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Charles Darwin: The rapist’s English naturalist?
Iran is uprisen, Michael Jackson is dead, and U.S. governors are taking impromptu trips to Argentina via the Appalachian Trail to cry over “two magnificent parts” of cross-continental pen-pals.
And so, inevitably, we turn to the caveman. Tell us, Newsweek‘s Sharon Begley, how might we blame ancient cave-people for all bad things that happen?
In her latest Newsweek piece, Begley asks whether we can blame bad human behavior like raping and murdering on our caveman ancestors. The answer is yes, we can—-though we will remain rapists and murderers. We will, however, be rapists and murderers with degrees in “evolutionary psychology,” or as I like to call it: “another excuse for rapin’ that ain’t gonna hold up in court.”
Rapists exist today, you see, because many, many moons ago, a cave-man met several cave-women whom he liked very, very, much. The cave-women didn’t particularly care for him, however, so he cave-raped them, all of them, thus increasing the likelihood of his cave-rape genes surviving in modern man. We call these men “evolutionarily fit.”
The cave-men who only got cave-boners for consensual cave-sex, however, spread their cave-seed to fewer cave-women, thus passing fewer consensual sex genes unto modern man. We call these men “pussies.”
This evolutionary psychology business is a win-win for rapists: They can blame old Ooog for their non-consensual trysts, while taking comfort in the fact that their rapiness is just the natural result of evolutionary victory. Begley’s piece reveals evolutionary psychology to be a racket. But that’s not gonna stop Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I from taking a trip down Paleolithic lane—-a simpler time, when rape was just natural, man, and caves weren’t equipped with wireless Internet connections for women to bitch about why rape is so terrible and we should, like, try to figure out how to make it stop. Lets go!
SADY: hello!
AMANDA: hi!
SADY: i am very excited to discuss caveman times with you today. scientifically, of course! with caveman science! evolutionary psychology has always been my favorite bullshit science because it just sounds like some creepy guy going, “i’m just WIRED this way” over and over and over.
AMANDA: allow me to suppress my rape gene in order to converse with you for several minutes about all of our rape genes. ahem, yes, evolutionary psychology. it’s interesting how in these debates there seems to be a tendency for people to figure out what IS and then justify why what already IS is inevitable (and/or good). people rape? must be because people were so rapey in the past, and now there’s just nothing we can do about it. evo psych makes everything so easy!
SADY: right: although, what IS, is predicated very much on stereotypes. like, one part of the article i found fascinating is the idea that rape is actually disastrous in a small community: the “rape” gene is actually a “get beat up and not given food by your fellow tribespeople and also someone might kill your rape baby which defeats the whole procreative rape-gene-spreading thing” gene. or, the idea that male jealousy is somehow intrinsically different from female jealousy and that is why dudes kill “unfaithful” mates. basically, boiling everything down to reproduction entirely misses the point of everything else people have to do to survive. not being known as a dangerous killer or other threat, in a community as small as these very primitive ones we’re talking about, is a good survival tactic. well, “primitive” is a bad word for it, since they’re using data from contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures to test these points.
AMANDA: sure, and one thing the article doesn’t talk about is in nowaday-land, how many women are actually stopping reproductive function entirely by sticking devices in their vaginas and medicine in their bodies. that’s just one example where science can help defeat science when our evolutionary history doesn’t really fit our needs right now.
SADY: right? exactly! but the whole appeal of the field is that it calls back to One True Natural Human Experience, before the dag-blasted condoms came to take it all away. and it seems – by sheer magical coincidence! – to be a version of True Humanity in which women ought to be sexy, men ought to be powerful, and violence against women makes you happier and more successful. it’s kind of ricockulous to project all that back onto Caveman Times, when the fact is that those attitudes are clearly part of our culture NOW, but if you want to run with Fred Flintstone as archetype of undiluted manliness, go on ahead.
AMANDA: and that’s why men rape, because at one point, not every man raped, and those men died out because they were PUSSIES.
SADY: CORRECT. Also, men of ye olden days KILLED their stepchildren. do you hear me, timmy? there was none of this “time-out” crap back when men were men!
AMANDA: it’s difficult for me to see “rapist” as a characteristic born unto man in any real sense
is “rapist” the magical quality that helps you understand that “no” means “yes”?
or is “rapist” the magical quality that helps you not care, specifically, whether another person wants to have sex with you or not?
SADY: “rapist” is all of that, and more! but, more importantly, “rapist,” in this theory, is the MAGICAL GENETIC GETAWAY CAR that allows you to say YOU didn’t do it. it was your pesky genes! clamoring for evolutionary dominance! whereas, as the article notes, being a rapist in a small community where that’s not tolerated actually has more repercussions than being a rapist in a LARGE community where it’s hard to bring rapists to justice. i mean. i think whether you’re a rapist might have a lot to do with how rape is received within your culture.
AMANDA: what is this “culture”? that’s an interesting point, especially when we’re talking about “date rape” or the dreaded (aiee) “grey rape” scenarios—-people tend to dislike these terms because they make some forms of rape seem less “serious” than others. but they also, i think, are an attempt to push ACTUAL RAPISTS into thinking of their behavior as rape. when, in the past, many people haven’t considered pass-out scenarios as rape at all. so if you can’t even think of something as rape, you don’t have to think of yourself as a rapist, and that’s really convenient!
SADY: right. because “no” was the criteria, not the absence of “yes.”
AMANDA: yes but Sady, we were BORN with the “no means no” gene. that’s the only way we are able to define rape, as a result.
SADY: oh, right! i mean: how many other “genes” are we born with? is there a bukkake “gene?” is there a blow-job “gene?” is the fact that i find the naked picture of sascha baron cohen on the cover of GQ at once attractive and offensive attributable to a “gene?”
because i’d really like an explanation of that which in no way reflects upon my psyche.
AMANDA: it’s natural. can we go back to the beginning for one second? what do you make of the headline of this piece: “Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?” a little bit of a one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other trick going on there, Newsweek!
SADY: I like the equation of the last item on the list to the first two! Raping. Murdering. CASUAL SEX. All evil! I also like the fact that these “genetic” explanations for sex do nothing to explain people having sex for fun and profit. it’s all procreation, all the time!
AMANDA: how did these fornicators not get weeded out?
SADY: yeah, but. you will notice. the slant of these theories is that male sexuality is a positive, ALWAYS, and female sexuality, if it even exists, is a negative. and there’s some beeswax about how ladies have to be “picky” to ensure that they only mate with “the best genetic material,” because apparently our vaginas are all hitler, but dudes just have to stick it into ladies as often as possible. no concerns about genetic fitness affect them! so, the headline should really read, Why Do Dudes Rape, Murder, And Sleep Around, Because Ladies Are All Waiting For Their Genetic Prince Charming And Therefore Don’t Do Any Of The Above, Except Sometimes They Do?
AMANDA: right. and the answer is, as this story suggests, a lot of these scientists are themselves just kind of fucking weirdos.
SADY: right. i liked the part where the scientists responded to critiques of their work with accusations of MARXISM. “i believe your data to be faulty.” “COMMUNIST!” that is what science is all about, right there.
AMANDA: also, that some of these quotes were taken from a scientist bbq.
SADY: oh, lord. why didn’t they film the scientist bbq? THAT, i would pay to see.