The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,242

has been taken from me. I feel cheated. She was all mine before and now she’s not.” It’s not uncommon in the aftermath of a rape for a marriage to unravel.50

And finally we get to the third party to the rape: the victim. The same genetic calculus that predicts that men might sometimes be inclined to pressure women into sex, and that the victim’s kin may experience rape as an offense against themselves, also predicts that the woman herself should resist and abhor being raped.51 It is in the nature of sexual reproduction that a female should evolve to exert control over her sexuality. She should choose the time, the terms, and the partner to ensure that her offspring have the fittest, most generous, and most protective father available, and that the offspring are born at the most propitious time. As always, this reproductive spreadsheet is not something that a woman calculates, either consciously or unconsciously; nor is it a chip in her brain that robotically controls her behavior. It is just the backstory of why certain emotions evolved, in this case, the determination of a woman to control her sexuality, and the agony of violation when it has been forcibly wrested from her.52

The history of rape, then, is one in which the interests of women had been zeroed out in the implicit negotiations that shaped customs, moral codes, and laws. And our current sensibilities, in which we recognize rape as a heinous crime against the woman, represent a reweighting of those interests, mandated by a humanist mindset that grounds morality in the suffering and flourishing of sentient individuals rather than in power, tradition, or religious practice. The mindset, moreover, has been sharpened into the principle of autonomy: that people have an absolute right to their bodies, which may not be treated as a common resource to be negotiated among other interested parties. 53Our current moral understanding does not seek to balance the interests of a woman not to be raped, the interests of the men who may wish to rape her, and the interests of the husband and fathers who want to monopolize her sexuality. In an upending of the traditional valuation, the woman’s ownership of her body counts for everything, and the interests of all other claimants count for nothing. (The only tradeoff we recognize today is the interests of the accused in a criminal proceeding, since his autonomy is at stake too.) The principle of autonomy, recall, was also a linchpin in the abolition of slavery, despotism, debt bondage, and cruel punishments during the Enlightenment.

The idea, seemingly obvious today, that rape is always an atrocity against the rape victim was slow in catching on. In English law there had been some rebalancing toward the interests of victims in the late Middle Ages, but only in the 18th century did the laws settle into a form that is recognizable today.54 Not coincidentally, it was also during that era, the age of Enlightenment, that women’s rights began to be acknowledged, pretty much for the first time in history. In a 1700 essay Mary Astell took the arguments that had been leveled against despotism and slavery and extended them to the oppression of women:If absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State how comes it to be so in a Family? or if in a Family why not in a State? since no reason can be alleg’d for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other....

If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves? As they must be if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slavery?55

It took another 150 years for this argument to turn into a movement. The first wave of feminism, bookended in the United States by the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, gave women the right to vote, to serve as jurors, to hold property in marriage, to divorce, and to receive an education. But it took the second wave of feminism in the 1970s to revolutionize the treatment of rape.

Much of the credit goes to a 1975 bestseller by the scholar Susan Brownmiller called Against Our Will. Brownmiller shone a harsh light on the historical indulgence of rape in religion, law, warfare, slavery, policing, and popular culture. She presented contemporary statistics on rape and first-person accounts of what it is like to be raped