ACT I
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Are you listening?
Are you paying attention?
Good.
This episode deals with sexual violence.
And it’s very long.
Because there are a lot of primal feelings here that we need to put into words.
Sexual consent is
coherent,
clear,
voluntary,
enthusiastic, and
ongoing.
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We’ve been talking about relationships between men and women and why we each have points of view that don’t make sense to the other.
We’ve been building up from general biology to the differences in how men and women reproduce, to how that affects our reproductive instincts.
Then we walked through the motivations level of the Web of Human Behavior to talk about how men and women have different ways of thinking about different parts of life that each make sense to us, even if they don’t make sense to the other.
So far we’ve been talking about ways to see the other’s point of view so we can have relationships where we both get what we want. But that’s not what happens a lot of times.
Why do things go wrong? How do they go wrong? And what happens when they do?
A big part of aviation psychology is understanding how people acting on what they feel to be true makes people misinterpret their situations, and leads good pilots to make bad decisions.
How do we see that in relationships? How do men confuse what they want with what women want?
The idea of consent seems simple enough. If a woman says No, it means 100% No.
So why do so many men feel that No isn’t supposed to apply to them?
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This is going to be hard for a lot of people to listen to. Even if you aren’t a rape survivor.
That’s because there are two main bodies of information surrounding sexual assault. The one we hear about most comes from the anti-sexual assault movement.
The most outspoken people there, understandably, are a lot of sexual assault survivors. They use a lot of words to talk about it that come from sexual assault therapy.
That’s better than no one doing anything about sexual assault. But it’s only a first step. It isn’t the last step.
The purpose of sexual assault therapy is to help restore the woman’s sense of well being. It does that by helping her to put what happened to her into a context that fits with the rest of her life in a way that lets her move on from it.
But that isn’t the same thing as anticipating how men think and recognizing how that leads men to commit sexual assault. If we all try to combat sexual assault using the words the most outspoken leaders of the anti-sexual assault movement have been using, we would be trying to turn the whole world into sexual assault therapy for everyone.
But that isn’t going to work. Men who commit sexual assault think very differently about it than their victims.
I’m not a woman who’s a rape survivor. But over a dozen friends of mine are.
In this episode I’m going to combine what I’ve said about evolutionary psychology so far with forensic psychology that the FBI uses to catch rapists, with things these friends of mine have told me.
My goal here isn’t to provide therapy for rape survivors. My goal is to help prevent rapes in the first place.
ACT II
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Let’s break this down, and go through the motivations level of the Web of Human Behavior.
“When I think about survival, the first things that come to mind are…”
Men don’t have anything to say here. For men there’s no connection between reproductive instincts and immediate survival.
Women have a lot to say here.
For most of the 7,000,000 years since our species split off from the chimpanzees, abortion, adoption, and 20th century medicine hadn’t been invented yet.
If a man rapes a woman and gets her pregnant, he’s stolen about 19 of the best years of her life from her.
Even if she didn’t get pregnant from it, he still tried to steal 19 years of her life.
If she wanted to have a baby and now she’s pregnant with his baby, she can’t get pregnant from a man she wanted to get pregnant from.
If she didn’t want to get pregnant, now that she is pregnant, for the next 9 months she’s going to put a lot of time and energy into having this baby. At the end, she’s going to have a baby who has her genes and who she went to a lot of effort to give birth to, but who doesn’t have the genes of a man she wanted to mix her genes with.
After 9 months of being pregnant, she has something she didn’t really want, but that has some value to her. Now all the choices she has are of how to make the best of a bad situation.
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Why do we call them rape survivors? Very few women who are raped are also murdered.
A few men murder women they rape, because they want to inflict the most violence possible on women. But think about men’s reproductive instincts.
Let’s take rape out of the discussion for the moment.
If a man has sex with a woman, he has a chance of getting her pregnant. You know how men are usually protective of women and children? And especially protective of babies and pregnant women? And especially especially protective of their own babies and women who are pregnant with their babies?
Men who protect women who might be pregnant with their babies automatically get a higher survival rate for their genes than men who kill women who might be pregnant with their babies. So obviously men have evolved instincts for that.
Now let’s put rape back into the discussion and pull on that thread a little more.
If we can say that there’s an optimal way for a man to rape a woman, it would be to hurt her badly enough that she couldn’t resist him anymore, but not so badly that she couldn’t recover. He still wants a physically healthy woman to raise his baby.
So why do we call them rape survivors when it’s rare for rape victims to be murdered?
Here we go again, trying to find words to explain feelings that half the people in the world don’t have a starting point for feeling and that most of the rest have never felt.
A man can rape another man. When that happens, the man who got raped is going to feel like he lost a fight in the worst way possible. He probably lost that fight worse than he even imagined possible. It’s probably going to make him feel worse than he ever thought he could feel.
A woman will feel all of that too.
It’s appropriate to call a man a rape survivor because if he lost a fight badly enough to get raped, it would’ve been easy for his rapist to murder him too. We say rape survivor because we’re taking the side of the person who was raped. A man who was raped has very good reasons for feeling like he could’ve been killed in the process.
Women feel all of that too.
But women feel a lot more than that. A man can’t get pregnant by getting raped. So a man can’t get 19 years cut out of his life.
A woman who gets pregnant by getting raped has her whole reproductive future sent in a direction she never wanted. Getting pregnant by that man at that time wasn’t the best choice she felt she had for herself and the future of her descendants. That’s why it wasn’t consensual sex.
So even though rape survivors almost always live through being raped, they still feel like the rapist sent, or tried to send, the future of their bloodline in the wrong direction. And the wrong direction for a bloodline to go means extinction.
So these are two feelings that have a lot in common. One is easy to talk about because everyone can feel it. The other is one that only women can feel, but it has so much in common with the first one that it’s the most accurate word we have for talking about it.
To say that a woman is a rape survivor isn’t to say that it’s remarkable that she physically survived being raped. It’s to say that she’s still living with the feeling that someone tried to push the future of her descendants in a direction that she felt would lead to their extinction.
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“When I think about safety, the first things that come to mind are…”
Again, men don’t have anything to say here. Not unless they’re in danger of being raped.
Women plan their lives around this. You can look up long lists of tips for women on ways to keep themselves safe from sexual assault.
If rape feels to women like a threat to their survival because it’s a threat to the survival of their descendants, what’s the safety equivalent of that?
That’s unwanted sexual attention. Because unwanted sexual attention is the first step toward unwanted sex.
Many men say and do a lot of profoundly dumb things to draw women’s attention to the fact that they’re sexually attracted to them. And to draw everyone else’s attention to that fact.
Let’s take a really big eraser, and erase the last 7,000,000 years of human evolution. What these guys are doing would make a lot of sense if we were still chimpanzees.
If there were only four of five young male chimps in her troop to choose from, it would be helpful to a female chimp to know which ones were attracted to her.
It would even be helpful to her to know which male chimps were attracted to her the most, because they were the ones who howled the loudest when they saw her.
It would be helpful for everyone else to hear him announce his attraction to her too.
That lets the other males know that he’s attracted to her, so they better stay out of his way. It would let the other females know he was attracted to her, so they didn’t have as good of chances with him as she did. Or that they’d have to try harder if they wanted as good of chances as she had with him.
Today, if you’re dumb enough to believe that whistling at a woman is supposed to make her feel like you’re asking her for a date or proposing to marry her, what else are you dumb enough to believe? And what are you going to do when your chimpanzee mating strategy doesn’t work? Are you just going to leave her alone? Or are you going to try harder with your unwanted sexual interest?
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Here’s another part of safety. Is rape always violent?
It might not always look violent to someone else. But think about what rape actually is.
If you rape someone you’re doing one of the worst things you could do to them physically. So how could you have non-consensual sex with someone without violence?
The only way you could seem to have non-consensual sex with someone without violence was if you threatened them so much with destructive force that they didn’t dare to resist you at all. This was a distinction people had to work through back when they were formulating the idea of slave rape.
A lot of slave owners had sex with their female slaves and got them pregnant. But a lot of people looking back on it couldn’t figure out if the enslaved women were being raped, or if they were having sex with the slave owners willingly.
So some Black women had to explain to them that enslaved people didn’t do anything that slave owners wanted them to do willingly. Slavery depended on the slave owners using so much violence and so much threat of violence against the enslaved people that the enslaved people didn’t dare to resist.
So when a slave owner told an enslaved woman that he wanted to have sex with her, and she agreed to it, it didn’t matter whether he used any violence against her that day. He’d already used so much violence against her that she already knew that if she said No, he’d just hurt her until she said Yes. Or he’d hurt her family until she said Yes. So from the point of view of a rape survivor, rape always feels like violence.
Whether it’s because physical violence led directly to the rape, or it’s because the threat of violence felt so bad to the woman that having sex with the man felt like the best choice she could make.
ACT III
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“When I think about sex, the first things that come to mind are…”
This one item from the list is such a big topic that I have to devote an entire episode to it. That’ll be the next one. For now, here’s a preview.
There’s a lot of controversy about whether or not rape is motivated by sex. If you feel, like most people do, that there’s nothing positive about rape, then it’s easy to feel that we should take the side of rape survivors and talk about it from their point of view. From the survivor’s point of view, rape is violence, not sex.
The problem with that is that rapists think very differently about rape than their victims. Rapists aren’t just a bunch of cockroaches we can stomp on.
One very direct way to prevent rapes is to get men to recognize when the way they’re thinking is putting them on a path to raping a woman. But that depends on us talking about the feelings of rapists.
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Forensic psychology was pioneered by FBI agents. One of them was John Douglas, who has written over a dozen books about it.
The Netflix series Mindhunter is based on his work.
The Silence of the Lambs is based on his work more abstractly.
The long running Criminal Minds series is another dramatization of forensic psychology and how the FBI uses it.
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Rapists fall into four basic categories. These are four patterns of behavior of why they rape and how they choose their victims.
Power seeking rapists rape to prove they can do something to their victims that their victims can’t stop.
Erotic aggression rapists rape to inflict the greatest possible suffering on their victims.
Retaliatory rapists rape as a type of revenge, either against people they feel have wronged them, or against people they feel represent people who wronged them.
All of those fit with the anti-rape movement’s rape therapy messaging, that rape is motivated by aggression, not sex.
Now here’s where the controversy starts. There are two parts to it.
The fourth category, called Reassurance Seeking rapists, are motivated by sex. These are guys who want sex and get it without consent. This is by far the biggest category. But it’s the least represented in the media because it’s the least sensational.
The other part of the controversy is that all rape is motivated by the reproduction instinct on the most primal level.
If you interview rapists from the first three categories and ask them why they did it, they might spend all their time talking about how much they hate their victims. They might not be conscious of how their reproductive instinct affected them.
But if the rapist’s dick got hard, his reproduction instinct was affecting his thinking. If the main part of his assault on the woman was focused on her vagina, his reproduction instinct was affecting his thinking.
To cut a long story short— for now— it’s called sexual assault because it’s a form of assault, but it’s also sexual.
ACT IV
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“When I think of family, the first things that come to mind are…”
When a woman gets raped, it affects the future of her family. Because that’s what getting pregnant by someone you didn’t want to get pregnant by means.
A good relationship is one where you both feel good around each other most of the time. That’s true whether you’re just trying to be friends with them or you’re trying to have sex with them.
But how good of a feeling is it?
It’s easy to think that the relationship that makes you feel the best is the best relationship of your life. But does that make it a good relationship? What are the feelings better than?
In a world where men have taken the competition for women to murder to war to gang life to organized crime to white collar crime to human trafficking, and in other parts of the world and in other times in our history, to piracy, slavery, and genocide, many people have been stuck in situations that we wouldn’t call good, but that they had to find a way to make the best of anyway.
If you’re a woman in your late teens and you’ve grown up in a neighborhood where women aren’t safe walking around by themselves at night, but then you have a chance to hook up with a guy who everyone else in the neighborhood is afraid of, is that a good start for a relationship? If everyone knows you’re his girlfriend, you’ll be a lot safer, regardless of how attracted you are to his personality.
How do those feelings fit with people’s ideals about consent?
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Now imagine you’re a 20 year old woman living on the coast of England in the year 900.
Early one morning vikings raid your village.
They abduct you, tie you up, and throw you in one of their boats.
They sail back across the sea to Norway with you.
One of the vikings takes you for his wife.
What do you do?
No one is coming to rescue you.
You can’t escape and sail back across the sea on your own.
No one here wants to take you home.
No one here even recognizes you as having any human rights.
What are you going to do?
What path can you find into the future?
You could kill yourself.
But if you don’t want to die, what do you do?
A forced marriage starts out as rape. But does it always stay rape?
It does from our point of view in the 21st century.
But if your new viking husband really did want a wife, and he found a way to eliminate all the other choices you had in life, and he was kind to you when you cooperated with him, you could start to think of this as a good relationship. Because most of the time it made you feel better than any other life you could imagine living anymore.
If you have four children with him, and he leaves it up to you to raise them while he’s away at sea, they are still your children, with your genes.
The best choice you have in life now isn’t a complete victory for you, but it isn’t a complete loss either. You’re the hand that rocks the cradle.
Making the best of the choices available to you now means you get to help raise the next generation of vikings. So you get to teach your children what you want them to know.
What would happen if 10 years after you were abducted, you got a chance to escape, but you would have to leave your 4 children behind?
How simple of a choice is it now?
You’ve paid the price to have your four children.
Do you want to go back to England now and try to pick up your life where you left off, and meet a man to marry and start over on having a family by having a baby for the fifth time?
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Now let’s zoom out a little here.
When a woman gets pregnant, which man is she most attractive to?
If you’re a man and you know that a woman is pregnant with a baby that isn’t yours, you know that she’s going to invest a lot of her time and energy into raising another man’s baby.
The man who has the most to gain by a baby growing up, is the baby’s father.
So when a woman gets pregnant, or even feels like she might be pregnant because she had sex with a man, she often feels positive feelings for him.
Because if she feels positive feelings for him, that will help get him to feel positive feelings for her and their baby, which will help get him to help her raise the baby.
This is another reason people’s feelings about rape get confusing. This is why rape therapy stresses that rape is violence against women. This is why laws against rape specify that the person has to consent to having sex before they have sex.
Because in the 7,000,000 years before laws and courts and police and prisons and abortions were invented, if you were a woman and you were raped, and you got pregnant from it, being pregnant, or already having a child, would make you less attractive to other men.
So what’s the easiest way to get a man to help you raise your child? Which man potentially has the greatest interest in your child’s future?
Your rapist.
So if you start having positive feelings for him now, that improves your baby’s chances of survival, and therefore, the survival rate of your genes that your baby carries.
If you’re a woman in this situation, feeling positive feelings toward the father of your potential child means empathizing with your rapist.
Empathizing with your rapist can mean agreeing with him that you must’ve wanted to have sex after all.
That’s why rape therapy focuses on how women felt about having sex before they were raped, and uses that as the starting point for interpreting their feelings now.
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How many ways do people turn those feelings against rape survivors?
Rapists aren’t completely wrong that if they rape women, those women could start to have positive feelings toward them. Because part of men’s reproductive instincts is the expectation that women we get pregnant will have positive feelings for us.
Defense attorneys use this to try to push rape survivors to have emotional breakdowns on the witness stand so they’ll get confused and won’t seem to know what they’re talking about.
Separately from that, we all have social instincts that make us try to find ways to keep things harmonious and working smoothly among the people around us.
If I told you that a male friend of yours, or a male member of your family, raped a woman, but you know him well and you never imagined that he would do something like that, would you believe me?
How much evidence would I have to show you to convince you it was true?
What if I don’t have that much evidence? Do you want one of your friends or relatives sent to prison for years for a crime you don’t believe they committed?
If he didn’t do it, or if he might’ve done it but it isn’t clear that it wasn’t consensual sex, or if she isn’t clear on wanting him to go to prison, those are all reasons to not turn against your friend or family member.
The safest thing to do might be to just hope that something like this doesn’t happen again.
Juries are members of the public. Even though they don’t know anyone in the case, they have the same instincts that can make them see shades of gray between consensual and non-consensual sex.
Who else turns rape survivors’ mixed feelings against them?
Police, lawyers, judges, and reporters who don’t completely understand how human psychology works for rape survivors.
ACT V
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“When I think of social, the first things that come to mind are…”
Let’s start with men.
People live in groups to cooperate for their mutual interests while competing for their individual interests. So to be seen as a successful man according to men’s reproductive instincts, you have to have children.
That starts with having sex.
To try to get that, we have to compete against each other. There are always a few men who lose at it.
What are you willing to do to keep from losing?
And even if you’re winning, what opportunities are you willing to take advantage of to get ahead of other men?
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What does that tell you about women’s instincts for avoiding sexual assault?
Why do so many women get grossed out by pornography?
Why do women feel uncomfortable with men staring at them?
Why do women feel so uncomfortable with even mild unwanted sexual advances?
What these all have in common is that they’re all ways that men seem to women to be closing the gap between normal behavior and sexual assault.
If a woman got on a subway car in New York City and saw a naked man sitting there, she’d probably just wrinkle her nose and move to the other end of the car with everyone else.
If she got on a subway car and saw it was full of naked men, she’d probably run for her life to get off again before the door closed.
We all try to make the best decisions we can wherever we go.
Think about the odds and the stakes.
If a woman sees a man who seems like he might have a 1% chance of wanting to rape her, she’s probably safe. But she’s going to keep her eye on him and be prepared to do something if he looks like he’s going to try it.
If a woman sees 100 men who each seem to have a 1% chance of wanting to rape her, that’s a dangerous situation that she better escape from right away. Because there’s a good chance that one of them will try it.
ACT VI
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“When I think of self-gratification, the first things that comes to mind are…”
There are some things about consensual and non-consensual sex that overlap with each other.
Things like this happen elsewhere in the animal kingdom. For some species, it might even be hard to define the role of consent in their mating patterns.
Zebras need to run fast to keep from getting eaten by lions.
When a female zebra wants to mate, what’s the first thing she should look for?
Fast males.
And what’s the easiest way to see how fast a male is?
By running away from him as fast as she can.
If she outruns a male and then goes back and mates with him, her children will grow up to be slower than she was.
If she runs as fast as she can and the male still catches up with her, and she mates with him, her children will grow up to be faster than she is.
But how much do zebras think about consent?
If she runs away from him as fast as she can, and he catches her and has sex with her, she’s going to have children who are good at running from lions.
If that’s the test for a good mate, and that’s by far the most important thing zebras need to do, zebras’ brains wouldn’t have evolved much for thinking about their own or the other zebra’s consent.
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The ability to run fast is valuable to humans too. So is strength.
If a man wants to prove to a woman how strong he is, one very simple way to do it is to hold her down while she tries as hard as she can to push him off her.
I’m not talking about consensual sex or rape here. This could be either one.
One of the simplest ways for a man to feel how strong a woman is, is to feel how hard she tries to push him off her while he holds her down.
I’m still not talking about consensual sex or rape. This still could be either one.
Feeling how strong a woman is, when she fights back with everything she has, could be sexually arousing to a man.
And he could have reasons to believe that she was turned on by it too, even though she wasn’t.
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Something related to self gratification that affects women is called involuntary arousal.
Guys, I’m going to tell you something now that will gross you out for the rest of your life. And you need to hear this.
Imagine you went to your grandmother’s house one day. It’s just the two of you, and no one else there.
You sit down at the kitchen table and she gives you some milk and cookies.
But she’s laced the milk with her sleeping pills.
You wake up to find that she’s tied you to your chair with garbage bag ties.
You try to pull yourself loose, but you can’t.
You say,“Grandma, what are you doing?”
She looks at you seductively, over the top of her reading glasses, and says,
“I know why you keep coming over to visit me. You want to do something more fun than having milk and cookies.”
Then your grandmother reaches down and unzips your pants.
With her wrinkly hand she reaches into your underwear and pulls out your dick.
Then she bends down and puts in her wrinkly mouth.
Your grandmother sucks your dick until it gets hard.
Then she gets up and goes over to the cupboard.
She gets out the vegetable oil and rubs it all over your hard dick.
Then she pulls up her dress.
She pulls down her granny panties.
You’ve never seen gray pubic hair before.
You’ve never even thought about gray pubic hair before.
Then she straddles you.
Then your grandmother has sex with you until you ejaculate in her vagina.
That’s disgusting.
But it’s possible.
She could do that because she knew how to stimulate your body to make it happen.
Ordinarily, when you have sex with a woman, you want to feel like you have a chance to get her pregnant.
You didn’t want to have sex with your grandmother, but you couldn’t turn off your reproductive instincts that far down in your brain.
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When involuntary arousal happens for a woman, it makes rape confusing.
It means things like her vagina lubricating, or her shifting her pelvis to give her rapist a better angle for penetration, and only afterwards realizing what she’d done.
To a rapist, that can feel like she’s consenting.
To the woman, it can make her wonder how to feel about it, and how to explain it to anyone else.
Did she want to have sex with the guy after all, on some level?
No.
He figured out a way to stimulate her body to make that happen.
If a woman is getting raped, and subconsciously she reaches the point of realizing that sex is going to happen to her, one of the last things she can do to protect herself is to go along with it.
If her body makes raping her easier for the rapist, then getting raped won’t hurt her as badly.
That isn’t consent.
Consent is a conscious decision.
ACT VII
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“When I think of self actualization, self fulfillment, and fulfillment of self fulfillment, the first things that come to mind are…”
Is it having sex with a particular woman?
Or with women in general?
Is it proving to people in general, or to some people in particular, that you can have sex with a woman whether she wants you to or not?
Is to hurt women, or to hurt a particular woman?
What do you think rape does to women’s self actualization and self fulfillment?
Getting raped is the worst day of a woman’s life.
She’ll probably spend years, if not the rest of her life, trying to process it.
All the time and energy she spends thinking about it, remembering it, still feeling it, and trying to stop feeling it, is time and energy she isn’t going to be able to use to do the things she wanted to do in life.
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This is the beginning of an ongoing conversation.
Our basic reproductive instincts combined with men’s and women’s very different physical abilities for reproducing, give us very different ideas that we feel are common sense.
Often we can’t guess the other side’s idea of common sense because it’s too different from our own.
But if we build up to talking about our relationships, whether they’re good or bad relationships, from a foundation of human biology and how biology created our instincts, suddenly we can have reasonable discussions about our feelings.
We do that the same way any two people have a reasonable discussion about anything: By finding a common point of reference that we can both relate to.
Even if it still takes a lot of words to express our feelings.
