What causes rape? How can we change our culture so that it happens less often, or not at all? I’d like to give my opinions on this – at, perhaps, some risk of pissing some folks off.
Alas readers who know me know that I’m a font of statistical evidence about rape; there was a year or so in which I didn’t read about much other than quantitative research about rape. But of the hundreds of stats about rape I’ve read, the most essential one is the most obvious: the overwhelming majority of rapists are male. If we want to discover how to reduce rape, we have to be willing to figure out what the hell is wrong with men, and how to change it.
(Okay, ass-covering time: when I say “what the hell is wrong with men,” I do mean all men in our culture – even men as “enlightened” as the more feminist men on this board. But I don’t mean that all men rape, or even that all men are potential rapists. Rather, I’d say the things in our culture which screw up men so much that rape becomes a widespread problem affect all men to some degree – even those who never rape.)
Unfortunately, I think feminism – and especially radical feminism – has been limited in increasing our understanding of rape, because feminism is (generally) focused on women, whereas rape is mostly about men. You will never find the cause or cure for rape by examining women, because rapists are overwhelmingly male.
So what does cause rape? Or, put another way, if we can agree that we live in a “rape culture” (defined as “a culture in which rape is prevalent and is maintained through fundamental attitudes and beliefs about gender, sexuality, and violence”), then what are those fundamental attitudes about gender, sexuality, and violence?
I’d identify three interrelated candidates: the myth of masculinity, cultural disdain for women, and our society’s conception of sexuality as something possessed exclusively by women. If we want “24 hours in which there is no rape,” then we have to destroy these three warped cultural ideas.
1) The Myth of Fragile Masculinity.
From early boyhood, men are taught that their masculinity must be protected above all else, or else it will be lost. Men who have lost their masculinity are objects of contempt, derision and violent abuse, and have lost the right to be loved or respected by their fellow men and by their fathers.
Boys are also taught that masculinity is fragile and high-maintenance; you work to get it and to retain it, and the slightest slip can cause it to be altogether lost. You can slip instantly, with no transition, from the most popular boy in the room to the butt of everyone’s jokes: all it takes is a moment’s lapse in which you say or do anything that can be interpreted as feminine.
This is essential: Masculinity is fragile. The man who has lost his masculinity is, in the eyes of male culture, less than nothing, worse than dead. Therefore, force in defense of masculinity – like beating up a boy who accuses you of being a faggot – can feel to boys and men like a form of self-defense.
Masculinity is defined by what it is not. Being masculine means avoiding the feminine. Being feminine, even for an instant, means risking loss of masculinity. Empathy, in our culture’s warped conception, is feminine; thinking about other people’s emotions is feminine. Boys are taught to avoid empathy.
Masculinity is also defined by power-over. The man who is overpowered by others is less then a man; the man who has power over others is a man among men. Remember, masculinity is fragile: if you don’t have power-over, you’re in danger of losing your manhood.
Once boys become teens, masculinity is additionally defined by the absolutely crucial task of getting laid. Once again, masculinity is fragile: he who isn’t getting any ain’t a man.
So there are a myriad of ways in which boys and men can lose the status of “being a man.” But at the same time, boys and men feel absolutely entitled to becoming men.
Masculinity comes wrapped around a sense of entitlement. Men don’t feel grateful when the women in their life (mothers, wives, maids) prepare meals, make beds, or whatever: in our society’s warped view, the women are just doing what they’re supposed to, and men are just getting what they’re entitled to. (Statistically, it’s interesting that virtually everyone in our culture who decides to blow up a building or machine-gun a crowd is white and male. The main reason for this, I believe, is that white men feel so entitled to high status in society, some of them take revenge if they don’t their rightful entitlement.)
There is one bit of good news – for most men, issues about masculinity are more extreme in the first thirty years of men’s lives then thereafter. For someone still in school – be it the 6th grade or a college frat house – the social enforcement mechanisms for not maintaining masculinity can be extreme. Those who can’t “be men” are social pariahs, are taught to be ashamed, and are not-uncommonly the subjects of beatings. But that’s not as true in most adult environments (although it’s true in some adult environments, like prison). Perhaps once we’ve been away from those sorts of environments for five or ten years, most of us begin to feel that our masculinity isn’t so threatened, after all.
Statistically, environments which tend to have the most rape – middle and high school, frat houses, prisons – are also the environments which most emphasize masculinity, and where boys and men have the most reason to fear losing masculinity. If we could change the culture of such environments, we’d go a long way towards reducing rape.
2) Low regard for women.
The fact is, women aren’t respected as equals, by and large. To some degree this is a self-perpetuating cycle: why aren’t women in more of public life’s highest-respected positions (Presidents, CEOs, Senators, movie stars, cartoonists :) , etc)? Because women aren’t seen as capable of holding society’s highest positions. Why aren’t women seen as being as capable? Well, just look around: there are almost no women are doing those things.
Women’s lower pay – and lower status generally in most of the overtly powerful and materially rewarding aspects of our culture – is both a cause of and a result of the low regard in which our culture holds women. That the huge amount of unpaid caretaking work our society requires to get by is overwhelmingly done by women, and accorded almost no respect (“stay at home moms just sit around watching TV all day, right?”), is both a cause of and a result of the low regard in which our culture holds women.
Women get paid less. Women get promoted less. Women get out of the house less. The work women do is worth less. In our society, women are less. This must change if rape is to be eliminated.
Remember how masculinity encourages lack of empathy? Well, low regard for women also encourages lack of empathy. Social scientists have shown that people (regardless of sex) are less empathic towards those who are below them in the social hierarchy. Bosses are less empathic towards secretaries than vice-versa; owners less empathic towards slaves than vice-versa; men less empathic towards women than vice-versa.
Why do men rape women? It’s not because they hate women, by and large. Do hunters hunt because they hate animals? No, they hunt because hunting is fun, because they like the meat, and maybe because hunting is a way of male-bonding, They don’t hate the animal; they just consider empathy for the animal’s feelings irrelevant, less important than their desire for meat or fun. (I’m ignoring the ecological arguments for hunting for the sake of the analogy).
Men who rape women don’t do it because they hate women, but because they don’t give a fuck about women (at least, not the women they rape). They want something, they take it, and they’re by-and-large indifferent to how the person they “take” it from feels.
This is why the “rape isn’t about sex, rape is about violence” analysis falls short. It’s not true – not from the point of view of many rapists – and it denies the true horror of the situation. Many rapists don’t rape because they hate and want to hurt women; it’s not that personal. Rapists rape because they want sex; they don’t consider the woman’s feelings at all, because a woman’s feelings aren’t worth considering. They’re just women, after all.
Which brings me to my third point….
3) Sexuality is something possessed by women, which is given to (or taken by) men.
That’s our society’s view of it. Look at the magazines on the racks – it’s pretty obvious why men’s magazines, wanting to sell copies with a sexy cover, usually use photos of mostly-undressed women. But why do women’s magazines do the exact same thing? Because to do a sexy magazine cover, you generally have to show a photo of a woman. Sexuality equals women in our culture; it is something possessed by women, not by men.
That’s also why women are taught to wait to be asked for a dance (or for a date), while men are taught to do the asking. Women have it; men ask for it. That’s why porn-like images of women are so common they’re impossible to avoid, while porn-like images of men are (outside gay male culture) relatively infrequent. Women have sex; to show a picture of sex, show a porn-like image of a woman.
Why do men rape, while women virtually never rape? Because sexuality is something possessed by women, in our society’s warped view. In our society, women don’t rape for the same reason rich people don’t mug.
This connects to the first point, too – the fragility of masculinity. Men who have lost their masculinity are, in our culture’s view, less than men, less even than women. They are the lowest of the low. One way to lose your masculinity is to be unable to “get” sex from a woman. This also breeds resentment of women (in much the same way that poverty can sometimes breed resentment of rich people): “how dare women not give something to me that I need so desperately? How dare women withhold from me the masculinity that I’m entitled to?”
If there’s nothing worse to a man than losing that fragile masculinity, and if one way of retaining masculinity is to use masculinity’s power-over to take sex from the owners, and if the owners are only women, anyway, rather than being anything important – then rape is frequently the result.
Hell, looking at how twisted and sick our culture is, sometimes I’m surprised rape doesn’t happen even more often.
* * *
Obviously, I’m not saying that this is right. It’s sick, warped, and twisted. But that is the truth about our sick, warped, and twisted society, in my opinion. People talk about a “rape culture.” I’d argue that these three things – Masculinity, Low Regard for Women, and Sex is Owned by Women – are the three main ingredients of that rape culture. And if we want to create a world without rape, finding ways to change those three things is where we should start..
Great read!
Just a quick comment.
You mention gay men in reference to pornography, but you don’t account for the amount of rape that occurs in the gay community by men. I don’t think it discounts much of what you are saying. I’m just curious if you have an idea of how to account for it; especially since you downplay the ‘rape as violence’ assumption.
I’d say that it fits reasonably well into the same paradigm, with some alterations. Gay men are still raised in our culture — while they are more likely to question masculinity, they have still been raised with the same expectation that masculinity is (a) an entitlement (b) fragile and (c) something that they maintain by getting sex from someone else. A gay man becomes more ‘masculine’ by getting laid, despite the fact that he is having sex with other men; the incentive to rape in order to maintain his masculinity is the same.
There are obvious differences between the hetero and homosexual situations with respect to rape; none of the arguments about sex as something possessed by women who are perceived as lesser beings are relevant. Still, the masculinity mechanism Ampersand describes works for both situations.
Excellent post.
What do we do about women who think that abusive behavior toward them is a sign of love? I know women who seem to think this, and it kills me to try to convince them that they deserve better, because they don’t believe me. Hell, at one point I thought that violence in a relationship, toward me, was normal. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how I realized that that attitude was sick, because I don’t know.
So, I guess I would say that eliminating all the problems you talk about above would only solve half the problem. Most of the women I know don’t really believe, deep down, that they deserve better than the assholes they get. How do we change that?
Obviously, I’m not saying that this is right. It’s sick, warped, and twisted. But that is the truth about our sick, warped, and twisted society, in my opinion.
Ah, a leftist who admits he hates America.
What a refreshing change of pace!
Well done, Amp.
we have one thing going for us, i guess. Our courts won’t throw out a rape case if two men didn’t witness it. How twisted of us. And sick, for that matter.
This is why the “rape isn’t about sex, rape is about violence” analysis falls short. It’s not true – not from the point of view of many rapists – and it denies the true horror of the situation. Many rapists don’t rape because they hate and want to hurt women; it’s not that personal. Rapists rape because they want sex; they don’t consider the woman’s feelings at all, because a woman’s feelings aren’t worth considering. They’re just women, after all.
I don’t disagree with this, but I’d add that the act, specifically, of overpowering somebody to get this thing that they want (as opposed to having it genuinely offered) is part of what is desired, specifically because it feeds into part I of your argument. In other words, they take the sex that they want, but they also help prop up their fragile masculinity by the show of both virility and specifically of power/strength. It may not help with the boss/frat brother (although it may, in fact, with the latter), but it helps with the self-image of self as strong and manly…
(How can we undermine the idea that taking advantage of weakness is anything but manly, anything but admirable? Is it too simplistic to think that diffusion of bullies in the schoolyard is a place to start?)
Anon inadvertently raises an interesting question: what does that “our . . . society” comprise? Can’t much of amp’s analysis can be applied to Japan, the UK, Mexico, &c.? Where can we go to see a non-rape culture?
Hey Anon,
What a useful and enlightening comment you made on a such a serious issue. Forget that Amp is talking about a real issue that affects real people…all you hear is that he hates America (and by the way, he didn’t even MENTION the US – and this applies just as well in Canada and in fact in most of the world.)
Did you even have a point??
Amp, you rock. That was brilliant. And you know, I agree with your contention that rape isn’t so much about violence and hatred as it is about entitlement and dehumanization–esp. WRT date rape/aquaintence rape. I want it, I will get it, and who gives a fuck what you want?
Anon–maybe he meant human society. Or maybe he was talking about American society because that’s what he knows best. No need to fly off the handle and have convulsions just because someone isn’t singing God Bless America.
Pril, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to criticize a society that shows the misogyny that ours does. We might not have the same type of draconian laws that other nations do; Amp wasn’t discussing that. He was discussing attitudes, which are still pretty backwards in regards to women. And yes, when it’s popular to use the word “bitch” as a synonym for a woman, and using woman as an insult, that’s sick and twisted.
(Somewhat OT, rape in Japan isn’t reported all that often because the plaintiffs get dragged through the mud worse than here before the rape shield laws.)
Amp-
They don’t hate the animal; they just consider empathy for the animal’s feelings irrelevant, less important than their desire for meat or fun.
Do you have research on rapists’ attitudes toward women to support this? I have always been under the impression that most rapists actually enjoy the emotional pain and fear of their victims. And since such emotions can be experienced by both male and female victims, it would seem to be a better explanation of why both men and women get raped than your “women are worthless” theory. Also, it shows the critical psychological difference between men who rape and men who don’t. In short, it’s not that rapists hate women, it’s that they hate people.
One other thing. Your theory seems to presuppose that only men whose masculinity is threatened rape. How to explain men who have willing sexual partners who then also rape? To use your analogy, how to explain the rich person who embezzles or commits tax fraud?
Do you have research on rapists’ attitudes toward women to support this? I have always been under the impression that most rapists actually enjoy the emotional pain and fear of their victims.
I completely disagree. I have (unfortunately) met a number of people who have been on both sides of the rapist/rape-ee scenario. Hell, I’ve through it personally, and the “rapist” couldn’t understand why I was so upset. He didn’t hate me… he was convinced that he loved me, actually. He didn’t understand why his actions caused me pain, and could never really grasp that *his* actions *hurt* me. He simply didn’t seem to be capable of that cognitive leap.
As for the pain and fear comment… at the actual time of “the incedent” I don’t think I was in pain or in fear… I was in shock, confused, at war with myself over what to do, how to get out from under… it wasn’t until afterwards that it really sunk in, how it made me feel, and that waking up in the middle of it (literally, and I wasn’t drunk or drugged or in a strange hotel room with a man I didn’t know, thankyouverymuch) did NOT consitute consent.
That last part took months to realize, by which point things had disintigrated. Because after that first time, there was his sense of entitlement and the ever present “well I just couldn’t help myself!” excuse, despite my frequent, tearful pleas to not start again. I had been trained to be powerless, and it took a long time to shake those chains. And here we see how my socialization as a woman comes into play.
Not very many people HATE other people. They don’t understand how what they do can affect someone else. Maybe this is an emotional immaturity thing, like a 2 year old not understanding that “When I hit my friend in the head with a dump truck, it hurts them”, but at a much more insiduous level.
So yes, amp’s theory is something I’ve seen echoed in my own experience, and in others I have known since. However, I’m not a researcher, so my experience is limited and my opinion just as prone to error as anyone elses.
Great analysis.
Well thought out, Amp.
This is EXCELLENT.
Hey Barry,
Lots of food for thought here. One thing that always makes me a little anxious about this kind of analysis is that overemphasis on the culture might seem to diminish the reponsibility of the individual rapist. Clearly, you’re not trying to do that, so I was curious as to how you understand the individual’s agency in this context? Perhaps part of it would most obviously come from the fact that men do not receive one clear culture message. They also are told that rape is terribly wrong. Would you say that individual agency and responsibility come in deciding what message one is going to listen do?
Also, I think there are many myths of masculinity in our culture, not just on the one you describe. The one you describe is certainly very pervasive and pernicious, but there are others. Conservative Christians are big on gender roles, but they don’t see masculinity in the same way frat boys do. For example, conservative Christians aren’t so big on sex as a way of proving one’s masculinity, particularly when it takes place outside of marriage. So when you say “environments which tend to have the most rape…are also the environments which most emphasize masculinity” it seems to me that those are environments which emphasize one particular dangerous masculinity. Does this make sense/seem legitimate? If it does, do you have any thoughts about how different masculinities in our culture interact?
Thanks for the thoughtful and thought-provoking post.
Mithras wrote:
“One other thing. Your theory seems to presuppose that only men whose masculinity is threatened rape. How to explain men who have willing sexual partners who then also rape? To use your analogy, how to explain the rich person who embezzles or commits tax fraud?”
That was the question in my mind, too.
Once again, Amp, profound and thought-provoking. Bravo!
It seems to me that hate requires something of an emotional attachment, either to an idea (ie, “I hate people who are rich because they have money and I don’t” to use an example) or a person. I still think the reasons behind rape are multiple and somewhat individual. To me, from personal experience and the experience of my friends, there is DEFINITELY that sense of entitlement and a stunning inability to understand WHY it was hurtful. The fact that that seems so prevalent leads me to think that there is an underlying social component there- perhaps tied to the insiduous and “unspoken but practiced” idea that women are less than men.
But how to explain men with partners who rape, indeed? Is it an even more egotistical sense of entitlement? Or is it a desire for control beyond the control exerted in the every day?
Rape has existed for millenia. I do agree with Amp that attitudes should change, MUST change, if we are to reduce sexual assaults. But I also think there will remain a segment of society that no matter how much we enlighten and educate, will still rape. Somehow, it seems inextricably woven into the human fabric to cause pain to others.
Men who rape do so out of a feeling of entitlement. Some serial rapists–the ones who commit stranger rape–may be total sociopaths, and they may feel like real men when they dominate women. These guys probably do get off on the pain and fear of their victims; others like the idea of being domineering. Some of these guys may also force their so-called willing partners into sex. Some men who have committed acquaintence rape may have done the same thing to their partners, who have willingly had sex with them before.
Wookie, you’re right on. I know plenty of women who were assaulted by their boyfriends/husbands, and said boyfriends/husbands didn’t understand what the big deal was. So *what* if you were passed out or asleep? So what if you said it hurt and told me to stop? So what if you were crying in pain? The reaction wasn’t joy at the woman’s fear (often, they didn’t feel fear, more helpless and angry). They were irritated if she said *anything* and/or bewildered that it was even an issue. What they wanted, they took, because they saw it as their “right”. It’s entitlement.
Also, Mithras, a man with willing sexual partners can still feel as if his masculinity is threatened. Especially if the measure of masculinity is determined by how many sex partners a man has, or how often he has sex. And, I would wager that if he rapes, he may have raped some of those supposedly “willing sex partners.”
I’m not Amp, but I’ll posit an explanation for why men with partners still rape. Actually, I have two explanations that I don’t think are contradictory…
My experience has been that the social pressure for men to have sex is geared toward not merely having sex but toward having sex with multiple partners. The man who has sex with the same woman every night for a week is, according to some, much less manly than the man who has sex with a new woman every night for a week. Men in monogamous relationships are considered “pussy-whipped,” or tied down to one woman and her genitals (that’s an odd image), thus unable to go out and “pick up chicks.” Popular cultural images bear this out. To take just one example, James Bond is not studly because he only has sex with one woman.
By this explanation, the rapist who has a willing partner could still feel his masculinity threatened by virtue of his being “tied down” to a single partner.
My other explanation is that Amp’s paradigm doesn’t explain, or, I believe, seek to explain, all rapists, just most rapists. As such, there are some rapists who get off on the fear/powerlessness of their victims, some who get off on the violent aspects of rape, and so some who rape for reasons other than their masculinity feeling threatened by not being able to have sex. I would posit that these people are most likely to commit stranger rape, while those persons who fall into Amp’s paradigm are most likely to commit acquaintance rape, which is the most common form of rape.
And neko beats me to it… Damn my slow fingers.
I agree with many of your points so I will only comment on a minor disagreement of your first point about the “myth of masculinity”.
* “From early boyhood, men are taught that their masculinity must be protected above all else, or else it will be lost. Men who have lost their masculinity are objects of contempt, derision and violent abuse, and have lost the right to be loved or respected by their fellow men and by their fathers.”
I think you have it mostly backwards. I don’t think we are taught masculinity; I think it is mostly genetic predisposition. And I think it is perfectly natural in a primitive way: Rivals are beaten into submission, or driven out of the tribe. Brute force wins the day. The strongest leads, and gets the mate. That worked great for a long time and still works for lions, and many other mammals. The problem is that we are not the primitives without language scraping for survival and living in caves anymore and our genetic code hasn’t caught up.
But we are not slaves to our genetic dispositions of personality. The culture at large and especially parents that are supposed to civilize their children. So instead of teaching us masculinity, as you believe, I believe we are naturally predisposed to it and should be taught strict limits and productive ways to channel the natural aggression and competitiveness. Such as sports, work, or maybe even the chess club, and such. I think the reason we have so many problems these days is that we don’t civilize our children enough anymore.
Back when my dad was a kid, it was common for boys to take their guns to school so they could go hunting after. There were still plenty of fist fights, but other behavioral limits just were not crossed. Random school shootings were unthinkable. Small anecdote, I know. But I believe something has happened to our culture in the last 30-40 years that has made people less civilized in many ways than previous generations. I think our mass culture of permissiveness and hedonism wars directly against the positive influences, if any, of the family. “If it feels good do it” becomes “if I want it I will take it”. Maybe the breakup of the American family has something to do with it, or that may be a coincidence, or even a symptom of something larger.
Also regarding the “myth of masculinity”, I think many stereotypes of masculinity are reinforced by women. I believe many women are attracted to “the bad boy”, “the winner”, “the leader”, “the quarterback” (who is both the winner and the leader), etc. All of those archetypes are part of masculinity. As most guys will tell you, when it comes to getting dates, nice guys really do finish last. Maybe its another genetic disposition? Who knows?
Amp,
I think your analysis has a large amount of validity and I hope it helps to open people’s minds.
I do have some points of discussion/disagreement for you:
1) blaming society may lead rapists to say that they are not at fault for raping women – they are “just” doing what we “program” them to do.
2) I understand what you are saying about the possiblity of rape being connected to sex. However, I think that the point of the theorists who say that it isn’t about sex but about violence and power fits into your theme – they have the power to take what they want and since sex is what they want they just take it without consequences.
3) Men need to be held more accountable for rape and its long-term psychological and psyco-social consequences.
4) My largest point of disagreement is when it come to the “specialized” form of rape which is incest. I do NOT believe that a man who moletests his two-year-old daughter (a common age for father-daughter incest to begin) is doing it for sexual pleasure. The sick bastard is doing it because he can.
I look forward to your response.
Also regarding the “myth of masculinity”, I think many stereotypes of masculinity are reinforced by women. I believe many women are attracted to “the bad boy”, “the winner”, “the leader”, “the quarterback” (who is both the winner and the leader), etc. All of those archetypes are part of masculinity. As most guys will tell you, when it comes to getting dates, nice guys really do finish last. Maybe its another genetic disposition? Who knows?
At this point I feel I must point you towards http://www.heartless-bitches.com and to their “nice guy” section.
Women don’t want “nice guys” (many nice guys are rapists). Women want a man who is kind. Big difference.
And Leah, it’s been said in a couple of spots that Amp doesn’t seem to be “going for all” rapists, but aquaintence rapists, which are the most common kind.
I believe incest falls under the sociopath box… although I’m sure if that specific subset of rape were to be dissected, you’d find the sense of entitlement and the disbelief that their actions (raping their 2 year od) could hurt that child. I don’t think being a sociopath excludes the last sentence from being true, but I think there is a word that is more accurate than sociopath.
Great post, Amp. I sent a link to my husband, who likes to call himself a feminist, but he really isn’t. Are you aware of the 1996 book, _Transforming a Rape Culture_? It contains 34 essays on this topic by various writers. Here’s the blurb from Amazon:
“The contributors to this invaluable sourcebook share the conviction that rape is epidemic because our society encourages male aggression and tacitly or overtly supports violence against women. Cumulatively, these 34 essays by such figures as Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Ntozake Shange, Michael Kimmel and Louise Erdrich situate rape on a continuum extending from sexist language to pornography, sexual harassment in schools and the workplace, wife battering and date and marital rape. Most of the selections were written for this volume. Highlights include a proposal to make rape a presidential election issue, an analysis of the churches’ ambivalent response to societal violence, guidelines for raising boys to view themselves as nurturing, nonviolent fathers and inspirational visions of personal or institutional change. Buchwald is publisher/editor of Milkweed, Fletcher an English professor at North Hennepin Community College in Minnesota and Roth edits the feminist quarterly, Hurricane Alice.”
I own the book, and it rocked my world when I read it. I am a rape/incest survivor, and he’s still denying he hurt me, 18 years later.
Your blog is on my daily must-read list. Keep up the good work!
**”Women don’t want “nice guys” (many nice guys are rapists).”
Hmm, I think we are talking about two different things. I am using “nice guy” as the antithesis of the “the bad boy.” A rapist might use the cover of a “nice guy” to get close to someone. But by definition, a nice guy would never rape a women.
Larry, I’m not going to argue the biological determinism of masculinity/femininity, however, even if we accept that masculine traits are determined by biology, then the concept of losing masculinity is such a logically absurd concept it can only be due to societal influence.
Leah, you mention that rapists should be held accountable, and you are absolutely right. But rapists are too often not held accountable, and it is for the same reasons that rape exists in the first place, so if we change the aspects of society that foster rape, then it would follow that those who still rape will be held more accountable for their crimes.
Amp, it seems to me that sections 2 and 3 are redundant in that they are sort of extensions of society’s view of masculinity. I’m saying this from a pragmatic angle. If we want to eliminate the rape culture, it seems sufficient to remove society’s myths regarding masculinity.
Anyway, this was a quickly written and to the point post. I’ll see if I can get a more elegant response after I’ve eaten something.
“Also regarding the “myth of masculinity”, I think many stereotypes of masculinity are reinforced by women. I believe many women are attracted to ‘the bad boy’, ‘the winner’, ‘the leader’, ‘the quarterback’ (who is both the winner and the leader), etc. All of those archetypes are part of masculinity. As most guys will tell you, when it comes to getting dates, nice guys really do finish last. Maybe its another genetic disposition? Who knows?”
Look, I’m probably going to go off here, but I’ve been hearing this a lot from the guys I know, and I’ve about had it.
A leader or a quarterback could be very considerate and kind. And I dated plenty of “bad boys” who treated me like a queen, and had no compunction about stopping anything sexual if I didn’t feel comfortable. They were bad boys to everyone else, they were great boyfriends to me. I dated someone who was known for being nice. I soon realized that he was only nice in public. He was anything but nice in private–the guy was a total closet misogynist. By the time we officially split, I was scared of him.
Thing is, a lot of these self-proclaimed “nice guys” are their own worst enemies. They won’t give anyone who’s not skinny with a supermodel’s looks a chance–the rather plain woman who’s really nice? Forget it! The woman who’s slightly over/underweight? No way. The woman who’s actually interested in them? Run for the hills! A woman who’s their age? Uh-uh.
They go for unattainable women (either way too young for them, seeing someone else, lesbian, or recently broken up and not into the dating scene). They will date women who routinely treat them like garbage, and then complain that women don’t appreciate nice guys (well, duh, not the ones they’re dating).
They will do something nice for a woman they are interested in, and then get huffy when she won’t go out with them–apparently, she’s obligated. (And that’s not nice.) A friend of mine complained that he couldn’t figure women out, since the woman he liked wasn’t interested in dating him. (She’d been involved with someone else when he started paying her some attention. She wasn’t eager to see anyone right away after the breakup. Go figure). But he wasn’t the only person to get rejected, I get exasperated when someone uses their disappointment in love as an excuse to blame an entire group of people.
Who the heck calls themselves nice, anyway? Isn’t that kind of a default? Shesh, there’s no challenge in being *nice*. I hope my boyfriend isn’t seeing me just because I’m *nice* since plenty of people out there are nice, and it would be easy for him to get attracted to someone else. I hope he’s seeing me because he thinks I’m smart, interesting, funny, inquisitive, and a whole bunch of other things. If niceness was was the only reason why I’d go out with him, *he’d* have an awful lot of competition. I like him because he’s smart, well-traveled, interesting, compassionate, interested in the world around him, and all that good stuff. He’s fun to be with. And yeah, he’s nice, but again, who isn’t?
I’ve never felt like I owed him for what he does for me (something many self-proclaimed “nice guys” have done–I got you a birthday present! You HAVE to date me! Or you don’t like nice guys!!!).
Look, I don’t mean to dismiss people’s angst, but rejection happens all the time. There is no magic combination to make someone want you. If I had a dime for every time someone didn’t return my feelings, I could retire in a Swiss chalet. That’s life–not everyone is going to be interested. It ain’t the end of the world.
Larry, I’m not going to argue the biological determinism of masculinity/femininity, however, even if we accept that masculine traits are determined by biology, then the concept of losing masculinity is such a logically absurd concept it can only be due to societal influence.
If you are saying what I think you are saying, I agree. As I said, we are not slaves to our genetic dispositions of personality. If I have a predisposition of having a bad temper for instance, then through proper discipline and influences from the parents and culture I can learn to control it.
A couple of notes on the comments thus far (which have been pretty darned good:
Larry wrote: “But I believe something has happened to our culture in the last 30-40 years that has made people less civilized in many ways than previous generations. I think our mass culture of permissiveness and hedonism….”
While I’m sorta with you on a lot of your comment, this quote could be lifted almost word for word from any time within the last 500 years (at least). You may want to check some of the other recent comment threads for this statement quoted from works over the last 2 centuries.
I’m w/ Raznor on the comments about biological determinism – although Larry was talking more about genetic predisposition than determinism (I think).
Larry is also correct, to a certain extent, about the attraction to “bad boys” (vs. “nice guys”). There is no doubt that there are women who are self-destructive. But that doesn’t really explain the causes of rape. I think a better example would be the encouragement of the “myths of masculinity” by women. Which I don’t think attraction to “bad boys” is.
I also think, like somebody before me said, that rape will always be around. We can certainly do things to reduce it to a minimum though. I also think that part of why there are so many more men than women who commit rape is the physical aspects of the act. It’s much easier to stick something into an unwilling place than to get something unwilling to be stuck into a place. (Sometimes I amaze myself w/ my eloquence ;))
And lastly, I agree w/ everybody who has said that sex w/ multiple women is regarded as more masculine than sex w/ one woman.
“One other thing. Your theory seems to presuppose that only men whose masculinity is threatened rape. How to explain men who have willing sexual partners who then also rape? To use your analogy, how to explain the rich person who embezzles or commits tax fraud?”
That was the question in my mind, too.”
Well, it seems to me that there is more than one reason for committing rape. For some it may be a power thing, for some it may be sexual frustration, for some (date rapists come to mind) it may be an inability to recognize other’s pain. The reasons may very well all stem form culture, as Amp suggests, but that doesn’t mean that the individuals involved all have the same reasons for doing what they do.
Example form personal expirience:
I did drugs when I was young, and hung out with others who did drugs. Some of them did it for the kicks, some of them did it to escape the world. Same end result, unfortunately, but different paths getting there, starting form different places that were nonetheless at least partlly functions of our culture.
I don’t see why rape would have a radically different structure.
Mithras: “Your theory seems to presuppose that only men whose masculinity is threatened rape. How to explain men who have willing sexual partners who then also rape? To use your analogy, how to explain the rich person who embezzles or commits tax fraud?”
I would throw that under the entitlement issue – if you have privilege and like that privilege, one wants to be more priviliged. Just a guess.
Also, while I disagree with some of Larry’s statement, I must say that I agree that hedonistic aspects of our culture add to and perpetuate entitlement to sex.
And last post before I go, regarding the term “nice.”
In Old English, nice meant several interesting things:
Of a person: foolish, silly, simple; ignorant; Of an action, utterance, etc.: displaying foolishness or silliness; absurd, senseless; Of conduct, behaviour, etc.: characterized by or encouraging wantonness or lasciviousness; Of dress: extravagant, showy, ostentatious; Fastidious, fussy, difficult to please, esp. with regard to food or cleanliness; of refined or dainty tastes.
This probably explains why the word nice is also used in close proximity to the word but, as in “He’s really nice, but…”
I dated a lot of “nice” guys too. And in general, they suck.
I think Kevin may have touched on something when he mentioned the inability to recognize others pain let me explain…
There may be two types of rape. intentional and unintentional
The first, I belive, is the result of culture, Violence and control.
the second is the result of an unfortunate mix of testerone and alcohol/drugs. Not all but, many Date Rapes fall into this category I believe.
I am not excusing the behavior of the rapist any more than I would excuse the drunk driver who killed some one.
But I think women should beware that the guy that seems so polite and caring when sober. may not recognize your pain at his actions when sufficiently drunk and arroused.
of cousre we are a “culture of drugs and alcohol” too.
Women “possess” sex! What a fascinating idea! Yes, I can see how men might feel that way.
Still, I think at least some of the women — is it 40%? some appalling number — who describe themselves as sexually dissatisfied would be interested to know where, exactly, it is.
Wow! A lot of comments. My apologies to everyone I can’t respond to individually. I read all the comments, and some of the ones I thought the most about I didn’t reply to at this time.
Yvelle, as LizardBreath wrote, I think that there are similar motivations for rape between gay rapists and straight rapists; gay men aren’t immune to receiving warped messages about masculinity. Obviously, the stuff about contempt for women doesn’t apply directly. (I wonder if gay rapists of men might have issues with internalized homophobia – but that’s just an idle speculation, and I might not be willing to stand behind it once I’ve thought through it more).
Corwin, I agree that there are women with self-esteem issues in the world. Nonetheless, I don’t think that’s a major cause of rape, much less “half the problem.” Rapists are male; to understand why rape happens, I think we need to concentrate on understanding men.
Anon, you’re reading the wrong post. Go read my post on patriotism, which is much more directly about my not feeling any special adoration for the USA.
The people who responded to Anon were all correct in saying that I’m a bit vauge as to where the bounderies of “our culture” are. I’m pretty sure things are pretty much the same in Austrailia and England and probably Canada; I’m not sure if things are really any different anywhere in the Western world. I’m too ignorant to suggest an opinion for beyond the Western World, however.
I know I live in this culture; I don’t know where its boundaries are. It’s like asking a fish to draw a map of the Atlantic Ocean.
Pril, I think we have a lot going for us. Obviously, things are a lot better here than they are in Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless, as Neko said, I still see a lot wrong that should be improved.
Mr. Ripley, I’m not sure if any non-rape cultures exist. However, 300 years ago no true democracies (i.e., ones with universal suffrage) existed; that something has never existed isn’t proof that they can never exist. (I’m not saying you necessarily disagree with me about this).
Mithras, I don’t have supporting research on that, just a lifetime of experience talking to men and being male in our culture, plus a lot of anecdotal evidence (such as wookie’s story).
However, I’m not the first to have suggested this view – at least one legal scholar of rape has made much the same argument in a journal article that influenced my thinking. Unfortunately, I don’t have my files handy now (they’re mostly in boxes – I still haven’t unpacked completely, sad to say), but if you want remind me and I’ll find you the citation info.
I’d also point out that research on rapists is usually on convicted rapists – a disproportionate number of whom are stranger rapists. I’m therefore not sure that the research is really representative of acquaintence and date rapists.
Mithras also wrote: One other thing. Your theory seems to presuppose that only men whose masculinity is threatened rape. How to explain men who have willing sexual partners who then also rape? To use your analogy, how to explain the rich person who embezzles or commits tax fraud?
Yet rich people embezzle and commit tax fraud pretty often. I’d say the drive to have more and more money – or to “prove” masculinity over and over again – isn’t a rational drive. Poor people aren’t necessarily more money-driven than Donald Trump, and the dateless geek isn’t necessarily more masculinity-driven than the captain of the football squad.
In fact, those who have the most outward markers of “masculinity” are sometimes the ones who are most driven to prove it, over and over. (To some degree, that may be why they have so many markers of masculinity).
A lot also has to do with one’s peer group, I think. Someone in a geeky peer group may be able to “show masculinity” to his wimpy peers just by collecting soft-porn images of women (Boris paintings, comic books featuring women with breasts larger than their heads, etc) and saying sexist things. In contrast, someone who is in a group that competes to see how many girls they can score with may feel that his masculinity is threatened if he has had sex with only one or two girls and his peers have five or six.
Neko and PinkDreamPoppies also addressed this question very well, I thought.
Wookie, thanks so much for sharing your story here.
Sara and also Leah (responding to her first question), I think it’s possible – even necessary – to have enough complexity of thought to simultaniously admit that our culture molds us and influences our actions, and a the same time to realize that we’re individually accountable for our actions.
(By the way, I think a lot of rapists resolve the “rape is wrong” problem by convincing themselves that what they did wasn’t rape).
The large majority of men go through life without ever committing rape. Yes, we’re all screwed up by society – but it’s up to us as individuals what we do with that. Someone who rapes is – well, I was going to say “an asshole,” but that’s not nearly strong enough. They’re goddamned rapist scum, and they chose that themselves at some level, and I think we all agree that they should be held responsible as individuals for their crime.
That said, I do think it’s probable that if we changed society, and in particular changed the way we raise boys into men, we’d have fewer men making the choice to rape.
As for different forms of masculinity, I’m not sure I agree with you or disagree with you. What you write makes sense, but then again, I’ve known women who have escaped conservative Christian communities with horror stories. Not having ever been a Christian Conservative myself, it’s hard for me to tell how much of the piousness is real and commonplace and how much is hypocripsy. (And don’t even get me started on the Mormons!)
I certainly do agree that there are multiple, competing visions of masculinity. Since there are multiple versions, probably some do less harm than others. I’m not sure that there are any that aren’t harmful at all, however. Look at the letters Margaret Cho got from self-described Christians – there’s a lot of woman-hating (and, I’d suspect, homophobia) lurking below the surface of Christian Conservative culture.
There are certainly visions of masculinity that I can see the value of – take Atticus Finch, for instance. But I think it’s more important to wipe out the entire notion that “being a man” is something that we have to aspire to, or fear losing.
Leah, I certainly wasn’t meaning to explain what’s going on with incest, and especially not with someone who molests a 2-year-old. As others wrote, I was trying to talk about the typical rapist, and I don’t think what I said applies to the sick bastard you describe.
Obviously, I agree that men need to be held more accountable for their actions.
Mychelline, I haven’t read that book and I should. I’ve done a lot of reading, and have read a few of the authors you mention discussing rape in other publications. My own views on rape probably come closer to Michael Kimmels’ than Andrea Dworkin’s, although I like both writers. (I’m particularly a fan of Dworkin’s “I Want a 24-Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape.”)
Thanks to everyone for responding.
“They will date women who routinely treat them like garbage, and then complain that women don’t appreciate nice guys (well, duh, not the ones they’re dating). ”
The same argument used to blame the women for being in abusive relationships.
Congratulations.
Very interesting, both the post and the comments to it. I think that you’ve got something here, Ampersand, but my own thoughts are in a bit of confusion about the issue. Have to think some more:).
The concept of masculinity as something fragile strikes very true, though, and explains quite a few other things as well, not just possibly rape. I’m thinking of the anger of many male blue-collar workers when the first woman joins the team. Where does this anger come from? If they think she’s no good, well, haven’t they had other not-so-great coworkers before?
Ineptness may well be the quoted reason, but I think the real reason is this fragile masculinity concept: If this job, which defines me as a man (provider and strong) can be done by women, or even one woman, am I still a man? Nobody likes to have such self-doubts, so I understand why this might be the reason for sexual harassment on the job, especially as such harassment itself might score one some male points. It’s still wrong, of course. Speaking as a one-time victim of such acts.
I still think (despite many good comments suggesting other reasons for this on an earlier thread here)that femininity is nowhere near as fragile, on the whole, because femininity is already at the bottom of the hierarchy hill. What seems to be fragile is the way to salvation for women, i.e., how to act to get out of the ghetto. Is it by getting bigger breasts or a face-lift? More revealing clothes? Appreciation of porn? Is it by being ‘one of the guys’ or ‘daddy’s girl’?
None of these work, though all of them are earnestly tried by many.
Sorry for getting off the path so much.
Sorry to join the Greek chorus on this one, but excellent work. Was particularly salient for me, as I go to an all guys’ high school, where the machoismo culture is omnipresent. I’ll also join the chorus on the innate/societal argument: it doesn’t particularly matter to what extent masculinity is biologically or socially derived, just what social changes we need to make to put an end to it.
The obvious question this begs is, though: how on earth _do_ we change this? Americans, by and large, would scream “social engineering!” or some similarly vacuous battle cry if there was a major effort by the government to do battle with Rape Culture rather than simply individual cases of rape. It’s the same paradigm that precludes us from winning the War On Drugs: our only solution to a problem is to boost penalties and talk about being “tough on crime”.
Or am I just so blind a liberal that I’m not looking at nongovernmental solutions to this?
I’ve been looking around the internet for more resources on rape and this struck my attention:
CHARACTERISTICS OF ACQUAINTANCE RAPISTS
1. Acts immaturely, shows little empathy or feeling for others and displays little social conscience.
2. Displays anger or aggression either verbally or physically. May be displayed during conversations by general negative references to women, vulgarity, curtness toward others, and the like. Often views women as adversaries.
3. Acts “macho” and discusses acts of physical prowess excessively.
4. Displays short temper, physically abusive (slapping, grabbing arms, etc.)
5. Acts excessively jealous and/or possessive of you. Be especially suspicious of this behavior if you have recently met or are on a first or second date.
6. Ignores your space boundaries by being too close or by placing his hand on your thigh, etc. Especially when you are in public.
7. Ignores your wishes.
8. Attempts to make you feel guilty or accuses you of being “upright.”
9. Becomes hostile and/or increasingly more aggressive when you say no about anything.
10. Acts particularly friendly at a party/bar and tries to separate you from your friends.
11. Insists on being alone with you on a first date.
12. Demands your attention or compliance at inappropriate times such as during a class.
13. Asks personal questions and is interested in knowing more than you want to tell him.
14. Subscribes excessively to traditional male and female stereotypes.
[end]
All of these characteristics fit your analysis well, Amp, the entitlement, the adherence to gender roles, but not the position of women possessing sex.
While I agree that society generally believes that women possess sex, I tend to get the feeling that it is also assumed that men have the right to take sex.
I’m particularly troubled by the language of sex. I frequently hear my male peers refer to sex as hitting it, getting it, slamming it, fucking (which isn’t alogether bad, I suppose), women as pussy, men as pimps, shall I go on?
And as I see it, all of this adds to the culture of rape.
The other night, someone called me a pimp. A good thing. I said, “Well, I guess it’s good that you didn’t call me a bitch.” The guy was floored. “I never call women bitches.”
He gets half the point. He understands that calling a woman a bitch is disrespectful, but has never really thought out what it insinuates when one is called a pimp.
Hey, Echidne got off the mark. My right, too.
I’d like to suggest that rape is just an extreme form of the conventional asymmetry between aggressive men and passive women. Men desire, women are desired. Men ask for dates and pay the bills.
If we want to change the culture, we need to improve the status of women, which we are doing, however slowly. This is something we can achieve in the social and political arena.
In the cultural realm, we need to consider women equal partners in sexuality, and perhaps we could teach them not to consider masculinity fragile.
(Personally, I think Amp is overestimating the fragility and underestimating violence, but that is probably just my upbringing.)
theogon: I cling to the belief we can change society for the better, through government controls and general activism. It’s not easy, nor is it clear exactly how this would be done, but as an example I consider lynchings in the south. Until recently, lynchings were commonplace, and now they’re not. There’s more to it than that, but that’s a distinct improvement that allows me to believe that the Herculean task of ending our rape culture will be accomplished.
But then that’s the optimistic humanist in me talking.
This whole theory is hard to reconcile when you find that rape is prevalent among animals.
Eric, so is incest. And baby-killing. Doesn’t mean that it should or does influence human behavior.
Is anything chimpanzee entirely alien?
Reasons #1 and #2 are hard to argue with, but #3 is just plain silly. Only an extreme social constructionist could possibly believe that women’s power over men to decide if and when sex happens is just a “myth” with no basis in the objective reality. Eggs are expensive and sperm is cheap, and everything logically follows from this.
It would be just as silly to claim that “power is something possessed by rich people, in our society’s warped view”, even though I bet rich people would love it if they could persuade the others to think that they don’t really have any power over them. After all, what difference does it really make to anything if in the bank’s computer, person A’s account has a few bits on that are off in person B’s account? Nothing! It is just a myth!
Is it also just “a myth” that employers have more power than employees? Is a job something that an employer has and can choose to give or decline to an applicant? Why, of course this is just a myth! Employers and employees are perfectly symmetrical partners in a job relationship! Therefore there is no need whatsoever for unions, workplace safety legislation or anti-discrimination laws.
(I can’t help but add: “That’s also why employees are taught to wait to be asked for a job interview, while employers are taught to do the choosing. Employers have it; employees ask for it.”)
Rape does not exist amongst animals. Forced copulation does. There is a world of difference between the two; why for example, is there stigma associated with being a rape victim in human society? Clearly, there are characteristics and consequences associated with forced copulation in human societies that transform it into rape. For a more detailed explanation of the distinction, Anne Fausto-Sterling has a really good discussion of forced copulation in mallards in Myths of Gender.
To the biological determinists generally; please can you explain the cultural differences in the treatment of rape and female sexuality in genetic or biological terms, between say, Saudi Arabia and the US? Or feel free to address how it is that there has been such a huge shift in how sex and female sexuality functions in only three generations in the West.
I thought it was a great piece, although I have some qualms about shifting the focus so dramatically away from violence. The cultural sanction for men to externalise their anger and violence, versus the tendency for women to internalise theirs, seems pertinent for example.
“This whole theory is hard to reconcile when you find that rape is prevalent among animals.”
So is stealing. So is infanticide. So is killing.
So?
Reasons #1 and #2 are hard to argue with, but #3 is just plain silly. Only an extreme social constructionist could possibly believe that women’s power over men to decide if and when sex happens is just a “myth” with no basis in the objective reality. Eggs are expensive and sperm is cheap, and everything logically follows from this.
Well, I must be an extreme social constructionist then, because it seems pretty clear to me that women do in fact have sexual desire of their own, and that men are, at times, not in the mood or are otherwise unattracted to women who are readily available to them. An act of sex takes two (or more) willing and equal partners. Neither of the parties involved posseses something that the other doesn’t possess in kind, nor can either of the parties grant something that the other doesn’t grant in kind. That the idea that women “possess” sex runs so deep in our culture that some see it as a biological certainty doesn’t bode well for the eradication of rape culture.
Dan J: “Well, I must be an extreme social constructionist then, because it seems pretty clear to me that women do in fact have sexual desire of their own, and that men are, at times, not in the mood or are otherwise unattracted to women who are readily available to them. An act of sex takes two (or more) willing and equal partners.”
We can apply your logic to the workplace. For example, employers have desire to hire workers (note: I use “worker” simply as a generic term here for simplicity), and some workers are, at times, not in the mood to do certain work that is readily available to them. A job takes two willing and equal partners: the employer who pays for the work and the worker who does it.
Based on this, do we conclude that employers and workers “possess” a job exactly the same way? Or, using your words, “Neither of the parties involved posseses something that the other doesn’t possess in kind, nor can either of the parties grant something that the other doesn’t grant in kind.”
No. Since the employer needs the worker far less than the worker needs the employer (exactly the same way women want men far less than men want women), the party who is needed less by the other one has to make concessions for the transaction to go through. For example, it is the worker who has to send hundreds of resume to the employers to get a job, and the employers just sit back and select the few that they like for a job interview. (Analogy to men and women is hopefully obvious.)
Is it this way simply because our society has somehow decided so, with no basis on supply and demand? Could the society decide that from now on, it shall be the employers who send their resumes and work offers directly to workers, who just sit back, sift through the hundreds of job offers and select the best employers for whom they’ll grant an interview?
The society recognizes that an employer and a worker do not have symmetrical power over each other, and therefore grants more legal protection to the party who is needed less by the other one. For example, when employers are hiring, they cannot legally discriminate based on race. The job applicants have no such legal duty: they can freely not apply if they don’t like the race of the employer.
Ilkka, I don’t think your analogy really works. The reason for the asymmetric power of employers and employees is twofold: 1. The society has allocated the property rights to jobs to the owners of the firms, not the workers. This is a cultural thing, and possible to change. 2. The number of employers is much smaller vis-a-vis workers. These are what create the extra power of the employers. They can always hire someone else, and they can also pretty much fire people at will in many countries (though not in all, of course).
Men and women are roughly equal in numbers, so the supply and demand analogy based on few numbers on one side doesn’t work. The property rights to women’s bodies have traditionally not been given to the women themselves, but rather first to their father and then their husband. This certainly still affects the cultural perception that men have some rights to control the sexuality of women.
You also argue that men need women more than women need men. This seems to be based on the argument that sperm is cheap and plentiful and eggs are few and expensive. First, neither sperm nor eggs are human beings. Second, whether eggs are less plentiful than sperm doesn’t really matter as even with eggs a girl starts with many more than she can ever use. Third, I don’t really see where the expensiveness or cheapness comes in. Sperm seems to be produced as a matter of fact, and eggs are there from the beginning.
I think you mean that you believe that in theory one man could inseminate thousands of women, is somehow very aware of this, and furiously tries to do just so, whereas women can only have at most, say, thirty births per life, are assumed to be aware of this, and try to be selective in whom they choose to have these children with. This is one of the Rudyard Kipling-like stories that sometimes are called sociobiology. For men and women to be this way, the argument goes, the mass-inseminator guys beat out all the other guys, so now men have these desires, too. Why women don’t get them passed on from their fathers is not explained, as there is actually absolutely no genetic evidence for this theory to begin with.
It suffers from a lot of problems, and I’m not going to write a book here, but one example might be useful: There is an assumption here that genes are passed on by the simple act of intercourse. But not all intercourse leads to pregnancy, and especially in prehistoric times it must have been incredibly hard for a woman to bring up baby to adulthood. Only adult children can pass the genes on in the next round, after all. So a man who flitted around like a butterfly from one flower to another might not have left behind many babies, after all. Maybe the man who stuck around, shared his food with the woman and protected and helped care for the child got at least as many of his genes passed on?
I might also point out that sperm is not as plentiful as has been assumed by the (predominantly male) evolutionary psychologists. Recent research shows that men’s sperm count declines quite rapidly with age, so that the biological clock is no longer seen as just a woman’s problem. It has also been found that Down Syndrome babies born to older mothers might not be because her eggs have grown old, but because older mothers tend to have older partners whose sperm appears to have many more anomalies than that of younger men.
IOW, to base rape on the men’s biological desire to spread their seed widely is not necessarily an established sort of scientific theory.
This workplace analogy is completely fallacious. Neither men nor women, employers or employees, experience pleasure from their jobs in the same way that they experience pleasure during sex. Sexual desire and the desire for a job are two seperate types of desire, and because women desire sexual pleasure, too, they don’t “possess sex,” or have control over the whole of sexuality.
And don’t try to tell me that women don’t like sex. I know plenty of women who lust after men, and other women, more than I do.
Great post, Amp; just excellent.
I will say that I think in some respects, Ilkka may have a point. Just potentially not the point he thinks he does. It is accepted, in Western societies and some others that women “own” sex. But this is a learned behaivior, not – I believe – genetically determined.
Men are taught that sex is something they seek from women and womon are – generally – taught that they are the ones to be asked and who can give permission. They are taught to protect their “virtue,” while waiting for just the right person to come along. This is a broad-brush statement, and behaviors and mores are changing, albeit slowly.
The answer, however, is one that Amp and some others have advocated, but which, like Ilkka doesn’t quite address the problem in the way they think it does. Teaching the equality of men and women (in this case, most especially in sexuallity). Equality of sexuality would not only have the goal of changing the perceived role of men, but of women as well.
What I’m trying to get to is that this change would result in both men and women learning that neither of them “owns” sexuality, but that it is something that can really only exist between two people. The Omega Man (or Woman) could not rightly be said to posses sexuality: that means something only in relation to another person.
Again, Amp, I think you’re on the right track here…
Admittedly, “Eggs are expensive and sperm is cheap” is somewhat of an oversimplification. (I really didn’t expect anyone to take this as literally as Echidne!) It is better to simply say that for women, the consequences of sex are a much higher burden than they are to a man. Especially so in the prehistorical times with none of the help and welfare that the modern society offers, without which pregnancy is super-expensive.
Therefore, women have evolved to be more choosy on who they have sex with. Women who were less choosy had their children mostly with loser men, and their genetic lines disappeared countless millenia ago.
This strange idea that women want sex with men as much as men want sex with women… it simply goes so much against the common sense and all everyday observations of how the world really works that I really have to wonder what planet the people who claim such a thing actually live in. I guess Tom Cruise or Matt Damon could honestly believe it based on their personal experiences, but the real-life experiences of about, say, 99.999% of men have taught them very differently.
If women really want sex as much an men, they admittedly do quite an impressive job in hiding it. When we think of phenomena that occur in the sexual pairing process in the real world, they tend to be highly consistent with the hypothesis “women want sex less than men” and more or less inconsistent with the opposite hypothesis. I challenge anyone to come up with an example real-world phenomenon for which this does not hold in the level of the general population.
For starters, please explain the complete lack of heterosexual bathhouses. After that, you could explain why practically all thirtysomething involuntary virgins are men.
The original analogy of workplace and sex was simply meant to illustrate that the argument “because sex takes two, both men and women have equal power” is invalid. Now Corwin, since it was an analogy, of course it will fail at other points. But I now cannot stop myself from extending that analogy and noting that employers typically distribute their paychecks far more equitably compared to how women distribute their sexual favours. The women “who lust after men, and other women, more than I do” are probably highly choosy of what men they so highly lust after.
You know, Ilkka, not once, but multiple times in my life I’ve turned down offers for sex with women. And I’m not a physically attractive guy (not by standard measures, anyhow). I say that not to show off (I’ve also been turned down, natch), but to make the point that even anecdotally, what you describe doesn’t match my life’s experiences.
There isn’t a complete lack of heterosexual bathhouses (assuming by “bathhouse,” you mean “private club where people go to have sex”). Nor is there a complete lack of lesbian bathhouses, for that matter. It’s true that gay male bathhouses are far more common. However, that’s as easily explained culturally as it is biologically.
I have no idea where your data on 30-year-old virgins comes from. Can you provide a source?
One interesting thing is that virtually every society comes up with severe restrictions to limit women’s sexuality. From clitorectomies, to the daughters-as-property measures used in Saudi Arabia (and also in Western society until fairly recently), going all the way back to biblical times (remember the bit in the Old Testiment about how a woman who merely brushes her hand against a man’s clothed crotch should be executed?), there’s a long tradition of restraining women from expressing sexuality with horrible punishments and dire restrictions.
Why was all of that invented, if women are biologically programmed to be relatively indifferent to sex?
There are several species of animals and birds where the females sleep around – bonobo chimps are the most famous example – despite the fact that there are more sperm than eggs, and the cost to the female of preganancy is higher than the cost to the male. If sperm and egg counts are as biologically deterministic as you claim, then how do you explain the behavior of these species?
To add to what Ampersand said, it’s really difficult to differentiate how women feel about sex per se, and how they feel about the prospect of going away for a quickie with a stranger. I’d suspect that almost all women’s sexual desires are mixed up with things like fear of possible male violence from a stranger and fear of unplanned pregnancy. The consequences of sex for women may be more serious than for men, but I don’t think that these consequences need to affect the women’s sexual desire; they are just an additional consideration. What they do affect is how women act, and the way women act is also severely affected by societal and cultural considerations, as Ampersand pointed out. It is indeed true that it is the women’s sexuality that is usually severely controlled, not the men’s. I’ve even read that in some cultures the belief is that women are utterly insatiable sexually, and that that’s why they must be controlled.
Btw., Ilkka, I have serious reservations with the idea that women who mated with the losers didn’t get to pass their genes on. There is no way to get evidence about this theory: we have not sociological artefacts from prehistory; in fact, we barely have some bone fragments. And what ‘a loser’ might have been in those days is another difficult question to answer. We don’t even know what the climate was like, precisely, or how the early hominids or whatever lived. Where they even in large enough groups to afford the men the chance to mate with many women? This seems pretty unlikely, based on studies of primates. And also, btw., chimpanzee females also practise what might be called marital infidelity. They are so good at it, that researchers only found out when the DNA tested the babies that were being born. About a third of them had a father not in the group. So the females had slipped away to meet strangers.
I don’t usually advertize my blog on other blog’s comment threads, but my last post actually is about some of my criticisms concerning the weird world of evolutionary psychology or sociobiology.
If it’s not ok to post the link here (for Ilkka ;)), go ahead and remove the post.
On Buttocks
I’m not a big fan of evolutionary psychology. It serves as an excuse for horrible human behavior. For the most part, it ignores that human beings have free will and are not subject only to their “innate” desires, if you happen to believe in innate social behavior, which I, obviously, do not.
I concur in the suspicion toward evolutionary psychology. Amp, correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t there been studies showing that most sex offenders (indeed, most violent criminals) were themselves victims of sexual or physical abuse during childhood? This suggests that they are acting out learned behavior, not something innate.
Very interesting article and I believe it has some interesting perspective, but…
The primary reason people engage in sex of any kind boils down to biological drive, but moreover, it feels good. The only forces stronger in our psyche than sex would be breathing and eating.
Without the ability to breathe we cease to exist quite quickly. Lack of food and water will have the same result over a longer period of time.
Oddly enough eating and sex both bring higher levels of sensual enjoyment than the higher priority of breathing.
So why do people rape? While it’s also possible to find psychological reasons for rape, it boils down to two major points.
1)It feels damn good, which leads us to
2)Not caring about others enough to not do that which we feel strong desire to do.
All other differences withstanding, one constant you will find with all rapists is their self-centeredness and ability to justify whatever they want to do.
Akami: pleasure + lack of morals is an inadequate explanation. All that requires for me to reach orgasm is to masturbate. Copulation _with_ someone else probably involves one or a mix of either love, social accomplishment (affirmation that one is a “real man” as per the article), or desire to control – with rapists, we’re talking about the third and possibly the second. Hence, social/psychological factors have to be involved, not just pleasure-seeking; otherwise, all we’d have to do to stop rape in this country is hand out free buckets of rocky road.
Raznor: I don’t disagree that a large enough, well-thought-out government campaign could put an end to this within, say, a generation; I’m just not so optimistic about our ability to get it through the legislature. Even if we mobilize every feminist group in the country there will be a counterreaction – we’d be dealing not only with a population that slanders any government project to change culture for the better as “social engineering” but also with the famed white male paranoia of emasculation. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, though.
The best bet in my opinion, considering the difficulty in large-scale governmental action, would be to go after the three socializing pillars: school, media, parenting. The best penetration (pardon the loaded term, in this context) into the latter that’s really possible to get is in those dumb parenting manuals, but whatever. In the media (films, etc.) I suppose a concerted ideological effort towards the demythologization of the manly would be the path, but as in the last one, going for the lowbrow is the key. As for school, copy the Religious Right: take over PTAs, bowlderize books of objectionable material, and influence teaching philosophy. The main problem with this course of action is that it’s horribly long-term, and its resources are limited to the network of feminist/liberal activists (Gee, it’s not like _those_ resources are stretched to the limit). The main advantage is that I have absolutely no qualifications to talk about this kind of thing whatsoever, so there’s probably a much better one out there. Any takers?
Ampersansd’s post was excellent and reinforced many of the views I have about rape and masculinity. I have been reading the comments with interest.
The idea that women = sex = women is so pervasive in our culture. To take a brief example, whenever people defend ads which are offensive to feminists they always excuse it by saying that that “sex sells”. What they are actually referring to, 90% of the time, is women’s bodies, not actually sex. This is just one example of the way in which women’s bodies = sex in our culture. Women’s bodies have come to represent sex.
I hate these biological arguments, too. In many ways they are a red herring. So what if rape exists in the “natural world”? So what if there is more sperm around than eggs? It’s irrelevant – sex without consent is WRONG. FULL STOP (sorry – period for your U.S. people!). END OF STORY. We are human, we can control our actions and we have morals and – in theory – empathy with other people. There is NO excuse for rape. I’m not accusing anyone of trying to condone rape here, just trying to get back to the basic facts in a way.
The idea that “men want sex more than women” is a cultural construction which changes from culture to culture and throughout history. I studied the European medieaval witchcrazes as part of my History degree and the belief current at the time, for *centuries* in fact, was that women were infinitely more carnal and more desiring for sex then men. Women were more *earthly*, more “of the body” and men were “higher”, more mental and more spiritual. Women were blamed for leading men astray, and this is also why peple thought they would be more susceptible to becoming witches. This was the *undisputed* belief at the time, as sure as it is the undisputed belief today that men “just want it more” than women.
Things change.
We once belived the earth was flat, but that didn’t make it true.
We have to – we *must* – always question the way things are. One of the things that I love about feminism is that it *questions* – it doesn’t accept the way things currently are as “this is the way it is, this is the way it has always been and always will be” which some people seem to. It’s also optimistic – it has vision and hope that society can change. All of this men are from mars crap that the media comes out with is totally depressing, imho.
I love the postcard which says:
Men are from earth.
Women are from earth.
Deal with it.
Ampersand: “There isn’t a complete lack of heterosexual bathhouses”
Yes, there is. A total and complete lack. I can easily demonstrate this: I bet nobody here is able to name even one. To specify: (1) Within reasonable requirements of hygiene, age, looks and sobriety, any man or woman can enter by paying a modest entrance fee and (2) at least 1/3 of the patrons are women and (3) casual sex is the main activity. (Places like this for gay men are easy enough to find: heck, even my university newspaper contains big ads for one.) So, anyone?
Women simply do not want sex with men as much as men want sex. This is simply so obvious that I again note how surreal it is even to read some people claim otherwise. It is like as if somebody claimed that poor people really have just as much political power than rich people. (Of course, it is not hard to see the political goal of making such claims.)
Since women do not constrain the sexual market for gays, by looking at how gay men behave we can get an idea how dramatic this difference really is. For a gay man, it is not uncommon to have hundreds, even thousands of sexual partners during his lifetime, despite the relative rarity of potential partners.
Echidne: “I have serious reservations with the idea that women who mated with the losers didn’t get to pass their genes on. There is no way to get evidence about this theory:”
It follows simply by definition of the evolutionary process. The evolutionary process requires selection to work, so that not everyone produces viable offspring at the same rate. Humans are a product of darwinian evolution, so there has necessarily been some kind of selection. Evolutionary losers do not produce viable offspring as well as the evolutionary winners.
Of course, our modern concept of “loser” probably is very similar to that of evolutionary losers: physical and social weakness, stupidity, inability to plan for the future etc. This is because it is difficult to imagine an environment where these properties would be assets to anybody.
Catherine Redfern: “I hate these biological arguments, too. In many ways they are a red herring. So what if rape exists in the “natural world”? So what if there is more sperm around than eggs?”
I love it how quickly my notion that there is a evolutionary explanation for why women want sex less than men turned into an implication that rape has an evolutionary explanation.
“The idea that “men want sex more than women” is a cultural construction which changes from culture to culture and throughout history.”
Very well. People, here is another challenge. There are thousands of cultures around the world. Name one real culture where women are visibly significantly more eager to have sex than men. For example, a culture where the average man can simply walk into the bar or other such common meeting place and wait for dozens of women to try to approach him for sex.
If anybody seriously believes that primitive cultures (medieval Europe, modern Middle East) severely restrict women’s sexuality for any other reason than that each woman is property of some man, I have a bridge to sell you. This phenomenon is no different to a modern car owner using locks, alarms and other anti-theft devices to restrict his car’s freedom to let other people drive it. It’s not that the car has this burning desire to let other people drive it, it’s simply that there are lots of people who would do it if given a chance.
“We once belived the earth was flat, but that didn’t make it true.”
That is such an overused cliche that I hope this wasn’t taught in your history class as an actual medieval belief.
“We have to – we *must* – always question the way things are. One of the things that I love about feminism is that it *questions*”
Another cliche so overused that it is now only silly. It doesn’t seem to me that feminism ever questions the idea that absolutely everything is socially constructed. If anyone has a counterexample for this, please let’s hear it.
Ilkka, although you’re very fond of issuing “challenges,” I notice that you ignored my question to you. Here it is again:
Other folks brought up similar examples, which you didn’t address.
You wrote: “Yes, there is. A total and complete lack [of hetero sex clubs]. I can easily demonstrate this: I bet nobody here is able to name even one.”
First of all, as has already been pointed out, this is a ridiculous measure of biological tendencies, because sex clubs happen in a social context. There are many more social restraints on women’s sexuality (plus worries about safety and the like) – and, just as importantly, many men are raised to believe that they need to have frequent sex. To claim that this is proof of biological disposition is just silly; it’s not proof of anything either way.
In other words, I think this is a stupid argument, and I resent being dragged into it.
Second of all, there are indeed heterosexual sex clubs. Here’s a few I found with a brief search of newspapers (there were dozens more, I’m not bothering to list them all):
In and around San Diego, there’s Thad’s, Club Exchange, La Villa and Club CB, among others. (San Diego Union-Tribune, 5/5/2002)
The Fantasy Barn and Couples Playhouse in Illinois (Chicago Sun-Times 1/16/03)
From an article in The Guardian (8/29/03) about La Chambre, Britain’s largest swingers club:
Mingles in Connecticut was busted by the cops, but according to the newspaper article there are at least seven other such clubs in the state. (Hartford-Courant, 9/16/03)
The San Diego Union-Tribune article estimated that there are about 400 such clubs in the US. That’s not much compared to gay clubs, but it’s still a lot more than the none you claim exist.
I can’t believe I’m wasting my time discussing this.
* * *
A couple of comments.
First of all, what you’re saying is just as true (or just as lacking truth) of men who breed with “losers” as women who breed with “losers.” So why did you single out just one sex?
Second of all, people who are socially or physically weak or who aren’t good future-planners still exist, so it’s clear that these traits have not been bred out of humanity. Either these traits do not breed true, or perhaps they aren’t big impediments to breeding after all. (After all, if a “loser” manages to mate, why shouldn’t their “loser” kids manage the same?)
Ilkka, it seems that sociobiologists never ever question the idea that all behavior is due to genes.
Women who fuck around are branded sluts, whores, and other lovely things. *Society* (male-dominated society) devalues women who are openly sexual. So it’s rather disingenious to say that women don’t want sex because you see no evidence of it, when women who act like they want sex are pilloried.
If it’s so natural for women to not want sex as much as men, why all the societal effort to keep our legs closed?
Ilkka, you are completely divorced from my reality; and in my reality *women want sex.*
You can look at the Good Vibrations website, for instance; that’s a sex shop founded and run by women. Pay close attention to the workshops they run.
You could also look at Tristan Taormino’s website; she’s made a career ouot of teaching people how to have anal sex. She is also, last time I checked, a woman.
You could visit One Leg Up NYC; a recurring sex party run by a woman.
You could find the books written by Dossie Eastman and Catherine Lizst, on polyamory and BDSM. They mention over and over in those books how much they like sex.
Now, Echidne is completely correct that social considerations will modify behavior. However, when (not if) you find safe social spaces, women’s and men’s sexuality equals out.
I’d also like to make the flip-side of Amp’s argument from personal experience, and comment that as a reasonably attractive heterosexual woman (within 50 pounds of a medically approved body-weight; no major facial scars) I have in my more promiscuous younger days frequently offered to have sex with particular men and been refused.
One way that the “women have sex, men seek it” idea is socially self-reinforcing is that it raises the possible level of humilation for a woman who seeks sex. When a man seeks sex from a woman, and is refused, something perfectly normal in our society has happened — he may be annoyed and moderately humiliated, but it is on some level an expected result. When a woman seeks sex from a man and is refused, something truly strange has happened — we ‘know’ that the vast majority of men are willing to have sex with any woman on a moment’s notice, so a refusal must indicate that the woman is not only ‘slutty’ (which is oddly a sexually unattractive quality in our culture) but somehow truly outside the pale as a possible sex partner. Given the asymmetry in the possible social penalties for failure, is it surprising that fewer women actively seek sex from men than the reverse?
To add to Amp & LizardBreath’s comments:
Yeah, I’ve been offered sex by women. And I’ve turned down offers of sex from women. I also (although it’s anecdotal) have not seen that men solicit sex more often than women. It’s true that, for the most part, methods of propositioning differ between the sexes. For cultural/societal/learned reasons I would guess.
I think Ilkka is off his rocker if he really believes that men want sex more often than women. I’ve never seen any sort of credible study that supports that position. In fact, the studies that I have seen support the idea that libido is more or less equal between the sexes.
Ampersand: for your question about animals, of course in many animal species, the females are known to eagerly mate with highest-quality males and let their lower-quality mate help take care of the offspring. This is a successful strategy for female in producing best offspring so it is no wonder it evolves. Of course, it is not totally unknown among the human females either. One should also note that the females do not go for the weakest and lowest-status males to copulate with.
According to a short Google search I just did (but of course I knew it would be so even before the search), the sex clubs that you listed are swingers clubs, which are a completely different thing from what I asked! These clubs carefully screen the members that they allow in, and they do not allow single men to enter at all.
So no dice. I ask again: does there exist even one bathhouse / sex club that an average single man can walk in, pay a modest entrance fee and have sex with several eager females? If the security is an issue, one might think that these places could hire bodyguards to take care of that. And why isn’t the security such an issue for gay bathhouses?
Furthermore, for the swingers clubs, you consider the enthusiasm of the women there as evidence that women want sex as much as men. It might be that, but it also could be evidence for the exact opposite! Consider the possibility that these women are statistical outliers among women for how choosy they are of the men that they have sex with. Typical women do not find the idea of swinging at all appealing, and since woman’s willingness is the constraint that determines whether a couple will swing. Therefore all couples that you can find in a swingers club have such an outlier female who is unusually less choosy.
To answer your question about “losers”, of course the situation is symmetric between men and women and dogs and elephants, but the original topic was about women, so I wrote about women instead of men or dogs or elephants.
Lastly, your reasoning of why weakness (and other properties we usually associate to “loser”) is not a big impediment to breeding could directly be used to prove that lethal diseases are not really a big impediment to breeding, since they also exist today. (In fact, the logic here reminds me of a conservative column I once read. It claimed that homosexuality cannot possibly be genetic, since if it was, it would have already been bred out of existence.)
Corwin: “Ilkka, you are completely divorced from my reality; and in my reality *women want sex.*”
Add “…with alpha males” to the end of that sentence and I agree 100%.
Of course, fully celibate women do did not want sex at all have been selected against in evolution, and their genetic lines have disappeared long ago. So women do want sex sometimes. Just not nearly as much as men, and they are quite a bit choosier of who they have it with. Just like the evolutionary biology correctly predicts.
I love it how quickly my notion that there is a evolutionary explanation for why women want sex less than men turned into an implication that rape has an evolutionary explanation.
Well, evolutionary psychologists do loudly declare the notion that because rape exists in nature, so it exists in “civilized” society. Their further response is that rapists shouldn’t be stigmatized as horrible creatures, because, after all, they are just responding to their “natural instincts.”
I’m paraphrasing, of course.
Of course it follows that we would implicate that this is what you’re suggesting as well, since you so fervently argue on behalf of their psychological scaffolds, Ilkka.
There’s a reason they’re called evo-psychos. This is the number one reason why I agree.
Sorry if someone has already addressed this, but: What’s your definition of rape? I ask because you say that the majority of rapes are committed by men, and then later ask why women don’t commit more rapes. My response when I read that is to say, “Of course women don’t commit rapes. They don’t have the necessary equipment.” I.e., I thought rape was something that by definition had to be committed by a man. On the other hand, maybe you’re using “rape” to mean “sexual assault of any kind.”
does there exist even one bathhouse / sex club that an average single man can walk in, pay a modest entrance fee and have sex with several eager females?
I think those are known as brothels.
Name one real culture where women are visibly significantly more eager to have sex than men. For example, a culture where the average man can simply walk into the bar or other such common meeting place and wait for dozens of women to try to approach him for sex.
Well, America, if you’re interested in visible evidence. Why would women wear bikinis and push-up bras if not to attract men? If men wanted more sex, wouldn’t they be the ones trying to attract women? And if an average (read: not supermodel) woman walked into a bar, I sincerely doubt there would be “dozens” of men suddenly hanging all over her. And read Dan Savage’s Skipping Towards Gomorrah for an example of a man walking into a place where all the women want to have sex with him. For that matter, watch any movie where the guy’s divorced and goes to PTA meetings and school soccer games. (I’m not serious about these answers; I’m not taking the question that seriously, either.)
I don’t see any evidence at all, really, that men are more eager to have sex with women than vice versa, except for the prevalence of female prostitutes, and there’s a huge difference between “wanting sex” and “willing to pay for sex.” I mean, of course there’s a stereotype that’s reflected in fiction, TV, and movies, but stereotypes aren’t necessarily true. And even if it were, like several people have said, there are enormous societal influences on who wants and who gets sex.
I ask again: does there exist even one bathhouse / sex club that an average single man can walk in, pay a modest entrance fee and have sex with several eager females?
Oh, I don’t know: brothels?
I’m also sticking with swingers’ clubs. There are thousands in the United States, they cater to heterosexuals, women play a very significant and powerful role in them, and they aren’t terribly hard to find. If you’re trying to prove that more men want sex than women, then you have to accept swingers clubs as a valid argument against it. Just because one isn’t quite as easy to get into as another (and I haven’t been to either, so I don’t know the requirements) doesn’t change the fact that they exist, swingers’ clubs probably in a greater number than bathhouses.
Of course, our modern concept of “loser” probably is very similar to that of evolutionary losers: physical and social weakness, stupidity, inability to plan for the future etc.
But these kinds of people exist all over the place in contemporary society. We’re not all well-organized, beautiful, strong geniuses. So evolution couldn’t have possibly cancelled the “losers” out.
If anybody seriously believes that primitive cultures (medieval Europe, modern Middle East) severely restrict women’s sexuality for any other reason than that each woman is property of some man, I have a bridge to sell you.
Why would they restrict the women’s sexuality, then? Why wouldn’t they make laws that punished men?
You haven’t really provided any evidence whatsoever supporting your assertatins, except “That’s just the way it is,” which I doubt would win over any jury. (Why has this kind of argument popped up so much more often recently?)
Ampersand: “…if women are biologically programmed to be relatively indifferent to sex?”
I know that at least I certainly haven’t claimed that. Women are anything but “relatively indifferent” to sex! Sex, and especially avoiding it with most men, is a pretty huge deal for them.
Jake Squid: “I think Ilkka is off his rocker if he really believes that men want sex more often than women. I’ve never seen any sort of credible study that supports that position.”
Have you seen credible studies for the opposite, then? Or do you know of any phenomenon that occurs widely in the general population and is highly consistent with “women want sex as much or even more as men” and highly inconsistent with “women want sex much less than men” ?
I am not just trolling or nitpicking here. I am ready to change my opinion if someone points out such phenomena to me, because I really can’t think of any. (Maybe the society decided that too.)
LizardBreath: “…comment that as a reasonably attractive heterosexual woman (within 50 pounds of a medically approved body-weight; no major facial scars) I have in my more promiscuous younger days frequently offered to have sex with particular men and been refused.”
Most people have a far tighter standard of “reasonably attractive” than being less than 50 pounds overweight and having no major facial scars. You also don’t say anything about how high these men were in the male hiearchy of desirability to women, so it is hard to say anything based on that information.
I am sure that men like Tom Cruise or Matt Damon have often turned down offers to have sex with women, especially women who are 50 pounds overweight.
Neko: “Ilkka, it seems that sociobiologists never ever question the idea that all behavior is due to genes.”
Sociobiologists also don’t go around saying “la de da, it is important to always question everything” and use that pretend that they are somehow morally higher creatures.
Ilkka:
Sociobiologists also don’t go around saying “la de da, it is important to always question everything” and use that pretend that they are somehow morally higher creatures.
Nor do feminists go around saying “la di da, it’s important to swallow social ‘science'” and use that to pretend that they are somehow on higher moral ground than people who believe otherwise.
As much proof as you have demanded, you have provided little proof of your own. As much as I respect your commitment to defend your beliefs, you must agree that what you are arguing is just opposite rhetoric, and hardly proof by any means.
Ms. Lauren and Hestia, so the brothels are the heterosexual equivalent of bathhouses that I earlier asked for? I thought I blocked this escape hatch by using “a modest entrance fee” as a requirement, but we can let that slide for now.
Until now, I believed that the official feminist line was that the prostitutes don’t really enjoy their work, but they just do it for the money. I still believe it, because just as with any other transactions, simply by looking at who has to pay who for sex to happen, we can see which party likes the symmetric sex act less and can therefore ask additional incentives, which in this case is money.
Ilkka, I think that you are misusing evolutionary theory. There are two different things under that label: general evolutionary theory which is a valid enterprise in my mind, and which actually uses evidence from findings of skeletal remains, geological changes etc. Then there is social Darwinism, later called sociobiology and now evolutionary psychology (NOT evolutionary biology as you say).
I have read extensively in this latter field, and the theories are largely pseudoscience, defined as science which you cannot falsify by any kind of conceivable experiment or test. Freudianism is another pseudoscience.
Your argument that losers must have been bred out of the human gene pool is also an example of how evo-psychos do their stuff: They are JustSo -stories, i.e. observe something that you think exists widely today, then explain its absence by noting that at some prehistoric point it was the optimal strategy to follow and was sexually selected, however unsuitable it might be today.
The problems with doing this are obvious to me: anything that I might observe today, from some people committing serial murders to my biting my nails can be explained using this device. What’s more, nobody can come back with evidence that disproves the theory, as there is no such evidence, and it can’t be obtained.
Then the evo-psychos make an appeal to something that sounds very scientific and empirical: genes. But actually they don’t have any of the needed information on genes. It just doesn’t exist yet.
My earlier points were that what a winning strategy for a prehistoric man might have been is not necessarily the one you hold true. If we view ‘passing ones genes on’ from a wider perspective than simple mating fights, it becomes evident that men who assumed other strategies than the wide-inseminator might have had equally good, if not better winning strategies. If that is the case, then today’s men are not, or at least not all, of the wide-inseminator type (if this characteristic is somehow passed on genetically which we don’t know). Other types that have been shown (in theory) to be possibly successful strategies are : friend (one who hangs around the women, helps out and gets permanent access to sex that way)and lover (one who woos a woman intensively for some period of time, then may or may not leave). Thus, your argument that men want more sex with multiple women (which is essentially what you are implying with the bathhouse argument) isn’t the only one that could be derived from evolutionary psychology. It’s incorrect to imply that you somehow have a fact without thinking about where your assertion comes from.
Besides, since the societal norms are so different for women and men as regards sex, I find it very odd that so many evo psychos totally ignore this and just assume that culture has no effect. I’d say that culture has an enormous effect in this field.
My own experiences sometimes make me think that it’s not possible for women to even know themselves how they’d act sexually if the rules were different. The rules have been there since we were little girls, and everything we hear goes one way.
Finally, I’d like to mention the Japanese geisha houses for women. They are a new development, but are doing extremely well. Alcohol can cost $1000 per bottle, but women go in in droves. The workers are young men who are trained in the acts of pleasing their female customers. For example, they are told to call them once and a while during the day etc.
Ms Lauren: “Of course it follows that we would implicate that this is what you’re suggesting as well, since you so fervently argue on behalf of their psychological scaffolds, Ilkka.”
Guilt by association. Lovely.
I wrote earlier that I agreed with reason #2 in the Ampersand’s original blog posting. He wrote: “Men who rape women don’t do it because they hate women, but because they don’t give a fuck about women (at least, not the women they rape). They want something, they take it, and they’re by-and-large indifferent to how the person they “take” it from feels.” Hard to argue with. This is no different from home invaders or bank robbers.
As as side note, I find it extremely amusing that the anti-evolutionary sentiment of the (obviously very leftist) people in here rivals the same sentiment of the Christian right-wingers. Even though evolution does not explain absolutely everything about current human behaviour, some would apparently like it to be that the human species is not a product of a long process of Darwinian selection, since that would imply several unpleasant things. For example, the existence of evolutionary losers.
(As for myself, I am obviously an evolutionary loser, since I have no intention to have children or help the children of my close genetic relatives. But there are many different types of being a loser. One such type are those who deny reality and believe that everything could be socially constructed to be the way they would like just by deciding so.)
Hestia:
Most swingers clubs allow men only if they are accompanied by a woman. Without this rule, there soon would be many more men than women. Sad, but true.
Regarding Amp’s original post:
The third reason (or the perception of that reason) is the part of the source of rapists. The other part of the problem is this: “simply because you need or want something, you should get it”. My political bent is Libertarian/Objectivist, so I see this entitled-to-sex idea to be similar to the entitled-to-housing (or food, health insurance, safety from myself, etc).
When our government (read: the biggest or most influential citizen mob) tries to solve problems, it uses the same idea–take what you want/need from someone else.
I eagerly await the day when the majority of the population doesn’t consider other people as cows to be milked. Individuals are the sole rightful authority over their money, time, body, energy. Our government–if it ever gets its hands and eyes out of our wallets and our bedrooms–needs lots of reforming in this area.
Terry.
The essential notion of a capitalist society is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force. Milton Friedman
LizardBreath: “…comment that as a reasonably attractive heterosexual woman (within 50 pounds of a medically approved body-weight; no major facial scars) I have in my more promiscuous younger days frequently offered to have sex with particular men and been refused.”
Most people have a far tighter standard of “reasonably attractive” than being less than 50 pounds overweight and having no major facial scars. You also don’t say anything about how high these men were in the male hiearchy of desirability to women, so it is hard to say anything based on that information.
I am sure that men like Tom Cruise or Matt Damon have often turned down offers to have sex with women, especially women who are 50 pounds overweight.
Ilkka — look what you’re doing here. You’ve redefined the class of people who have no need to seek sex from “women” to “attractive women” and conceded that women do actively seek sex from attractive men (Matt Damon, Tom Cruise, and apparently Jake, Amp, and any man who’s ever turned down an offer of sex from me or any other woman). Once you’ve made those concessions, your argument is reduced to: Men seek sex from attractive women; women seek sex from attractive men. What, exactly, are you arguing about?
Drat: the first three paragraphs of the above should all be italicized, as a quote from Ilkka’s post. The unquoted part of the post begins with “Ilkka –“.
Should’ve previewed.
Actually, Ilkka, I never pretended to be a morally higher creature. You, however, seem to have no problem casting aspersions on the intellect of anyone who has the gall to refute your arguments. Instead of calling the arguments weak, you’re going after the people who make them. I find your indignation at “guilt by association” to be rather rich, all things considered.
Your smarmy comments about feminists, leftists, and anyone who disagrees with you says a lot about your mind set.
When you lay off the hissy fits, we can resume the discussion.
Ilkka, I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make.
First you said, When we think of phenomena that occur in the sexual pairing process in the real world, they tend to be highly consistent with the hypothesis “women want sex less than men” and more or less inconsistent with the opposite hypothesis. I challenge anyone to come up with an example real-world phenomenon for which this does not hold in the level of the general population.
Swingers’ clubs absolutely meet this challenge.
Then you go on to say, (1) Within reasonable requirements of hygiene, age, looks and sobriety, any man or woman can enter by paying a modest entrance fee and (2) at least 1/3 of the patrons are women and (3) casual sex is the main activity.
Swingers’ clubs also absolutely fit this definition. Just because they have more stringent standards doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and in a greater number than bathhouses.
Your leap from “Gay bathhouses exist” to “Men want sex more than women” doesn’t make any sense at all (unless, of course, you’re trying to show that gay men want sex much more than all women and heterosexual men combined). Please clarify what you mean.
Also, some proof that any of your conjectures are true would be nice. Why should I bother trying to disprove something that you yourself have no evidence is true? In fact, until you come up with some real facts supporting your position (beyond “This is the way it is because it’s the way it is”), from now on my response can only be, “Nope. You’re wrong. Prove otherwise.”
Also, please stop saying, “Your argument is just like this other conservative/Christian/etc. argument.” (I believe it’s called an ad hominem.) That doesn’t make the original argument wrong in any stretch of the imagination, and I really don’t care who you think I’m “like;” I prefer my claims stand on their own.
Most swingers clubs allow men only if they are accompanied by a woman. Without this rule, there soon would be many more men than women. Sad, but true.
But if the stigma of “women liking sex” were removed from society, then I posit that women would flock to swingers’ clubs and heterosexual bathhouses in droves–many, many more than men, since women haven’t been encouraged to publicly pursue sexual relationships.
So why does the “if they were allowed, more men would join swingers’ clubs” argument support the claim that “men want sex more than women,” but the “if it were acceptable, more women would joing swingers’ clubs” argument doesn’t support the claim that “women want sex more than men”?
Look, I’m just trying to show that “one gender as a whole wants sex more than the other gender as a whole” is impossible to prove, as Ilkka is trying to do. And I’ve forgotten what exactly it has to do with Amp’s original post, so perhaps I should back out of the discussion.
Ilkka,
All the studies & reviews of existing studies that I can find online indicate that the results are mixed – there is no clear answer at this time. That is to say that some studies show that men do want sex more often than women, some studies show no difference in sexual desire between men & women, and a few show a higher desire for sex in women than in men. One thing that does come up several times is the difference in cycles of sexual desire – men are steady, women are cyclical. So I apologize. There are in fact credible studies to support your position. But there are also opposing studies that are credible, so to reach a conclusion at this point seems premature.
So I’m giving up on debating your theories on human sexuality on a factual level. If we want to just describe our own experiences & conclusions based on anecdotal data…..well, I’m more than happy to add my share. Because that’s all that we can do at this point in time.
I’ll leave it with: I think you’re wrong. I don’t believe that your experience is wide enough or that you come into it with enough of an open mind to see what is in front of you. I’m sure you feel the same about me.
Neko, you did not, but in my real-life experience, anyone who writes something like “We have to – we *must* – always question the way things are. One of the things that I love about feminism is that it *questions* – it doesn’t accept the way things currently are as “this is the way it is, this is the way it has always been and always will be” which some people seem to. It’s also optimistic – it has vision and hope that society can change.” really does consider herself to live on a morally higher plane.
But perhaps this argument is indeed pointless. I shall therefore apologize and leave you all with one final thought. Let us for a moment assume that I am indeed completely wrong. Women do want sex as much as men, even though most people believe the harmful and rape-inducing myth that the very opposite is true.
Now, perhaps such a myth is as a whole actually beneficial to most women, and therefore they have no incentive to try to change it, so the myth persists. But if the majority of women really suffer from this myth, wouldn’t they want to do their best to make people stop believing in this myth? Where is the spark that strikes the flame?
Well, how have such injustices (“blacks are worth less than whites and therefore whites have a right to enslave them”, “gays should go back in the closet and stay there”) been fought and overturned in the past? By civil disobedience. When a large enough number of people stubbornly refuse to obey an unfair custom, they meet initial resistance but eventually their way becomes accepted, and after that, the old unfair custom changes and eventually falls to obscurity.
Therefore, if women want to get rid of the myth that they want sex less than men, my suggestion is to start a civil disobedience campaign where a large number of women announce that from now on, they are going to demonstrate in practice that they like to have sex as eagerly as men. “Come on, big boys!”
Even if such a group of women emerged, it is easy to imagine how other women would react to this especially, if these trailblazers were typically young, thin and beautiful. (Analogy: how do small stores typically react to Wal-Mart coming to town?) Such women would be hated and shunned… by other women, especially the older and less attractive ones!
In fact, we have a precedent for this. Consider the “sexual liberation” of the sixties. Of course the conservatives and the religious people hate it for obvious reasons. But surprise, so do the older feminists, who complain that the sexual revolution just codified the men’s right for casual sex, and that a woman who does not “put out” is an evil prude.
But also men would socially shun and punish these courageous and selfless women, you say? Oh please. Modern western men tend to like porn, which works by selling men the very fantasy discussed in this whole thread, that women like sex and want men as much as men want women! Men would like nothing as much as women to have sex drive similar to men! (Truly it is no wonder why most women hate porn and sexual liberation almost as much as mom & pop stores hate Wal-Mart. And this hatred tells a lot!)
Iikka wrote: …But there are many different types of being a loser. One such type are those who deny reality and believe that everything could be socially constructed to be the way they would like just by deciding so.)
If you won’t make your case without insults like this, you’ll be banned from posting to this site. (On the other hand, refrain from insults and I won’t ban you, no matter how much I disagree with your views). This is your only warning.
Hestia: “(1) Within reasonable requirements of hygiene, age, looks and sobriety, any man or woman can enter by paying a modest entrance fee and (2) at least 1/3 of the patrons are women and (3) casual sex is the main activity. Swingers’ clubs also absolutely fit this definition.”
Swinger’s clubs most definitely do not fit (1) to any extent. For obvious reasons, these clubs let in single women but not single men. Even the couples who are let in are heavily pre-screened for the club to maintain its most desirable members, which is necessary for staying in existence.
In the swinger lingo, I believe they use a word “ticket”. Do you know what that word refers to?
“But if the stigma of “women liking sex” were removed from society, then I posit that women would flock to swingers’ clubs and heterosexual bathhouses in droves–many, many more than men, since women haven’t been encouraged to publicly pursue sexual relationships.”
Oh, wouldn’t men just love that to be true?
No, actually, men in this society have the whole Madonna and whore thing going on. It’s okay for them to fuck around, but they won’t take a woman who fucks around seriously.
And the radical feminists didn’t oppose sexual liberation because they didn’t want sex–they opposed the reinforcement of double standards and the commodification of women (“Girls say yes to boys who say no” to the draft and other such tripe.)
I don’t know that all women *hate* porn (quite a few like it). I do know that porn is geared for men–and not because it features sex. I’m not interested in naked women, or one woman giving blowjobs to multiple men, or scenes with women dressed as schoolgirls, or whatever. That’s not sex, that’s a power play, and it’s not appealing to a lot of women. That hardly means we don’t like sex.
Also, there *has* been a movement to overturn the sexual double-standard. It’s the movement you’ve routinely dismissed and derided–the feminist movement.
“‘”But if the stigma of “women liking sex” were removed from society, then I posit that women would flock to swingers’ clubs and heterosexual bathhouses in droves–many, many more than men, since women haven’t been encouraged to publicly pursue sexual relationships.’
Oh, wouldn’t men just love that to be true?”
First, can you prove this–that men would love for that to be true? I’ve seen zero evidence for this. Second, if it’s true that men would love for this double-standard to be eradicated, they’d let go of the Maddona-whore hang up. The words slut, whore, ho, etc. would be out of use. There would be no paranoia about the sexual past of women. There wouldn’t be this push for female abstinence/virginity.
Illka- Why do single women go to swingers clubs, if not for sex? What logic do you use to draw the opposite conclusion?
Therefore, if women want to get rid of the myth that they want sex less than men, my suggestion is to start a civil disobedience campaign where a large number of women announce that from now on, they are going to demonstrate in practice that they like to have sex as eagerly as men. “Come on, big boys!”
Yes, I’m sure it’s that easy.
You can’t honestly be saying, “In a society that represses female sexuality, all women have to do is express their sexuality just like men!” Can’t you understand that there are systems in place–beyond individuals’ reactions–that might prevent most women from doing so? And how do we make it acceptable for women to pursue sexual desire the way they want to, which just possibly isn’t “Come on, big boys”? Or does only one kind of sex count?
The rest of your post is mere conjecture, so I don’t think I need to address it.
Oh, wouldn’t men just love that to be true?
Apparently you’re not serious about discussion. You only considered one small detail of my post without commenting on the bigger issues I raised, and you responded to another point I made with sarcasm. That’s not a very good way to support your beliefs, or change mine.
I’m interested by how much of this discussion of sexual desire is using a single definition/measure (as Hestia was alluding to). What if, instead of the bath-house/bar model (willingness to have heaps of partners), the measure were enthusiasm for the act itself? Let’s say we only look at people within relationships, the balance of their interest, how often one or the other partner wishes that there were more activity (or regularly gets turned down on sexual overtures). Wouldn’t this be some sort of measure of who “possesses” sex? (the original basis for this topic)
It seems to me that there are probably about equal numbers of “complainers” on both sides, even if you control for general relationship duration and satisfaction. By stereotype, you would expect that young men would be more driven and older women more driven in their respective relationships, but there are counterexamples aplenty for those presumptions. I myself have been in relationships where I was constantly pestered for sex and in others where I constantly felt I was having to beg for sex. And I can think of both men and women who have had to have relationship negotiations on this matter because of mismatches in (non-gender-correlated) this department.
This seems an important measure in the acquaintance rape issue — if, in fact, men and women have similar sex drives, then there is a real societal misconception (that men are always hungry and need to persuade women to accomodate them). Then that (Amp’s #3) is something that could be worked on . . .
More grist for the mill.
Ilkka said: I love it how quickly my notion that there is a evolutionary explanation for why women want sex less than men turned into an implication that rape has an evolutionary explanation.
Er… I wasn’t responding to you directly, I was talking generally about my views on the idea that there is a biological “explanation” (read: excuse) for rape.
Ilkka said: “That is such an overused cliche that I hope this wasn’t taught in your history class as an actual medieval belief.”
My point was that in history the majority of people have believed things about the nature of the world, about people’s behaviour, and men and women – that have radically changed and been overturned. Yet the whole culture unquestioningly believed them; and I can see echos of this in modern culture about the things the mainstream culture tells us to believe about men and women. I’m not saying feminists are immune to this, just that feminism appeals to me precisely because it allows a vision of the future that is different from what we have now or what we had then.
Blimey. That’ll teach me to quickly type a couple of off-the-hoof thoughts and comments during my lunch hour.
Yours
Catherine “overused, chiched and silly”
Well, scientific determinism was a popular and in fact close to universal philisophical doctrine among the scientific community in the 19th century but is pretty much no longer accepted these days, what with the advent of quantum mechanics as well as math logical discoveries like the halting problem and Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Applying scientific determinism to biology, the least deterministic of the natural sciences, is really, to put it bluntly, bullshit. I’m sick of people alluding to biological determinism in determining human behavior pretending that this is at all scientific.
Shorter Ilkka:
Every comment that has attempted to prove me wrong fails to take into account the fact that I am right.