Sunday 8 March 2015

Richard Dawkins’ biggest contribution to feminism

No, it’s not “nothing”. Look, hear me out, OK? Yes, as a public figure Dawkins has said a lot of bigoted things in the last few years about women and sexual assault. In his books he discusses sexism every so often; it seems he thinks that prejudice about people’s gender is an equally big mistake regardless of which gender one is prejudiced against. Which is perhaps true purely in terms of whether your judgement of an individual person is likely to be right or wrong, but our society is heavily biased towards some kinds of gender prejudice and away from others, with moral and political consequences that can’t be ignored – except he does ignore them. (He also, disturbingly regularly, comments sympathetically on paedophilia. I devoutly hope the reason he gives in his autobiography is the real one: that he feels guilty about having been party to driving the teacher who molested him in boyhood to suicide.)

But before Dawkins was a public figure or a popular writer, he was a scientist. His research was on animal behaviour. And his big discovery, back in the late 1960s, is called the Drive Threshold Model. He tested it in chicks, which apparently show a definite colour preference when pecking at small objects: blue is preferred to red and red to green. Now you might think that this means a chick will always choose to peck a blue object when there’s one available, and a red one when there isn’t, and a green one only if there’s nothing else. But apparently not. Rather, when a chick’s drive to peck is low, it will only peck at blue objects; if it gets higher, it will peck randomly at either blue or red objects and ignore green; at the heights it will peck at any colour indiscriminately. Hence the term “drive threshold”.

If this only applied to chicks it would be pretty pointless me repeating it. But Dawkins applied the mathematics to a wide range of psychological studies on humans, measuring preferential behaviour towards flavours, colours, vegetables, handwriting styles, and composers. It turns out all kinds of human drives and desires fit the Drive Threshold Model. So if it’s been an hour or two since lunch you may find yourself hungry for chocolate, say, or salted peanuts, or something specific. If you’ve got children you’ll know how often they’re “only hungry for pudding”. But if you haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday I’ll wager you’ll be happy with stale cheese and wilting lettuce.

Now here comes the point. Women want to keep themselves safe from rape. And lots of people, not all of them men, have a helpful suggestion: maybe women should not “dress like sluts”, especially when out after dark. And this, funnily enough, makes a lot of women angry, because it places the responsibility on women not to be raped instead of on men not to rape. To which those giving the warnings reply that it’s no different from warning people to keep their cars locked in areas prone to theft, which is hardly taking responsibility away from the thieves, is it? In fact it is different, as New Zealand discovered in 2013, when a man was acquitted of a sexual assault that he had confessed to committing, on the grounds that his two female victims were “foolish” to have been crossing a park at night while “dressed as they were”.

But setting aside the ethics of such precautions – do they work? Let’s suppose that most sexual assaults are committed by men trying to satisfy their own sexual desires (obviously in a predatory, totally objectifying way). Let’s also suppose that in general men have a sexual preference for some styles of dress over others. Both these suppositions seem plausible enough at first glance, but I don’t know what the actual evidence is for either one. Obviously if one of them is not true then the whole thing is moot, the precautions don’t work. The point is that you still can’t conclude that dressing down will make a woman safe, because of what happens above drive thresholds. If a man is prepared to sexually assault strangers at night to satisfy his sex drive, it’s a reasonable guess that he must have a high sex drive at the time – way over the threshold where his preferences about clothing make any difference. The Drive Threshold Model therefore predicts that his choice of victim will have nothing to do with the way she’s dressed.

From which I draw three conclusions. In ascending order of importance—

For social justice people: the findings of science are not biased, or at least not hopelessly biased, by the scientists’ ideology. Biology is not the enemy.

For evo psych buffs: feminism will usually turn out to be right. Go ahead and bet on it.

For everyone: stop freaking telling women not to dress like sluts and they’ll be safe from rape. It doesn’t work.

4 comments:

  1. Of course, the other reason that telling women not to "dress like sluts" doesn't work is that violent rape by strangers is by far the smallest proportion of sexual violence overall. Counter to the popular "criminals are monsters" thesis, most rapists are rational human beings who come to the rational (if awful) conclusion that it's far safer for them to target someone who's an easier mark than a total stranger in a park. A far more popular strategy is to pick on someone they have prior connection with and either socially isolate them or incapacitate them with drugs or alcohol (or both).

    I don't think that has anything to do with drive thresholds, as the amount of sex that someone's having doesn't seem to have much of a bearing on their deciding on rape as the best strategy.

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    1. Hmmm. My example was perhaps a bit misleading. With food your drive to eat does correlate fairly closely with how long it's been since you've last eaten, but that's not necessarily the case with all drives. Some aspects of sexuality do work like that, but they can be dealt with by, shall we say, taking matters into one's own hands. Other drives and desires might fluctuate more cyclically or randomly. What I'm saying is that the amount of sex that someone's having doesn't predict their sex drive, at least not to the point that someone who had sex the night before last is likely to still be depleted.
      Indeed most rapists don't hide in dark corners and prey on total strangers, and of course drive thresholds have nothing whatever to do with date rape or marital rape. But the "don't dress like a slut" precaution isn't intended for those situations in any case. (Many of the people who recommend "not dressing like sluts" are the same people who think "a man who pays for a date has earned something in return" or "when you're married you've got a right to expect some sex, don't you?"). But more common than the "stranger hiding in the bushes" is the situation where a man at a party or a bar seems friendly enough at first but is skilled at manipulating women into a position where they're alone with him or too drunk to resist. There again the attacker has a choice of targets before initiating the action. I would still argue that a man prepared to do that probably does it when he's feeling horny right now god damn it, in which case drive thresholds once again apply.

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    2. "But the "don't dress like a slut" precaution isn't intended for those situations in any case."
      I think that's true, I just thought that was worth mentioning because I think the people you allude to who think a man is "owed something" on a date, also tend to minimise the amount of rape between acquaintances because they have a narrative of "real" rape that they're trying to uphold (as a way to control women's sexuality, whether that's conscious on their part or not).

      I think you're probably right in the case of random bar/party opportunists - but I also think that people who abuse established relationships are still (probably) more common.

      I think the complicating factor with sex drives and rape as compared to hunger and food is that a) without food you'll die, so the drive is a bit more fundamental and b) you don't need to have any sort of relationship with your food while you do need to decide what sort of relationship you want with a sex partner. I think the drive threshold thing is quite possibly relevant to *when* someone might attempt rape, but I think there's probably a decision that gets made earlier about whether rape is a strategy that they're willing to use in the first place.

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    3. ...they have a narrative of "real" rape that they're trying to uphold (as a way to control women's sexuality, whether that's conscious on their part or not).

      For a given value of "controlling women's sexuality", sure. I think the driving force behind the contradictory sexual values of patriarchy is basically: each man is simultaneously trying to guarantee himself sex, and exclude other men from it. The mindset is easiest to understand if you assume that the men basically think of women as livestock producing a commodity. Of course keeping your goats from being stolen includes making sure they don't wander off of their own accord. The complication arises from the fact that women aren't in fact goats, and that if you try and tether them they will gang up on you, including recruiting allies from among your rivals. You have to resort to making rules and hoping they're internalized as "morality". But such men also want to leave wiggle-room in the rules for when it's OK to have sex with women that don't belong to them, which comes down to "sluts are fair game". That women don't seem to want to be "fair game" and will therefore adhere to the norm rather than be seen as "sluts", is (for possessors) an added bonus, but not a planned one. (For men who've missed out it's a minus.)

      I think the complicating factor with sex drives and rape as compared to hunger and food is that a) without food you'll die, so the drive is a bit more fundamental and b) you don't need to have any sort of relationship with your food while you do need to decide what sort of relationship you want with a sex partner. I think the drive threshold thing is quite possibly relevant to *when* someone might attempt rape, but I think there's probably a decision that gets made earlier about whether rape is a strategy that they're willing to use in the first place.

      I get what you're getting at, but there are a number of things here that I take issue with.
      (1) What does "fundamental" mean? Rationally, of course, you'll die without food but you won't die without sex. But your instinctive desires are part of the make-up of your brain, and that's not made by "you" -- "you" don't exist until it's already well on the way towards completion. Your brain is made by your genes (yes, acting within your environment, sidetrack avoided), and your genes are just as dead if you fail to have sex as if you neglect to eat. Where things get more complicated than I care to try and squeeze into a single blog comment is just how your reproductive prospects correlate with your sex life. But unless you devote your life to helping your siblings produce nephews and nieces (like a worker bee), zero sex equals dead genes. And genes try not to be dead.
      (2) You don't need a relationship with the food, but you generally do need some kind of relationship, at the very least a non-theft relationship, with the person who provides it to you. I feel a strong natural desire for sweet and/or oily foods, inherited from millions of years of fruit- and nut-eating ancestors, but you don't see me scoffing chocolate ginger straight out of the supermarket bulk bins.
      (3) And that highlights a major point: absent counteracting social norms, the default human attitude to strangers is predatory. If you don't feel this, it's because you've internalized the social norms. (Norms can be criticized, and many are unnecessary, but we can't get by without any.) If a man is not willing to commit rape, it's because at some point his consciousness has been raised to the humanity of women. There will not be a generation that doesn't need to be educated about consent for a long time to come.

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