellow who’s in touch with his inner caveman, leads to some dubious prescriptions. They want to institute formal training for boys in how to resist their “natural” sexual impulses to rape. Well, sure, kids should learn that rape is wrong, along with all other forms of assault. But the emphasis on rape as a natural male sexual impulse is bound to baffle those boys—and I would like to think there are more than a few of them out there—whose sexual fantasies have never drifted in a rape-ward direction.

  As for the girls, Thornhill and Palmer want them to realize that since rape is really “about sex,” it very much matters how they dress. But where is the evidence that women in miniskirts are more likely to be raped than women in dirndls? Women were raped by the thousands in Bosnia, for example, and few if any of them were wearing bikinis or bustiers.

  Yes, rape is “about sex,” in that it involves a certain sexlike act. But it’s a pretty dismal kind of “sex” in which one person’s pain, and possible permanent injury, is the occasion for the other one’s pleasure. What most of us mean by sex is something mutual and participatory, loving and uplifting, or at least flirty and fun. In fact, making the world safe for plunging necklines and thong undies is a goal that enlightened members of both sexes ought to be able to get behind. As for those guys who can’t distinguish between sex and rape, I don’t care whether they’re as “natural” as granola, they don’t deserve to live in the company of women.

  The Warrior Culture

  Time, 1990

  In what we like to think of as “primitive” warrior cultures, the passage to manhood requires the blooding of a spear, the taking of a scalp or head. Among the Masai of eastern Africa and dozens of other human cultures, a man could not marry until he had demonstrated his capacity to kill in battle. Leadership, too, in a warrior society is typically contingent on military prowess and wrapped in the mystique of death. In the Solomon Islands, a chief’s importance could be reckoned by the number of skulls posted around his door, and it was the duty of the Aztec kings to nourish the gods with the hearts of human captives.

  All warrior peoples have fought for the same high-sounding reasons: honor, glory, or revenge. The nature of their real and perhaps not conscious motivations is a subject of much debate. Some anthropologists postulate a murderous instinct, almost unique among living species, in human males. Others discern a materialistic motive behind every fray: a need for slaves, grazing land, or even human flesh to eat. Still others point to the similarities between war and other male pastimes—the hunt and outdoor sports—and suggest that it is boredom, ultimately, that stirs men to fight.

  But in a warrior culture it hardly matters which motive is most basic. Aggressive behavior is rewarded whether or not it is innate to the human psyche. Shortages of resources are habitually taken as occasions for armed offensives, rather than for hard thought and innovation. And war, to a warrior people, is of course the highest adventure, the surest antidote to malaise, the endlessly repeated theme of legend, song, religious myth, and personal quest for meaning. It is how men die and what they find to live for.

  “You must understand that Americans are a warrior nation,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan told a group of Arab leaders in 1990. He said this proudly, and he may, without thinking through the ugly implications, have told the truth. In many ways, in outlook and behavior, the United States has begun to act like a “primitive” warrior culture.

  We seem to believe that leadership is expressed, in no small part, by a willingness to cause the deaths of others. After the US invasion of Panama, President Bush exulted that no one could call him “timid”; he was at last a “macho man.” The press, in even more primal language, hailed him for succeeding in an “initiation rite” by demonstrating his “willingness to shed blood.”

  For lesser offices, too, we apply the standards of a warrior culture. Female candidates are routinely advised to overcome the handicap of their gender by talking “tough.” Thus, for example, Dianne Feinstein embraced capital punishment, while Colorado senatorial candidate Josie Heath found it necessary to announce that although she is the mother of an eighteen-year-old son, she is prepared to vote for war. Male candidates are finding their military records under scrutiny. No one expects them, as elected officials in a civilian government, to pick up a spear or a sling and fight. But they must state, at least, their willingness to have another human being killed.

  More tellingly, we are unnerved by peace and seem to find it boring. When the cold war ended, we found no reason to celebrate. Instead we heated up the “war on drugs.” What should have been a public-health campaign, focused on the
persistent shame of poverty, became a new occasion for martial rhetoric and muscle flexing. Months later, when the Berlin Wall fell and communism collapsed throughout Europe, we Americans did not dance in the streets. What we did, according to the networks, was change the channel to avoid the news. Nonviolent revolutions do not uplift us, and the loss of mortal enemies only seems to leave us empty and bereft.

  Our collective fantasies center on mayhem, cruelty, and violent death. Loving images of the human body—especially of bodies seeking pleasure or expressing love—inspire us with the urge to censor. Our preference is for warrior themes: the lone fighting man, bandoliers across his naked chest, mowing down lesser men in gusts of automatic-weapon fire. Only a real war seems to revive our interest in real events. With the Iraqi crisis, the networks report, ratings for news shows rose again—even higher than they were for Panama.

  And as in any warrior culture, our warrior elite takes pride of place. Social crises multiply numbingly—homelessness, illiteracy, epidemic disease—and our leaders tell us solemnly that nothing can be done. There is no money. We are poor, not rich, a debtor nation. Meanwhile, nearly a third of the federal budget flows, even in moments of peace, to the warriors and their weaponmakers. When those priorities are questioned, some new “crisis” dutifully arises to serve as another occasion for armed and often unilateral intervention.

  With Operation Desert Shield, our leaders were reduced to begging foreign powers for the means to support our warrior class. It does not seem to occur to us that the other great northern powers—Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union—might not have found the stakes so high or the crisis quite so threatening. It has not penetrated our imagination that in a world where the powerful, industrialized nation-states are at last at peace, there might be other ways to face down a pint-size third-world warrior state than with massive force of arms. Nor have we begun to see what an anachronism we are in danger of becoming: a warrior nation in a world that pines for peace, a high-tech state with the values of a roving warrior band.

  A leftist might blame “imperialism”; a right-winger would call our problem “internationalism.” But an anthropologist, taking the long view, might say this is just what warriors do. Intoxicated by their own drumbeats and war songs, fascinated by the glint of steel and the prospect of blood, they will go forth, time and again, to war.

  At Last, a New Man

  New York Times, 1984

  There have been waves of “new women” arriving on cue almost every decade for the last thirty years or so—from the civic-minded housewife, to the liberated single, to the dressed-for-success executive. But men, like masculinity itself, were thought to be made of more durable stuff. Change, if it came at all, would come only in response to some feminine—or feminist—initiative.

  In the 1970s, for example, it had become an article of liberal faith that a new man would eventually rise up to match the new feminist woman, that he would be more androgynous than any “old” variety of man, and that the change, which was routinely expressed as an evolutionary leap from John Wayne to Alan Alda, would be an unambiguous improvement.

  Today a new man is at last emerging, and I say this as someone who is not much given to such announcements. A new man, like a new sexuality or a new conservatism, is more likely to turn out to be a journalistic artifact than a cultural sea change.

  But this time something has happened, both to our common expectations of what constitutes manhood and to the way many men are choosing to live.

  I see the change in the popular images that define masculinity, and I see it in the men I know, mostly in their thirties, who are conscious of possessing a sensibility and even a way of life that is radically different from that of their fathers. These men have been, in a word, feminized, but without necessarily becoming more feminist. In fact, I do not think that those of us who are feminists either can or, for the most part, would want to take credit for the change.

  If we had not all been so transfixed by the changes in women in the last fifteen or twenty years, far more attention would have been paid to the new man by this time. We can recall—with nostalgia or relief—the feminine ideal of less than a generation ago: the full-time homemaker who derived her status as well as her livelihood from her husband and considered paid employment a misfortune visited only on the opposite sex or the unwed. So sudden was her demise, at least as an ideal for most girls to aspire to, that we sometimes forget the notion of manhood that went along with that “feminine mystique.”

  I think of the men of my father’s generation, men who came of age in the 1950s and who, like my own father, defined their masculinity, if not their identity, in terms of their ability to make a living and support a family. This was a matter of convention as much as of choice, for the man who failed to marry and become a reliable provider was considered a failure, and those who failed to marry at all (that is, by the age of thirty or so) were candidates for the label of “latent homosexual.” Men of this generation were encouraged to equate effeminacy with un-Americanism and to use their leisure to escape—into sports, hunting, or simply the basement—from women and all things feminine.

  We recognize that for the most part men aren’t like that anymore and those who are seem grievously out of style. Usually, we think of the change simply as a movement away from the old norm—an opening up of possibilities. But the new man emerging today is not simply the old one minus the old prohibitions and anxieties. There is a new complex of traits and attitudes that has come to define manhood and a kind of new masculine gentility.

  Taking his mid-1950s progenitor as a benchmark, the most striking characteristic of the new man is that he no longer anchors his identity in his role as family breadwinner. He may be the family breadwinner, or imagine becoming one someday, but his ability to do so has ceased to be the urgent and necessary proof of his maturity or of his heterosexuality. In fact, he may postpone or avoid marriage indefinitely—which is why the women’s magazines complain so much about the male “lack of commitment” and “refusal to grow up.”

  But if the old responsibilities have declined, the pressure is not off: The old man expressed his status through his house and the wife who presided over it; the new man expects to express his status through his own efforts and is deeply anxious about the self he presents to the world. Typically, he is concerned—some might say obsessed—with his physical health and fitness. He is an avid and style-conscious consumer, not only of clothes but of food, home furnishings, and visible displays of culture. Finally, and in a marked reversal of the old masculinity, he is concerned that people find him, not forbearing or strong, but genuine, open, and sensitive.

  These traits do not always occur together; in individual men, in fact, we are probably more used to encountering them separately, scattered among men of the middle and upper-middle classes. For example, on a spring lunch hour in the nation’s capital, you will find scores of ruddy, middle-aged men, jogging resolutely on the banks of the Potomac, and I doubt that many of them are practitioners of the new sensitivity. On the other hand, sensitivity is now fairly well dispersed throughout the male population, so that it is not uncommon to encounter it in married breadwinners with children, where it may take the form of a somewhat fatuous volubility on the subject of fathering. Then, too, rejection of the breadwinner role—at least as reflected in the high rate of default on child-support payments by men who could well afford to pay them—is so endemic that it cannot be confined to a special new type of man. There are men who are otherwise old-fashioned but have taken up a formerly feminine activity like cooking; just as there must be (though I have not met one) upscale bachelors who eschew physical exercise and designer shirts.

  But it is possible, increasingly, to find men who qualify as prototypical new males. They are likely to be from twenty-five to forty years old, single, affluent, and living in a city, for it is among such men that the most decisive break in the old masculine values is occurring. In these men, the traits that define the new masculinity are beginni
ng to form a pattern and even to frame a new kind of conformity—one that is vastly different, however, from the gray-flannel blues that bedeviled an earlier generation of middle-class American men.

  Jeffrey A. Greenberg was one of a number of young men interviewed by me and my assistant, Harriet Bernstein, a market researcher, who helped me locate single affluent men who were willing to discuss their interests and values. Greenberg is a thirty-two-year-old resident in neurosurgery who lives and works in Washington. He puts in eighty to a hundred hours a week as a doctor, works out in a gym three times a week, and otherwise devotes himself to “the study and acquisition of art.” Cooking is his latest enthusiasm: “I thought I wasn’t creative in that aspect, but I found that I’m definitely OK. I know what tastes good and I’m able to do that.” He entertains at least once a week, which gives him a chance to show off his paintings and eclectic music collection. He indicated that, while there were women in his life, he did not yet “have the ability to make a firm commitment.”

  Thirty or even twenty years ago, a man like Jeffrey Greenberg would have been a self-conscious minority of “older” bachelors—probably envied by his married friends, and, at the same time, faintly suspected for his “effeminate” tastes.

  Today [1984] he is part of a demographic trend that fascinates market researchers and delights the purveyors of upscale consumer goods. There are 7.5 million men living alone (twice as many as there were in 1970). And as the home-furnishings expert Joan Kron observes in her recent book Home-Psych, single men are less likely to view their condition as one of temporary deprivation, marked by canned-hash dinners and orange-crate furniture. They cook; they furnish; they may even decorate. Home Furnishings Daily has declared them the “New Target,” and the magazines that guide their consumption decisions are proliferating and expanding. Significantly, the genre of men’s magazine that has done the best in the last few years is the one (represented by Esquire, GQ, and M) that does not depend on the lure of sexy female images, only page after page of slender, confident-looking male models.