Rape

“Alone, biological explanations will not solve social problems because people cannot change their evolutionary history. However, a conceptualization of biological influences not as hardwiring but as potential pathways that are shaped by the environment can lead to research with practical implications. Viewing men as inherently rapacious is hopeless. On the other hand, knowing how harsh environments, lack of secure attachments; or social learning favor the development of promiscuous male sexuality sets a prevention agenda.” Mary P. Koss “Evolutionary Models of Why Men Rape” “Evolution, Gender and Rape” 2003

“The evolutionary approach holds that no behavior is inevitable. Only by understanding this point can we hope to understand how human mediated alterations in the developmental environment can produce desirable behavioral changes. Knowledge about evolution is required if we are ever to escape from what Symons (1979, p. 313) called “the nightmare of the past.” With respect to rape, the power of the evolutionary approach lies in its ability to identify environmental changes that may remove cues that activate the evolved mechanisms which underlie rape behavior.” Thornhill and Palmer “A Natural History of Rape” 2000

Is Rape Natural?

Popular science books like “The Naked Ape“, “The Bell Curve”, “A Natural History of Rape” etc. are published regularly and once in awhile they attract a lot of attention and generate large volumes published to debunk them. Discussion of TBC and its debunkers occurs in other sections of this book as appropriate. Rape, however, is an important issue to discuss in the context of Women’s Issues. Rape is one of the most abused words in the English language today. The use of Rape has become so general and the number of acts described as Rape so encompassing that not only can you make a compelling logical case that there are no conceivable circumstances where it is legal for men to have sex with women in the US today, you can make a compelling logical case that there has never been an act of consensual sex in the history of the world since the first incidence of sex in the evolution of life.

This problem with words may be emphasized by reading the two quotes at the top of this page. It would appear that both authors are in complete agreement with each other. Both recognize the usefulness of biological explanations in the evolution of behaviors and of changes in the environment to control or prevent those behaviors. However, the two quotes above are formally in complete disagreement with each other. Each author is convinced that the other author is a pseudo-scientific religious nutcase spreading their own version of the divine Gospel. Thornhill and Palmer launched a frontal assault on many tenets of the feminist social sciences in their book on Rape. This assault was replied to by a number of authors in the responding volley “Evolution, Gender and Rape”.

The two quotes above are interesting in another way. The top quote appears to weight the empirical evidence approach more heavily. It emphasizes factual knowledge of how environment may shape the rape behavior in men. The second quote appears to emphasize theory as the guiding light which will illuminate which factual information is relevant and will really help identify the causes and thus provide a solution to the problem. This is a shift of emphasis only. The two quotes still remain essentially in perfect agreement with each other. Yet, we are passionately assured that they are in complete 100% disagreement with each other. Obviously these words mean very different things to the people using them, or the people using them assume that the other side doesn’t really mean what they are saying.

I read Thornhill and Palmer first and then read Evolution, Gender and Sex. My initial reaction to Thornhill and Palmer was positive. They seemed to have the right ideas and the right approach, but as I read the entire book I found myself unable to accept a lot of what they asserted as valid. After recognizing the importance of environment, they dismissed culture as merely a religious construct something which did not exist. Culture is very important. Culture when conceived as the be all and end all of all causes in human behavior may be considered accurately to be a religious construct, but rejecting this extreme view of Culture does not in any way justify rejecting Culture itself as existing. I found as I read Gender that I was not alone in this conclusion.

“There is another literature on the relations between human culture/psychology and genetics in evolutionary biology, oddly absent from Thornhill and Palmers book. Thornhill and Palmer ignore the careful, quantitative and theoretical work that has been doen on the co-evolution of genes and culture (Boyd and Richardson 1985; CavalliSforza and Feldman 1978; 1981; Durham 1991; Laland, Odling- Smee and Feldman 1996, 2000 Lewontin 1982) These authors concentrate on the mutual effects that genes and culture have had and can have on human evolution. Unlike Thornhill and Palmer, they do not see cultural and biological explanations as on the same level of experience, nor do they attempt to reduce one to the other.” Elisabeth A. Lloyd “Violence against Science” “Evolution Gender and Rape”

Thornhill and Palmer commit a number of glaring errors which are apparent to someone even cursorily familiar with comparative anthropology and primate studies. They grotesquely underestimate the sexual drive and potential promiscuity of the primate female. They fail to recognize that sexual fidelity is not a universal requirement of marriage throughout human cultures. They deny any status, power, or dominance element in rape, not so much as denying that it exists at all but by blasting the idea of it as the only cause of rape and focusing only on an explanation of rape in terms of reproductive behaviors. Based on these errors they then propose some evolutionarily determined behavioral mechanisms which really cannot be conceived to exist.

Their discussion of rape trauma posits two distinct causes of pain to the victim. One the interference with her control of her reproductive potential and the second that the rape will make her appear promiscuous and therefore deny her the economic support of her mate. The first of these might plausibly be considered evolutionary in origin. The second must be attributed to cultural norms.

The primate female is notoriously promiscuous in many societies human as well as ape. She is caught between an evolutionary rock and a biological hard place. On the one hand she must choose the best father(s) for her child(ren). On the other hand her reproductive potential is strongly limited by time and resources and if she is too choosy she cannot maximize her reproduction. One of these mandates she be choosy the other mandates she mate whenever she is sexually receptive. There is a tradeoff here in which promiscuity frequently wins out over choosiness as the best evolutionary choice.

How much difference does it really make for a Chimpanzee female in a patrilineal tribal group which male fathers her child? They are all relatively closely related. Lions and Gorillas and other natural hazards have pretty well eliminated the real losers. Any phenotypal problems they may exhibit are as likely to be the result of environmental problems as any real genetic defects. Why should she care which one she mates with? How much impact, in the long run, will her being choosy actually have on her offspring’s viability?

In this scenario not much. Promiscuous sexuality may be her best option. The fact that a lot of primate females seem to show little or no choosiness in their sexuality and to regularly have sex with virtually all the males around them suggests that sexual fidelity is not the driving evolutionarily programmed adaptive mechanism which Thornhill and Palmer make it out to be.

The idea that rape trauma associated with fear of how their mate will see them is evolutionary in origin is difficult to credit. You can suggest that it derives from an evolutionary mechanism which makes them generally sensitive to their social status and acceptance and an ability to learn what behavior their culture accepts and a fear of offending those standards. There is increasing scientific evidence for such a physically measurable source of psychological pain related to social status.

Here we have scientific evidence clearly showing a physical source for the pain felt from social failure, loss of status, and ostracism. It takes no great leap to go from exclusion in a game to fear of social ostracism or status loss due to rape as a source of real physical pain and trauma.

This is far removed from the explanation which Thornhill and Palmer propose. They propose that there is a direct evolutionarily determined mechanism which makes women feel traumatized by being perceived as possibly unfaithful. After recognizing formally the importance of environment in shaping behavior they proceed to fairly grotesquely overextend the role of evolution in shaping very specific and obviously culturally specific sources of trauma for the rape victim. They extend it so far, in fact, that environment, especially cultural and social environment has no role in the reasons for the trauma which a woman feels when raped.

So, Thornhill and Palmer are guilty of overextending their evolutionary theory to account for things which it cannot even remotely plausibly account for. This is the problem with the theory based approach, the elegance of a theory can be so seductive that it leads you to ignore relevant facts. This is why Aristotle remained so popular so long after Galileo factually refuted him. Aristotle’s description of the Heavens was nothing if not elegant. Evolutionary theory has a strong power to seduce people as well. It also has a long history of seducing people into grievous errors based on misunderstanding and oversimplification. When this happens, evolutionary theory itself become a pseudo-religion or faith based belief system. Many of the essays opposing Thornhill and Palmer are based on a general concern about ihis occurring again.

The book “Evolution, Gender and Rape” is devoted to debunking Thornhill and Palmer. The arguments raised against them come from a number of sources. Some ideologically feminist and as much based on pseudo-science as the more extreme conclusions in Thornhill and Palmer, others more or less ideologically based in political correctness but more fact based and realistic. (Which means naturally more in agreement with my own criticisms of Thornhill and Palmer.) There are many essays from many political ideologies in this book. You cannot group them together as a whole in any meaningful sense. If this book proves anything it proves that politics makes strange bedfellows. Feminist essays suggestive of the condemnation of marriage as the financial slavery of woman occur side by side with essays touting the importance of the Father and a stable marriage environment to the growth and development of children. The book “Evolution, Gender, and Rape” cannot be right, because is represents so many different viewpoints. If one author is right about why Thornhill and Palmer are wrong, then another author must be wrong about why Thornhill and Palmer are wrong. In this tempest of warring publications you are faced with a situation akin to the religious wars of Reformation Europe where Catholics and Protestants joyfully burnt each other at the stake. Today we may entertain a reasonable doubt about either side in those wars being actually right, and we must entertain a similar doubt about the sides in this issue. The idea that either Thornhill and Palmer or the authors Evolution, Gender and Rape are right is not really credible. While both sides may possess some elements of truth in their presentations and ideas, neither can possibly be right.

Possibly the worst single essay in the book is the one I quoted above by Ms. Koss. Among many other irrational errors she attempts to debunk Thornhill and Palmer’s thesis that the majority of women raped are sexually attractive because of their fertility by pointing out that 32% of them are between the ages of 12 and 17. Throughout most of history almost universally in all early civilizations girls were married off between the ages of 12 and 17 and in many if not most of them girls not married by 15 were considered to be old maids too sexually unattractive to have a decent chance of catching a man. This is true of Rome, Athens, and Renaissance Italy. Girls from the age of 12 to 17 are not biologically speaking children any longer. They are legally children in the US, but their legal status is irrelevant to the biological issue of their appropriateness as candidates for impregnation or there sexual attractiveness. With enemies like Ms. Koss, basing their arguments entirely on politically correct “facts” and apparently feeling that politically correct “facts” are more real than scientific facts, Thornhill and Palmer do not need friends. Another issue in which the ‘facts’ which Ms. Koss want to use to debunk Thornhill and Palmer are in serious professional scientific question is the trauma associated with pedophilia. That issue is addressed more at length in the section of this book on “Bogeymen and Witchhunters”.

Let us take another look at how Thornhill and Palmer claim they differfundamentally, theoretically, from their opponents.

What does history teach us about this issue. Historically the more advanced periods of civilization are accompanied by the failure, sometimes the catastrophic failure of human reproduction.

This means that whatever genetic drives humans have that cause them to reproduce the species systematically break down and fail when the environment changes x amount in a given direction which it consistently does in more advanced Civilizations. By examining how society changes, and how the breakdown in reproduction occurs, it is possible to describe the specific area of breakdown and thereby to isolate and describe the specific mechanisms which guarantee reproduction in nature.

Civilization provides greater freedom of behavior to its Citizens. Greater freedom to not work more opportunity to play, and it always produces greater ability to prevent childbirth as a consequence of sex. Civilization allows sex without children. It also produces a greater isolation from nature and therefore it produces a greater isolation from direct knowledge of the process of reproduction in nature. When these changes happen, sufficient women consistently choose to not have children, or to have only one child, or to raise only one child, to produce a net population decrease. This happened in Classical Greece, in Rome, in all the Roman provinces before they were conquered by Barbarians, and it is happening today throughout the developed world. Population loss is a major problem facing all the nations of the European Union. The US population would have been declining for decades without immigration. There are various estimates of this issue, some have radical population loss, some have a steady state population developing, and others manage to propose some population increase, but the problem is in general well known.

We know that whatever behavioral drives evolution provided people with to ensure propagation of the species break and fail when the environment provides easy fertility control, or failing that accepts abortion and infanticide as legitimate means of disposing of unwanted children. It is apparent therefore that there is no drive to have children. The process of having children must be accomplished by another drive.

Humans have a drive to have sex, but they do not possess a drive to have children. Many of you will disagree with this. You will say, quite rightly, that you know many people who desperately want to have children. This is true, but what is the origin of this desire. It is obviously pretty weak, because it just doesn’t work to maintain population when people can have sex without having children.

Human females do have a maternal instinct. This instinct is triggered by the presence of an infant. The mechanisms nature have provided humanity with to ensure propagation are twofold. A drive to have sex and a drive to love and take care of children once they are present. Sex produces the child and then the maternal instinct takes over.

Can a woman take care of a child if it is not in her physical presence? If a woman cannot take care of a child when it is not in her physical care, then she must have an instinctive drive to keep it where she can care for it. Women in order to take care of children must become possessive of children. This possessiveness and desire to possess a child are triggered by the physical presence of a child. A woman who sees a child will want a child. Virtually everyone who has ever been in a family with children and in a society where the presence of children is common will be nodding their heads here.

Civilization reduces the frequency of this stimulus in the daily life of young women. Women are not as closely integrated in matrilineal groups where the young females are constantly exposed to the infants of other women and allowed sometimes to share in care-giving activities. Birth rate drops and thus the number of children present to stimulate this response is lower. This process becomes circular, reinforcing itself until negative population growth ensues. This has happened over and over in history.

This illustrates the fairly clumsy and specific nature of human instinctive behaviors in this area. History suggests, in this instance at least, separate and distinct behavioral modules which in nature accomplished a more general task but which fail to interlock properly and accomplish that task in another environment. They are no more sophisticated than they had to be in the EEA to get the job done, and they fail, sometimes catastrophically when the current environment is sufficiently different from the EEA to produce such a failure.

All of this has taken us far afield from the question of whether rape is natural or not. The discussion is not meaningless or irrelevant, because the controversy is not really about whether or not rape is natural. The controversy and in general all the arguments are about what happens in society if rape is called natural.

It is all the Woman’s Fault

That is what the idea of rape being natural is supposed to mean by Feminists. It echoes the traditional masculine view that women were asking for it. That if the woman had dressed differently acted differently or not teased the man, then it would not have happened. Feminists are afraid that if rape is called natural and the result of mans natural urge to have sex then the onus for being raped will once more fall on the woman. Women who are raped will be told that they should have acted differently, or not done whatever they did to put themselves into a position where they might be raped. Indeed, in Chapter 10, Barriers of their book, Thornhill and Palmer propose exactly this kind of solution to help prevent rape.

The feminist position that rape is not about sex but only about power, status, domination, and the degradation of the person raped is all about denying that rape is natural. Sex is natural, everyone has a sex drive, if rape is about sex, then maybe if women dressed in a less sexy manner, they might be less likely to be raped. Thornhill and Palmer attack this feminist position with the literary equivalent of an armored assault. One of the results of this is that in virtually every essay in “Evolution, Gender and Rape” the author of that essay states in no uncertain terms that she or he, (most authors are feminist dialecticians) never maintained that rape was only about power or that rape did not have anything at all to do with sex. At most, rape is mostly about power and dominance and only a little bit about sex.

These positions expressed by feminist ‘scientists’ in this book is at variance with what is still generally being taught about rape throughout the US.

This is the official party line. Rape has nothing to do with sex. It is important to understand that sex is not the motive. Rape is only about power. The entire purpose of rape is to abuse and degrade the victim so the rapist can feel powerful. The above cites generally come from College rape centers and police websites with rape counseling information. Let us compare these strong and certain words being dinned into the ears of the youth of America with unanimity and absolutely no dissent allowed to be voiced to what Feminists themselves felt confident enough to say when Thornhill and Palmer challenged them about it. With the exception of only a few fanatic FemiNazis the majority of authors in “Evolution, Gender, and Rape” carefully distance themselves from the idea that rape is only about power, and control.

One thing that Thornhill and Palmer’s book has done is produce a volume in which the consensus of scientific opinion unites in agreeing that the motives for rape are mixed. Rape is about both sex and the desire to dominate or humiliate. Motives vary from incident to incident. In some instances rape is mostly about sex, domination and humiliation are accidental byproducts and not the intent of the rapist, in other instances rape is almost entirely about power and humiliation the sex itself is incidental. This description of the motives for rape is very different from the description of rape which is being put out as the TRUTH in virtually every rape crisis and prevention center in the US. “Evolution, Gender and Rape” accidentally includes a general admission that FemiNazis who dominate the public policy discussion of rape in this country are lying to the people of the US about what rape is and how and why it occurs.

Thornhill and Palmer have a right to doubt that public policy rape prevention decisions based on a lie about why rape occurs will actually prevent rape. This does not mean that their proposals to prevent rape are correct, but it suggests that the other sides proposals are at least equally wrong.

Why are we being lied to about rape? The idea that rape is sexually motivated suggests that the woman stimulated sexual desire in the man. If the woman has any control over her ability to stimulate sexual desire in a man, then it becomes possible to argue that the rape was the woman’s fault. If rape can sometimes be partially the woman’s fault then prosecution of rapists becomes more difficult. The rape prevention policies in the US are not based on any attempt to prevent rape. They are based on a desire to make prosecution of rapists easier. This may indirectly help to reduce rapes by making punishment of rape more certain, but it is not really likely to ever lead to an accurate analysis of real societal causes of rape. Which means that it is not likely to ever lead to any policies which actually address the root causes of rape and prevent the occurrence of rape on a societal level.

How do you empower women? How do you empower women to prevent rape? How do you help women to avoid being raped? FemiNazi rhetoric is superficially about empowering women. FemiNazi rhetoric maintains that the woman has no causal input to the issue of being raped. Regardless of anything which a woman does she is just as likely to be raped as any other woman. According to FemiNazi rhetoric, the sexual attractiveness of a woman has nothing to do with her chances of being raped. The places a woman frequents has nothing to do with her chances of being raped. The social choices a woman makes have nothing to do with her chances of being raped. Indeed, according to FemiNazi rhetoric, no woman can take any actions in her day to day life which will in any way change the probability of her being raped. According to FemiNazi dialectic, it is impossible to empower women to avoid being raped by education about rape, because rape just happens as a result of androcentric patriarchal dogmas which are so widespread in society that women can do nothing individually to change their chances of being raped. This comes down to the issue of responsibility. If women can do something to avoid being raped, and they do not do it they may be held responsible for being raped. Therefore, women must be completely helpless and unable to take any steps in the way they dress, the way they act, and the places they frequent to avoid being raped. The fear that courts may hold women responsible for being raped has led to a dialectic which makes it impossible to empower women to avoid rape by changes in their daily behaviors.

Thornhill and Palmer make an attempt to empower women in their book. They suggest that women have some power to influence their chances of being raped by making conscious decisions about how they dress, what people they spend time with, and the places they go.

According to FemiNazi rhetoric, a woman who wears a wide belt with no panties instead of a skirt, and goes to the Bikers from Hell Fight Club and Bar, and sits on the pool table, spreads her legs wide and says, look but don’t touch has no greater chance of being raped than a woman who goes to the Mojave desert, dresses in baggy clothes and spends her life studying the water storage mechanisms of desert organisms.

There is something unrealistic about this point of view. It is possibly morally correct in a perfect society to suggest that in both these circumstances when a woman says no, no means no, but to suggest that it is a scientific fact in order to justify this ideological agenda is a lie.

What empowers women more? Saying that no matter what you do, no matter how you act, you are just as likely to be raped, or saying if you change this or that in your daily choices you reduce the chances of being raped.

Women like to believe that they can turn men on. There is a multi-billion dollar industry in this country based on this. Women spend billions of dollars every year on clothes, perfumes, lingerie, sex aids, and other article in the hope that they can turn men on when they want to. This implies that they have some influence on when and how they turn men on. At least women like to think they do.

The amount of control that women have over men is limited. The idea that a woman can make choices about which men they turn on and which they don’t is seriously open to question. In the absence of women, men rape men. In the absence of women or men, men masturbate with a wide variety of objects. It is clear that no action a woman can take can prevent them from stimulating sexual desire in some men some of the time.

Still, women do have some power in the choices they make in their daily lives which can influence the chances of being raped. Thornhill and Palmer suffer some of their greatest criticism because they suggest that avoiding situations and behaviors likely to increase the chance of rape may decrease the chance of rape. The attempt Thornhill and Palmer make to empower women to take precautions in their daily lives to avoid rape is one of the primary sources of their criticism by feminists. The reason is that if women can take precautions to avoid rape, then to some degree, being raped may be construed as their responsibility.

FemiNazi rhetoric makes women powerless to do anything to avoid being raped. Power and responsibility are irrevocably tied together in any functional system. In order to ensure that women can never be suggested to have done anything which makes them even partially responsible for being raped, FemiNazi rhetoric demands that women be totally powerless to take any precautions to prevent being raped. So, ironically, Thornhill and Palmer’s attempt to empower women in their own lives as individuals to avoid being raped has suffered some of the most severe criticism from advocates of FemiNazi Dialectic.

There is room for realistic discussion of how women can choose to act to avoid being raped along the lines discussed by Thornhill and Palmer. FemiNazi Dialectic is too extreme when it comes to these issues. It suggests that women should not take the same common sense precautions to avoid being raped that men take to avoid being mugged. In the name of freedom of speech, movement and assembly they suggest that women should never consider the possibility that this or that course of action might increase the chances of their being raped.

Foolishness, and foolish actions, which lead to a man being mugged may lead people to shake their heads at his stupidity, which he deserves, but it does not make mugging less of a crime. Similarly, foolishness on the part of a woman may be implicated in creating the circumstances under which she was raped, this does not make rape less of a crime. On the other hand, society should not endorse foolishness as model behavior. A woman who is raped because of her own stupidity, poor judgment, or arrogance sets a bad example for others. Just as a man who insists on behaving foolishly, and walks through a bad neighborhood flashing big wads of cash sets an example of foolish macho arrogance. She deserves less sympathy and respect than a woman who was raped without contributing to the likelihood of the rapes occurrence by her own behavior. Feminists will be outraged by this denial of sympathy to the stupid, arrogant, or immature. They can be outraged all they want to.

The fundamental principle of natural law underlying all the freedoms, liberties, and rights of the American people is the absolute requirement that the Social Contract maintain a strong relationship between action and result. This has been cited to justify condemning the wealthy as a class, to justify a Constitutional right to a livable minimum wage, and in most other essays in this book. It has been tied to the failure of the USSR as a system and discussed in why Slavery is an economic crime as well as a moral abomination. Violation of this principle has been cited as a possible environmental cause of schizophrenia, and tied to the failure or inefficiency of various societies throughout history at various points in this book. It applies to rape as well.

Saying that the circumstances and behaviors of a woman that may have contributed to her being raped cannot be taken into account in societies evaluation of the event means that discussion of how a woman can avoid being raped is forbidden by society. Discussion of how to avoid being raped inevitably leads to the consideration of the question of how a woman got raped so that others may avoid it in the future. Thus, to empower women to avoid rape it is necessary in some degree to judge the behaviors of women who are raped in context of their contribution to the occurrence. Women who are raped to a large degree due to their own stupidity should be considered to be idiots, just as men who are beaten or mugged due to their own stupidity should be considered to be idiots. This does not change the legal status of assault and battery, mugging or rape. A crime remains a crime even when you recognize that an idiot is still an idiot.

Cock Teasers

The words above should arouse a welcome cry of hysterical outrage and frenzied insanity from the FemiNazi Dialecticians. Cock Teasing is traditionally a justification for rape. It is the most perfect ‘she was asking for it’ defense. As such it should excite such frenzied outrage on the part of the FemiNazis that their reason will be temporarily suspended and they will be incapable of understanding anything in this section.

The Cock Teaser I knew best and remember most clearly was one of my two lesbian roommates. Let us call them A and B. A was a very nice person, I had actually tried to put some moves on her before I learned she was a lesbian. She was kinda chunky in the build, and dressed in jeans and tees, but there was just something about her I liked. Her partner B was slimmer and dressed to be more attractive but never really appealed to me.

I lived with these two women for several months. I drove them around town on shopping errands and stuff, shared housework with them, and got to know them both fairly well. Both had reasons for being lesbian, and the reasons seemed not so much a matter of sexual orientation as a matter of bad experiences of men in the past. B had the most dramatic story of abuse. She came from one of the poor southern states where the po’ whites are much poorer and have lower annual incomes than inner city blacks. Her father used to beat her mother regularly, after which her mother and father would go into their bedroom. Then the mother would come out, smile at the children and say that everything was alright now. One day B’s father came home, and beat the crap out of her. Then as usual B’s father and mother went into their bedroom. Then as usual B’s mother came out and told the children that everything was alright now.

B was the Cock Teaser in the couple. She would vamp a man, flirt with him, and then invite A over to cuddle just to watch his face fall. She got off on emotionally abusing men in this way. A person who grows up in an abusive environment, as B did is likely to become an abuser herself. None of this is surprising or radical, it is the very stuff and fabric of common discussions on these subjects.

A few weeks before I was transferred overseas for a tour of duty, A came to me in private. She was becoming increasingly afraid of B’s. B’s abusive behavior was apparently not limited to men. She was becoming increasingly emotionally abusive to A, and A was afraid that it would escalate into physical abuse.

I left A the revolver an S&W model 27, I used to carry as a voluntary police officer just in case she needed to defend herself. By the time I returned from my overseas tour, they had broken up and I never saw either of them again.

There is nothing particularly radical about this story. Psychological abuse escalates into physical abuse, etc. The only thing is that it involves two lesbians, and the pattern of abuse includes cockteasing.

An abuser is an abuser. A person who engages in the gratuitous emotional abuse of men will also abuse women. In this case a pattern of cock teasing escalated into woman beating. Abuse is not a one way street. A person who abuses men is just as much an abuser as a person who abuses women. The psychological abuse of men is just as much real abuse as the psychological abuse of women. Given the opportunity, a woman who abuses men psychologically may well escalate into the physical rape and abuse of women. Abuse is abuse is abuse.

According to the FemiNazi Dialectic of rape, all forms of abuse are precursors to rape and should be classified and prosecuted as rape. Sexual innuendo at the office, obscene phone calls, indecent exposure are all the same as rape. They are the use of sex as a weapon to hurt another person. So is cock teasing. If we apply the principles of FemiNazism to women as well as men, then all cock teasers should be sent to jail as serial rapists. At the very least cock teasing should be as much of a criminal offense as making obscene phone calls.

Abuse is almost never a one way street. The single thing most likely to be in the history of a rape victim, is a prior history of being a rape victim. People who have been abused tend to incorporate behaviors which are abusive to others and behaviors which invite abuse as well. The combination of abusing others and inviting abuse contributes to being abused.

While many victims of this sort of behavior are randomly encountered by the abuser, as most of the men abused by my cock teasing lesbian roommate were, and deserve nothing but the sympathy of society, in many cases the only real solution to the situation will be to look at the behavior of the victim as well. You cannot address the problems of the use of sex as a tool for the psychological abuse of Citizens by looking at only men. You have to look at the entire picture.

The FemiNazi Dialectic of Rape

FemiNazis are as much a product of an androcentric patriarchal system as anyone else in America and their dialectic of rape demonstrates subconscious acceptance of the stereotype of men being inherently and naturally superior to women because men are just more mature, more rational, more responsible by nature than women are.

According to FemiNazi dialectic, if a woman agrees to have sex with a man because of her concerns of the consequences of not having sex with him then she has been raped. If she has sex with him to cement the relationship and keep him from wanting to leave she has been raped. If she has sex with him to make up after a fight, to even things out and make a better atmosphere, she has been raped. Similarly if a man has sex with a woman when her judgment is impaired in any way, then he has raped the woman.

When carried to their logical extremes, these two definitions of rape include all possible reasons why a woman might choose to have sex with a man. If a woman chooses to have sex with a man on the basis of emotional impulses without consideration of the future, then her judgment is clearly impaired and the man is guilty of raping her. If she considers the sex act and its consequences in the future then she is having sex out of concern for those consequences, she has been coerced by concern for future consequences into having sex and the man is guilty of rape.

You might maintain that reasonable people would never carry these definitions to such an extreme that all sex between men and women is implicitly illegal. FemiNazis are not reasonable people and their vocal condemnation of ‘rape’ has frequently carried these definitions to either logical extreme so that indeed, it is theoretically impossible for a woman to ever consent to have sex with a man. Whenever a woman cries rape, these definitions are pulled out, and they are extended as far as necessary to classify whatever happened as rape. This has happened often enough, and been treated as legitimate enough in enough legal cases that it is no longer theoretically legal, under any conceivable circumstances for a man to have sex with a woman in the US.

This violates one of the most fundamental principles of good law making which is developed in the section of this book on Justice and Morality. The principle is that you should never make the penalty for a lesser crime as bad as or worse than the penalty for a greater crime. If you classify the persistent request for sex by an unwelcome suitor as rape and punish it the same as you would punish a man who hogtied, bullwhipped and sodomized a woman, you remove any deterrent effect that laws against truly brutal forms of rape have. Men will seek to have sex with women regardless of any laws passed regarding it. Just as men will breathe air, drink water, and eat regardless of any laws passed making these things illegal. If you classify non-violent strategies to get sex as rape and punish them as violent rape you simply create a society in which all men can at any time be punished as though they were the most brutal and murderous monsters history has ever scene. In such a situation, how can you expect the law to have any deterrent effect against truly monstrous crimes against women.

The ironic thing about all of this is that it is possible in the US because the US is a traditionally androcentric patriarchal culture, and the idea that the man is always responsible and the woman can never be held responsible resonates strongly with the cultural stereotype of men being better than women and therefore men must be held to a higher moral standard than women. Women, those poor, brainless bundles of hormones and emotions just never mature enough to really consent to sex. Men however are strong, mature, responsible individuals. Men can be held to a superhuman standard of self-control and personal restraint, because well, they are just better, nobler, stronger, more mature and more rational than women.

Thus, on a case by case basis, rape is cried by a woman in this circumstance and in that circumstance, and it is always and invariably the man’s fault. A woman who got drunk, and went to bed with a man even suggesting to him the different things he should try, and then the next morning decides, she shouldn’t have done that. Who is responsible, the man. He should never have taken advantage of her. His ability to control his sexual drives is just so much superior to those of women, those poor, brainless bundles of hormones and emotions, that it is clearly his fault as the only true adult in the situation. The nasty bastard should have been brought up on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Since, after all, women are perpetual children who never grow up and become mature enough to knowingly consent to sex.

Power and responsibility are inseparable in a functional system. If men are always the responsible party in a sexual encounter, they are also always the party possessing the power. While it may feel like empowerment of women to insist that women can never be held responsible for their own behavior or misunderstandings in sexual encounters, such a position is implicitly insulting to women because it suggests that they are mentally incapable of controlling their own behaviors. If no means no, then yes must also mean yes.

There are few attitudes in America today as insulting to women as FemiNazi Dialectic about rape. This is because it subconsciously accepts the patriarchal stereotypes of men as rational and women as weak. By placing all the responsibility for misunderstandings in sexual encounters between men and women on men it implies that women are too weak and irrational to be able to act responsibly themselves. Feminists must have standards of what represents responsible sexual behavior for women as well as for men.

Rape as a Social Construct

Rape is a social construct. When and how consent to sex is present is something that changes with social conventions about how women do or do not consent to sex. As late as the early 20^th century marriage by abduction was the standard practice in villages in Algeria. Young men and women would meet and talk around the village well. After a few weeks, all things being understood, the man would grab the woman and carry her off to his home. A few days later the Greek Orthodox Priest would come by and make the union officially legal and sacred.

Everyone understood the rules. Girls were ‘abducted’ by the boys of their choice. Consent was clearly present, but formally it was kidnapping and rape. In pre-feminist 20^th century America, it was formally necessary for girls to protest against sex to prove they were ‘nice’ girls. In order for girls to have sex, and they wanted sex as much as girls have wanted sex throughout history, it was equally necessary for men to ignore these protests. It was formally ‘rape’ but everyone knew the rules. Both parties got what they wanted sex, and a chance for the girl to save face and prove that she was a good girl.

In circumstances like this, where people say one thing and mean another, chances of misunderstanding are no doubt greater than in circumstances where yes means yes and no means no. Social Constructs determine what rape actually is, not the formal behaviors involved, but the question of whether or not the rules were obeyed. If the rules were obeyed, then neither party suffered a crime against their personhood. If one person understood the rules and played by them, and another person did not understand the rules, then the person who did not understand the rules may feel that a crime against their personhood was committed when none was intended.

The person who ‘committed the crime’ may feel equally bad and wronged because they did what social scripts told them they were supposed to do and are suffering for it. To a large degree the FemiNazi definitions of rape and coercion ignore the role of society in determining when an act is rape. They maintain that regardless of the social conventions involved, regardless of the traditions involved, regardless of the mutual understandings of the parties involved, yes always means yes and no always means no. Historically, this is almost rarely true.

Social scripts where everything is clear and understood may act to make such misunderstandings less frequent. A society where yes means yes and no means no may make everything simpler for everyone concerned. When, however, has anything about the sexual behavior of men and women ever been simple? Men and women both want sex. They also both want to have sex under circumstances where it is not injurious to their dignity as human beings. Clarity in the rules and when and with whom you can have sex may make this easier for all involved.

Such clarity in the rules implies the existence of rules and the existence of rules implies some coercion in when and with whom you do have sex. This implies a subtle contradiction. The damage of rape is psychological and related to its impact on felt dignity as a human being. In situations where the rules are clear and you have sex with your partner under circumstances where it is accepted and understood that that is what you are supposed to do, you do not feel like you have been raped. In situations where the rules are not clear, and sex is unexpected and the fact that you should consent to it is unclear, then you feel raped. A lot of women who have sex with men in the US today are not sure if they are raped or not even when it meets the legal definition of rape. They frequently discuss the matter with their peers to determine exactly how they should feel about it.

The contradiction is that coercive sex is not psychologically damaging as rape when it is not degrading to the woman’s status. In this sense coercion precludes rape. Yet the definition of rape is coercive sex. The issue is the source and legitimacy of the coercion involved and the understanding of the woman concerning these things. Certain coercive concerns related to when and how to have sex are entirely legitimate and accepting them as legitimate increases a woman’s dignity while ignoring them decreases her dignity as a human being.

Studies have shown that both men and women in marriage frequently have sex with their partners when they really don’t want to. Marriage is fundamentally a sexual partnership. If one partner refuses consistently to have sex with their partner, then marriage cannot endure. Sex with ones partner in marriage is under many circumstances a duty. There will be times occasionally when one partner or the other partner is not really in the mood but does it out of a legitimate concern for the relationship and the feelings of their partner. This is a legitimate concern. Having sex under these circumstances is not rape. It is a discharge of one’s marital duties and a necessary practice in the real world. Accepting the fact that partnership and relationships occasionally include doing what the partner wants and not always having your own way about everything is a mark of maturity and responsibility. Insisting on everything always being done at your whim and convenience is a sign of immaturity and pettiness. People who behave in this manner should be condemned by society, not endorsed and praised. This applies to sex as well as everything else. Marital partners have to make an effort to accommodate each others needs.

Montaigne maintained that a marriage where the man did not perform his duties to his wife was legitimately dissolved. Jewish law also maintained a duty of the man to have sex with his wife several times a week. The idea that a man has a marital duty to have sex with his wife is well established in the Western Tradition. Such duties are equally binding on the woman in marriage. This is what equality means, a certain sameness in freedoms and responsibilities. Certainly a man should never physically force his wife to have sex with him. On the other hand, a woman should never be so adamant in refusing to have sex with a man with whom she actually intends to have a lifetime relationship that such behavior on his part becomes necessary. The idea that the woman can just arbitrarily refuse to have sex with her marital partner for whimsical or petty reasons is wrong. Marriage includes a commitment to have sex with your marriage partner. It is one of many commitments involved in marriage, without such a commitment, marriage in any real sense is impossible. Many things which FemiNazi Dialectic identifies as rape are merely legitimate concerns which a mature and responsible human being takes into account when deciding whether or not to have sex.

MythoPoetic excursion two: Atlantis Revisited: The Fall of Woman

We left woman in charge of the world. Human society was matriarchal because anything else was literally impossible. Women evolved the ability to speak before men, and for tens of thousands of years, women used speech to develop a world of culture, history, medical lore, and religious tradition which men, lacking speech, could not participate in. Women are no longer in charge of the world. Something must have happened to cause their fall from power. This is inevitable in any scenario which proposes a matriarchal period in human prehistory. Regardless of its causes, regardless of how it arose, regardless of how legitimate or illegitimate it was, if it existed and it no longer does, it must have failed for some reason.

There are three plausible causes for the fall of women in our mythical society. One is that as men developed the capacity for speech, either through genetic drift, or through selective mate choice by women who preferred more articulate men, men became more capable of participating in society as equals, and the traditional inferiority of men ceased to be fact based. Human societies being conservative, this traditional status would have remained long after it ceased to be justified. As people in power hate relinquishing it, the matriarchal power structure composed of women would have insisted on maintaining that power long after it became unjust and abusive. Such things would have led to a revolution in which men overthrew the existing matriarchal system, reduced women to property and replaced the mother gods of the matriarchy with new male gods in their own image. Such a change in religion did apparently take place just before the dawn of our earliest history.

The second plausible cause is The Great Melt. We are currently in an interglacial period which began about 12000 years ago.

There are two very important things to bring out here. One is that a major climatic catastrophe occurred immediately preceding our earliest history, and it is blamed on the anger of the gods. Such a catastrophe would have destroyed an early matriarchal civilization. Much of the remains of such a civilization would have been lost under the sea. It would have also led the remnants of that civilization to blame themselves for the event. Humans seem to like to blame themselves for things they have no control over. In truth, the event was beyond any human control.

In this scenario, women in particular and humanity in general are traumatized by the great melt. They assume it is a punishment for their sins. They then seek to find in themselves what they have done ‘wrong’ to displease the supernatural powers. The most obvious possible thing being that they have placed women in charge of men when all around them in the world males tend to dominate females, so the Gods punished them for this unnatural act. The reaction is to change from a matriarchal to a patriarchal power system, to replace the female goddesses with male gods. The breakdown in civilization itself would create a more brutal and violent environment while it occurred, a time when a man’s strength and aggressiveness would make him naturally the leader. This is a no fault scenario for women. It just happened because of natural causes beyond any human control.

The third plausible scenario is that while women ruled the world they had complete control over reproductive choice. They and they alone chose which men would have children and which men would not.

Ms. Gowaty is typical of FemiNazi dialectic. Here she says that both sexes should have roughly equal voices in choosing whether or not a woman should have a man’s child. Absolute control by either sex is harmful to individuals of both sexes and the species as a whole. Clearly men should have an equal voice. She very soon abandons this theme and concludes in favor of women having absolute and total control over human reproduction. This implicit conclusion of her paper contradicts the principles on which her argument is founded, but that is typical of FemiNazi ’logic’.

It is perfectly, poetically, appropriate to quote Ms. Gowaty in this context, because she uses a science fiction scenario of a male dominated society to bolster her arguments in her paper. So she deserves to be quoted in a similar science fiction scenario painting the other side of the picture. Let us take Ms. Gowaty at her word at the start of her paper. Let us assume that absolute control of reproduction by one sex would be catastrophic for society as a whole. In our Matriarchal society that control is vested in women. The logical conclusion is that when this happened, women made the wrong choices. Women did something dreadfully, horribly, wrong. They chose to allow the wrong kind of men to reproduce and denied the right kind of man the ability to father children. According to Ms. Gowaty‘s principle expressed above, when applied equally to women as well as men, if there was a matriarchal civilization, with this kind of power, then this would have happened.

Is there any evidence in our myths and legends coming to us out of that dim prehistory which preceded what we know of human history which hints at such a breeding program? The answer to this question might lie in the body of myths and legends relating to the Corn King. According to this body of myths and legends a man was selected every year to be King for a year. During this period he had sexual access to all the women. At the end of the year he was sacrificed to ensure the fertility and abundance of crops in the future. Such a process would have been a form of selective breeding. Whatever standards were used to choose the Corn King would have been increased through the population as that individual would have had breeding rights with all the women.

The Corn King was chosen for his warrior virtues. Possibly this was the result of some early arms race in which warring matriarchal kingdoms bred men to be the best warriors in competition with other matriarchies. In a masters thesis on royalty and the role of kings and queens in myth and history that I read many years ago the history and references to the Corn King were laid out clearly and graphically. I am sorry I do not have a copy with me to reference here. The most aggressive and violent man, who won a competition with other men, was licensed by the matriarchy to father children. Such myths play a large role in the Mabinogion in which the traveling warrior encounter these women’s villages where they are invited to enjoy such privileges, and similarly in the cycle of legends of Arthur. The tradition of identifying the King with the good of the land and sacrificing him to appease the Gods if things went wrong survived strongly in Germanic legend and lore. In one instance discussed in the thesis, the Corn King was so violent and brutal that he was literally chained under a tree because he had to be physically restrained as he would brutally murder anyone who came near him.

This is echoed in the Odyssey of Homer. If you have read it you will have realized that the words King and Murderer are basically synonymous.

In almost every instance where royal qualities are addressed in Homer, the ability, the willingness of a man to murder others, is the first and most important mark of nobility and royal blood. Almost every time Odysseus introduces himself into a strange court, he lies about his desperate situation and says instead that he is fleeing his native land because he killed a noble in a fit of homicidal rage. This is apparently a witness to the nobility of his character and his possessing noble or royal blood.

Please take a moment to stop and think about this. In our society a murderer fleeing justice in his homeland would lie and say that he was a shipwrecked sailor or other refugee in order to command the respect and aid of the people he met. In the Odyssey, Odysseus, who is a shipwrecked sailor, lies and claims to be a murderer fleeing justice in his homeland in order to be treated nobly and accepted into the courts of the various petty kings he meets in his travels.

This type of tale is repeated over and over in his travels, but one instance of his professing to be a cold blooded murderer as proof of his good character and noble nature is when he lies to the Goddess Minerva upon arriving home in Ithaca.

It is true that hospitality and a fear of the God’s is praised in Homer, as is the sanctity of poetry and the importance of being good to wandering minstrels, but murderousness is the greatest and most royal of virtues.

Such a system of selective breeding would have, in a few generations, changed the nature of humanity. Men would have become progressively more brutal and violent. Eventually, they would have rebelled against the idea of being sacrificed at the end of the year and insisted on being King for life. Women would have become their chattel property.

Indeed, the historian, reading the chronicles and records of this early period in the history of humanity sometimes gets the feeling that a wave of insanity swept over the world. That for some reason entire societies became dysfunctional.

What happened to the other men, the gentler kind of men who were not of ‘royal’ caliber? They would have been less aggressive, less violent, they would have expected that by being good and doing what women wanted they would get sex and father children. They would have willingly labored in the fields, planting the grain and harvesting it for the matriarchal storehouses, in huge ceramic urns like those which survive in the ruins of Crete.

What would have happened to them when they realized that the promise would never be kept, that all they were was slaves and that women disdained to have their children? They would not have rioted and murdered and raped, they were not genetically disposed to that. What could they do?

In historical times, when the Spanish conquered Central and South America, many Native American were reduced to a similar condition. Missionaries writing about it state that entire tribes just died. No apparent disease, or physical disability was involved. Instead, longing for their freedom, seeing nothing but hopelessness before them, they apparently died in the fields of their masters of nothing more than a broken heart.

A similar fate may have befallen the men not violent or aggressive enough to father children under the breeding program of our matriarchy. The good men, the ones who could be played as fools, enticed with a distant promise of sex never to be kept, who labored sweating in the fields for a smile from their mistresses one day realized that the promise would never be kept. Despair and hopelessness spread among them like a disease, and they died in the fields of broken hearts.

This, of course, is merely a fable. It may have happened. It could have happened but it could very well have never occurred. Still it points up something quite important. Power, by itself, is no guarantee of good results. Many of the papers in “Evolution, Gender, and Rape” make the point that rape could not have evolved as a reproductive strategy because it is extremely inefficient. They make the point that women have had a great deal of control in choosing the men who had children throughout the evolutionary history of our species. This being true, women chose the men who fathered children in the past. Through their own control of their reproductive choice, women have made men into the image of their desire. If they find it hard to live with men, then their desire is not a perfect indicator of the kind of man who will make a good life partner. If there is anything generally wrong with men, then it is women’s fault, because women made those choices. You cannot tar men without tarring women with the same brush.

Similarly, if women want a better world in which nice men are predominant they have to make sure that nice men are the winners in the sexual contest. This implies that women’s reproductive choice must be constrained. Far from being free to choose who fathers their children they must be required to marry and have children by nice guys. Women cannot be allowed sexual or reproductive control, instead, society must make the choices of who they have sex with, and who they have children by. All of which assumes a level of biological determinism not really supported by the evidence. There is sufficient evidence for the role of nurture in determining human character to allow human beings freedom in choosing their partners.

A second thing which is implicit here is that women made those choices based on what they felt was sexually attractive in men. If men were to suddenly change and become ‘better’, women would probably find that men were no longer what they were genetically driven to desire as sexual partners. Men and women evolved together as two parts of one whole. One cannot be separated from the other, they interlock like two parts of a jigsaw puzzle. Anything that is in man has its corresponding element in woman. If men are demonic, women are equally demonic, and women would be unhappy and unsatisfied without their ‘demonic’ males. Similarly the role of nurture must be brought in here. Women reward men’s behaviors by having sex with them. They have sex with men who turn them on. This nurtures the behaviors which turn them on and does not reward other behaviors. If men’s behaviors are offensive to women, it is again largely women’s fault because women choose which behaviors to reward with sex.

The world is a big place. We have described three possible causes for the fall of our mythical Matriarchy. It is likely that if events similar to these occurred, all three causes contributed in one degree or another with different causes predominating in different areas of the world. Surely though, this did not happen throughout the world. Some of these early Matriarchal civilizations did not abuse men, causing revolution, or selectively breed men to be murderous monsters.

Surely in protected enclaves some vestige of the best of these prehistoric Matriarchies survived where women adopted a fairer and more egalitarian approach to their treatment of men. In areas like the Nile where Civilization was isolated and protected by surrounding desert, or in the islands of Indonesia which became islands and geographically isolated and protected by the surrounding sea, maybe this did happen. After all, Egypt one of the most ancient of Civilizations, was matrilineal, and similarly the Minankabau of Indonesia are matrilineal. Indonesia is specifically instanced as being isolated and turned into islands by the Great Melt around 8000 years ago. Also the Zuni Indians of the American Southwest living basically in a desert and more or less isolated maintained a matrilineal system. Are these isolated and unusual matrilineal societies the distant survivors of an ancient Matriarchal age? Is the speculation above merely speculation, or did events like this happen in various combinations around the globe around the time of the Great Melt resulting in the fall of a Matriarchal Age? Regardless, it is useful to look at some of these societies to see what they can teach us about Rape.

Rape Free Societies

FemiNazi Dialectic holds up ‘rape-free’ societies as models to the corrupt and evil Patriarchal West as models on which we should rebuild a better, saner, nicer, world. However, they only look at the empowerment of women in these societies. They never look at the guarantees which these societies offer men in exchange for the increased power of women. Power and responsibility are inseparable in any functional system. In any system where women have more power, in order to make that system work, they will have to have assumed greater responsibility as well. Let us look at four of these ‘rape-free’ societies from a new viewpoint. Instead of looking a the ‘destruction of the patriarchal system’ or at the ‘empowerment of women’ let us look at what these societies offer men or males. Four societies generally referenced as ‘rape-free’ are the bonobo among our primate relatives, the pygmies of the Congo, the Zuni Indians of the American Southwest and the Minankabau of Sumatra.

First the bonobo. The bonobo are held up as having eliminated serious violence and confrontation from their society. Instead they settle all personal disagreements by having sex with each other. This is seen as infinitely superior to settling differences by fighting. What does it imply as a model? Should we have laws reading, “Whenever a situation appears to be potentially violent women should immediately rush in, spread their legs and invite men to have sex with them to defuse the situation. At the very least women should be prepared at all times and under all circumstances to immediately provide oral or manual sexual stimulation to men. Women who fail to do their duty to maintain a peaceful society will be guilty of misdemeanor contribution to disturbance of the peace.” Somehow this kind of legal reform doesn’t seem like what the FemiNazis want when they hold up the Bonobo as a model. Yet, this is what the Bonobo do. This society is touted as a ‘rape-free’ society. This is attributed to the strong female social organization. Yet, in this society it is clear that there can be no sexual motivation for rape. Any bonobo male can count on getting sex any time he wants it without ever having to think of something as dangerous and risky as raping a female.

Colin M. Turnbull introduced the Pygmies of the Congo to the world in his book, “The Forest People, A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo”. There is a chapter in this book called “The Marriage of Kenge”. Yambabo is a young pygmy girl who like sleeping with a man but refuses to marry him and accept the duties and responsibilities of a wife and mother.

No one objects to her flirtations with the other young men but it has come time for her to marry. One of her brothers wishes to marry, and in Pygmy society one tribe cannot afford to give up a woman unless they receive a woman in return. The Pygmies are small tribes of people who all know each other, there are no more secrets there than in a really small town in the US. Everyone knows that Yambabo finds a particular man from the other village attractive. Everyone knows that Yambabo must get married soon. One day her brother Kenge starts beating her mercilessly to force her to accept the situation. No one in the village interferes. Then Yambabo runs off to her mother. This is what her brother has to say.

This indeed does happen. The mother is more subtle than the brother, she does not insist that her daughter marry the young man. Instead she says that she will arrange for her other daughter to marry the young man, and see to it that Yambabo never gets married at all. Yambabo, badly beaten, physically exhausted, and suffering the threat of exclusion and ostracism from her people, and the loss of the boy who she really does like, yields to the inevitable. She says that she will marry Taphu or anyone else that she is told to.

Now a number of things show up here. One is that there is a lot of casual promiscuity among young adults in the Pygmy community. Young Pygmy men can pretty much count on getting laid if they are fairly nice to the girls. Again sex as a motive for rape is not an issue here as it is not an issue in Bonobo society. Second is the coercive nature of the matrilineal social group. In the end it is the mother not the brother or father who forces the girl to marry her chosen mate. There is also an issue of trust. The man involved in the situation has absolute faith that the matrilineal power structure will be even harsher and more coercive than he is in forcing the woman to toe the line. Finally the nature of the coercion used. Instead of physical beating, psychological warfare, the threat of ostracism and social exclusion and the loss of what the girl already has are the prime weapons in the matrilineal arsenal.

This is done to guarantee a man a wife. The matrilineal power system steps in in this instance to coerce a woman to do her duty to men and to guarantee an orderly system of sexual partnership between men and women.

The matrilineal system of the bonobo is also built around the desire for acceptance and the threat of exclusion. Female bonobo’s trade sexual favors to older females in return for acceptance into the female social hierarchy. Women use coercive tactics on other women which may be different from the agonistic displays of males but which are just as coercive, though not always just as obvious.

The Zuni Indians of the Southwest are another ‘rape-free’ society. This society takes great pains to remove the stimuli to physical violence. Internal disputes and struggles are very formal, and loss of face or status is carefully avoided in confrontations. There is also a lot of sexual freedom on the part of the women which naturally amounts to an increase in sexual promiscuity. Again, any man with two brain cells to rub together knows that if he is nice and treats women well one of them will drag him off into the bushes in the near future. There is no sexual motivation for rape.

The matrilineal power system here also frees men from any economic responsibility for their biological children. A woman who is ’married’ to a man in this system basically owns all the property in the family. Anything which he produces while he lives with her, corn he grows, a house he builds, is her property. If she decides to divorce him, he is freed of all economic responsibility for any children she might have had of which he is the biological father. He is also guaranteed economic security. His mother is also the matriarchal owner of property and her home always has food, shelter, and a welcoming social environment for him. Divorce is no-fault in this society. If we were to model laws after this society, then alimony and child-support would not exist. One divorce settlement would end all financial obligations of the man to his children. Federal taxes would be levied on women to guarantee men physical and financial security. Women in this society are very sensitive to and careful of male dignity. While women are empowered in this society, men are not degraded. Somehow, this does not seem like what FemiNazis want when they talk about ‘rape-free’ societies as a model for the US.

The Maninkabau are also referred to as a ‘rape-free’ society. In this society, women are not raped, because they are viewed as the weaker sex.

Would FemiNazis really support Federal Law protecting women on the basis that they are the weaker sex and therefore must be protected by men. You can see how the ethos of this ‘rape-free’ society protects male ego and feelings by covering the power of women in the need of men to protect the weaker sex. Men protect women because they are the weaker sex.

Sexual promiscuity is also a likely component of this rape free culture. There is little room for doubt that human females, along with her closest primate relatives the chimpanzee and bonobo females, are extremely promiscuous by nature. The natural and inherent first consequence of empowering women is to increase the availability of sex to men. This naturally decreases any sexual motive for rape. While the sexual freedom of women is generally mentioned in FemiNazi literature, any possible correlation of this to an absence of a sexual motive for rape is studiously ignored.

As a general rule, behaviors which are normative in a society are also to one degree or another coercive. I.E. failure to behave in the manner which is normative for that society is a violation of social norms and subject to coercive pressures to ensure conformance to social norms. In any society where promiscuity is normative there will also be coercive pressures on women to have sex where it is normally expected of them. Hence the more promiscuous a society is, the more circumstances where it is normative to expect women to have sex and therefore the greater number of circumstances in which subtle coercion exists to compel women to have sex. Of course, women like sex, it doesn’t take much coercion to encourage them to do so if it is socially acceptable.

There are a number of things which FemiNazi rhetoric typically overlook in discussions of ’rape-free’ societies. The degree to which sex is guaranteed to men by the society without rape. The degree to which a rewarding family life is guaranteed to men by the society. The degree to which women are coerced into doing their duties to men by the matrilineal power structure itself. Women in Maninkabau society are not free to choose their husbands any more than they are in a patriarchal society.

Men are chosen by the matrilineal system in accordance with the standards of society, and a man who toes the line can count on getting married. As predicted in our fable above about the ‘Fall of Woman’ society denies control of their reproductive choice to women and makes it legally mandatory on women to marry and have children by nice guys.

Again, sex as a motive for rape does not exist. You can also be sure that the matrilineal power structure polices sexual conduct within the family as well. While a man who beats his wife may be sent home, a woman who does not have sex with her man will no doubt be subject to subtle coercive pressures from her matrilineal group. In a society like this, a man can trust absolutely that if he has a legitimate gripe about how his partner is treating him, he can appeal to the matrilineal power structure and be sure that subtle coercive pressures will be applied to make her toe the line. It is very likely that the older women in this society if informed of the behavior of many women in the US in abusive relationships would throw up their hands in disgust and conclude that such women deserved to be beaten black and blue.

All of the things which a patriarchal authority system guarantee to men are guaranteed to men in a matrilineal system where women are empowered. The only difference is that in the matrilineal system it is the older women who become the enforcers who make women toe the line.

The system may actually work better for average men in ensuring that their physical and emotional needs are met. Possibly we should have Federal laws dictating who women should marry and at what age to ensure that good, hard-working, law abiding men are married. Somehow this does not seem like what the FemiNazis want when they talk about ‘rape-free’ societies as a model for the US, but this is what such societies do.

The ‘empowerment’ of women also makes things which are considered goods in our society incompatible with this kind of social system. Let us look at a few of these things.

Love is Against the Law

Love, a deep and eternal bond between a man and a woman, is inherently incompatible with the idea that a woman can just dump a man when she gets the 7-year itch. Empowering women to just dump men when they decide they want a change means that men cannot be expected to make this kind of emotional commitment to women. Men must enter into any relationship in this kind of society knowing that it can and very probably will end in a few months or years. They must, therefore, make only a shallow emotional commitment to the woman they are living with. They cannot afford to make the kind of emotional investment in a woman which is expected in our marriage traditions.

Love is also a threat to the matrilineal power structure itself. A woman who falls in love with a man is likely to break ranks with other women for that man. She is also likely to fall in love with a rebel without a cause instead of the kind of decent, socially conformist male that her older relatives pick out for her. There is a passage in Ruth Benedict’s “Patterns of Culture” where one woman in the Zuni Indians was discouraged from pursuing a relationship with a man because she might be falling in love with him.

Romantic love and the kind of deep personal commitment it is supposed to entail is functionally incompatible with these societies.

Fatherhood is Against the Law

In the passage above you will have noticed that it is the Mother’s brothers who provides a male voice in choosing the husband for a young woman, not the father. In Zuni society likewise the biological father is an ephemeral figure leaving at any moment at the mother’s whim. The uncles, on the other hand have a fairly constant presence. They may leave for awhile but they come back. Uncles, not Fathers provide the real male role models in these societies. The biological tie between a Father and his Children is seen as weak and relatively unimportant. Ms. Sanday maintains that fathers are still important but from the examples of who actually has a voice in the children’s future, the Uncle, not the Father is in loco parentis. Fatherhood is indeed against the law.

This does not mean that there is no male role model for the children. The Uncle fills this role as he does in many other societies around the world. This may indeed be closer to nature than our traditional system and it is not necessarily inferior to our system.

Non-Conformity is Against the Law

These societies place an extremely high value on avoiding confrontation which might lead to violence. This means a set of rules and social mores which are followed without exception by all reputable members of the society. There is no room in these societies for any kind of non-conformist thought or action.

In “Patterns of Culture” Ruth Benedict discusses the case of a Zuni Indian who was being tortured to death for non-conformity. The man would have died if the governor of New Mexico had not intervened. Ms. Sanday points out that men who do not live by the strict rules of the Maninkabau leave the society and accept voluntary exile rather than accept all the rules and strictures.

Summary

If we were to model our society after ‘rape-free’ societies, women would accept a high standard of personal responsibility in their conduct towards men. This standard would be brutally and coercively enforced by the female power structure. It would include an expectation that women would be sexually nice to men, and would include social sanctions such as the social condemnation and ostracism of women who did not treat men nicely in a sexual manner when social conventions made such treatment expected. It would include an expectation that women would be careful of and interested in the emotional well being of men. Women would be expected to take pains in their daily lives to avoid status challenges and confrontations with men. Men could trust that when they felt abused or hurt by a woman that the matrilineal power system itself would step in and discipline the woman to make her toe the line and treat men more decently. Men could in fact trust that said power structure would be stricter and harsher on the woman than men would be. Marriages would be more than likely arranged for women by other women with the input of older men, to make sure that men who played by the rules got their proper rewards. Because the biological tie between father and children was seen as unimportant, alimony and child support would not exist. Financial responsibility for her children would rest entirely with the woman, and if she needed a man’s help, then she should have picked out her new man before she dumped the old one. This is how the Zuni do it. This is the feminist utopia which we would create if we modeled our society after ‘rape-free’ societies. Somehow it does not seem like what the FemiNazis had in mind.

What are the Societal Roots of Rape?

FemiNazi dialectic focuses on the power and dominance motivation for rape. It ignores the sexual dimension of rape. Looking at ‘rape-free’ societies it becomes apparent that the sexual motivation for rape is largely eliminated. This suggests strongly that the sexual motivation for rape is a root cause of rape in a society.

Recognizing this fact does not mean that other social and cultural conventions do not contribute to rape as a societal pattern. Rape is well known to have begun as a property crime. It has its roots in the idea of women as property and their sexuality as a property to be exploited for the profit of the patrilineal system. In early ideas of Rape, the crime was against the property owners who had lost a valuable property by having their virginal daughters lose value as marital property by losing their virginity.

People erect barriers to protect their property. The concept of woman as property required erecting barriers against women indulging their natural promiscuity and having sex freely. This made sex more difficult to get while obeying accepted social constraints. This naturally leads sexually frustrated males to consider other methods of getting sex, methods which are condemned to one degree or another by society.

In early rape, where the woman’s consent was irrelevant to the idea of rape. The woman might frequently have been a major co-conspirator in her own ‘rape’. Taking a lover without family approval. The crime against the family property would be the same regardless of the woman’s degree of participation. For a long time, only virgins could be ‘raped’.

The modern idea of rape is an odd combination of patriarchal conceptions of women as property and feminist conceptions of women’s rights. Women are still conceived of as property but they have assumed ownership of themselves. In this system women maintain the traditional Patriarchal barriers against having sex but in the name of their own ownership of their sexuality. Women have assumed such an absolute right over their sexual property that they do not recognize any circumstances where they can be legally or morally obligated to have sex. This position is so extreme that it essentially reduces women to a position of being mentally incompetent to consent to have sex. Consent which is not binding is not consent in a meaningful sense of the word. If consent is binding then there must be circumstances where a woman is legally or morally obligated to have sex. So that women remain, under this conception of rape, essentially eternal children who never grow up. This reflects the Patriarchal conception of women and the legal status of women under Patriarchal systems.

FemiNazi dialectic condemns the Patriarchal system for the oppression of women. It overlooks the fact that this system gave Fathers a power over their Sons just as absolute as it gave Fathers a power over their daughters. Under the law of the Republic of Rome, a Father could sell his son into slavery up to three times. Everything that the son made during his life was legally the property of the Father as long as the Father was alive, and could be disposed of by the Father according to the Father’s choice without consulting or considering the wishes of the son in any way. A Father also had the absolute legal right to kill his son at any time and for any reason that the Father deemed sufficient.

This system of authority is not just about oppressing women. It is a form or pecking order behavior in which certain persons are reduced to lesser persons or non-persons before the law with regard to their treatment by their legally ordained superiors. Everyone in this society with the exception of the dominant Alpha male of each kinship group lived under the absolute, arbitrary, authority of that Alpha male. This is reflective of primate pecking order and status behaviors.

FemiNazi Dialectic only looks at how this behavior reflects in the oppression of women. They write long dissertations about how Frat Brothers engage in ceremonial gang rapes of women to engage in male bonding. They overlook the fact that the same Frat brothers who abuse women are also the one abusing nerds and outsiders on campus. They overlook the fact that the same jocks who rape women in high school are banging the heads of nerds into lockers. The pecking order behaviors which facilitate rape in our society are not just about sex, they are about a general right of those higher in the pecking order, those in the ‘in’ crowd to abuse those of lower social status.

Women are just as guilty of these types of abuses as men are. The degree of nastiness and meanness of women to other women during the adolescent years has been the subject of several books recently.

Women who have bought into this pecking order pattern will also refuse to associate socially or to have sex with boys lower in the pecking order. For the loser, sex and status become irrevocably linked. Women accept the right of men to abuse them in order to associate with higher pecking order males and in turn abuse and humiliate lower status males.

Rape in our society may originate in sexual frustration. A male who is sexually frustrated may latch onto this pattern of dominance behavior and the feeling that it is legitimate to abuse those lower in the pecking order as a psychological tool to enable him to commit rape. The example of indifference to human feelings which is necessary for one person to rape another person is provided to him by this kind of pecking order behavior, especially in our public school system. See the discussion in the section of this book on school reform. The example is provided to him as much by the behavior of women as it is by the behavior of Jocks and Frat brothers.

Being armed with this tool of indifference to the feelings of others, the rapist becomes capable of the emotional destruction of a woman by rape. The prevalence of this behavior in society makes it a tool ready to the hand of the potential rapist. It is a tool enabling rape, like a gun or a knife. Thus the status behaviors which FemiNazi Dialectic call Patriarchal are an element of rape and probably contribute to the frequency of Rape in a ‘rape-prone’ society. It is wrong to identify them as Patriarchal, they are normal primate or hominid behaviors. They are as prevalent in female society as in male society.

FemiNazi dialectic ignores the role which is played by women in reinforcing status and pecking order behaviors in our society. Quite the contrary, FemiNazi Dialectic appears itself to be pure status behavior. It appears entirely occupied with securing High Status for Women and No Status for Men. To the degree that abusive status behaviors contribute to the frequency of rape in a society, FemiNazi Dialectic can only increase the frequency of rape in a society, not act to inhibit rape. There is a table in the section of this book on Abortion and Spouse murder which list side by side the recent crime statistics on rape and the rate of abortion in society. The interested reader may be wish to reference it.

In some cases of rape where previous sexual partners are concerned, status injury may be the defining motive for rape. It is unlikely that most women spend their lives fantasizing about a love affair with a man who feels like he is a loser for going to bed with them. Most women probably want their man to feel like he is a winner when he is with them. Others may want to feel like they are winners for going to bed with their current sexual partner. These concerns create two different status rape scenarios.

Where the man feels like he is a winner because this woman is going to bed with him, suddenly, for no reason he understands, he is excluded. This imposes a psychological injury on him. From being a winner he is suddenly a loser. In such an instance raping the woman is a way of making her feel what she has made him feel. The psychological status injury to the woman may be the primary motivation for the rape, not sex.

Where the woman goes to bed with a man because of his perceived status, she is treating herself like a low-status person. She assumes the right of the higher-status male to have sex with her and is flattered by his doing so. Monica Lewinski is the most perfect recent example of this. Pecking order behavior is subconsciously reciprocal, people who assume they have a right to abuse those below them in the pecking order tend to feel that those above them have a similar right to abuse them. NOW seems to have rolled over and accepted this in their continued endorsement of President Clinton long after no reasonable person could doubt that he was a serial rapist.

http://chblue.com/Feb1999/020399/clintonrape020399.htm

This long history of sexual abuse is too consistent and well-documented to be ignored. Clinton is probably the most successful serial rapist in US history.

Perceived status is a significant contributor to women’s desire to have sex with a man. This is why rock stars, athletes, and President’s have groupies. Even opera singers and best selling authors have groupies. This desire to be a winner by having sex with a winner is a primary sexual motive for women. It is tied to the same status behaviors which underlie rape as a status crime. It is why cheerleaders don’t generally complain about being ‘raped’ by jocks.

‘Rape-Free’ societies have conventions which avoid the kind of behaviors which underlie rape, not just in sexual situations but in everyday encounters throughout the entire society. Not just in encounters between men and women but also in encounters between men and men and women and women. FemiNazi Dialectic, on the other hand, reinforces the fundamental status and pecking order behaviors which underlie rape as a crime. The concept that it is always the mans fault, that the woman is always right, these are status assumptions. Assumptions which place women above the law, and ignore any psychological or emotional harm which the woman might have done to the man which precipitated the rape.

Abusive people are abusive people, and emotional abuse of men may escalate to the physical abuse of men or women. FemiNazi Dialectic focuses only on abuse of women, and not on fundamentals causes of abuse in society as a whole. Men who abuse women also abuse men. Women who abuse men also abuse women. It is not a sexual rights issue at all. It is a human rights issue. Rape does not exist independent of a general pattern of the abuse of one human being by another in society. By focusing on Rape as a ‘Woman’s Rights Issue” Feminist Dialectic ignores the larger framework of behaviors of which it is a part. By suggesting that only men are motivated to abuse others by the psychology which underlies rape they ignore the real causes of rape as a crime of power and status in society and insist that strategies to prevent Rape ignore the larger Societal roots of rape.

A real Rape prevention strategy would focus as strongly on the prevention of the emotional abuse of men by women as on the prevention of Rape. Monkey see, Monkey do. In a society where men see women emotionally abusing others, they will imitate this and show a similar indifference to the emotional abuse of women. The emotional abuse of men is a root cause of rape, not only as an immediate motive for rape as an act of revenge, but by making it appear that the emotional abuse of one person by another can be legitimate. Just as our lesbian friend B became an abuser of women by watching her father abuse her mother. Men learn to abuse others by the examples presented to them in Society. Including the example of women ignoring men’s emotional pain and suffering in the name of “Women’s Rights”.

FemiNazi Dialectic offers no hope of ever ending rape because it pretends that all female status behaviors are good, and identifies all male status behaviors as bad. By accepting and reinforcing status behaviors in women, it reinforces by example the fundamental psychological mechanisms which make rape possible to the rapist. Any real rape prevention program will focus as strongly on a woman’s duty to respect the feelings of men as on a mans duty to avoid destroying a woman’s self-respect by raping her. The burden of good behavior in a society cannot rest on men alone. Indeed, protecting the male ego, in a healthy way, is probably one of the most essential building blocks or cornerstones of a rape-free society.

The serial rapist for whom rape is primarily about the humiliation and degradation of women is a product of the status behaviors manifest in our society. He has learned this behavior from women as much as he has learned it from men. Since his behavior is focused on women, he may well have learned it primarily from women as opposed to men. He acts this behavior out to impose his own suffering and degradation on women. Degrading and attacking men in general will not eliminate this behavior from society. If anything, in the long run, it will increase it.

Rape is pecking order behavior carried to the extreme that it denies human beings their basic rights and dignities as a human being. This kind of pecking order behavior has been identified as antithetical to the principles on which the US is founded throughout this book. It is an un-American act, like abortion, infanticide, pedophilia, slavery, wife-beating and the legal right of a husband to kill his wife.

This kind of behavior was common throughout the world when the US was founded. Slavery was still practiced throughout the world, and in almost no society were women considered the equals of men. Over the two hundred years since the US was founded, the Declaration of Independence has been read with reverent respect every 4^th of July. This inspired the blacks of the antebellum South to believe that they to had a right to equality before the law. It inspired them to seek freedom in the North, inspiring the many remarkable and historic escapes of the underground railroad. It also inspired the whites of the north with a similar feeling that slavery was wrong and incompatible with the American Way.

Similarly, it inspired men with a feeling that equality was right and the legal subjugation of a population was wrong. It prepared the people of the US to accept the Suffragette movement and the idea of women having a right to vote and legal equality to men. As it has inspired the people of the US in the past to gradually reform our society and remove human rights abuses. It will continue to do so. If we continue to read the Declaration of Independence to our children every 4^th of July with its deserved degree of reverence and respect, we can trust that it will inspire our children to make the changes necessary in society to create a more rape free society.