Galileo's Middle Finger (16 page)

Craig recognized that this juxtaposition reflected the standard dogma about rape—that rape (and thus also kidnapping and murder done to facilitate a rapist’s aims) were not explainable simply as a sexual act gone evil. Before he gave up on school, Craig remembered telling his mentor in Arizona, “If I come back, the claim that rape isn’t sexually motivated might be one obviously wrong social science explanation worth challenging.”

While living in Maine, Craig got a call from an assistant district attorney in Arizona. About this, Craig told me,

My first thought was that I must have forgotten to turn in some library book that was now a year overdue. But the assistant DA said the rape/murder [of the neighbor] was coming to trial, and his job was to contact everyone who lived in that part of town to see if he could find anyone who had seen an angry interaction between the girl who was raped and murdered and the man who was accused.

Craig had nothing to offer. “I was curious about why he would need someone to report that specific thing, so I asked him, . . . ‘Couldn’t you just argue that the guy was sexually attracted to this girl and he knew she would never have sex with him willingly?’” Couldn’t the DA reasonably postulate that the motive was sexual and the murder had been committed to cover up the crime?

The DA answered that that was basically what they had tried to argue, but “the defense said something like ‘scientists had proved rape is not sexually motivated. Instead it’s motivated by a desire for violence, control, or power.’ So that’s the motive that had to be established.” Craig found himself thoroughly frustrated. Did it really make sense to talk about rape as if it were a nonsexual act—especially when such a poorly evidenced claim gets in the way of bringing rapist-murderers to justice? Clearly, the populist dogma “could even let a murderer and rapist go free,” he said to me. “So I asked my wife if she’d mind if I went back and finished my PhD in order to write a dissertation challenging that explanation of rape.” His wife did not mind, and Arizona was willing to take him back and backdate a leave of absence. Craig finished his last semester of course work and then returned to Maine to write his dissertation on rape while paying the bills in lobsters.

In writing about the biological bases of sexual coercion, Craig inevitably encountered the work of the zoologist Randy Thornhill, who was interested in the same topic. In his studies of scorpionflies, Randy had found plenty of evidence that male scorpionflies prefer consensual sex, i.e., sex in which the female participates, typically in response to male presentation of a nuptial gift, something along the lines of a dead insect or a mass of hardened saliva. But if a male is unable to get a female to cooperate sexually—if, for example, he can’t get his legs on a gift—he will resort to forced sex, using a grabbing organ that appears to have evolved for just this purpose. Craig and Randy understood that humans differ radically in many ways—no one’s getting this girl into bed with a gift of petrified spit, and men don’t have a specialized rape-facilitating organ—but Craig and Randy also understood the value of recognizing that human sexuality has
evolved.
Some men’s rape of women might therefore be explainable with the tools of evolutionary biology.

In their early (and later) discussions, Craig and Randy sometimes disagreed about evolutionary explanations for coerced sex. Craig thought sexual coercion was likely to generally represent a by-product of evolution—an accidental side effect of evolutionarily successful adaptations—whereas Randy was inclined to see evidence for adaptionist explanations. But the two realized they agreed more than they disagreed, and so they decided to write
A Natural History of Rape
together, a book that would work through massive amounts of data on sexually coercive acts in humans and other species.

As one might predict, when the media frenzy set in around the book, Craig and Randy had the typical experience of those who challenge conventional wisdom. Commentators took the existing stories of good and evil, good guys and bad guys, acceptable claims and unacceptable, and tried to fit Thornhill and Palmer into those preexisting slots. Since Thornhill and Palmer seemed to be saying unacceptable things about rape—it
does
matter whether a victim looks sexually attractive to a rapist; rape
is
often about sex; biology
does
contribute to sexual coercion—that meant they had to be the bad guys. Thus, in the crunching of the daily media machinery, they were magically transformed into misogynistic apologists for rape. Then all you had to do was put into their mouths the words Bad Guys say about rape: “The woman was asking for it, and the guy couldn’t help himself.” And so came the hate mail and the threatening phone calls. About those, Craig told me, “Let’s just say I learned the legal line that separates official death threats from run-of-the-mill nasty e-mails and letters.”

The
messages left on Randy’s answering machine
were so frightening that a local sheriff did him the favor of recording the outgoing message for him in a very macho voice. His message indicated that the speaker was a law enforcement official, said that the call was being recorded, and reminded people that it’s against the law to call people up to tell them you’re going to kill them. The business about the police recording the call wasn’t true, but it helped. Randy (and his kids) no longer had to hear what people wanted to do to this Thornhill guy. Meanwhile, on Craig’s end, “Things were so bad that the police told me to take some precautions, like checking my car for car bombs every morning and varying my routine. I was even provided a special parking place on campus they thought would be safer.”

Um, well, OK. I’d definitely found someone who’d had it worse than I. Humbled, I asked Craig what sustained him during this time. It obviously helped that he had to take care of his family; when that focus is required of a family oriented guy like Craig, there will be a certain lifesaving structure to one’s days, even in the face of insanity. (I knew that firsthand.) I suggested to Craig that it probably also helped that he and Randy were in this pickle together. Craig agreed. Not only did being “Thornhill and Palmer” mean built-in peer support, it also meant that Randy and Craig felt a responsibility to each other to see the business through—to stay professional, rational, and unafraid. But Craig mentioned one more thing that kept him going: the sense that he was right in a way that ultimately would help women. He had more and more reason to believe that was true because he was getting messages from rape survivors who told him they appreciated his understanding that the men who assaulted them had done so for sexual gratification. Some were even thanking Thornhill and Palmer in public.

In the Lifestyles section of the
Dallas Morning News,
Elizabeth Eckstein
began her op-ed this way:

Finally. Finally, somebody is coming around to my way of thinking on the motivations of rape. I can say this because I survived an aggravated sexual assault by a serial rapist and, more important, two years of post-traumatic stress syndrome that included an exhausting state of hypervigilance, sudden panic attacks, yelling at God and the cold clench of fear in my gut. I also was consumed with an obsessive (some would say unhealthy) need to know why. Why me? Why him? Why rape? So I tried to find out. During my quest, I came across a lot of people who liked to quote the so-called experts and say things such as, “It’s a crime of violence, not sex” and “It’s a control thing.” Boy, did I hate those people. In my mind, they were wrong. I used to reply to those sorts in a real catty fashion. “He didn’t force me into the kitchen to break all the dishes. He didn’t make me smash all the furniture in the house. He made me have sex with him against my will. Sex, people, sex at gunpoint. Choice absolutely and totally removed from the equation. An act, typically one of love, reduced to its lowest and ugliest form.”

Craig made sure I saw this in his stack of photocopies. I read it quietly and remarked to him how bizarre it was that we had reached a point at which we have to argue that an act that involves an erection and typically results in an orgasm is a
sexual
act.

“Exactly,” he answered.

Eckstein was not alone in thanking Thornhill and Palmer for challenging the Brownmiller construction. In an
interview with the
Boston Herald
, Jennifer Beeman, director of the Campus Violence Protection Program at UC–Davis—yes, the very university whose “rape is not about sex” pamphlet I quoted above—“said she hopes the article and book [by Thornhill and Palmer] will force scientists, social scientists, women’s organizations and rape experts to do some soul searching. ‘For so long our mantra has been “It’s about power, not sex,”’ she said, ‘that I think we’re afraid to admit it might be about both.’”

At some point, Craig pulled an envelope out of the stack, and from the envelope pulled out a four-page handwritten letter
from a guy serving time
in a federal penitentiary in the South. Craig skimmed it, paused, and handed it to me, saying I needed to be sure that if I used this letter, I not identify the writer. The handwriting was neat, the prose clear, and the writer pretty well educated. He had read or heard of Randy and Craig’s article in the
Sciences
, and he was writing to give Randy his own opinion:

I know from repeated first hand experience that sex really is the central motivation to rape. Although this may not always be true with all offenders, or even all cases of adult rape, I know from my own self introspection through offender programming treatment, and from other adult offenders I’ve been in such programming with, that sexual attraction and instinctual sex urges acting as biological imperatives strongly motivated acts of rape (strangers/adult female). It’s frequently confessed.

The convict went on to explain about how rapists—presumably just like him—pick off females as attractive and “available” targets. He agreed with Palmer and Thornhill on this: “A
dumb
myth is that rapists go after
any
female.” The writer went on: “Although from a therapeutic view it is of course important that an offender in no way get to abrogate his guilt by placing blame on the victim’s real or imagined provocative behaviors, the school of thought [that says rape is not about sex] stymies and downplays the existence of these powerful motivations.”

How, the letter implicitly asked throughout, can rape be successfully prevented, and rapists treated or at least adequately controlled, if we deny the reality of men like this? The correspondent, a man hopefully locked up behind bars for a very long time, was clearly moved to commit a heinous crime by a pathological kind of lust. But a
lust
nonetheless.

Reading this letter, I found myself going still with fear. Or rather, a combination of fears: One part a fear of rapists like this man, who will see a sexual solicitation in a woman’s bending down to pick up her keys. One part a fear of ideologies like feminism—ideologies that might lead reasonable, progressive people like me to accidentally hurt someone for the sake of a more palatable or more useful argument. And one part a fear that anything I say can and will be used against me, as had happened to Craig.

 • • • 

T
ALKING TO
C
RAIG
in his office about his frustrating encounters with my fellow feminists soon had me involuntarily mulling over what had happened to me at the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) almost five months earlier. It was there that, for the first time in my life, I found myself wondering whether I should (or could) really call myself a feminist.

When the call for conference proposals had gone out for the 2008 NWSA conference, to be held in Cincinnati, several colleagues had written to me upset about a post on a major Women’s Studies e-mail discussion list from a trans woman graduate student named
Joelle Ruby Ryan
. Ryan was putting together a panel for the meeting and was seeking participants for what would no doubt be a scathing criticism of me and Bailey. The title of the planned session? “The Bailey Brouhaha: Community Members Speak Out on Resisting Transphobia and Sexism in Academia and Beyond.” This was obviously payback time for my exposé of what Andrea James, Lynn Conway, and Deirdre McCloskey had done to try to shut Bailey up. Not too surprisingly, Ryan’s work was funded by an LGBT foundation grant for which
Conway functioned as Ryan’s “mentor
.”

The call for proposals lumped me and Bailey together, suggested that my work contributed to a “chilly climate” for transgender academics, and so forth. No wonder colleagues on the list were writing to me to ask me to defend myself. So I hopped on this e-mail list and attempted to point people toward my peer-reviewed article and the
New York Times
coverage
of it. I also pointed out that anyone could submit a response and have it published right alongside my article in
Archives of Sexual Behavior.
I threw in a note that the call for panel participants was riddled with problematic claims.

Knowing I’d basically been set up, I also wrote to the programming committee of NWSA and asked that I be given time to respond to the panel. No deal. I wrote a proposal to contribute to the panel, sent it to Ryan, and was told there was no room for me. I saw in the coming plans for the session that there
was
room for Andrea James and two other trans women—with Lynn Conway functioning as the “session advisor.” Finally, I submitted to the NWSA conference organizers my own proposal for a paper, a comparison of techniques used in the intersex rights movement and in the Bailey book controversy. The conference organizers granted me a slot in a random session earlier in the day.

In Cincinnati,
in my allotted fifteen minutes
, I pleaded with audience members to attend the later session, the session dedicated to taking me down, and yet to not simply believe what they would hear. Don’t believe what you have not seen evidence for, I told them. I asked people to think about the importance of evidence to issues of identity rights. I talked a little bit about why scholarship is not the same as activism. The audience looked incredibly uncomfortable. In a first for my public talks, no one had any questions for me afterward.