The Invisible Woman. Joanne Belknap
as an Explanation of Sexual Abuse
A significant amount of the BSET resurgence in the last quarter century has been to explain infidelity (cheating on one’s romantic/sexual partner) and gender-based abuses such as rape, intimate partner abuse, and child abuse (including child sexual abuse) rather than general offending or delinquency. Even in her groundbreaking book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (discussed more fully in Chapters 7 and 8), feminist Brownmiller (1975) views rape as possible because men have penetrating penises and women have penetrable vaginas. BSET explanations of men’s violence against women emphasize that “sexually aggressive behavior is a biopsychosocial phenomenon that is primarily engaged in by males” (Hall, Hirschman, Graham, & Zaragoza, 1993, p. 1). But both males and females have genitalia that can be abused, and Cahill (2001) effectively argues that males also have penetrable anuses that can be sexually abused (by any gender). If we recognize that it is the ability to coerce or physically overpower another person through forceful sexual contact, then clearly sexual abusers and victims alike can be any gender. Given that most babysitting, child-care work, childhood teaching, and parenting are performed by women (or girls) who typically have considerably more physical power than the children they oversee, we would expect child sexual abuse to be predominantly committed by women and girls. This is clearly not the case and defies the BSET contention that physical domination ability is the main determinant of sexually abusing,
Many current-day promoters of BSET claim to integrate the biosocial approach with social theory (just as some of the early positivists did), and some, even with feminist theory. But the result (similar to the similarly situated early positivists) is claiming that biology, with perhaps a smattering of sociological forces, predicts why females are victims and males are offenders. In this context, gender-based abuses (i.e., rape and intimate partner abuse) are typically explained (or even excused) by such biological forces as sex drives and hormones. Key to the evolutionary theory approach is the concept of adaptation. As applied to investigating why men/boys perpetrate rape, it is as an adaption that “would increase the reproduction or survival of descendants and, therefore, that person’s genetic material” (Burch & Gallup, 2004, p. 244).
L. Ellis (1993, p. 23) uses natural selection to explain that our gender roles are a result of our biological dispositions, whereby men gain by being pushy about sex and women gain by showing such feminine traits as coyness and hesitancy. He suggests men and boys compete for the best female sex partners, whereas girls and women compete with each other to find the best male who can provide for their offspring. Ellis believes that males do not rape because they want to dominate females but that they use these dominating and aggressive rape behaviors simply to copulate (have sexual intercourse) and spread their genes (p. 24). Similarly, Duntley and Shackelford (2008) report, “Rape is a strategy aimed directly at obtaining reproductive resources at a cost to the victim. A male rapist may benefit from the behavior by siring offspring that he may not otherwise have produced” (p. 376). Sociobiologists believe that men “naturally” pursue more sexual partners (to better plant their seeds), while women are more “naturally” monogamous (to be choosier in picking the fathers of their future children).
Baker’s (1996) Sperm Wars details (without any references to other research and no subsequent validation) ways in which sperm are “egg-getters” (try to fertilize ova) and “egg-killers” (try to kill other men’s sperm inside of women) and how confusing, unpredictable, and moody women are relative to men. L. Ellis and Walsh (1997) claim that women resist sex/rape until they are confident the male will provide for their offspring. Of course, this simplistic reasoning does not explain why men and boys, premenstrual girls, postmenopausal women, women and girls on effective birth control, and others would resist rape. Not surprisingly, Ellis and Walsh’s perspective is not only sexist but lso racist and classist. For example, they suggest African Americans are more criminal than Whites and Asian Americans due to “an evolutionary foundation for racial/ethnic differences” (p. 252).
In 2000, Thornhill and Palmer published the controversial book A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, claiming that an evolutionary approach is better suited to understanding the causes of rape than are social science and social learning. Like L. Ellis (1993), they view rape as an adaptation used by men who are unsuccessful in their efforts to have consensual sex with women. The book has been soundly criticized on numerous fronts, including ignoring scientific evidence, misrepresenting facts, and being simplistic and misleading (Coyne & Berry, 2000; Ward & Siegert, 2002). With an amusing example, Coyne and Berry (2000) point out that evolutionary psychology and the focus on adaptation, specifically that natural selection is the basis for all human actions, are problematic: “The most imaginative and committed sociobiologist would be hard-pressed to show that masturbation, sadomasochism, bestiality, and pornography’s enthusiasm for high heels are all direct adaptations” (p. 122).
A 2014 BSET study using NIBRS (a U.S. police database) define it as “the largest sample of sexual assaults ever analyzed” (Felson & Cundiff, 2014, p. 281). The aim was to show that sexual assault is an exception to the Felson and Cundiff’s earlier age-desistance phenomenon (that most offenders slow or stop their criminal behavior as they age). They state:
Older men have almost as strong a sexual attraction to younger women as do younger men…. However, since young women tend not to be sexually attracted to older men, older men do not have sexual access to young women. While prostitutes provide older men opportunities for consensual sex with young women, their services are expensive. As a result, some men use illegitimate means, i.e., sexual assault, to satisfy their conventional aspirations. (Felson & Cundiff, 2014, p. 274)
Felson and Cundiff’s simplistic argument is that young women aged 15 to 19 are at the greatest risk of men raping them “because of their contact with motivated offenders, their vulnerability, and their sexual maturity and attractiveness” (p. 282), although they include no measures of victims’ and nonvictims’ “attractiveness” or sexual maturity. Because Felson and Cundiff (2014) found “males of all ages are likely to target young women” (p. 278) (but males also target boys and young men) and older men are more likely to commit sexual than physical assaults (p. 279), they concluded “the tendency for sexual assaults to involve male offenders and female victims reflects male sexuality rather than attitudes about women” (p. 273). In sum, BSET is used to excuse rapists while blaming biology and women and girl victims.
BSET as an Explanation of Intimate Partner Abuse (IPA)
In addition to sexual abuse, BSET is used as an explanation for intimate partner abuse (IPA) (domestic violence) (Janssen et al., 2005). One evolutionary psychologist insinuates that all women are more attracted to more domineering men (Barber, 1995, p. 418). A small study solely of men verbally and physically abusive to their wives attributed their IPA to their elevated testosterone levels (Soler, Vinayak, & Quadagno, 2000), while a larger study found no relationship between men and boys’ aggression and their testosterone levels (Huesmann, Lefkowitz, Eron, & Walder, 1984). Yet other BSET proponents hypothesized that “men’s partner-directed violence is produced by psychological mechanisms evolved to solve the adaptive problem of paternity uncertainty” (Kaighobadi & Shackelford, 2009, p. 282). Other BSET studies focus on “competitively disadvantaged males” (CDMs), hypothesizing that men who rate as low quality for mates because of their low socioeconomic status and physical unattractiveness are more likely to use coerciveness and violence to gain sex (because it may be their only access to it) and to use violent sex against their wives and children in order to terrorize their wives (dominating their wives through abusing their children) into not leaving them (e.g., Figueredo et al., 2001; Figueredo & McCloskey, 1993). Once again, this approach is inherently offensive on numerous levels (e.g., class and societal ideas of attractiveness). Ironically, Figueredo and his colleagues’ test of this found the opposite of what was hypothesized: CDMs were more likely to abuse competitively disadvantaged females (CDFs) than the “higher mate quality [women] partners” they would seemingly need to abuse to “keep” (Figueredo et al., 2001, p. 315).
A survey study of women claimed