Galileo's Middle Finger

by Alice Dreger

  But in taking seriously the idea that not everyone is devastated by everything termed childhood sexual abuse, Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman were saying something very politically incorrect: some people grow up to be psychologically pretty healthy even after having been CSA victims. In fact, Rind and company opted to go even further in their paper, suggesting that the term childhood sexual abuse seemed to imply that child-adult sex always led to great and lasting harm, whereas the data seemed to show it did not in a surprising proportion of cases. The Rind paper recommended that those studying the problem employ a more neutral terminology and sort out the different types of sex (and harm) occurring.

  Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman closed the paper with an attempt to avoid being accused of being apologists for pedophilia, reminding readers that just because an action might not harm does not make it morally right: “If it is true that wrongfulness in sexual matters does not imply harmfulness”—a point they attributed to my old pal John Money—“then it is also true that lack of harmfulness does not imply lack of wrongfulness. . . . In this sense, the findings of the current review do not imply that moral or legal definitions of or views on behaviors currently classified as CSA should be abandoned or even altered.”

  Well, that little “we’re not advocating pedophilia” disclaimer sure didn’t work. Activist pedophiles saw in the Rind paper justification for us all to just get out of the way already and let them at little kids. Blatantly ignoring the point made at the end of the Rind paper, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMbLA) called the Rind paper “The Good News About Man/Boy Love.” Thus the Rind paper became the gospel according to NAMbLA, a group whose mere logo can thoroughly creep you out. (The M for Man leans to the right, pushing against the little b for boy, as though the M is mounting the b. Seriously, that’s what it looks like.)

  If NAMbLA saw a golden opportunity in the Rind paper, Laura Schlessinger had visions of platinum. In the spring of 1999, on her Dr. Laura Program, Schlessinger simplified the whole scene in predictable ways, making the Rind paper out to be junk science and suggesting that Rind and company were virtual pitchmen for pedophilia. The fact that the American Psychological Association (Psychological Bulletin’s publisher) then looked like the PR arm of NAMbLA was undoubtedly a delightful side effect from Schlessinger’s point of view. Schlessinger had no use for the APA, an organization that openly leaned left. She pulled out all the stops, ultimately encouraging conservative members of Congress to use the Rind paper to go after the APA. The not so honorable Tom DeLay, representative of Texas’s Twenty-Second Congressional District, was only too happy to heed Dr. Laura’s call. No doubt still stinging from impeaching Clinton without managing to remove him as president, DeLay found in the Rind paper a new sexual ticket to ride. And ride it he did.

  By July of 1999, DeLay managed to get the House of Representatives to condemn the Rind paper by a vote of 355 to 0 (with 13 members voting only “present”). Just a few days later, the Senate followed suit, unanimously resolving “that Congress condemns and denounces all suggestions in the article ‘A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples’ that indicate that sexual relationships between adults and ‘willing’ children are less harmful than believed.” Congress also saw fit to condemn “any suggestion that sexual relations between children and adults . . . are anything but abusive, destructive, exploitative, reprehensible, and punishable by law.”

  And there you have it: the only scientific paper ever to be condemned by an act of Congress. Sher and Eisenberg found themselves getting mail like this:

  WHO THE HECK CAME UP WITH THE IDEA THAT BEING RAPED IS OKAY IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE A LITTLE CHILD? WERE ANY OF YOU VICTUMS [sic] OF SEX ABUSE? BELEIVE [sic] ME YOU WOULD BE CALLING IT ABUSE IF IT HAD HAPPEND [sic] TO YOU. . . . SO BEING SEXUALLY ABUSE [sic] MAY NOT BE A CRIME TO YOU BUT IT IS TO ME. . . . CUT OUT THIS INSANITY AND JUST SAY THAT YOU ARE SORRY AND ARE IN ERROR.

  Sitting at the Missouri bar with me nearly a decade later, Sher seemed to alternate between a cringe and a sardonic smile as he recounted to me the insanity of it all. I mean, how do you even start to explain what the Rind paper actually said when you’re dealing with Dr. Laura’s distorted caricature? And as for DeLay—it’s one thing to use your elected office to show your support for survivors of pedophilic abuse. It’s quite another to condemn any consideration of an unpopular possibility by voting through an act of Congress that pedophilia must be as harmful as the public generally believes, no matter what the studies showed about the reality.

  What seemed to bother Sher most, though, wasn’t the stupidity of Congress. It was the way the American Psychological Association had handled the matter. In spite of being reasonably worried that the controversy might be used to cut federal funding to such institutions as the National Institute of Mental Health, initially the APA had done a good job keeping the politicians at the gate. Despite calls for the editors’ heads, they were not removed by the APA, and the APA kept Sher and Eisenberg apprised of what was going on. One of the senior staff even made a point of calling to acknowledge the stress Sher and Eisenberg had to be experiencing.

  But then, as DeLay increasingly threatened to go after the APA itself, Raymond Fowler, the association’s chief executive officer, caved. He wrote what came to be known as the capitulation letter, assuring Delay that “the article included opinions of the authors that are inconsistent with APA’s stated and deeply held positions on child welfare and protection issues.” Meaning what, exactly? That the APA’s “stated and deeply held positions on child welfare” included that all victims of pedophilia must be profoundly and immutably harmed?

  More problematically, Fowler announced that the APA would arrange for an independent review of the Rind paper, an unprecedented move and a seeming admission that if a paper’s PR was bad enough, the normal scientific review process could be subverted in the service of politics. Sher recalled to me that the APA turned to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to do the review, only to have the AAAS do what the APA should have done: defend the scientific process from political meddling. Irving Lerch, chair of the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, dressed the APA down:

  We see no reason to second-guess the process of peer review used by the APA journal in its decision to publish the article in question. . . . We believe that disputes over methods in science are best resolved, not through the intervention of AAAS or any other “independent” organization, but rather through the process of intellectual discourse among scientists in a professional field.

  Lerch also suggested in his letter that the APA might have done more to correct the public mischaracterizations of the Rind paper, rather than implicitly repeating them through capitulation.

  Many saw Fowler’s letter on behalf of the APA as selling out not only the Rind paper’s authors, editors, and reviewers, but science itself. You have to wonder if Fowler or his staff was ashamed of what he did. Up until this point, the APA had made sure to keep Sher and Eisenberg apprised of what was going on over the Rind paper. But news of Fowler’s capitulation came not directly from the APA, but through an improbably circuitous route: Sher learned of it from Eisenberg, who learned of it from her editorial assistant, who learned of it by hearing Dr. Laura on the radio trumpeting her little victory over the APA.

  This was hard to swallow. So I swallowed a bit more of my drink and remarked to Sher how odd I thought it was that people would be so angry to hear that not every victim of pedophilia had had his or her life utterly ruined. It seemed to me the Rind paper contained a bit of good news for survivors, namely that psychological devastation need not always be a lifelong sequela to having been sexually used as a child by an adult in search of his own gratification. But simpler stories of good and evil sell better.

  Remembering the whole fiasco, Sher recalled to me how the process had been rigged. The Congressional resolution condemned togethe
r both pedophilia and the Rind paper, so as Sher and Eisenberg later noted in a written reflection on the whole mess, “One could not vote in favor of the [Rind] article without voting for pedophilia.” If you wanted to try to distinguish pedophilia and the scientific process, abstaining from voting was the best you could do. Surely DeLay purposely set it up that way.

  I didn’t bother asking Sher if he’d be voting for Obama.

  • • •

  CRAIG PALMER’S OFFICE had the oddest homemade doorbell I’d ever seen, one that reminded me of the Winnie the Pooh story in which Owl accidentally walked off with the donkey Eeyore’s tail and turned it into a bell pull. When Palmer opened his door, I realized what was up. His office consisted of two rooms, an anteroom and an interior office, so that if he happened to be working in the inner room at his desk, he might not hear a person knock at the outer door—hence an elaborate contraption that allowed a visitor to pull on a long string that would ring a little bell hanging within earshot of Palmer’s desk.

  Mike Bailey’s son, Drew, had been particularly keen on my talking to Craig Palmer. Before my trip, Drew had checked several times to make sure I knew about Joan Roughgarden’s review of the book Craig had coauthored with Randy Thornhill, A Natural History of Rape, a book that explored biological explanations for forced sex. Roughgarden was the trans woman scientist at Stanford who had become one of my most vocal critics following my work on the Bailey controversy. Months before I had gone to Columbia, Drew had sent me the “biology of rape” review Roughgarden had published in Ethology, and I assured Drew I remembered it. You don’t easily forget an essay in a scientific journal that calls for authors of a scientific monograph to swing in the wind. (Quoth Roughgarden: “Thornhill and Palmer are guilty of all allegations and they deserve to hang. But before stringing them up, let’s reflect.”) But even Roughgarden’s contempt for these guys would not have made me like them if they had actually said what they’d been accused of saying: that rapists should be excused and forgiven because their genes made them do it and that raped women had been asking for it. Of course, they hadn’t said that.

  What Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer had said was that rape has a sexual component to it—that contrary to the claims of some feminists, rape isn’t merely an expression of unadulterated power. Thornill and Palmer marshaled evidence suggesting that some kinds of sexual coercion in some species, including humans, may increase the likelihood of reproductive success of some males. They also collected evidence showing that human rapists in general tend to be interested in women of childbearing age whom they find sexually attractive. Notably, Thornhill and Palmer took very seriously the harm caused to women by rapists and argued that truly caring for victims of rape meant taking seriously possible biological contributions to sexual coercion. While their work might help to explain rape—and, they hoped, even prevent and prosecute it—they certainly did not excuse, condone, or forgive rape. Contrary to Roughgarden’s assertions, they did not provide “the latest ‘evolution-made-me-do-it’ excuse for criminal behavior.”

  Craig had told me in advance of our meeting that he didn’t much enjoy thinking back to what happened when the book had come out but that he had kept a mess of papers related to the controversy in a filing cabinet. He said that, given Drew’s recommendation of me, I was welcome to go through the collection with him. As we settled in to talk in his office, he told me the story of having been in a class a year or two before, talking about the controversy over his work, and finding that this one grad student named Drew Bailey was thoroughly engaged. Finally he realized that the kid was Michael Bailey’s son—that Bailey.

  I laughed and asked Craig if he was aware that, if you Googled “Thornhill and Palmer,” one of the first hits you got was a page from Lynn Conway’s Web site attacking Thornhill and Palmer and trying to tie them to the Bailey controversy. Craig apologized that he didn’t know what I was talking about. I explained as best I could.

  Although Craig’s office counted as a model of cleanliness and order for an academic suite, the file drawer in which he had collected writings on his own controversy was a total mess. The papers were stacked horizontally in some places, shoved in vertically in other places, some in folders or envelopes but many without. It was obvious that this portion of Craig’s life had been chaotic and that he had literally just put it all away and moved on. Now, as he went through the jumble, trying to create logical stacks for me on his table, he tried to explain what had happened.

  Like Mike Bailey, Craig Palmer and Randy Thornhill weren’t naive, and they weren’t shy. They knew that when they set out to collaborate on their mutual interest and to publish together on the biological bases of sexual coercion that the work would draw attention and also some ire, but they had no idea what they were really in for. The first inkling that something was up came when the two of them went to Boston for a meeting at MIT Press, the outfit publishing their book. Craig and Randy thought that they were going to discuss how the book would be promoted, but when they got there, they were suddenly informed that they had to present a lecture on the work to a group of people the press had assembled. Craig recalled to me, “We walk in, and there were 50 or 60 people in this room.” The authors were understandably bewildered. They’d never heard of such a thing (nor had I). Randy let Craig take the lead, and as Craig recalled, he jotted down a bunch of notes on a legal pad and went from there. Though there was plenty of hostility to the project, Craig and Randy felt the sum-up went pretty well. They were able to handle all the questions, however misdirected, but it was a disturbing situation nonetheless. Craig told me, “It was clear that news of the book had spread around MIT, and the people there were basically protesting the publication of the book.”

  Then in January 2000, Randy and Craig published a summary of their forthcoming book in an article entitled “Why Men Rape” in the Sciences, a magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. All hell started to break loose, and things only got worse when the book came out in April. Craig told me,

  The very first media attention I knew of [came via] a phone message from a friend from high school, saying that Rush Limbaugh was talking about my book on the radio. Obviously not the typical phone message. First I thought, how did Rush Limbaugh hear about our book? Then I wondered what in the world Rush Limbaugh thought of it. Then I wondered what happened to my friend that he was listening to Rush Limbaugh.

  Craig went on:

  It was interesting, because as I thought about it, I thought I could see Rush Limbaugh going either way on it: he could like it because we were challenging the feminist explanation of rape, or he could dislike it because we take an evolutionary approach. But it turned out he was criticizing it because he thought we were trying to excuse Bill Clinton’s behavior.

  Long after Limbaugh lost interest, the heat kept up. One criticism after another came flying at Thornhill and Palmer, in the popular media, in the presses of the intelligentsia, and in the mail. As Craig showed me, the majority of these criticisms attributed to Craig and Randy various ignorant and obnoxious claims that they had never made. For example, in Time magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich suggested that Thornhill and Palmer seriously downplayed the amount of harm done to rape victims, even though the book takes that harm very seriously, even attempting to quantify it and make sense of variations in levels of harm. (Perhaps like Dr. Laura in the Rind case, Ehrenreich just couldn’t wrap her head around anything other than the classic story of sexual assault in which the victim is always irrevocably devastated.) A letter writer to the Los Angeles Times assumed that because Thornhill and Palmer said rape was sexual, they were also labeling it normal. The Nashville Tennessean’s headline called the work a “‘Can’t Help It’ Theory,” while the Manchester Guardian similarly announced “The Men Can’t Help It,” as if Thornhill and Palmer had concluded that men amounted to pathetic slaves to their evolutionary histories. Meanwhile, the Toronto Globe and Mail ran angry letters under the title “Are Men Natural-Born Rapist
s?” as if that was exactly what A Natural History of Rape had concluded, the reality of the book be damned.

  The feminist writer-activist Susan Brownmiller seemed particularly furious, and no wonder. In their work, Randy and Craig directly took issue with Brownmiller’s highly influential opinion that rape is essentially about power and domination, not lust. Thornhill and Palmer acknowledged that the treatment of raped women in courts and in society had greatly improved since the time of Brownmiller’s bold work, and indeed it had. Brownmiller and other feminists had radically changed the public story of rape by reframing it as symptomatic of a pandemic disease—patriarchal misogyny. By talking about how rape is used as a tool of power and intimidation, by steadfastly seeing rape as part of cultural systems that oppress women, Brownmiller and others had changed many harmful and entrenched cultural assumptions about rape. No longer could someone easily get away with blaming a rape victim for what she was wearing; no longer was she the one to be on trial.

  Thornhill and Palmer shared Brownmiller’s desires for an end to rape and for compassion and justice for rape victims, but they argued that Brownmiller’s account of rape as primarily being about power didn’t match the facts. Men seeking power over women could find it in a number of ways, but the choice to rape a woman and especially the ability to sustain an erection during a rape suggested, at the very least, significant sexual arousal. Denial of that reality, Randy and Craig argued, would only lead to more harm to women.