The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,240

Rape is the legitimate spoils of war.

When medieval European governments began to nationalize criminal justice, rape shifted from a tort against a husband or father to a crime against the state, which ostensibly represented the interests of women and society but in practice tilted the scales well toward the side of the accused. The fact that a false charge of rape is easy to make and hard to defend against was used to put an insuperable burden of proof onto the prosecutrix, as a rape victim was termed in many legal codes. Judges and lawyers sometimes claimed that a woman could not be forced into sex against her will because “you can’t thread a moving needle.”36 Police often treated rape as a joke, pressing the victim for pornographic details or dismissing her with wisecracks like “Who’d want to rape you?” or “A rape victim is a prostitute that didn’t get paid.”37 In court, the woman often found herself on trial together with the defendant, having to prove that she did not entice, encourage, or consent to her rapist. In many states women were not allowed to serve on juries for sex crimes because they might be “embarrassed” by the testimony. 38

The prevalence of rape in human history and the invisibility of the victim in the legal treatment of rape are incomprehensible from the vantage point of contemporary moral sensibilities. But they are all too comprehensible from the vantage point of the genetic interests that shaped human desires and sentiments over the course of evolution, before our sensibilities were shaped by Enlightenment humanism. A rape entangles three parties, each with a different set of interests: the rapist, the men who take a proprietary interest in the woman, and the woman herself. 39

Evolutionary psychologists and many radical feminists agree that rape is governed by the economics of human sexuality. As the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin put it, “A man wants what a woman has—sex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States) or own it outright (marriage in most societies).”40 What evolutionary psychology adds to this analysis is an explanation of the resource that backs these transactions. In any species in which one sex can reproduce at a faster rate than the other, the participation of the slower-reproducing sex will be a scarce resource over which the faster-reproducing sex competes.41 In mammals and many birds it is the female who reproduces more slowly, because she is committed to a lengthy period of gestation, and for mammals, lactation. Females are the more discriminating sex, and the males treat restrictions on their access to females as an obstacle to be overcome. Harassment, intimidation, and forced copulation are found in many species, including gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees.42 Among humans, the male may use coercion to get sex when certain risk factors line up: when he is violent, callous, and reckless by temperament; when he is a loser who cannot attract sexual partners by other means; when he is an outcast and has little fear of opprobrium from the community; and when he senses that the risks of punishment are low, such as during conquests and pogroms.43 Around 5 percent of rapes result in pregnancies, which suggests that rape can bring an evolutionary advantage to the rapist: whatever inclinations sometimes erupt in rape need not have been selected against in our evolutionary history, and may have been selected for.44 None of this, of course, implies that men are “born to rape,” that rapists “can’t help it,” or that rape is “natural” in the sense of inevitable or excusable. But it does help explain why rape has been a scourge in all human societies.

The second party to a rape is the woman’s family, particularly her father, brothers, and husband. The human male is unusual among mammals in that he feeds, protects, and cares for his offspring and for their mother. But this investment is genetically risky. If a man’s wife has a secret dalliance, he could be investing in another man’s child, which is a form of evolutionary suicide. Any genes that incline him to be indifferent to the risk of cuckoldry will lose out over evolutionary time to genes that incline him to be vigilant. As always, genes don’t pull the strings of behavior directly; they exert their influence by shaping the emotional repertoire of the brain, in this case, the emotion of sexual jealousy.45 Men are enraged