The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Page 60
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: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.57
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.58 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
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.
FIGURE 7–9. Rape prevention and response sticker
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: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.
He uncovered just a handful of exceptions in his worldwide search, and each triggered instant and vehement protest.59
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).60 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.)61 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.62 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.)
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.
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.
FIGURE 7–10. Rape and homicide rates in the United States, 1973–2008
Source: Data from FBI Uniform Crime Reports and National Crime Victimization Survey; U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009.
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.
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 pu
blic safety a right, and spur the recivilizing process of the 1990s.
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.
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.”63 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.
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.
FIGURE 7–11. Attitudes toward women in the United States, 1970–1995
Source: Graph from Twenge, 1997.
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.
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.”64 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.
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.65 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.
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.”66 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.”67 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.68 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.69 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.
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.”)70 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.”
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.