Straw men and fairy tales: evaluating reactions to a Natural History of Rape.

In this paper we respond to two frequent criticisms of our book, A Natural History of Rape (Thornhill & Palmer: 2000). The first criticism portrays the book as little more than a "just-so" story that human rape is an adaptation, We demonstrate that this portrayal is not accurate. The second criticism reflects a common response to the book's challenge of the popular assertion that rapists are not motivated by sexual desire but instead commit these crimes motivated by the urge to power; domination, and violence, and the urge to degrade and humiliate women. We demonstrate that such criticisms of our book are inherently contradictory and illogical. We believe it is important for sex researchers to understand that these sorts of criticisms are seriously flawed so that future research efforts toward understanding the causes of sexual coercion are not stalled.

Many published reactions to our book, A Natural History of Rape, were filled with misunderstandings and misrepresentations. These reactions, however, can be used to help clarify certain issues relevant to preventing the horrible crime of rape through increased knowledge of its causes. This paper examines reactions to two specific aspects of A Natural History of Rape. First, at the level of ultimate (i.e., evolutionary) causation, many reviewers accused the book of being an example of facile enthusiasm for adaptationist explanations of evolutionary phenomena ("ardent adaptationism") and of forcing data to support that conclusion. In this case, the accusation of ardent adaptationism surrounded our consideration of the hypothesis that rape might be an adaptation (a product of direct selection for rape in human evolutionary history). This is a straw-man argument that misrepresents both this specific book and the general attempt to determine if human rape is an adaptation or a by-product of other adaptation. Second, at the level of proximate causation (i.e., immediate or occurring during the lifetime of an organism), the most controversial aspect of the book was its challenge to the widely held view that rapists are not sexually motivated when they commit the crime. When this challenge was originally made in Palmer's Journal of Sex Research (JSR) article, "Twelve Reasons Why Rape is Not Sexually Motivated: A Skeptical Examination" (Palmer, 1988b), one colleague commented that reading the article reminded him of the fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes (Andersen, 1837/1872) when the child proclaims that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes at all. When this challenge was repeated, however, in A Natural History of Rape, reactions indicated that Hans Christian Andersen's story actually overestimated the objectivity of humans. In the fairy tale, the people immediately stopped making their inaccurate assertions about the naked emperor's "beautiful clothes" as soon as they heard the child. Reactions to the analogous argument about the motivation of rapists produced a wide variety of erroneous and contradictory statements. We address both of these reactions to demonstrate the need to approach the study of rape with reason and scientific method, instead of "established dogma and ideology" (Pinker. 2000).

HUMAN RAPE: ADAPTATION OR BY-PRODUCT REVISITED

"Ardent adaptationist," "Panglossian selectionist," "ultra-Darwinist," "Darwinian fundamentalist," "'Darwinian Extremist," "hyper selectionist," and unskeptical, overly zealous believer in "just so stories": Most evolutionary psychologists or sociobiologists have had these labels applied to them, if not directly to their own work then at least indirectly by virtue of being allegedly associated with these approaches. But are these accusations part of a legitimate scientific debate, or do they represent a straw-man argument that has been used to give the illusion of a scientific justification to those who oppose evolutionary explanations of human behavior for nonscientific reasons?

The first reason to suspect that the charge of ardent adaptationism is a straw-man argument is that it has been made against a category of researchers who are perhaps most accurately defined by a common intellectual ancestry that traces back to the following line from George Williams's 1966 book, Adaptation and Natural Selection: "Evolutionary adaptation is a special and onerous concept that should not be used unnecessarily, and an effect [even a beneficial effect] should not be called a function [that effect of a trait that accounts for it being directly favored by selection] unless it is clearly produced by design and not by chance" (1966, p. vii). The demonstration of design is onerous because "the demonstration of a benefit [e.g., increased reproductive success] is neither necessary nor sufficient in the demonstration of function [i.e., design]" (Williams. 1966, p. 209). Plausibly demonstrating design by natural selection requires showing that a trait accomplishes its alleged function with "'sufficient precision, economy, and efficiency, etc." (Williams. 1966, p. 10). This raises the obvious question of why Gould and Lewontin accused the followers of this approach of being ardent adaptationists in their famous paper, "The Spandrels of San Marco" (Gould & Lewontin, 1979). Rose and Lauder provided this answer: "Williams (1966) emphasized that the concept of adaptation is 'special and onerous' and should not be applied lightly. Many did not take his advice [italics added], leading to... Stephen Jay Gould speaking at a 1978 meeting of the Royal Society of London" (Rose & Lauder, 1996, p. 1). But is this true? Did the followers of Williams really start assuming every trait was an adaptation, or did they, as Williams suggested, consider hypotheses about adaptation to be no more than hypotheses until evidence of functional design, the criterion for calling a trait an adaptation, ruled out other explanations?

History of the Debate About Whether Human Rape Is an Adaptation or a By-Product

The question of whether human rape is an adaptation or a by-product was first addressed in the late 1970s. In a 1979 paper, Alexander and Noonan suggested the hypothesis that"... concealed ovulation and some aspects of rape in humans may be [italics added] historically related. As females evolved to deny males the opportunity to compete at ovulation time, copulation with unwilling females became a feasible strategy for achieving some reproduction" (p. 449). If the followers of Williams were the ardent adaptationists they have been portrayed to be, they would have simply accepted this hypothesis as fact, and that would have been the end of the story. Instead, the same year saw Symons, in his book The Evolution of Human Sexuality, state, "I do not believe that available data are even close to sufficient to warrant the conclusion that rape itself is a facultative adaptation in the human male...." (1979, p. 284). Symons instead saw rape as a by-product of various different sexual adaptations in men and women. Males are designed to be sexually ardent and women to be choosy about mates, which incidentally sometimes leads to rape. Symons, however, did not specify exactly what aspects of the "available data" were insufficient, or what data might be discovered in the future that would demonstrate that rape is a facultative adaptation. Hence, it is perfectly understandable that other researchers would more thoroughly investigate this question.

The first papers to do so were published in 1983 by Shields and Shields, and Thornhill and Thornhill. Both of these papers put forth more detailed versions of the hypothesis that rape might be an evolved conditional tactic that occurred under certain specific environmental conditions in which the reproductive benefits would have outweighed the reproductive costs. The Shields focused on situations that made potential victims extremely vulnerable, while the Thornhills "... hypothesized [italics added] that human rape is an evolved facultative alternative that is primarily employed when men are unable to compete for resources and status necessary to attract and reproduce successfully with desirable mates" (p. 137). Once again, instead of simply asserting that this hypothesis was a proven fact, the Thornhills stated, "The evolutionary view of rape we propose is completely testable" (p. 137), and then, after presenting 30 pages of data relevant to 15 specific predictions, concluded that "Further data collection will be necessary to thoroughly test each of the predictions we have discussed" (p. 168).

Toward this end, Palmer (1988a) considered the predictions generated from the following seven alternative evolutionary hypotheses (p. 13) and tested them against existing cross-species, cross-cultural, and modern societal data.

1. Rape is a male adaptation engaged in by males of all social status when victims are highly vulnerable.

2. Rape is a male adaptation engaged in by only low-status males excluded from other mating alternatives.

3. Rape is a male adaptation for achieving dominance over females.

4. Rape is a male adaptation that is the result of female preference for physically strong males.

5. Rape is not an adaptation, but a by-product of evolved differences in male and female sexual behavior.

6. Rape is not an adaptation, but a result of how recently disturbed (novel) environments impact men's evolved sexual psychology.

7. Rape is not an adaptation, but a pathological act of abnormal individuals. This hypothesis is evolutionary in that it implies that selection in the past has designed men's sexuality such that it is sometimes subject to the pathology. Palmer's conclusion, published in the JSR article "Human Rape: Adaptation or By-Product?", was that the only hypothesis consistent with existing evidence was number five. Hence, "Existing evidence is found to be insufficient to warrant an adaptive explanation of rape per se in humans" (Palmer, 1991. p. 365).

A Natural History of Rape

The publication of this article produced a productive exchange of punished papers between the two authors of the current article debating what evidence would or wouldn't provide a sufficient demonstration of rope's design. By the mid-1990s, while still disagreeing about whether rape-specific adaptations are likely to exist in the human male, we agreed that an evolutionary approach to explaining rape could greatly increase knowledge about the causes of rape and hence help prevent its occurrence. Therefore, we decided to collaborate on a book that was eventually titled A Natural History of Rape (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000). We decided to use our continuing disagreement about the existence of rape-specific adaptation in the book as an example of how the evolutionary approach generates alternative, testable hypotheses, thus dispelling the lingering myth that the evolutionary approach only produces "just-so" adaptive stories.

Using the same approach of testing alternative hypotheses, we examined the following expanded list of potential evolutionary explanations of human rape.

1. Rape is a phylogenetic holdover.

2. Rape is a result of mutation-selection balance.

3. Rape is a product of genetic drift.

4. Rape is a product of novel environments.

5. Rape is a pathology.

6. Rape is an adaptation for dominance and control.

7. Rape is the result of an adaptation in human females that functions to assure insemination by the fittest males.

8. Rape is the result of psychopathy.

9. Rape is a by-product of differences in male and female sexualities.

10. Rape is an adaptation,

After pointing out the reasons the first eight alternative evolutionary explanations are very unlikely, we stated, "There are currently only two likely candidates for ultimate causes of human rape" (p. 59). "[t]here are reasons for seriously considering each of these hypotheses" (p. 60), and "we disagree as to which of these two ultimate explanations of rape we expect to be confirmed by evidence" (p. 61). To emphasize that there is no a priori reason to assume the existence of any adaptation, we discussed the by-product hypothesis first (p. 61). and when we eventually turned to the possibility of rape-specific adaptations, we emphasized that "One, or more, or none of the following potential adaptations may exist" (Thornhill & Palmer. 2000, pp. 65-66):

1. Psychological mechanisms that function to help males evaluate the vulnerability of potential rape victims (increasing the reproductive benefits historically of rape).

2. Psychological mechanisms that motivate men who lack sexual access to females (or who lack sufficient resources) to rape.

3. Psychological mechanisms that cause males to evaluate sexual attractiveness (as indicated by age) differently for rape victims than for consensual sexual partners (increasing rape of fertile age females).

4. Psychological and/or other physiological mechanisms that result in differences between the sperm counts of ejaculates produced during rape and those of ejaculates produced during consensual copulation (more sperm during rape to offset competition with the sperm of the victim's partner).

5. Psychological mechanisms that produce differences between the sexual arousal of males caused by situations of rape and that caused by situations of consensual mating (high sexual arousal to depictions of situations involving relatively high-benefit/low-cost rape).

6. Psychological or other mechanisms that motivate males to engage in rape under conditions of a partner's possible consensual insemination by another male.

After discussing the existing evidence for and against each of these, we repeated our conclusion that "the question whether rape is an adaptation or a by-product cannot be definitively answered" (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000, p. 84). Thus, there is no strong evidence that men are functionally designed for raping per se, which is the evidence necessary to demonstrate rape adaptation and thus past direct selection for rape. We emphasized that knowing which of the two ultimate hypotheses--rape adaptation or by-product--is correct is critical, because the answer will help illuminate proximate causes that may be useful to manipulate to reduce rape.

Reviews

If the charge of ardent adaptationsim is part of a scientific debate, it should only be made when an ardent adaptationist argument is actually presented. However, if ardent adaptationism is a straw-man argument used for nonscientific reasons, it should be found whenever there is nonscientific opposition to an argument, even when there is no evidence of ardent adaptationism. Reviews of our book confirm this second hypothesis.

In some cases, the portrayal of us as ardent adaptationists was a straightforward repetition of the charge from long-time opponents of sociobiology in general. For example, Tang-Martinez and Mechanic (2001) not only accused us of arguing that rape is an "adaptation," they also stated. "Thornhill and Palmer proceed, throughout the book, to analyze rape as if they, in fact, believe it continues to be an adaptive strategy" (p. 1223). Similarly, long-time critics Rose and Rose (2001) stated that "In characteristic EP style, Thornhill and Palmer argue that rape is an adaptive strategy" (p. 3), and they even gave us somewhat of an exalted position among the mythological pantheon of ardent adaptationists by calling our book "Perhaps the nadir of evolutionary psychology's speculative fantasies..." (p. 3).

A much more creative charge of ardent adaptationism is found in the review by Coyne and Berry (2000). They started with the same misrepresentation: "In A Natural History of Rape, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer argue that rape is an adaptation." However. perhaps sensing that this may be too blatant a misrepresentation, they came up with a much more creative way of charging us with ardent adaptationism, even while admitting that we argue the opposite:

   "What persuasiveness, the book does possess rests on an ingenious
   rhetorical trick. The authors lay out two alternative evolutionary
   hypotheses: rape is either a "specific adaptation" (i.e. natural
   selection explicitly promoted the act) or a 'by-product of evolution
   (i.e., there was no direct selection for rape: rather it is an
   accidental product of selection for, say, male promiscuity and
   aggression). Readers unconvinced by the specific-adaptation
   argument therefore find themselves embracing by default the
   by-product alternative." (Coyne & Berry, 2000, p. 121)

We can understand why Coyne and Berry think in terms of rhetorical tricks, since the attack on ardent adaptationsim has always rested not on substance but on what Queller called the "rhetorical masterpiece" (Queller, 1995, p. 485) of the "Spandrels of San Marco" paper. However, Coyne and Berry gave us far too much credit, because we do not have the ability to portray the testing of alternative hypotheses as a rhetorical trick or anything other than what it is: the mainstay of the scientific method. More importantly, even if it was a rhetorical trick, we would certainly not deserve the credit for ingeniously" inventing it. Several generations of evolutionary biologists have considered both by product and adaptationist hypotheses, with Gould and Lewontin's (1979) "Spandrels of San Marco" paper being, ironically, the best-known example of arguing that traits may be either adaptations, analogous to the functional structures of cathedrals, or spandrels, architectural by-products.

As an alternative to this conspiratorial trick hypothesis, we suggest that the charge of ardent adaptationism has never been anything more than a tactic used to distance oneself from positions that are unpopular, usually because people continue to commit the naturalistic fallacy (the logical error of assuming that what is natural, biological, or evolved is morally correct). This hypothesis is not only consistent with the use of this tactic by those opposed to sociobiological positions in general, but also by those only opposed to evolutionary explanations of a specific subject or to a specific type of evolutionary methodology.

An example of using it to distance oneself from a particular subject is the review by Frans de Waal (2000), who wrote, "The greatest flaw of A Natural History of Rape is that it quotes but then blithely ignores the warning of the evolutionary biologist George Williams that "adaptation is a special and onerous concept that should be used only when it is really necessary'" (p. 17). To support this accusation, de Waal points out that "Even common behavior, like smoking or masturbation, isn't necessarily adaptive--let alone uncommon behavior [such as rape]" (p. 17). What is interesting about this particular criticism of our book is that we used the exact same example of masturbation to illustrate the exact same point that many common behaviors, to quote from our book, are "merely by-products [italics added] of the adaptations governing male sexual desires" (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000, p. 60)

The charge of "adaptationist storytelling" (Smith, Borgerhof Mulder, & Hill, 2001, p. 134) also has been leveled recently by some behavioral ecologists against some of the work of evolutionary psychologists, perhaps including our book. The irony in the argument proposed, for example, in the article by Smith et al.--that rape isn't an adaptation because ethnographic evidence supposedly demonstrates that the overall reproductive costs of rape are higher than the benefits--is that it actually implies a lower standard for identifying adaptation than the one we used in our book. Their argument implies that rape could be considered an adaptation if its current reproductive benefits outweigh its cost to reproductive success. However, as Williams (1966) stressed,"... this is an insufficient basis for postulating adaptation [because even] . . . a benefit can be the result of chance instead of design" (p. 12).

Conclusion

In conclusion, the question of whether traits such as human rape are adaptations or by-products cannot be answered unless hypotheses about adaptation are proposed. The charge of ardent adaptationism against anyone who proposes such a hypothesis olden has been an effective means for preventing this from happening. This is tragic because identifying whether or not human rape is an adaptation or a by-product would not only answer theoretical questions about human evolution, it also could identify the specific mechanisms involved in rape. Identification of these specific mechanisms then could be used to help prevent rape, whether or not these mechanisms turn out to be adaptations or by products. Not only do we need to continue to defend the evolutionary approach in general against the charge of ardent adaptationism, we also need to resist the temptation to use this charge among ourselves to discredit studies on particularly controversial subjects, or in our internal debates over which method of evolutionary analysis is best.

RAPE, SEX, AND THE "EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES"

Like many traditional fairy tales. The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen (1837/1872) satirized aspects of commonplace human behavior. In this case, it portrayed the absurd potential for social and political considerations about one's social image to cause humans to deny the evidence of their senses. Comparison to a similar real-world situation, however, suggests that Andersen's conclusion to the story may have greatly underestimated this human tendency. In the story, once the child states that the emperor isn't wearing anything at all, the townspeople all agree, abandoning their previously held inaccurate position, Although an analogous real world situation resulted in some people reacting in this way, many others stated positions even more astonishing than the original assertion that the naked king was wearing fine garments.

In 1988, JSR published a paper entitled "Twelve Reasons Why Rape is not Sexually Motivated: A Skeptical Examination" (Palmer, 1988b). That paper documented the history of the "not sex" argument: the view that "sexual coercion is motivated by power, not lust" (Stock, 1991, p. 61). It described how, after originating in the works of Millet (1971), Griffin (1971), and Greer (1970), this claim became famous after Brownmiller's endorsement in her book Against Our Will (1975). Then it documented how the "not sex" assertion was repeated in so many publications that it became "a mantra that blanketed the American media" (Paglia, 1994, p. 41), like the claim that the naked emperor was clothed in a brightly colored gold garment. Eventually the "not sex" assertion became "generally accepted by criminologists, psychologists, and other professionals working with rapists and rape victims .... " (Warner, 1980, p. 94) Palmer's paper (1988b) then expanded on the argument made by Symons (1979) that none of the reasons given to support the claim that rapists are not motivated by sexual desire is "watertight" (p. 279).

Upon reading Palmer's paper, one colleague commented that it made him feel like one of the townspeople in The Emperor's New Clothes when they hear the child speak. When the same argument was made in the book A Natural History of Rape, it received much wider attention, and many of the reactions were much less reasonable than the ones made in the fairy tale. In the fairy tale, Hans Christian Andersen wrote the following:

   "But he has nothing on at all," said a little child at last. "Good
   heavens! Listen to the voice of an innocent child," said the father,
   and one whispered to the other what the child had said. "But he
   has nothing on at all," cried at last the whole people (Andersen,
   1837/1872, p. 36)

Numerous people responded to A Natural History of Rape in much the same way. Pinker, for example, clearly saw the similarity with the fairy tale when he wrote, "I believe that the rape is not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Pinker, 2002, p. 362). Perhaps the most moving of these reactions to our book came from a rape victim:

   "Finally. Finally, somebody is coming around to my way of thinking
   on the motivations of rape.... During my quest [to know why
   I was raped], 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." (Eckstein, 2000, p. 2)

Similarly, Lambert commented, "And so the evidence builds up. It looks as though, after all, rape is more about sex than power" (Lambert, 2000. p. 3). Mullen also observed, "... the traditional desexualization of rape does not fair well before the authors' arguments...." (Mullen, 2000, p. 11). Shackelford and LeBlanc (2001) noted, "These key flaws identified by Thornhill and Palmer include... the empirically indefensible assertion that rape is motivated not by sexual motivation, but by the need for power and domination...." (p. 82; see also Miller, 2000). More diplomatically, Jones observed, "At a time when it is heresy to publicly question the forceful assertion that rape has nothing whatsoever to do with the rapist's sexual desire, Thornhill and Palmer offer refreshing (if often irreverent) skepticism toward orthodox theories of rape causation. This skepticism revitalizes scrutiny of rape theories and will remain valuable .... " (Jones, 2001, p. 1400). Even Beeman, Director of the Campus Violence Protection Program at the University of California, Davis, at least acknowledges that it is time to consider the possibility the emperor may be at least partially naked: "For so long our mantra has been 'It's about power, not sex,'... that I think we're afraid to admit it might be about both" (in Lawrence, 2000. p. 13).

Other people, however, behaved similarly to the emperor in the story who refuses to admit he is naked and continues to walk down the street as if garbed in fine clothes. Instead of this reaction being limited to the emperor himself, comments like the following were common: "'These are outrageous assertions,' said Sandra Horley, of Refuge, the United Kingdom charity that helps the victims of domestic violence. 'Rape is about power and control, not about sex. Rape is violence, and nothing to do with sex'" (McKie & McVeigh, 2000, p. 4).

A more interesting reaction was analogous to the townspeople stating, "We never really meant the emperor was wearing clothes; we just said it for political reasons":

   It is true that in recent decades the discussion of rape has been
   dominated by such notions [as rape is not about sex, but about
   violence and power], though one must remember that they originated
   not us scientific propositions but as political slogans
   deemed necessary to reverse popular misconceptions about rape.
   (Coyne, 2000, p. 27)

This comment is obviously true. In fact, it is the very point A Natural History of Rape and Andersen's fairy tale attempted to make: People say absurdly false statements about the world for political reasons. However, while A Natural History of Rape and The Emperor's New Clothes see the making of false statements as a problem, "Coyne, for one, appears to acknowledge that these assertions are not necessarily true, but he lets the matter slide" (Alcock, 2001, p. 212). Whether or not making false statements about the causes of rape for political reasons really is a problem is discussed below.

Even more interesting is the denial that anyone had ever said the emperor was wearing clothes, exemplified by Brownmiller's statement below:

   First of all, I think what they're saying is ridiculous. They
   misrepresented my position. I didn't say rape was only about power.
   I also say it's about humiliation and degradation.... When
   women started to talk about this in the early '70s, the women who
   had experienced rape said they felt it had been an act of
   humiliation. They didn't see it as a sex act. But obviously we
   didn't think. This had nothing to do with the sex act-of course it
   is, sexual organs are used (in Ellison. 2000. p. 2)

These comments are spurious since the issue has never been whether the motivation of rapists is power instead of humiliation and degradation, nor has anyone ever debated whether or not "sex organs are used" in rape. The issue has always been whether sex was a motivation for the rapist:

   The first step in evaluating the "not sex" explanation of rape is to
   establish exactly what the debate is over. Thanks to the feminist
   movement, no one any longer defends the dangerous claim that
   rape is a sexually arousing or sought after experience on the part
   of the victim. Neither does anyone deny that male sex organs are
   necessarily involved in the act. The debate is over the motivation
   of the rapist in using his sex organs in a way that constitutes rape.
   (Palmer. 1988. p 514)

Angler takes Brownmiller's reaction to an even more absurd extreme in her review of our book:

   It sets up a straw woman in the form of a misunderstanding of
   Brownmiller's classic text, and of feminist views of rape general]y,
   by claiming that Brownmiller et al. regard rape solely as a
   crime of violence not of sex.... As it happens, neither
   Brownmiller nor any other thoughtful person ever claimed that
   rape was only about power and aggression not about sex.
   (Angier, 2000, p. 81)

This suggests that Anderson's tale might have been more realistic if it ended instead with the following:

   "But he has nothing on at all," said a little child at last. "Good
   heavens! Listen to the voice of an innocent child," said the father,
   and one whispered to the other what the child had said. "But no
   one ever said he did!" cried at last the whole townspeople.

What makes the real-world setting even more amazing is that it occurs in a society with writing, so that the countless earlier claims of the "'townspeople" that rape is not an act of sex call be easily checked (for an introduction to the "not sex" literature, see Palmer, 1988b: Palmer, Dibari, & Wright, 1999). Further, if Brownmiller and Angier really never held the position that rapists weren't motivated by sex, then why haven't they railed against the countless authors who have attributed this position to Brownmiller? For example, why aren't they outraged by the following claim?

   ...Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape--rated by the New
   York public library its one of the 100 most influential books of the
   20th century--first instigated the theory that rape had nothing to
   do with sex and everything to do with a desire to dominate and
   control women.... (Hill, 2000, p. 3)

All of these reactions might only be the subject for an interesting study of illogicality except that the claim that rapists are not sexually motivated has such serious consequences. The "not sex" explanation is not presented as a political slogan: it is presented as a serious statement about the causes of rape, and as such it is the basis for attempts to prevent the crime of rape. This is best seen in the repetition of the claim in the instructions given to women in college on how to avoid becoming a victim of rape. If the "not sex" explanation of rape was never meant to he taken as a real explanation of the causes of rape or if it had never even really been stated in the first place, why do the "rape myths" presented to students at the University of Wisconsin, Texas A & M, Tulane University, and Monash University in Australia (among others) contain statements like the following: "Since sexual assault is all about power, not sex, the age or appearance of the victim is irrelevant," and "Rape is not about sexual orientation or sexual desire. It is an act of power and control in which the victims is brutalized and humiliated" (Alcock, 2001, p. 207).

If this is really a gross misrepresentation of Brownmiller's often-cited position, why haven't she and Angier decried such instructions to one of the most at-risk segments of our population? Should we, like Coyne, let slide the use of patently false statements about the causes of rape as instructions to young women on how to avoid becoming victims? Further,

   The flight from reality of the rape-is-not sex doctrine warps not
   just advice to women but policies for deterring rapists.... Savvy
   offenders who learn to mouth the right psychobabble or feminist
   slogans can be seen as successfully treated, which can win them
   earlier release and the opportunity to prey on women anew.
   (Pinker, 2002, p. 370; see also Symons, 1979)

If the "not sex" explanation of rape is so absurd that no thinking person would ever say it, why do so many people continue to say it? Jones suggests this is the result of honest confusion about the meaning of the phrase "rape is about violence, not sex." Indeed, he dedicates five pages of dense, law-journal-style writing and a chart to dissecting the phrase and meticulously explaining the possible interpretation of each word until he establishes that the phrase has at least "a bewildering 4,096 possible meanings" (Jones, 2000, p. 169). While this is an immensely impressive example of logical analysis and a laudable effort at diplomacy and reconcilement, we suggest that it also is analogous to a lawyer in the fairy tale trying to explain the behavior of the townspeople as a result of differences in the meanings of the words clothes, new, and emperor. Whatever misunderstandings about such matters exist, they are clearly far from sufficient to account for the phenomena at hand. The explanation, as Andersen clearly understood, lies not in differences in the meanings of words among people trying to accurately describe the world, but in the human tendency to sacrifice the goal of accurate descriptions of the world for social and political considerations. As Pinker phrases it, "People may have to decide which they value more, an ideology that claims to advance the interests of the female gender or what actually happens in the world to real women" (Pinker, 2002, p. 371).

The Emperor's New Clothes (Andersen, 1837/1872) illustrates a disturbing aspect of human behavior: the willingness of people to abandon the evidence of their senses and agree with what other people are saying, especially when to do so helps people be accepted and avoid being branded as ignorant. We assume Andersen sensed a danger in such behavior, and that one of the reasons for writing the story was to warn people of this danger so that they could strive to avoid engaging in such behavior in real life. The real world analogy of the history of the "not sex" explanation of rape, and the reaction to the challenge of that explanation, suggests that even greater and more dangerous forms of illogical behavior may be found in human behavior. The goal of this paper is not to embarrass people who have repeated the "not sex" slogan; it is simply to influence people to, in John Hartung's words, "get real about rape," (Hartung, 1992, p. 392), at least in contexts where people will use what is said about rape to avoid being raped. If no thinking person ever seriously thought that rapists were not sexually motivated, then let's rid our rape prevention handbooks of this claim and start, like the child in the story, to say what we see with our eyes.

We would like to thank Joshua Crabtree, Corey Lane Fincher, Paul Okami, and Anne Rice for their assistance in the preparation of this manuscript.

Address correspondence to R. Thornhill, Department of Biology. MSC03 2020, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131.0001; e-mail: [e-mail].

Craig T. Palmer University of Colorado

Randy Thornhill The University of New Mexico

REFERENCES

Alcock, J. (2001). The triumph of sociobiology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Alexander, R., & Noonan, K. (1979). Concealment of ovulation, parental care, and human social evolution. In N. Chagnon & W. Irons (Eds.), Evolutionary biology and human social behavior (pp. 436--453). North Scituate, MA: Duxbury Press.

Andersen, H. C. (1872). The emperor's new clothes (H. P. Paul, Trans.). London: Gilead. (Original work published 1837)

Angier, N. (2000, June/July). Biological bull. Ms., 201, 81.

Brownmiller, S. (1975). Against our will: Men, women, and rape. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Coyne, J. A. (2000, April 3). Of vice and men: The laity tales of evolutionary psychology. The New Republic, 147. p. 27--34.

Coyne, J. A., & Berry, A. (2000). Rape as an adaptation Nature, 404, 121--122.

de Waal, F. B. M. (2000, April 2). Survival of the rapist. New York Times, p. 17.

Eckstein, E. (2000, February 2). Rape: A survivor's view. The Dallas Morning News, p. 2.

Ellison, M. (2000, January 30). Biology, feminism, and rape. Nashville Tennessean, p. 2.

Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 205, 581--598.

Greet, G. (1970). The female eunuch. New York: Bantam.

Griffin, S. (1971). Rape: The all-American crime Ramparts, 10, 26--36.

Hartung, J. (1992). Gelling real about rape. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 15, 390--392.

Hill, A. (2000, February 27). Rapists' charter or theory of evolution? Scotland Sunday, p. 3.

Jones, O. D. (2000). Law and the biology of rape: Reflections on transitions. Hastings Women's Law Journal, 11, 151--178.

Jones, O. D. (2000). Realities of rape: Of science and politics, causes and meanings Cornell Law Review, 86, 1386--1422.

Lambert, A. (2000, February 19). Are men biologically programmed to rape? Daily Mail, p. 3.

Lawrence, J. M. (2000, January 12). Scientists spark debate with controversial rape theory. Boston Herald, p. 13.

McKie, R., & McVeigh, T. (2000, January 16). Scientists' claims that rape is about sex not violence outrages feminists. The Guardian, p. 4.

Miller, G. (2000, March 6). Why men rape. Evening Standard. P. 12.

Millet, K. (1971). The prostitution papers: A candid dialogue. New York: Basic Books.

Mullen, D. J. (2000, May 2). Review of A natural history of rape. Mental Health Net's Bookstore, p. 11.

Paglia, C. (1994). Vamps and tramps. New York: Vintage

Palmer, C. T. (1988a). Evolutionary explanations of rape: Testing adaptive and nondaptive hypotheses. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Arizona State University.

Palmer, C. T. (1988b). Twelve reasons rape is not sexually motivated: A skeptical examination. The Journal of Sex Research, 25, 512--530.

Palmer, C. T. (1991). Human rape: Adaptation or by-product? The Journal of Sex Research, 28, 365--386.

Palmer, C. T., Dibari, D., & Wright, S. (1999). Is its sex yet? Theoretical and practical implications of the debate over rapists' motives. Jurimetrics, 39, 271--282.

Pinker, S. (2000). [Jacket comment on the book A natural history of rape]. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pinker, S. (2002). The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. New York: Viking.

Queller, D. C. (1995). The spaniels of St. Marx and the Panglossian paradox: A critique of a rhetorical programme. The Quarterly Review Biology, 70, 485--489.

Rose, H., & Rose, S. (2001). Introduction. In H. Rose & S. Rose (Eds.), Alas poor Darwin: Arguments against evolutionary psychology (pp. 1--15). New York: Harmony Books.

Rose, M. R., & Lauder, G. V. (1996). Post-spandrel adaptationism. In M. R. Rose & G. V. Lauder (Eds.), Adaptation (pp. 1--10). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Shackelford, T. K., & LeBlanc, G. J. (2001). Courageous, compassionate, and scholarly: An evolutionary analysis of rape and male sexual coercion. The Journal of Sex Research, 38, 81--83.

Shields, W. M., & Shields, L. M. (1983). Forcible rape: An evolutionary perspective Ethology and sociobiology, 4, 115--136.

Smith, E. A. Borgerhof Mulder, M., & Hill, K. (2001). Controversies in the evolutionary social sciences: A guide to the perplexed. Trends in Evolutionary Ecology. 16(3), 128--135.

Stock, W. (1991). Feminist explanations: Male power, hostility and sexual Coercion. In E. Grauerholz & M. Koralewski (Eds.), Sexual coercion: A source book on its nature, causes, and prevention (pp. 61--73). Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Symons, D. (1979). The evolution of human sexualty. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Tang Martinez, Z., & Mechanic, M. (2001). [Review of the book A natural history of rape]. American Anthropologist, 103, 1222--1223.

Thornhill, R., & Palmer, C. T. (2000). A natural history of rape: Biological bases of sexual coercion. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.

Thornhill, R., & Thornhill, N. W. (1983). Human rape: An evolutionary analysis. Ethology and Sociobiology, 4, 137--173.

Warner, C. (1980). Rape and sexual assault: Management and intervention. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers.

Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and natural selection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Manuscript accepted February 3, 2003