> And there was, remember, that notorious book
> which claimed that men were genetically "hardwired" to rape, roundly
> condemned as bad science and bad reading of data by scientists
I should imagine they were falling over themselves to distance
themselves from it. Still, if memory serves, the claim was that making
a sexually aggressive body might, for a gene, be an alternative (or
supplementary) reproductive strategy to making a sexually appealing
body. If one wanted to account for the sexually aggressive behaviour
of other species, such as ducks, that might be the sort of explanation
one would venture. But I gather that other scientists didn't think it
was a terribly good one, even then.
It has been and remains one of the mightier labours of feminism to
denormalise sexual aggression among human males, to get rid of the
"metaphysics of force" that says that using force is just part of what
sex is for males and that being subject to force is just part of what
sex is for females. If you didn't spot the Andrea Dworkin reference
coming, you weren't paying attention. She's all about that
"metaphysics of force", and the need to elaborate an ethic/aesthetic
that doesn't enshrine violent coercion at the very heart of sex.
Even among non-humans such as chimps, it's clear that expressing or
absorbing sexual aggression is as much a social strategy as a
reproductive one. It never is just "the gene for sexual violence"
getting itself passed on. If the "metaphysics of force" sometimes seem
intractable, an "old Adam" that keeps coming back to bite us, the
reasons may lie in the prototypical social forms of primates - more
software than hardware, but deep legacy systems nonetheless. But that
is a conjecture, and not a particularly scientific one at that.
Dominic
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