Customer Reviews

A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(34)

 

 

My criticism of this is not that it tries to find a biological basis for distressing behaviour -- my criticism is that it is simply bad science, packaged to sell.

Example: Thornhill claims that a study has shown that reproductive-age women are more traumatized by rape than older or younger women who are not in danger of pregnancy, and he takes this as one of the pillars of his argument that rape is a strategy for reproduction.

Problem: His reference for this study is one of his own articles, dated 1991. When you go find this article, you find that it contains a reference to one of his articles, dated 1990. When you find this, it references the study yet again, but in an article of his dated in the early 1980s. When you find this article, you find another reference, but at least this is to the original research -- a study of 27 women that was done in 1974, and which, in fact, the original researchers (not Thornhill) found to indicate that women of all ages and reproductive status were equally traumatized. It was only after Thornhill ran this study through a series of computerized "filters" to factor out things he felt to be extraneous, was he able to turn this interpretation on its head. And it seems that he and Palmer went to extraordinary lengths to make the original data hard to find, in order to obscure the small size and age of the study as well as the original interpretation. The _accepted_ method for citation is to list the original study "as quoted in" one's own article -- not simply to quote one's own series of articles.

He and Palmer consistently make use of obfuscation to avoid answering criticisms of their arguments, as well. For instance, one of his arguments is that scorpionflies regularly "rape" (i.e. force copulation) as a reproductive strategy. At one point, they address the real and relevant question that must be asked -- "How is scorpionfly behavior relevant to *human* behavior" -- by immediately diving off into a rant about the evils of assuming that they advocate biological determinism. In fact, they do not answer the relevancy question at all, but bury it under a load of righteous indignation against a different argument.

Rape of children was not included in any of their analyses; rape of teens and adults was reclassified into only two impossibly broad age categories, thereby obscuring the actual curve of incidents. In fact, the vast majority of rapes target pre-reproductive girls, going by FBI and National Crime Victim Survey statistics -- something that the authors waffle between not mentioning or denying outright, but without naming a source for their statistics. Sex attacks that do not involve a possible result of pregnancy (that is, same-sex rapes, penetration with objects, and penetration of "other orifices", etc.) are not mentioned at all, anywhere in their work -- a strange omission for a book that claims to deal with the entire phenomena of rape. One can only think that they leave these inconvenient facts out of the book because they look awkwardly like evidence against their theory.

This was published as a "popular science" book to make money; such a volatile and emotive topic will always sell. The pity of it is that it would never have passed peer-review as a genuine scientific argument.

I was deeply disappointed, first because of all of the above, and second because the only suggestion they could come up with for actually combating the male tendency to rape was to suggest women dress and speak modestly, and in general do all the things to appear unavailable and spoken for, and to understand that "males are driven by biological needs" -- in other words, the same advice that has failed to work to stop rape in any culture, over a period of centuries.

The book really doesn't advance anything, except Thornhill and Palmer's royalty checks.

OVERALL GRADE: B-

The main strength of this book is its very publication, I think. I suppose to get a more vigorous debate going on about all the causes of rape, someone had to write this book. Thornhill and Palmer did it, and hopefully it will spawn more research, either in support or in opposition. This book is written for a general audience but its main targets are within academia, namely the social sciences. I think T&P wrote it to a mass audience as a way of circumventing what they saw were roadblocks within the academic community to a serious discussion of these concepts. If so, then that's great.

T&P also do well in pointing out some of the (mostly) logical flaws of the current social theory behind rape. The main one for me was that, while social theory stresses that power, hate, and so forth motivate rape (which I'm sure they do), the social theory never really answers for me this question, "Why rape"? There are other ways that misogynist men could express themselves besides this one, which seems to be numero uno on the expression list, according to the prevailing theory. Sex has to be the underlying answer to this question. Men who rape are obviously sexually aroused, and the old mind/body duality a la Descartes doesn't cut it as an answer for this. There's room for both social and biological causes here, and both should be explored more fully.

That brings me to the book's main weakness. "A natural history" this isn't. T&P offer the basic theoretical idea behind rape being a specific adaptation of evolution. But its obvious that the research isn't there (yet) to support it. They overreach on their "pro" argument as a result, stating things as if they're already conclusively proven, when they can offer up only fragmentary evidence at best. Maybe its the ideological blockade that is making it hard to collect such evidence, and maybe this book will help overcome that. But, until more is found, for this neutral, general reader of science, I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude. There's not a consensus yet in the biological community about causes of rape, so Thornhill and Palmer shouldn't attempt to speak for that entire field, which it sometimes seems like they're trying to do.

Read it or not? Yeah, sure, read it. Anytime a book makes a splash you should at least be aware of its contents if nothing else. Just don't be misled into believing you're going to walk away from it with definitive answers, unless they're the ideological based answers (either way) that you walked in with in the first place. The jury's still out on this one

Thornhill and Palmer (TP) review tons of evidence on the nature of rape. The plusses of the book are (1) they show that rape is a sexual act directed at obtaining pleasure rather than being an expression of male power; (2) they show that as predicted by evolutionary theory, males are evolutionarily adapted to rape, whereas females are not. These are terribly important facts, and they go against the accepted wisdom in contemporary sociology and some brands of feminism; but the accepted wisdom has no empirical basis whatever, in the authors opinion and mine as well. The minuses of the book will appear trivial to those who believe in the accepted wisdom and are shattered by its demise. But they are important nonetheless. Most important, TP view males as touting up the costs of raping (pleasure, possible reproduction) against the costs (getting caught and punished). If the benefits exceed the costs, the male rapes. This ignores all forms of interpersonal interaction except the brute physical. For instance, the 'cost' of causing harm to an innocent victim, the 'cost' of seeing a victim helpless and miserable because of your actions, the 'cost' of having the self-image as a sexual predator, and the like, are simply not part of their model of human motivation. Yet there is overwhelming evidence that people are not self-interested in the way depicted by TP. Males who use TP's cost/benefit analysis are better described as psychopaths or sociopaths rather than normal humans. This is because in the course of our evolution, humans have picked up fundamental prosocial traits. When these are absent in a person, the person is an abnormal, pathological case. In short, an alternative to TP's characterization of rape is that rapists are males who have abnormal personalities (including but not limited to psychopathy) the allow them to act out on urges that all males have but in most are countermanded by basic human sympathies. TP do a disservice to evolutionary theory, which they use to portray humans as a sorry lot of selfish brutes. The fact is that evolution produces morality and beauty, sensitivity and love, just as much as rape, murder, and indifference.

Be very skeptical of what you may already have heard about this book. Read it yourself, and you will find that the authors make a far more compelling case for biology's effects on patterns of sexual aggression than the book's often alarmist critics would have you believe. The authors' argument, put simply, is that if we want to be more effective at preventing rape, then the more we understand about its multiple causes the better. The authors convincingly argue that causation of human behavior is a scientific, empirical issue that biology can help to illuminate. And the book provides a highly readable exploration of biological approaches to understanding sexual coercion in the many species (including humans) in which it appears.

Some critics of the book have attempted to make much of the theoretical possibility that the book may afford rapists a defense at trial. I am a law professor specializing in potential legal implications of human behavioral biology. And as I explain in a recent law review article (Sex, Culture, and the Biology of Rape: Toward Explanation and Prevention, California Law Review 87:827 -- July 1999) I do not think the biological theories presented in this book can or will support successful genetic defenses to rapists. Nonetheless, there are still non-trivial, non-trial, legal implications that may help the system handle and deter rape more effectively. This makes reading the book an essential step in understanding and reducing female victimization.

Disclosures: I Co-Directed a conference on Law, Biology, and Sexual Aggression, at which both Thornhill and Palmer were invited speakers, and I helped to review the Thornhill/Palmer manuscript in a pre-publication phase.

There are two issues here: (1) is the book well-researched? (2) does this information have policy implications; that is, can it help us reduce the incidence of rape? Yes, the objective reader will see immediately that it is a well researched book. The theory is solid and there is ample supporting evidence and not just evidence drawn from insect studies. Yes, there are policy implications here -- the authors suggest things we can do to reduce the chances a female will be raped. Despite the popularity of the power/violence theories, rape still occurs and with some frequency. The test of any theory should be found in whether it fits the evidence, not whether it is politically correct.

As a woman, a feminist, and a sociologist by training, I still find nothing offensive in this book. Thornhill and Palmer have tackled one of the most sensitive and inflammatory topics that exist and it is only natural that they will receive a lot of knee-jerk reactions to it. However, this book is well-written, well-researched and thought-provoking. Whether you ultimately believe their theory or not, T and P will make you seriously consider some of your assumptions about rape.

I'm not sure if some of the other reviewers have actually read this book, because nowhere in it do the authors assert that women are to blame for their rapes or that they provoke them through sexy clothing. They do suggest that sexy clothing might be one of many factors that lead men to rape and that women may CHOOSE to use this knowledge when deciding how to dress for certain situations. Why this particular issue is so offensive boggles me. I have had many people suggest that I take a women's self-defense class to help me avoid and/or survive an attack. But that suggestion in no way implies that if I *don't* take a self-defense class I am somehow responsible for causing my own rape. Similarly, women can arm themselves with the knowledge that how they dress may have an effect on how some men behave towards them, without being responsible for that behavior in any way.

I'd advise anyone interested in this topic to read the book carefully and thoroughly. Does the book prove that rape is an evolutionary adaptation? Of course not, but it certainly offers some compelling evidence and an interesting alternative to current theories on rape.

I have been a student of Dr. Palmer's at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and while I admire his ecoanthropology teachings, this book is beyond his scope as an anthropologist. Dr. Palmer's most knowledgeable topics are those of the fishers of Maine and New Foundland. Some of Dr. Palmer's best works are those he did with his former professor and mentor, Lyle Steadman at ASU regarding folklore, mythology and ancestor teachings. If I could have previewed this work before it was published, I would have said, "Craig, stick with what you know!" His documentaion is weak at best, and some of it is truly questionable. While I understand his logic behind this topic, I think his facts are weak. I suppose, if one were inclined, one could turn any set of numbers, statistics or facts to fit the hypothesis they have developed. I think that's what Craig and Randy Thornhill have done. Craig has written some absolutely wonderful works, however, this is not one of them.

My suggestion would be that readers find this in the library and not spend money on it, read it, then come to your own conclusions on whether or not you agree with the evolutionary basis of rape.

This book presents (among other things) a hypothesis that forced sex is an evolutionary adaptation, a somehow-hereditary strategy for reproducing under desperate circumstances. An interesting way to look at it, with some potential for scientific insight. But given that we're talking about a very real and all-too-common daily inhumanity, the implications of the insect research hardly describe the scope, the quantity, or even the central characteristics of this horrific behavior in human beings in any satisfactory way, either theoretically or practically. Consequently, the suggestions made by the authors at addressing the problem of rape, being based on their hypothesis seem hopelessly naive.

In this book, we seem to go from the position commonly attributed to feminist thinkers, that "rape is about men hating and wanting to control women," to that supposedly espoused by those friendly to evolutionary psychology, that "rape is a reproductive strategy." We're far from being able to say that human motivation and capacity for rape is entirely defined by either one of those views.

The strength of this book is that the authors had the cahones to say the things they do, especially to oppose the common but extreme view that rape is nothing more than a calculated power play intended to humiliate and socially dominate women. This should spark some useful discussions and interest as well as controversy.

The weaknessses of the book are that not only does it ignore virtually the entire body of research on human behavior related to crime and sexual coercion, but it does not even adequately represent current evolutionary thinking about complex behaviors. It covers far too narrow a range of scientific data to be considered representative of scientific thought in evolutionary biology.

I loved this book. Thornhill and Palmer explain rape in the same way as forensic psychologists using different methods. No one would accuse psychologists as 'justifying' rape and murder when they discuss a perpetrator's having been victimized by childabuse.

I once heard a forensic psycholgist being interview on National Public Radio suggest that women not park next to vans because this was serial killer's preferred method of abducting women. I haven't parked next to a van since. I don't care if this behavior is rooted in psychology, pharmachology, or biology. This is information I can use.

If dressing my daughter more concervatively or at least making her wear a concealing coat over her 'too hot to handle' outfits on the way to a club, lowers her risk of rape, then I think this is useful information, most of us already got that one figured out. Women have a right to wear what ever the hell they want, where ever they want. But will this 'right' will not innoculate us against rape, herpes, or AIDs. Nor will this 'right' raise the badly beaten body of my child from the dead.

Men also have the right to walk down the street without being shot at. But wearing the wrong colors in the wrong neighborhood is likely to get them killed. No doubt, gang behavior towards territorial intruders can be shown to have evolutionary roots. Because it can be explained in biological term does not infer that behaviors are fixed. Sociobiology explains patterns of behaviors and potential behaviors and what influences the frequency of their expression in a given population.

For those who persist in the biology as essentialism hysteria, please remember that the key to evolution is variation. Social groups can and do select for and against different behaviors through customs and laws.

Will understanding the biological undercurrents of rape better help men to control these impulses and women to prevent it. Hope so.

Unfortunately misinterpreted by the press, this book can actually increase our knowledge about how to stop the rape!It represents a brilliant and troubling attempt to look into who we really are: writers goad the reader to introspection and to fresh perspectives about one's choices and place in society; it could well change the way people think, and maybe even how they behave.