Origin of the Specious

Male jealousy is about sex; female jealousy is about the "risk of losing economic and material resources to a female competitor."

To demonstrate her choosiness, a woman sometimes appears reluctant to have sex, even with an attractive man. This "may increase the man's perception of her value in terms of paternity reliability," the authors write -- that is, the man knows if he mates with her, the children she bears will be his -- "and thus may result in her eventually getting more material benefits...If a woman's display of reluctance is truly effective, a man who achieves copulation with her will perceive that he achieved it by force."

At one point, the authors quote a pair of biologists who speculate that a woman's struggles with her rapist may have some evolutionary benefit, allowing only the fittest rapists to actually complete the act. "As in the case of the dung fly," they muse, "it is conceivable that in the past, women who filtered potential rapists by resisting them bore sons who turned out to be adept at raping and thus may have had more grandchildren than passive females." After a full page of discussion, however, they concede that this is unlikely.

Behavior is notoriously difficult to quantify, and inclinations even more so. Thornhill and Palmer present data in support of some of their assertions; others are simply quoted as generally accepted; still others are defined as intuitions requiring further research. Taken together, this cascade of fact, near-fact and hunch presents a worldview oddly reminiscent of the one that prevailed in the United States through the first five or six decades of the century, when men were seen as utterly at the mercy of physical urges, women as materialistic, teasing and coy, and rape as more amusing than criminal.

Craig Palmer is adamant that his book does not justify rape. "Because we say rape is part of the natural world, people think we're saying it's good," he comments. "Say we find there's a genetic influence on a terrible disease? Does that imply that the disease is not as bad as we say it is?

"There's also the idea we're saying rape is genetically determined. We go to great lengths in saying all behaviors in living things are the result of genes interacting with the environment. We can prevent rape by changing things in the environment."

Some of the criticism of A Natural History of Rape (including Barbara Ehrenreich's in Time) does distort the authors' premise. For example, Palmer and Thornhill don't say that "ordinary fellows" are most inclined to rape; instead, it's the losers and outsiders unable to attract women. Nor do they suggest rape is an efficient mechanism. It's dangerous for the male, devastating for the female, and seldom produces children. But natural selection advances the interests of the individual, not the group, they claim (this, too, is disputed by some biologists and anthropologists). So, while still being harmful to society at large, rape may benefit the individual rapist by increasing his chance of siring children from zero to some small percent.

Because rape is so non-specific -- although most victims are women of childbearing age, presumably not all of them are ovulating; rapists also attack children, boys, men, older women and the occasional chicken or sheep -- the authors disagree as to whether rape is actually selected for in Darwinian terms or is just a by-product of men's biologically determined promiscuity.

"There's abundant evidence that many males are not overly discriminating when it comes to what things in the environment they'll use for sexual stimulation," Palmer notes.

But Sauther disagrees. "I get so tired of hearing that males are these sex machines, looking to copulate with just about anything," she says. "Males make choices as well. You look at non-human primates: Males don't mate with just every female, and they certainly don't show much interest in females that are not interested in them. Baboons -- if a female acts like she doesn't want to mate with him, he's not going to bother with her. He'll find somebody who's interested in him. He ensures multiple copulations that way, a better chance of siring an infant."

The ramifications of the theories espoused in A Natural History of Rape go far beyond academia. Palmer believes that most rape-prevention programs fail because they are shaped by feminist ideology rather than scientific truth. Feminists stress that rape is a crime of violence, not sex. And some, he says, suggest that it is a learned, rather than natural, behavior.