With more and more women reporting rape and police time spent on sexual offences constantly increasing, when it comes to how we manage our sex lives something seems to be very wrong.
However, the problem does not lie with male behaviour. The problem lies with the culture of promiscuity that feminists have created through their stringent denial of differences between women and men.
The feminist denial of sex differences rides roughshod over female sensitivities. Huge international data sets show that a variety of willing sexual partners, or sex with strangers – are male not female proclivities. Casual sex leaves women feeling psychologically vulnerable and depressed.
Yet feminists have insisted that these differences are a product of ‘cultural construction’, gender narratives and sexual double standards. As Natasha Walter documents in her book Living Dolls, young women are living under significant female peer pressure to participate in a culture of casual sex.
However, men and women are the product of thousands of years of successful sexual reproduction. Our ancestral grandfathers were the men who were able to identify and driven to mate with the largest number of the most fertile women – described by “the Coolidge effect”.
Our ancestral grandmothers were not the women who partied but the ones who raised the most children to adult maturity.
The visceral almost physiological reactions of an adult women to a very young baby, and the adult male’s reactions to a novel female displaying all the signs of fertility, reflect our differences.
But crucial to all this was the recruitment of males to fatherhood – humans are the only species where the extended and deep involvement of the father has been achieved. This would not have happened had sex been freely and easily available. Female withholding and restraint are not only embedded in the heart of social reproduction. They are embedded in female DNA.
This I suspect is why females find rape so psychologically devastating. It interferes with the key to human social reproduction; female selection and withholding. But then so does casual sex.
The way in which females constantly police casual sex both in themselves and others is not a reflection of sexual double standards, but of their discomfort with casual sex. This discomfort provides the backdrop to understanding casual sex behaviours. And it does not honour the complexity of human interaction to assume the absence of verbal consent or the presence of alcohol are methods of defining rape.
There is an assumption that drinking results in promiscuity. I suspect many women drink to deal with the demands and expectations of a sexually permissive society. It is not so much that women have sex because they are drunk. They drink to cope with the expectations of casual sex.
This underlying discomfort means that far from being sexually assertive in casual relationships, most women prefer men to take the initiatives. Being very prepared for or participating too actively may interfere with deep-seated instincts towards self-restraint.
It is also not a context for communication. Talking about sex may be a long-term project even in the most committed relationships. It is easier to have sex than to talk about it when strangers are involved.
Add to this the fact that men suffer from a sexual over-perception bias where they are more likely falsely to infer that women are sexually interested in them. That they are more likely to find casual sex “a fun, intense, and exciting experience involving a rush of feelings…perhaps akin to consuming stimulants of some kind” and one can see that there is plenty of room for human error to occur.
And into this context comes our achingly right-on Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders to make judgements about them. This is the gross, heinous crime.
Of course horrible, dreadful rapes can happen in this context, but I suspect this is rare. Research suggests that evidence of pain, disgust or violence actually inhibits sexual response in most men.
But the fact that rape does happen should be taken as a warning to women that they should absolutely not be going into private places with men they hardly know. In one of the more recent rape cases, the reason the woman was able to secure a conviction was because the rapist had been foolish enough to choose a public place. This is probably quite rare. When it comes to private intimate contexts, the law cannot really protect us. Convicting a man without witnesses or evidence of violence ought to and should be hard.
Women also need to recognise that it is not just rape that they find psychologically difficult, but all casual sex. This is important because when women experience psychological difficulties as a result of sex they might assume this must be because they were abused or raped.
Hearing from men is crucial. Greater understanding between men and women would have a protective effect. It would also create the possibility of forgiveness as Thordis Elva bravely realised. There are many cases where I suspect mediation could usefully replace the court.
Because rape is experienced by women as an absolute loss of power, there is a deeply held belief in rape discourse that obtaining power over a woman is actually the purpose of rape. This helps the woman perceive herself as an absolute victim. However, rape might be easier psychologically to process if we understood the perpetrator hadn’t set out to hurt and disempower us. He had actually got carried away having sex.
As restraint and withholding are such a deeply rooted part of what it means to be female, failures to achieve this are experienced as profound guilt which is why all rape therapies are absolutely emphatic that the victim is not to blame. However, being able to take responsibility either for one’s actions, for forgiveness or for healing are all significant steps in the road to recovery. If women were allowed to acknowledge that getting drunk was a bad idea, as the victim in the most recent rape trial has bravely done, then they might also recognise that it was not they, but our feminist-created culture of promiscuity, that actually was to blame.
The Evolution of Desire strategies of Human Mating by David Buss provided evidence for some of these arguments.
