| XY - Parasites of the Human Ecosystem - Spring 09 |
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| Written by Gord Sellar | |||||||
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What would it take to eradicate rape around the world? In the winter of 2003, I spent about three weeks at McLeod Ganj, a town in Northern India at the beginnings of the Himalayas where many Tibetan refugees, following the example of the Dalai Lama himself, have built themselves precarious new lives in exile. I was subletting a house outside of town (incidentally on what I was told was the Dalai Lama's sister's property) and every afternoon I walked into town for coffee, dinner, a movie, or some socializing with other travellers. I found it necessary to break up the monotony of hanging around a chilly, sparse room while working on a (still unfinished) novel. One day, a girl who looked about thirteen years old started following me down the road. I noticed her because one had to keep one's eyes open when walking down the road since monkeys, a herd of goats, and plenty of vehicles all had a habit of showing up with great frequency in the area. But this girl was different. She posed no threat to me, unlike the aggressively avaricious goat herder and the speeding autorickshaws. I turned around, and when she naturally recoiled, I asked, "Are you alright?" She replied, in English, that she was, but she didn't like to walk alone along the road, and asked whether she could walk with me. Naturally, I assented, happy to have the chance to learn more about how Tibetan kids live in the area. It turned out she was an orphan and was being educated in a local school. She told me about the lessons she was studying, and about life in the area. After a few minutes she confessed why she was so scared to walk alone on that road. "Every month, one or two girls get raped here," she told me. It chilled me so deeply that I almost wanted to offer to walk her into town daily if she wanted. It was a long walk, but no kid should have to face that kind of risk. This is an instinctive reaction, and, I believe, a good one. Not to dismiss Germaine Greer's critique of the kind of horror we Westerners feel towards rape (as a despoiling of a woman, different in kind from other sorts of violence because of how we automatically sexualize women), but I have to admit I feel as if my reaction comes from somewhere deeper, more fundamental, than that. The feeling that this is just not right is a reflection of altruistic human decency, and I'm dubious that it is something that was just learned or acculturated. In the past, I've heard from some women who styled themselves intellectuals that Western culture endorses rape, teaches young men that rape is their right and privilege, and insists on blaming women when they are victims. Sometimes I wonder what culture it is exactly that they're talking about, and what species they're discussing. Not that humans aren't brutal; we share a stunning capacity for nastiness with our closest primate relatives. But if men were routinely taught in Western society that rape is a right and privilege, and were such a thing teachable, wouldn't rape be a much more common occurrence? Wouldn't most women be repeatedly raped throughout their youths, if not throughout their lives? The truth is, however fuzzy consensuality might become in a certain subset of sexual fantasies (among men and women), the vast majority of men not only do not desire to rape women, and never perpetrate such acts in their lifetimes, but feel actively disgusted by rape. Indeed, this is another side to how men perceive rape, one rarely discussed once discussions turn doctrinaire. There is, indeed, a violent impulse that many men feel towards those who violate women they know and care for: sisters, friends, lovers, and daughters. This makes evolutionary sense, as well as emotional sense. After all, rape is a violent assault, and assaults on any member of a kin group tend to be perceived as a threat. The fact that sexual (and potentially reproductive) violation of the group has been perpetrated suggests an even greater propensity to lash out, given the incredibly high priority on reproduction that is hardwired into human minds. Many men barely succeed in holding their violent rage in check. Despite the fact that, in our Western society, it's considered better to let legal authorities handle the situation, there is a deep, hardwired reaction, and at the core of it is the impulse to kill the intruder. This is not to dismiss all of what culturalists have to say. Anyone who's been online or in classrooms long enough has seen the debate, and how, when a woman's experience of rape is brought up, the first thing a man asks is, "What was she wearing?" Hell, I've done it myself in the past, in a moment of passing stupidity or out of ignorance, and very rightly had my error redressed with a verbal clue-by-four. But I've also noticed that some of the things I was saying about the male view of rape were being very strenuously ignored, and that the assumptions about how to prevent or reduce rape were, though well meaning, founded on pretty untenable assumptions. Allow me to repeat again: nobody should have to face those conditions, child or adult, woman or man. Human beings ought to be guaranteed free passage in the world, without having to risk rape. This is an ethical or moral statement, an ideal, and a worthy one. And to whatever degree that rape can be reduced by its promulgation (as, believe me, has happened in much of the Western world), this is a good weapon in the arsenal against rape. But even the most powerful weapon we have, a nuclear bomb, will not kill all the cockroaches. As Canadian writer Cory Doctorow has written (about a very different subject), every ecosystem has parasites. This is, unfortunately, true of human ecosystems as well: social groups, cities, communities, and sometimes, sadly, even families. It's a fact of life, and just as education and empathy training will not wipe out spam email or the practice of scamming grannies out of their savings, there is no measure short of institutionalized gender segregation with armed guards, or ubiquitous surveillance and an interventionist state that most human beings would find intolerable that will successfully eliminate sexual violence of the kind committed by men against women. For the foreseeable future, no arsenal, no matter how big, is ever going to eliminate rape to the point where ethics can trump the unfortunate reality. Because the unfortunate reality is, ultimately, ourselves. This is the problem with totalizing theories that have little or no room for science and for what science tells us about the human species. They neglect something extremely important in a practical sense: The World. The world is not something outside of us, or at least, the limits of the world do not stop at our skin. We are part of the ecology, and we are wired just like the rest of the world. The fact that we have internal wiring doesn't mean we're not responsible for our decisions, of course, any more than the fact that a car has internal wiring prevents it from driving in any one direction instead of another. But the wiring delimits the scope of decisions we perceive as possible, and determines what we make decisions about: cars cannot fly, and humans cannot stop eating all living things on ethical grounds (not without dying as a result, anyway). Rape is, in some societies, depressingly common. In Korea, where I live, rape cases are often handled pretty abysmally, like most other crimes against women, children, and men without means. Hell, even marital rape isn't considered a crime in Korea today, as several Anglophone bloggers have recently noted. That means the social-construction idea of rape is important because it's partly right: social change can affect the way people in a society handle sexual violence, as well as how frequently it occurs and in what contexts. The problem is not simply an issue of how Korean society looks at women; there are other social forces at work, such as a pronounced empathy deficit (in relation to strangers) that is perhaps as much a result of postwar privation as traditional Confucian ideology. It's important that institutions, and families, as well, work hard to promulgate a better understanding of these issues. "No Means No" public service announcements and other campaigns against sexual violence are an important part of the solution, and general social change can also improve things. The danger, however, is that we can mistake the power of social change for something it isn't. Social change can reduce the incidence of rape, but to think that it can eliminate it is unrealistic, or, at worst, deluded and irresponsible. To invest too much faith in the applicability of our rightful ethical aspirations, that no kid deserves to face the danger of rape, that women ought to feel as if they can walk anywhere at night alone without fear of being attacked, that holding empathy training sessions will inculcate a respect and sensitivity to women that will wipe out rape in general is, ironically, to ignore the world in a way that will probably cause more women to suffer sexual violence. Of course, empathy training and sex education involving sexual etiquette can improve things. Teaching "No Means No" and having young people who are more able to discuss sexuality certainly eliminates the whole "playing hard to get" game, which, in many cultures, still remains. In this game, women are not really taught that they can assert or express their own sexual desires and "No" sometimes means "No," but sometimes is simply the only answer a young woman feels she can give, and might mean "Ask me again" or even "Yes, but we have to pretend I didn't say yes." If this sounds downright medieval to you, that's because it is, and the frustration and confusion of young people of both genders I've known here in Korea has assured me of just how counterproductive it really is to keep people of both genders in the dark about such things. But people are not "blank slates," to use the term popularized by Stephen Pinker. We're not infinitely malleable, and we are not lacking a basic wiring program. But it's important to remember that while everyone is wired generally in the same way, there are little differences between everyone, divergences from the average. That means that there isn't just one reason men act one way, but rather an array of reasons. It's interesting to ask why men who don't rape women behave that way. After all, from a purely reproductive standpoint, even given the reduced chances of pregnancy in terms of rape, men who made a habit out of it would have, in terms of natural selection, come out ahead, wouldn't they? Studies suggest that they would not. The reasons, though, are complex and vary with the nature of each man. Here are some of the reasons we could suggest that men don't make a habit of rape:
These, however, only deal with the majority of cases, where the muddled confusions of culture, sexuality, and power intersect. In other words, these men, the majority, can be reached by these means. Some men cannot. There are estimates that at least one percent of people are psychopaths, human beings incapable of sympathy for others or any emotional experience comparable to yours or mine. This means you have probably met several already in your life, and may even be on a first-name basis with one. The vast majority of them are men, and they will not fear social or moral reprisal, will never learn empathy, and were never wired, from the start, to feel respect for anyone, let alone women in general. These are among the unfortunate parasites in the human ecosystem, the implication of that rule we cannot ignore: every ecosystem has its parasites. Likewise, if you look at the range of kinks that somehow turn up in human minds, you will find a bewildering array of things, many of which will shock you. A little surfing around the Internet is all it takes to become convinced that, for every kink, there's a small subculture devoted to it. If you don't agree, look up "Gorean" online. It's a group of fans of the Gor SF novels that believe women should be enslaved and men should be their masters, sexually and otherwise. Real women willingly sign themselves into domestic slavery with real men, who deem themselves slave masters. They live in normal neighbourhoods. If there are women who get off on selling themselves into voluntary slavery, then you can be sure that there are men who get off on raping women. Just because kinks may transgress the bounds of human decency, sanity, human rights, and mental health doesn't mean it is eliminable from the human gene pool. Ironically, the greater effort we make to realize our ethical ideals and free women from having to worry about their safety, the easier it will be for those parasites to game this system. And the word "game" is a good one, not because rape is a game, but because games are all about using intelligent strategies. This is why I see walking a woman to her car instead of letting her go alone as an ethical imperative, even in this day and age. Ideals are all well and good: everyone with even a modicum of sympathy and sanity holds pretty much the same ideals, but the question is whether they're realistic. When you get right down to it, that teenaged girl near McLeod Ganj ought to have been able to walk that road into town without the fear of being attacked by a strange man. Nonetheless, I'm glad I was there that day, to walk with her, and I hope that she and her friends began walking into town together. Ought is a wonderful and important thing, but without a firm grasp of is, ought can blind us to the dangers that remain, and the monsters among us. Comments (0)
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