A Dame With A Rod

(Just a note: No, Steven Pinker is not a rape-apologist...he has the wrong ideas of the causes of rape, and I don't appreciate his labeling people who disagree with him as "delusional" and the hyperbolic language like "the madness of crowds". But obviously he isn't "pro-rape" and would like rape become a thing of the past. OK? Good.) 

Well-respected evolutionary psychologist and author Steven Pinker says,

"I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence."

He thinks rape is motivated by the natural need for males to pass along their genes, an adaptive reproductive strategy, and that seeing it as a weapon of power is false and not helpful in attempting to stamp it out.

I think that if the motivation is sex, the fact that a man is ignoring a woman's privacy and bodily integrity by forcing himself on her while she is telling him to stop is *always* an expression of power and contempt. It's a sense of entitlement to a woman's body regardless of what she wants. To be able to do this is to have complete contempt for your victim, to be completely oblivious to their cries for mercy, begging you to stop, ignoring their tears and screams.

To be able to ignore this makes you a monster.

But apparently it's sheer "madness" to think a rapist is malicious in his intent. And preposterous! And utterly delusional! That Pinker uses such strong language to disparage women who point this out is just bizarre. And where is this "mountain of evidence" that proves otherwise? Assertions aren't evidence. Women, especially those uppity ones he often disparages ("gender" feminists)have no authority to talk about rape. Too emotional I guess.

But what is the typical excuse or justification used for rape? It's rarely 'I was just really desperate for sex, sorry.' It's 'she was asking for it,' 'she's a whore' or 'slut', she 'deserved it' or she was wearing the wrong clothes or was out where she shouldn't have been.

That's about punishing women for not obeying the rules of a male-dominated society and that is definitely about power. And to a victim, rape is definitely not 'just sex,' it's violence and abuse. And that violence includes ignoring a women's humanity and right to bodily integrity. And it does make me feel threatened whenever I see a woman put through hell when she's brave enough to try to prosecute her attacker and she's dragged through the mud and told rape was just punishment for her disobedient 'sluttiness.'

So yes, it does terrorize ALL women, and very effectively.

The fact that the statistics of women and girls who are raped are high, 1 in 4, is seen by people like Pinker as proof that rape is a natural thing. But he doesn't explain the high rate of male-on-male rape, which is thought to be one in six boys/men. How is that about passing on genes?

We all have the instinct/drive to eat, we need to eat for survival. That wouldn't justify someone walking up to strangers in a restaurant and grabbing the food off their plates, would it? (I know, I hate to compare women with objects or food, but I don't know what else could get through to someone making excuses for rape other than comparing rape to stealing).


For a great rebuttal of this idea and the bad science behind it I recommend biologist Jerry Coyne and Andrew Berry's "Rape As An Adaptation?"
http://www.eurowrc.org/06.contributions/1.contrib_en/11.contrib.en.html

And Jerry Coyne's article in The New Republic "Of Vice and Men: The Fairy Tales of Evolutionary Psychology":
http://www.uic.edu/labs/igic/papers/Coyne_2000.pdf







Juliana Hatfield - A Dame With A Rod

I'm a heroine.

Another reason to love Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of those people you wish you had for a teacher when you were a kid. That amazing teacher that made any subject exciting and fascinating, even if initially you thought the class would be boring or tedious. Neil is an astrophysicist and hosts the educational science television show NOVA scienceNOW on PBS.



He is also infamous for upsetting a lot of kids (and adults) by declaring Pluto isn't a planet anymore:

Alas, Pluto, which is small and icy and orbits just beyond Neptune and has an eccentric orbit that is tipped out of the plane of the solar system, is none other than a Kuiper belt object—a leftover comet from the solar system’s formation. If Pluto’s orbit were ever altered so that it journeyed as close to the Sun as Earth, Pluto would grow a tail and look like a jumbo comet. No other planet can make this (possibly embarrassing) claim.

"I must vote—with a heavy heart—for demotion."

He got quite a bit of hate mail after that.


At the Center for Inquiry conference, “Secular Society and its Enemies” a talk featuring Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ann Druyan and Victor Stenger, one of the last questions was from a male audience member, “A Larry Summers question. What’s up with chicks in science?”

For those who don't know, Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University, claimed that the reason for the low number of women in the fields of science and math was due to our biology and not discrimination, the lack of role models and the open hostility women face when trying to break into male-dominated fields. This view is heartily endorsed by evo-psychologist and author Steven Pinker, who believes IQ tests prove women's inferiority and that reality is sexist so feminists should basically just shut up.

Neil deGrasse Tyson answered the "Larry Summers question", saying:

“I’ve never been female, but I have been black my whole life so let me perhaps offer some insight from that perspective because there are many similar social issues related to access to equal opportunity that we find in the black community as well as the community of women in a white male dominated society…

"When I look throughout my life…I got to see how the world reacted to my ambitions. All I can say is the fact that i wanted to be a scientist and astrophysicistist was, hands down, the path of most resistance through the forces of society. Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say ‘don’t you want to be an athelete?’…

"I wanted to become something outside of the paradigms of expectations of the people in power…Fortunately my depth of interest in the universe was so deep and so fueled and rich that every one of these curveballs that I was thrown and fences built in front of me and hills I had to climb, I just reached for more fuel and I kept going. Now here I am, one of the most visible scientists in the land and I want to look behind me and say ‘where are the others who might have been this?’ and they are not there. And I wonder what is the blood on the tracks that I happened to survive that others did not, simply because of the forces of society that prevented me at EVERY turn, at EVERY turn…”

“So my life experience tells me that when you don’t find blacks in the sciences, when you don’t find women in the sciences, I know that these forces are real, and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today. So before we start talking about genetic differences, we got to come up with a system where there’s equal opportunities, then we can have that conversation.”