Chapter 2 - Men and Women are Different
FbF Book Club: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Perry, 2022)
Previous Entry - Sex is “Serious Business”
In the relatively short span of 10,000 years, Homo Sapiens has managed to rise up from the precariousness of primitive hunter-gatherer society to rule the world. We have not only created long-lasting civilizations, but have tamed wild animals, domesticating some of them to the point of reducing them to little more than showpieces. We have hunted some animal species to extinction, and have managed to transform large parts of the Earth to serve our own purposes (e.g. uprooting forests to create farmland). We see ourselves as masters of our planet.
Every now and then, Mother Nature will remind us that our victory is not total. Natural disasters and plagues are the best reminders of this fact, but there is even more to consider along these lines: the human drive to conquer all before us also drives us to try and conquer nature, and not just the physical, but the mental as well.
Utopianism requires not just a belief in the perfectibility of society, but also a belief in the perfectibility of mankind as well. In order to perfect Man, what is considered ‘evil’ about him must be expunged, as any utopia requires perfection from all in order to function as one. This invites the most important philosophical debate: was Man good or bad in the Original State of Nature? Utopians (like all liberal philosophers) support the position that Man was originally good.
Others disagree, and they will point to innate negative characteristics in men and women that have been our constant companions throughout the course of our species’ evolution. Murder, rape, theft, etc. are a constant presence in our lives to varying degrees. We have built civilizations that have attempted to tame humans, but these acts have failed to disappear entirely. This suggests to us that they are natural, if undesired by most.
To recognize what is natural is to use common sense. To understand that nature cannot be fully tamed invites scorn these days, and nowhere more than in the debates surrounding transgenderism. Here we see some humans openly rebelling against nature, insisting that there are no differences between the sexes, and that gender roles are entirely the result of socialization rather than being a mix of elementary biological facts in combination with culture(s). To understand that man is limited by nature is to be a realist, the polar opposite of a utopian.
Louise Perry has taken the long road towards realism. Having worked in a rape crisis centre and being informed by feminism as to why men rape, Perry admits to having a “Saul on the Road to Damascus” moment in the second chapter of this book thanks to reading ‘A Natural History of Rape’. This has put her on the wrong side of several schools of feminism, particularly the liberal and radical variants, as both insist that men were taught (they prefer to use the word ‘socialized’) to rape thanks to the Patriarchy, rather than it being an innate trait of male human biology.
Traditional feminist takes on rape:
Thus she suggests that the vast over-representation of men among perpetrators of rape is a product not of biology but, rather, of patriarchy: a social system which privileges male interests over female ones. According to this view, rapists are not born but made – they are the products of a culture that encourages men to see women as their sexual playthings. And so, to end rape, we must first end patriarchy.
and
Jill Filipovic, writing in The Guardian in 2013, expresses a mainstream feminist idea when she insists that rape is ‘about both power and violence. Rapists use sex organs as the locus of their violence, but rape isn’t about sex, at least not in the sense of being motivated by sexual attraction or an uncontrollable sexual urge.’5 This sentiment is often expressed in one, succinct phrase: ‘rape is about power, not sex.’
The innate biological differences between the sexes is what convinced Louise that the traditional feminist approach to rape is wrong. In her view, these feminists are loathe to accept rape as an evolutionary biological adaptation because that would make it much, much more difficult to eradicate from society.