Galileo's Middle Finger (15 page)

We see no reason to second-guess the process of peer review used by the APA journal in its decision to publish the article in question. . . . We believe that disputes over methods in science are best resolved, not through the intervention of AAAS or any other “independent” organization, but rather through the process of intellectual discourse among
scientists in a professional field
.

Lerch also suggested in his letter that the APA might have done more to correct the public mischaracterizations of the Rind paper, rather than implicitly repeating them through capitulation.

Many saw Fowler’s letter on behalf of the APA as selling out not only the Rind paper’s authors, editors, and reviewers, but science itself. You have to wonder if Fowler or his staff was ashamed of what he did. Up until this point, the APA had made sure to keep Sher and Eisenberg apprised of what was going on over the Rind paper. But news of Fowler’s capitulation came not directly from the APA, but through an improbably circuitous route: Sher learned of it from Eisenberg, who learned of it from her editorial assistant, who learned of it by hearing
Dr. Laura on the radio
trumpeting her little victory over the APA.

This was hard to swallow. So I swallowed a bit more of my drink and remarked to Sher how odd I thought it was that people would be so angry to hear that not every victim of pedophilia had had his or her life utterly ruined. It seemed to me the Rind paper contained a bit of good news for survivors, namely that psychological devastation need not always be a lifelong sequela to having been sexually used as a child by an adult in search of his own gratification. But simpler stories of good and evil sell better.

Remembering the whole fiasco, Sher recalled to me how the process had been rigged. The Congressional resolution condemned together both pedophilia and the Rind paper, so as Sher and Eisenberg later noted in a written reflection on the whole mess, “One could not vote in favor of the [Rind] article without
voting
for
pedophilia
.” If you wanted to try to distinguish pedophilia and the scientific process, abstaining from voting was the best you could do. Surely DeLay purposely set it up that way.

I didn’t bother asking Sher if he’d be voting for Obama.

 • • • 

C
RAIG
P
ALMER’S OFFICE
had the oddest homemade doorbell I’d ever seen, one that reminded me of the
Winnie the Pooh
story in which Owl accidentally walked off with the donkey Eeyore’s tail and turned it into a bell pull. When Palmer opened his door, I realized what was up. His office consisted of two rooms, an anteroom and an interior office, so that if he happened to be working in the inner room at his desk, he might not hear a person knock at the outer door—hence an elaborate contraption that allowed a visitor to pull on a long string that would ring a little bell hanging within earshot of Palmer’s desk.

Mike Bailey’s son, Drew, had been particularly keen on my talking to Craig Palmer. Before my trip, Drew had checked several times to make sure I knew about Joan Roughgarden’s review of the book Craig had coauthored with Randy Thornhill,
A Natural History of Rape
,
a book that explored biological explanations for forced sex. Roughgarden was the trans woman scientist at Stanford who had become one of my most vocal critics following my work on the Bailey controversy. Months before I had gone to Columbia, Drew had sent me the “biology of rape” review
Roughgarden had published
in
Ethology,
and I assured Drew I remembered it. You don’t easily forget an essay in a scientific journal that calls for authors of a scientific monograph to swing in the wind. (Quoth Roughgarden: “Thornhill and Palmer are guilty of all allegations and they deserve to hang. But before stringing them up, let’s reflect.”) But even Roughgarden’s contempt for these guys would not have made me like them if they had actually said what they’d been accused of saying: that rapists should be excused and forgiven because their genes made them do it and that raped women had been asking for it. Of course, they hadn’t said that.

What Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer
had
said was that rape has a sexual component to it—that contrary to the claims of some feminists, rape isn’t merely an expression of unadulterated power. Thornill and Palmer marshaled evidence suggesting that some kinds of sexual coercion in some species, including humans, may increase the likelihood of reproductive success of some males. They also collected evidence showing that human rapists in general tend to be interested in women of childbearing age whom they find sexually attractive. Notably, Thornhill and Palmer took very seriously the harm caused to women by rapists and argued that truly caring for victims of rape meant taking seriously possible biological contributions to sexual coercion. While their work might help to explain rape—and, they hoped, even prevent and prosecute it—they certainly did not excuse, condone, or forgive rape. Contrary to Roughgarden’s assertions, they did not provide “the latest ‘evolution-made-me-do-it’
excuse for criminal behavior
.”

Craig had told me in advance
of our meeting that he didn’t much enjoy thinking back to what happened when the book had come out but that he had kept a mess of papers related to the controversy in a filing cabinet. He said that, given Drew’s recommendation of me, I was welcome to go through the collection with him. As we settled in to talk in his office, he told me the story of having been in a class a year or two before, talking about the controversy over his work, and finding that this one grad student named Drew Bailey was thoroughly engaged. Finally he realized that the kid was Michael Bailey’s son—
that
Bailey.

I laughed and asked Craig if he was aware that, if you Googled “Thornhill and Palmer,” one of the first hits you got was a page from Lynn Conway’s Web site attacking Thornhill and Palmer and trying to tie them to the Bailey controversy. Craig apologized that he didn’t know what I was talking about. I explained as best I could.

Although Craig’s office counted as a model of cleanliness and order for an academic suite, the file drawer in which he had collected writings on his own controversy was a total mess. The papers were stacked horizontally in some places, shoved in vertically in other places, some in folders or envelopes but many without. It was obvious that this portion of Craig’s life had been chaotic and that he had literally just put it all away and moved on. Now, as he went through the jumble, trying to create logical stacks for me on his table, he tried to explain what had happened.

Like Mike Bailey, Craig Palmer and Randy Thornhill weren’t naive, and they weren’t shy. They knew that when they set out to collaborate on their mutual interest and to publish together on the biological bases of sexual coercion that the work would draw attention and also some ire, but they had no idea what they were really in for. The first inkling that something was up came when the two of them went to Boston for a meeting at MIT Press, the outfit publishing their book. Craig and Randy thought that they were going to discuss how the book would be promoted, but when they got there, they were suddenly informed that they had to present a lecture on the work to a group of people the press had assembled. Craig recalled to me, “We walk in, and there were 50 or 60 people in this room.” The authors were understandably bewildered. They’d never heard of such a thing (nor had I). Randy let Craig take the lead, and as Craig recalled, he jotted down a bunch of notes on a legal pad and went from there. Though there was plenty of hostility to the project, Craig and Randy felt the sum-up went pretty well. They were able to handle all the questions, however misdirected, but it was a disturbing situation nonetheless. Craig told me, “It was clear that news of the book had spread around MIT, and the people there were basically protesting the publication of the book.”

Then in January 2000, Randy and Craig published a summary of their forthcoming book in an article entitled “Why Men Rape”
in the
Sciences
,
a magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. All hell started to break loose, and things only got worse when the book came out in April. Craig told me,

The very first media attention I knew of [came via] a phone message from a friend from high school, saying that Rush Limbaugh was talking about my book on the radio. Obviously not the typical phone message. First I thought, how did Rush Limbaugh hear about our book? Then I wondered what in the world Rush Limbaugh thought of it. Then I wondered what happened to my friend that he was listening to Rush Limbaugh.

Craig went on:

It was interesting, because as I thought about it, I thought I could see Rush Limbaugh going either way on it: he could like it because we were challenging the feminist explanation of rape, or he could dislike it because we take an evolutionary approach. But it turned out he was criticizing it because he thought we were trying to excuse
Bill Clinton’s behavior
.

Long after Limbaugh lost interest, the heat kept up. One criticism after another came flying at Thornhill and Palmer, in the popular media, in the presses of the intelligentsia, and in the mail. As Craig showed me, the majority of these criticisms attributed to Craig and Randy various ignorant and obnoxious claims that they had never made. For example, in
Time
magazine,
Barbara Ehrenreich
suggested that Thornhill and Palmer seriously downplayed the amount of harm done to rape victims, even though the book takes that harm very seriously, even attempting to quantify it and make sense of variations in levels of harm. (Perhaps like Dr. Laura in the Rind case, Ehrenreich just couldn’t wrap her head around anything other than the classic story of sexual assault in which the victim is always irrevocably devastated.) A
letter writer to the
Los Angeles Times
assumed that because Thornhill and Palmer said rape was sexual, they were also labeling it normal. The
Nashville
Tennessean
’s
headline called the work a “‘Can’t Help It’ Theory,” while the
Manchester Guardian
similarly announced “The Men Can’t Help It,” as if Thornhill and Palmer had concluded that men amounted to pathetic slaves to their evolutionary histories. Meanwhile, the
Toronto
Globe and Mail
ran angry letters under the title “Are Men Natural-Born Rapists?” as if that was exactly what
A Natural History of Rape
had concluded, the reality of the book be damned.

The feminist writer-activist
Susan Brownmiller
seemed particularly furious, and no wonder. In their work, Randy and Craig directly took issue with
Brownmiller’s highly influential opinion
that rape is essentially about power and domination, not lust. Thornhill and Palmer acknowledged that the treatment of raped women in courts and in society had greatly improved since the time of Brownmiller’s bold work, and indeed it had. Brownmiller and other feminists had radically changed the public story of rape by reframing it as symptomatic of a pandemic disease—patriarchal misogyny. By talking about how rape is used as a tool of power and intimidation, by steadfastly seeing rape as part of cultural systems that oppress women, Brownmiller and others had changed many harmful and entrenched cultural assumptions about rape. No longer could someone easily get away with blaming a rape victim for what she was wearing; no longer was
she
the one to be on trial.

Thornhill and Palmer shared Brownmiller’s desires for an end to rape and for compassion and justice for rape victims, but they argued that Brownmiller’s account of rape as primarily being about power didn’t match the facts. Men seeking power over women could find it in a number of ways, but the
choice
to rape a woman and especially the ability to sustain an erection during a rape suggested, at the very least, significant sexual arousal. Denial of that reality, Randy and Craig argued, would only lead to more harm to women.

As Craig recalled the public battles with me, he pulled out an example of Brownmiller’s influence. He handed me
a pamphlet distributed
by the University of California–Davis’s Rape Prevention Education Program, a branch of the university’s police department. Here’s some of what it said:

FACT:
Sexual assault is an act of physical and emotional violence, not of sexual gratification. Rapists assault to dominate, humiliate, control, degrade, terrify, and violate. Studies show that power and anger are the primary motivating factors. . . .

FACT:
Sexual assault victims range in age from infants to the elderly. Appearance and attractiveness are not relevant. A rapist assaults someone who is accessible and vulnerable.

Craig looked visibly disturbed as he read this stuff. Was it really ethical to suggest to a woman that she didn’t need to be concerned about how attractive a potential rapist might find her when she was in an environment where she was vulnerable? And did it really make sense to suggest that rapists were never motivated by sex?

Craig explained to me that these were just the sorts of claims that had led him into this work. In the mid-1980s, Craig had been studying anthropology in graduate school at Arizona State University, but he’d decided to give up on it. “I dropped out of graduate school because postmodernism was then coming into academia,” Craig explained to me, “and it didn’t seem worthwhile to go through all of the hard work of science and present all the evidence, just to have it dismissed by [someone] saying, ‘Well, that’s just your narrative.’” So he dropped out of school, moved up to Maine, married, bought a house, and settled in as a lobsterman.

But circumstances around a rape combined to bring Craig back to academia. The year before Craig moved to Maine, in the Arizona neighborhood where he lived, a neighbor’s daughter had been kidnapped and murdered. “They caught the guy they thought had done it,” Craig recalled, “and said they had all kinds of forensic evidence that he had committed the crime. About three days after the body was found, I remember there were two headlines on the same page. One headline . . . said something like ‘Autopsy Determines Victim Was Sexually Assaulted.’ Which I think everyone who heard about the case expected. But on the same page, the main headline said something like ‘Still No Motive Found.’”