IT WASN’T LONG before I had lots of good company for my misery. As soon as word got around that I had a Guggenheim Fellowship to study conflicts between scientists and activists over issues of human identity, academics from all over started contacting me, suggesting I work on this controversy or that. I heard from one physician colleague about a clinician-researcher who dared to question the reality of chronic Lyme disease and was now chronically plagued by people who insisted they had it. I heard from another about the physician-researcher who had helped to define the condition known as fibromyalgia only to later doubt that it really is a distinct disease. (There’s a way to make yourself researcher non grata.) I started to wonder if this was just a guy thing. Are men much more likely to get into trouble because they’re taught and allowed to be aggressive? Then Mike Bailey told me about another woman who’d been in this kind of trouble, a clinical psychologist who had researched and revealed the disappointing reality behind a poster-child case of “recovered memory” of alleged childhood sexual abuse. Then I learned from an editor at Harvard University Press about another woman psychologist, one who had experienced some significant unpleasantness following a book in which she expressed scientific skepticism about alleged alien abductions. The abductees wanted a word with her.
I had accidentally stumbled onto something much more surreal—a whole fraternity of beleaguered and bandaged academics who had produced scholarship offensive to one identity group or another and who had consequently been the subject of various forms of shout-downs. Only these academics hadn’t yet formed a proper society in which they could keep each other company. Most of these people had been too specialized or too geeky (or too convinced they were the only ones who didn’t deserve it) to realize there were others like them out there. As I started collections of notes on each of these folks, I kept thinking about how Bo must have felt in the early 1990s, when she realized that there were others like her out there, others who had been born with ambiguous sex, who had been cut, changed, and lied to. “My people” were out there. I just had to put it—put them—all together.
But where to start? Mike Bailey’s son, Drew, insisted the place was the University of Missouri in Columbia. Drew was there earning his PhD in evolutionary psychology, a field I had long held in contempt as I knew feminist science-studies scholars like me were supposed to. Drew assured me I could get plenty of material from a single trip to the University of Missouri, because the place was littered with CV’s torn asunder in various controversies. There was Craig Palmer, the anthropologist who had dared to cowrite A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. There was Ken Sher, the psychologist who had been the action editor for an infamous paper purporting to show that children are not, on average, as universally devastated by sexual abuse as the angriest survivors might lead us to believe. There was Dave Geary, a psychologist who dabbled dangerously into the study of sex differences in mathematical abilities (even after Larry Summers). And there was Mark Flinn, a scientist whose career had been wrapped up with Napoleon Chagnon, the famous sociobiology-loving anthropologist who had been tried for high crimes and misdemeanors by the American Anthropology Association in 2001.
I wrote to all these people and set up interviews for the two days I would spend in Columbia in late October 2008. Then I crammed, studying these various people’s experiences, and got on a plane from Michigan to Memphis, because (as I had learned) Memphis was the only way to fly to Columbia. Turns out Columbia sports a tiny airport with a total of three flights in and three out each day, except on Saturdays when they drop down to two each.
As we approached the landing strip in the midst of green rolling hills dotted with brightly colored trees, I suddenly wondered something. If in a place as small as Columbia, I could quickly find people with intimate connections to at least four major controversies involving scientific claims about human identity, how many of us must there be?
• • •
OBAMA SIGNS WERE EVERYWHERE as I pulled my rental car into Columbia and found a place to park. It was five days before the presidential election of 2008, and Missouri had become a swing state. I knew that unless the polls suddenly shifted, Obama would be in Columbia the next night for a rally. Everyone seemed downright giddy, like the mood of the home-team fans as the clock ticks down on a national championship, the scoreboard shining with a point lead clearly too great for the visitors to overcome. The academics in Missouri were as academics everywhere that year—gaga over Obama not just because he could really think and reason and write and speak, but also because the Bush administration had been so profoundly antiscience and so very untruthful. Such liars. We just wanted reality back.
With all this going on and not really knowing if I was at the beginning or near the end of this shape-shifting project, it was impossible not to feel disoriented. I was glad when Ken Sher, my first interviewee, suggested we talk in a bar. It was hard to find a place to perch my computer for note taking, but I didn’t really care. The controversy he’d been involved with had already been exceedingly well documented, including by people like Ken. I mostly wanted to hear what Ken thought I needed to really appreciate about how these things play out.
I knew from my background reading that in 1998 Nancy Eisenberg (of Arizona State) and Ken had been the editors at Psychological Bulletin responsible for publishing a paper that came to be known as “the Rind paper.” Psychological Bulletin is one of the publications of the American Psychological Association, and at the time, Eisenberg served as editor in chief. As was typical for manuscripts submitted to the journal, Eisenberg assigned the submitted Rind paper to one of her two associate editors to shepherd it through peer review and revision. The associate editor assigned the task of managing the manuscript was Ken Sher.
Sher and Eisenberg had decided that the Rind paper—after it passed the usual peer-review process—would certainly be worth publishing. Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch, and Robert Bauserman had performed a meta-analysis of studies of childhood sexual abuse, or CSA. They took a series of existing studies—on college students who as children had been targets of sexual advances by adults—and looked to see what patterns they could find.
What had seemed particularly important to Sher and Eisenberg about the Rind paper was its parsing of which factors in cases of CSA were associated with long-term psychological harm. For example, the Rind paper’s analysis suggested that girls were more likely to be psychologically harmed by CSA than boys and that an incestuous family environment that also involved other forms of physical and emotional abuse was more likely to result in harm than nonincestuous CSA in less abusive environments. The paper also suggested that it did not make a lot of sense to lump together under the term childhood sexual abuse both (a) molestation of a five-year-old by a sixty-year-old, and (b) consensual sex that happens between a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old. Yet the scientific literature sometimes did that. The paper therefore tried to bring a more scientific approach to a very heated topic.
But in taking seriously the idea that not everyone is devastated by everything termed childhood sexual abuse, Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman were saying something very politically incorrect: some people grow up to be psychologically pretty healthy even after having been CSA victims. In fact, Rind and company opted to go even further in their paper, suggesting that the term childhood sexual abuse seemed to imply that child-adult sex always led to great and lasting harm, whereas the data seemed to show it did not in a surprising proportion of cases. The Rind paper recommended that those studying the problem employ a more neutral terminology and sort out the different types of sex (and harm) occurring.
Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman closed the paper with an attempt to avoid being accused of being apologists for pedophilia, reminding readers that just because an action might not harm does not make it morally right: “If it is true that wrongfulness in sexual matters does not imply harmfulness”—a point they attributed to my old pal John Money—“then it is also true that lack of harmfulness does not imply lack of wrongfulness. . . . In this sense, the findings of the current review do not imply that moral or legal definitions of or views on behaviors currently classified as CSA should be abandoned or even altered.”
Well, that little “we’re not advocating pedophilia” disclaimer sure didn’t work. Activist pedophiles saw in the Rind paper justification for us all to just get out of the way already and let them at little kids. Blatantly ignoring the point made at the end of the Rind paper, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMbLA) called the Rind paper “The Good News About Man/Boy Love.” Thus the Rind paper became the gospel according to NAMbLA, a group whose mere logo can thoroughly creep you out. (The M for Man leans to the right, pushing against the little b for boy, as though the M is mounting the b. Seriously, that’s what it looks like.)
If NAMbLA saw a golden opportunity in the Rind paper, Laura Schlessinger had visions of platinum. In the spring of 1999, on her Dr. Laura Program, Schlessinger simplified the whole scene in predictable ways, making the Rind paper out to be junk science and suggesting that Rind and company were virtual pitchmen for pedophilia. The fact that the American Psychological Association (Psychological Bulletin’s publisher) then looked like the PR arm of NAMbLA was undoubtedly a delightful side effect from Schlessinger’s point of view. Schlessinger had no use for the APA, an organization that openly leaned left. She pulled out all the stops, ultimately encouraging conservative members of Congress to use the Rind paper to go after the APA. The not so honorable Tom DeLay, representative of Texas’s Twenty-Second Congressional District, was only too happy to heed Dr. Laura’s call. No doubt still stinging from impeaching Clinton without managing to remove him as president, DeLay found in the Rind paper a new sexual ticket to ride. And ride it he did.
By July of 1999, DeLay managed to get the House of Representatives to condemn the Rind paper by a vote of 355 to 0 (with 13 members voting only “present”). Just a few days later, the Senate followed suit, unanimously resolving “that Congress condemns and denounces all suggestions in the article ‘A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples’ that indicate that sexual relationships between adults and ‘willing’ children are less harmful than believed.” Congress also saw fit to condemn “any suggestion that sexual relations between children and adults . . . are anything but abusive, destructive, exploitative, reprehensible, and punishable by law.”
And there you have it: the only scientific paper ever to be condemned by an act of Congress. Sher and Eisenberg found themselves getting mail like this:
WHO THE HECK CAME UP WITH THE IDEA THAT BEING RAPED IS OKAY IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE A LITTLE CHILD? WERE ANY OF YOU VICTUMS [sic] OF SEX ABUSE? BELEIVE [sic] ME YOU WOULD BE CALLING IT ABUSE IF IT HAD HAPPEND [sic] TO YOU. . . . SO BEING SEXUALLY ABUSE [sic] MAY NOT BE A CRIME TO YOU BUT IT IS TO ME. . . . CUT OUT THIS INSANITY AND JUST SAY THAT YOU ARE SORRY AND ARE IN ERROR.
Sitting at the Missouri bar with me nearly a decade later, Sher seemed to alternate between a cringe and a sardonic smile as he recounted to me the insanity of it all. I mean, how do you even start to explain what the Rind paper actually said when you’re dealing with Dr. Laura’s distorted caricature? And as for DeLay—it’s one thing to use your elected office to show your support for survivors of pedophilic abuse. It’s quite another to condemn any consideration of an unpopular possibility by voting through an act of Congress that pedophilia must be as harmful as the public generally believes, no matter what the studies showed about the reality.
What seemed to bother Sher most, though, wasn’t the stupidity of Congress. It was the way the American Psychological Association had handled the matter. In spite of being reasonably worried that the controversy might be used to cut federal funding to such institutions as the National Institute of Mental Health, initially the APA had done a good job keeping the politicians at the gate. Despite calls for the editors’ heads, they were not removed by the APA, and the APA kept Sher and Eisenberg apprised of what was going on. One of the senior staff even made a point of calling to acknowledge the stress Sher and Eisenberg had to be experiencing.
But then, as DeLay increasingly threatened to go after the APA itself, Raymond Fowler, the association’s chief executive officer, caved. He wrote what came to be known as the capitulation letter, assuring Delay that “the article included opinions of the authors that are inconsistent with APA’s stated and deeply held positions on child welfare and protection issues.” Meaning what, exactly? That the APA’s “stated and deeply held positions on child welfare” included that all victims of pedophilia must be profoundly and immutably harmed?
More problematically, Fowler announced that the APA would arrange for an independent review of the Rind paper, an unprecedented move and a seeming admission that if a paper’s PR was bad enough, the normal scientific review process could be subverted in the service of politics. Sher recalled to me that the APA turned to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to do the review, only to have the AAAS do what the APA should have done: defend the scientific process from political meddling. Irving Lerch, chair of the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, dressed the APA down:
We see no reason to second-guess the process of peer review used by the APA journal in its decision to publish the article in question. . . . We believe that disputes over methods in science are best resolved, not through the intervention of AAAS or any other “independent” organization, but rather through the process of intellectual discourse among scientists in a professional field.
Lerch also suggested in his letter that the APA might have done more to correct the public mischaracterizations of the Rind paper, rather than implicitly repeating them through capitulation.
Many saw Fowler’s letter on behalf of the APA as selling out not only the Rind paper’s authors, editors, and reviewers, but science itself. You have to wonder if Fowler or his staff was ashamed of what he did. Up until this point, the APA had made sure to keep Sher and Eisenberg apprised of what was going on over the Rind paper. But news of Fowler’s capitulation came not directly from the APA, but through an improbably circuitous route: Sher learned of it from Eisenberg, who learned of it from her editorial assistant, who learned of it by hearing Dr. Laura on the radio trumpeting her little victory over the APA.
This was hard to swallow. So I swallowed a bit more of my drink and remarked to Sher how odd I thought it was that people would be so angry to hear that not every victim of pedophilia had had his or her life utterly ruined. It seemed to me the Rind paper contained a bit of good news for survivors, namely that psychological devastation need not always be a lifelong sequela to having been sexually used as a child by an adult in search of his own gratification. But simpler stories of good and evil sell better.
Remembering the whole fiasco, Sher recalled to me how the process had been rigged. The Congressional resolution condemned together both pedophilia and the Rind paper, so as Sher and Eisenberg later noted in a written reflection on the whole mess, “One could not vote in favor of the [Rind] article without voting for pedophilia.” If you wanted to try to distinguish pedophilia and the scientific process, abstaining from voting was the best you could do. Surely DeLay purposely set it up that way.
I didn’t bother asking Sher if he’d be voting for Obama.
• • •
CRAIG PALMER’S OFFICE had the oddest homemade doorbell I’d ever seen, one that reminded me of the Winnie the Pooh story in which Owl accidentally walked off with the donkey Eeyore’s tail and turned it into a bell pull. When Palmer opened his door, I realized what was up. His office consisted of two rooms, an anteroom and an interior office, so that if he happened to be working in the inner room at his desk, he might not hear a person knock at the outer door—hence an elaborate contraption that allowed a visitor to pull on a long string that would ring a little bell hanging within earshot of Palmer’s desk.
Mike Bailey’s son, Drew, had been particularly keen on my talking to Craig Palmer. Before my trip, Drew had checked several times to make sure I knew about Joan Roughgarden’s review of the book Craig had coauthored with Randy Thornhill, A Natural History of Rape, a book that explored biological explanations for forced sex. Roughgarden was the trans woman scientist at Stanford who had become one of my most vocal critics following my work on the Bailey controversy. Months before I had gone to Columbia, Drew had sent me the “biology of rape” review Roughgarden had published in Ethology, and I assured Drew I remembered it. You don’t easily forget an essay in a scientific journal that calls for authors of a scientific monograph to swing in the wind. (Quoth Roughgarden: “Thornhill and Palmer are guilty of all allegations and they deserve to hang. But before stringing them up, let’s reflect.”) But even Roughgarden’s contempt for these guys would not have made me like them if they had actually said what they’d been accused of saying: that rapists should be excused and forgiven because their genes made them do it and that raped women had been asking for it. Of course, they hadn’t said that.
What Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer had said was that rape has a sexual component to it—that contrary to the claims of some feminists, rape isn’t merely an expression of unadulterated power. Thornill and Palmer marshaled evidence suggesting that some kinds of sexual coercion in some species, including humans, may increase the likelihood of reproductive success of some males. They also collected evidence showing that human rapists in general tend to be interested in women of childbearing age whom they find sexually attractive. Notably, Thornhill and Palmer took very seriously the harm caused to women by rapists and argued that truly caring for victims of rape meant taking seriously possible biological contributions to sexual coercion. While their work might help to explain rape—and, they hoped, even prevent and prosecute it—they certainly did not excuse, condone, or forgive rape. Contrary to Roughgarden’s assertions, they did not provide “the latest ‘evolution-made-me-do-it’ excuse for criminal behavior.”
Craig had told me in advance of our meeting that he didn’t much enjoy thinking back to what happened when the book had come out but that he had kept a mess of papers related to the controversy in a filing cabinet. He said that, given Drew’s recommendation of me, I was welcome to go through the collection with him. As we settled in to talk in his office, he told me the story of having been in a class a year or two before, talking about the controversy over his work, and finding that this one grad student named Drew Bailey was thoroughly engaged. Finally he realized that the kid was Michael Bailey’s son—that Bailey.
I laughed and asked Craig if he was aware that, if you Googled “Thornhill and Palmer,” one of the first hits you got was a page from Lynn Conway’s Web site attacking Thornhill and Palmer and trying to tie them to the Bailey controversy. Craig apologized that he didn’t know what I was talking about. I explained as best I could.
Although Craig’s office counted as a model of cleanliness and order for an academic suite, the file drawer in which he had collected writings on his own controversy was a total mess. The papers were stacked horizontally in some places, shoved in vertically in other places, some in folders or envelopes but many without. It was obvious that this portion of Craig’s life had been chaotic and that he had literally just put it all away and moved on. Now, as he went through the jumble, trying to create logical stacks for me on his table, he tried to explain what had happened.
Like Mike Bailey, Craig Palmer and Randy Thornhill weren’t naive, and they weren’t shy. They knew that when they set out to collaborate on their mutual interest and to publish together on the biological bases of sexual coercion that the work would draw attention and also some ire, but they had no idea what they were really in for. The first inkling that something was up came when the two of them went to Boston for a meeting at MIT Press, the outfit publishing their book. Craig and Randy thought that they were going to discuss how the book would be promoted, but when they got there, they were suddenly informed that they had to present a lecture on the work to a group of people the press had assembled. Craig recalled to me, “We walk in, and there were 50 or 60 people in this room.” The authors were understandably bewildered. They’d never heard of such a thing (nor had I). Randy let Craig take the lead, and as Craig recalled, he jotted down a bunch of notes on a legal pad and went from there. Though there was plenty of hostility to the project, Craig and Randy felt the sum-up went pretty well. They were able to handle all the questions, however misdirected, but it was a disturbing situation nonetheless. Craig told me, “It was clear that news of the book had spread around MIT, and the people there were basically protesting the publication of the book.”
Then in January 2000, Randy and Craig published a summary of their forthcoming book in an article entitled “Why Men Rape” in the Sciences, a magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. All hell started to break loose, and things only got worse when the book came out in April. Craig told me,
The very first media attention I knew of [came via] a phone message from a friend from high school, saying that Rush Limbaugh was talking about my book on the radio. Obviously not the typical phone message. First I thought, how did Rush Limbaugh hear about our book? Then I wondered what in the world Rush Limbaugh thought of it. Then I wondered what happened to my friend that he was listening to Rush Limbaugh.
Craig went on:
It was interesting, because as I thought about it, I thought I could see Rush Limbaugh going either way on it: he could like it because we were challenging the feminist explanation of rape, or he could dislike it because we take an evolutionary approach. But it turned out he was criticizing it because he thought we were trying to excuse Bill Clinton’s behavior.
Long after Limbaugh lost interest, the heat kept up. One criticism after another came flying at Thornhill and Palmer, in the popular media, in the presses of the intelligentsia, and in the mail. As Craig showed me, the majority of these criticisms attributed to Craig and Randy various ignorant and obnoxious claims that they had never made. For example, in Time magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich suggested that Thornhill and Palmer seriously downplayed the amount of harm done to rape victims, even though the book takes that harm very seriously, even attempting to quantify it and make sense of variations in levels of harm. (Perhaps like Dr. Laura in the Rind case, Ehrenreich just couldn’t wrap her head around anything other than the classic story of sexual assault in which the victim is always irrevocably devastated.) A letter writer to the Los Angeles Times assumed that because Thornhill and Palmer said rape was sexual, they were also labeling it normal. The Nashville Tennessean’s headline called the work a “‘Can’t Help It’ Theory,” while the Manchester Guardian similarly announced “The Men Can’t Help It,” as if Thornhill and Palmer had concluded that men amounted to pathetic slaves to their evolutionary histories. Meanwhile, the Toronto Globe and Mail ran angry letters under the title “Are Men Natural-Born Rapists?” as if that was exactly what A Natural History of Rape had concluded, the reality of the book be damned.
The feminist writer-activist Susan Brownmiller seemed particularly furious, and no wonder. In their work, Randy and Craig directly took issue with Brownmiller’s highly influential opinion that rape is essentially about power and domination, not lust. Thornhill and Palmer acknowledged that the treatment of raped women in courts and in society had greatly improved since the time of Brownmiller’s bold work, and indeed it had. Brownmiller and other feminists had radically changed the public story of rape by reframing it as symptomatic of a pandemic disease—patriarchal misogyny. By talking about how rape is used as a tool of power and intimidation, by steadfastly seeing rape as part of cultural systems that oppress women, Brownmiller and others had changed many harmful and entrenched cultural assumptions about rape. No longer could someone easily get away with blaming a rape victim for what she was wearing; no longer was she the one to be on trial.
Thornhill and Palmer shared Brownmiller’s desires for an end to rape and for compassion and justice for rape victims, but they argued that Brownmiller’s account of rape as primarily being about power didn’t match the facts. Men seeking power over women could find it in a number of ways, but the choice to rape a woman and especially the ability to sustain an erection during a rape suggested, at the very least, significant sexual arousal. Denial of that reality, Randy and Craig argued, would only lead to more harm to women.
As Craig recalled the public battles with me, he pulled out an example of Brownmiller’s influence. He handed me a pamphlet distributed by the University of California–Davis’s Rape Prevention Education Program, a branch of the university’s police department. Here’s some of what it said:
FACT: Sexual assault is an act of physical and emotional violence, not of sexual gratification. Rapists assault to dominate, humiliate, control, degrade, terrify, and violate. Studies show that power and anger are the primary motivating factors. . . .
FACT: Sexual assault victims range in age from infants to the elderly. Appearance and attractiveness are not relevant. A rapist assaults someone who is accessible and vulnerable.
Craig looked visibly disturbed as he read this stuff. Was it really ethical to suggest to a woman that she didn’t need to be concerned about how attractive a potential rapist might find her when she was in an environment where she was vulnerable? And did it really make sense to suggest that rapists were never motivated by sex?
Craig explained to me that these were just the sorts of claims that had led him into this work. In the mid-1980s, Craig had been studying anthropology in graduate school at Arizona State University, but he’d decided to give up on it. “I dropped out of graduate school because postmodernism was then coming into academia,” Craig explained to me, “and it didn’t seem worthwhile to go through all of the hard work of science and present all the evidence, just to have it dismissed by [someone] saying, ‘Well, that’s just your narrative.’” So he dropped out of school, moved up to Maine, married, bought a house, and settled in as a lobsterman.
But circumstances around a rape combined to bring Craig back to academia. The year before Craig moved to Maine, in the Arizona neighborhood where he lived, a neighbor’s daughter had been kidnapped and murdered. “They caught the guy they thought had done it,” Craig recalled, “and said they had all kinds of forensic evidence that he had committed the crime. About three days after the body was found, I remember there were two headlines on the same page. One headline . . . said something like ‘Autopsy Determines Victim Was Sexually Assaulted.’ Which I think everyone who heard about the case expected. But on the same page, the main headline said something like ‘Still No Motive Found.’”
Craig recognized that this juxtaposition reflected the standard dogma about rape—that rape (and thus also kidnapping and murder done to facilitate a rapist’s aims) were not explainable simply as a sexual act gone evil. Before he gave up on school, Craig remembered telling his mentor in Arizona, “If I come back, the claim that rape isn’t sexually motivated might be one obviously wrong social science explanation worth challenging.”
While living in Maine, Craig got a call from an assistant district attorney in Arizona. About this, Craig told me,
My first thought was that I must have forgotten to turn in some library book that was now a year overdue. But the assistant DA said the rape/murder [of the neighbor] was coming to trial, and his job was to contact everyone who lived in that part of town to see if he could find anyone who had seen an angry interaction between the girl who was raped and murdered and the man who was accused.
Craig had nothing to offer. “I was curious about why he would need someone to report that specific thing, so I asked him, . . . ‘Couldn’t you just argue that the guy was sexually attracted to this girl and he knew she would never have sex with him willingly?’” Couldn’t the DA reasonably postulate that the motive was sexual and the murder had been committed to cover up the crime?
The DA answered that that was basically what they had tried to argue, but “the defense said something like ‘scientists had proved rape is not sexually motivated. Instead it’s motivated by a desire for violence, control, or power.’ So that’s the motive that had to be established.” Craig found himself thoroughly frustrated. Did it really make sense to talk about rape as if it were a nonsexual act—especially when such a poorly evidenced claim gets in the way of bringing rapist-murderers to justice? Clearly, the populist dogma “could even let a murderer and rapist go free,” he said to me. “So I asked my wife if she’d mind if I went back and finished my PhD in order to write a dissertation challenging that explanation of rape.” His wife did not mind, and Arizona was willing to take him back and backdate a leave of absence. Craig finished his last semester of course work and then returned to Maine to write his dissertation on rape while paying the bills in lobsters.
In writing about the biological bases of sexual coercion, Craig inevitably encountered the work of the zoologist Randy Thornhill, who was interested in the same topic. In his studies of scorpionflies, Randy had found plenty of evidence that male scorpionflies prefer consensual sex, i.e., sex in which the female participates, typically in response to male presentation of a nuptial gift, something along the lines of a dead insect or a mass of hardened saliva. But if a male is unable to get a female to cooperate sexually—if, for example, he can’t get his legs on a gift—he will resort to forced sex, using a grabbing organ that appears to have evolved for just this purpose. Craig and Randy understood that humans differ radically in many ways—no one’s getting this girl into bed with a gift of petrified spit, and men don’t have a specialized rape-facilitating organ—but Craig and Randy also understood the value of recognizing that human sexuality has evolved. Some men’s rape of women might therefore be explainable with the tools of evolutionary biology.
In their early (and later) discussions, Craig and Randy sometimes disagreed about evolutionary explanations for coerced sex. Craig thought sexual coercion was likely to generally represent a by-product of evolution—an accidental side effect of evolutionarily successful adaptations—whereas Randy was inclined to see evidence for adaptionist explanations. But the two realized they agreed more than they disagreed, and so they decided to write A Natural History of Rape together, a book that would work through massive amounts of data on sexually coercive acts in humans and other species.
As one might predict, when the media frenzy set in around the book, Craig and Randy had the typical experience of those who challenge conventional wisdom. Commentators took the existing stories of good and evil, good guys and bad guys, acceptable claims and unacceptable, and tried to fit Thornhill and Palmer into those preexisting slots. Since Thornhill and Palmer seemed to be saying unacceptable things about rape—it does matter whether a victim looks sexually attractive to a rapist; rape is often about sex; biology does contribute to sexual coercion—that meant they had to be the bad guys. Thus, in the crunching of the daily media machinery, they were magically transformed into misogynistic apologists for rape. Then all you had to do was put into their mouths the words Bad Guys say about rape: “The woman was asking for it, and the guy couldn’t help himself.” And so came the hate mail and the threatening phone calls. About those, Craig told me, “Let’s just say I learned the legal line that separates official death threats from run-of-the-mill nasty e-mails and letters.”
The messages left on Randy’s answering machine were so frightening that a local sheriff did him the favor of recording the outgoing message for him in a very macho voice. His message indicated that the speaker was a law enforcement official, said that the call was being recorded, and reminded people that it’s against the law to call people up to tell them you’re going to kill them. The business about the police recording the call wasn’t true, but it helped. Randy (and his kids) no longer had to hear what people wanted to do to this Thornhill guy. Meanwhile, on Craig’s end, “Things were so bad that the police told me to take some precautions, like checking my car for car bombs every morning and varying my routine. I was even provided a special parking place on campus they thought would be safer.”
Um, well, OK. I’d definitely found someone who’d had it worse than I. Humbled, I asked Craig what sustained him during this time. It obviously helped that he had to take care of his family; when that focus is required of a family oriented guy like Craig, there will be a certain lifesaving structure to one’s days, even in the face of insanity. (I knew that firsthand.) I suggested to Craig that it probably also helped that he and Randy were in this pickle together. Craig agreed. Not only did being “Thornhill and Palmer” mean built-in peer support, it also meant that Randy and Craig felt a responsibility to each other to see the business through—to stay professional, rational, and unafraid. But Craig mentioned one more thing that kept him going: the sense that he was right in a way that ultimately would help women. He had more and more reason to believe that was true because he was getting messages from rape survivors who told him they appreciated his understanding that the men who assaulted them had done so for sexual gratification. Some were even thanking Thornhill and Palmer in public.
In the Lifestyles section of the Dallas Morning News, Elizabeth Eckstein began her op-ed this way:
Finally. Finally, somebody is coming around to my way of thinking on the motivations of rape. I can say this because I survived an aggravated sexual assault by a serial rapist and, more important, two years of post-traumatic stress syndrome that included an exhausting state of hypervigilance, sudden panic attacks, yelling at God and the cold clench of fear in my gut. I also was consumed with an obsessive (some would say unhealthy) need to know why. Why me? Why him? Why rape? So I tried to find out. During my quest, I came across a lot of people who liked to quote the so-called experts and say things such as, “It’s a crime of violence, not sex” and “It’s a control thing.” Boy, did I hate those people. In my mind, they were wrong. I used to reply to those sorts in a real catty fashion. “He didn’t force me into the kitchen to break all the dishes. He didn’t make me smash all the furniture in the house. He made me have sex with him against my will. Sex, people, sex at gunpoint. Choice absolutely and totally removed from the equation. An act, typically one of love, reduced to its lowest and ugliest form.”
Craig made sure I saw this in his stack of photocopies. I read it quietly and remarked to him how bizarre it was that we had reached a point at which we have to argue that an act that involves an erection and typically results in an orgasm is a sexual act.
“Exactly,” he answered.
Eckstein was not alone in thanking Thornhill and Palmer for challenging the Brownmiller construction. In an interview with the Boston Herald, Jennifer Beeman, director of the Campus Violence Protection Program at UC–Davis—yes, the very university whose “rape is not about sex” pamphlet I quoted above—“said she hopes the article and book [by Thornhill and Palmer] will force scientists, social scientists, women’s organizations and rape experts to do some soul searching. ‘For so long our mantra has been “It’s about power, not sex,”’ she said, ‘that I think we’re afraid to admit it might be about both.’”
At some point, Craig pulled an envelope out of the stack, and from the envelope pulled out a four-page handwritten letter from a guy serving time in a federal penitentiary in the South. Craig skimmed it, paused, and handed it to me, saying I needed to be sure that if I used this letter, I not identify the writer. The handwriting was neat, the prose clear, and the writer pretty well educated. He had read or heard of Randy and Craig’s article in the Sciences, and he was writing to give Randy his own opinion:
I know from repeated first hand experience that sex really is the central motivation to rape. Although this may not always be true with all offenders, or even all cases of adult rape, I know from my own self introspection through offender programming treatment, and from other adult offenders I’ve been in such programming with, that sexual attraction and instinctual sex urges acting as biological imperatives strongly motivated acts of rape (strangers/adult female). It’s frequently confessed.
The convict went on to explain about how rapists—presumably just like him—pick off females as attractive and “available” targets. He agreed with Palmer and Thornhill on this: “A dumb myth is that rapists go after any female.” The writer went on: “Although from a therapeutic view it is of course important that an offender in no way get to abrogate his guilt by placing blame on the victim’s real or imagined provocative behaviors, the school of thought [that says rape is not about sex] stymies and downplays the existence of these powerful motivations.”
How, the letter implicitly asked throughout, can rape be successfully prevented, and rapists treated or at least adequately controlled, if we deny the reality of men like this? The correspondent, a man hopefully locked up behind bars for a very long time, was clearly moved to commit a heinous crime by a pathological kind of lust. But a lust nonetheless.
Reading this letter, I found myself going still with fear. Or rather, a combination of fears: One part a fear of rapists like this man, who will see a sexual solicitation in a woman’s bending down to pick up her keys. One part a fear of ideologies like feminism—ideologies that might lead reasonable, progressive people like me to accidentally hurt someone for the sake of a more palatable or more useful argument. And one part a fear that anything I say can and will be used against me, as had happened to Craig.
• • •
TALKING TO CRAIG in his office about his frustrating encounters with my fellow feminists soon had me involuntarily mulling over what had happened to me at the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) almost five months earlier. It was there that, for the first time in my life, I found myself wondering whether I should (or could) really call myself a feminist.
When the call for conference proposals had gone out for the 2008 NWSA conference, to be held in Cincinnati, several colleagues had written to me upset about a post on a major Women’s Studies e-mail discussion list from a trans woman graduate student named Joelle Ruby Ryan. Ryan was putting together a panel for the meeting and was seeking participants for what would no doubt be a scathing criticism of me and Bailey. The title of the planned session? “The Bailey Brouhaha: Community Members Speak Out on Resisting Transphobia and Sexism in Academia and Beyond.” This was obviously payback time for my exposé of what Andrea James, Lynn Conway, and Deirdre McCloskey had done to try to shut Bailey up. Not too surprisingly, Ryan’s work was funded by an LGBT foundation grant for which Conway functioned as Ryan’s “mentor.”
The call for proposals lumped me and Bailey together, suggested that my work contributed to a “chilly climate” for transgender academics, and so forth. No wonder colleagues on the list were writing to me to ask me to defend myself. So I hopped on this e-mail list and attempted to point people toward my peer-reviewed article and the New York Times coverage of it. I also pointed out that anyone could submit a response and have it published right alongside my article in Archives of Sexual Behavior. I threw in a note that the call for panel participants was riddled with problematic claims.
Knowing I’d basically been set up, I also wrote to the programming committee of NWSA and asked that I be given time to respond to the panel. No deal. I wrote a proposal to contribute to the panel, sent it to Ryan, and was told there was no room for me. I saw in the coming plans for the session that there was room for Andrea James and two other trans women—with Lynn Conway functioning as the “session advisor.” Finally, I submitted to the NWSA conference organizers my own proposal for a paper, a comparison of techniques used in the intersex rights movement and in the Bailey book controversy. The conference organizers granted me a slot in a random session earlier in the day.
In Cincinnati, in my allotted fifteen minutes, I pleaded with audience members to attend the later session, the session dedicated to taking me down, and yet to not simply believe what they would hear. Don’t believe what you have not seen evidence for, I told them. I asked people to think about the importance of evidence to issues of identity rights. I talked a little bit about why scholarship is not the same as activism. The audience looked incredibly uncomfortable. In a first for my public talks, no one had any questions for me afterward.
A few hours later, when I walked up to the room where the session Ryan had organized would be, I found a legalistic note on the door, saying that anyone entering automatically gave Andrea James the right to videotape them and use the recording for her own purposes. I backed up, went over to the conference organizers’ stand, and asked them to come deal with that. One of the organizers came and took the note down. I then walked in, and saw not only Andrea James, but indeed Lynn Conway herself, standing behind the video camera ready to tape. And who was at her side but Juanita, she whom Conway had used to try to ruin Bailey on the sex charge.
Andrea James began the session by explaining that the note on the door really just meant that they would videotape the panelists for their own purposes. Uh huh. I decided I would say nothing during the session, afraid that anything I said would be clipped and twisted in an edited recording. The whole scene was maddening. Panelists repeatedly defended James’s online abuse of Bailey’s children, never explaining to the audience what James had actually suggested in conjunction with those photos—that Bailey might have sodomized his own children. They instead focused on the most outrageous lines of Bailey’s book, without any context—perhaps lest they let any novice grasp the real issue, autogynephilia? They never mentioned that trans women who had agreed with Bailey had been silenced by harassment and threats—including by one of the panelists now being given a spot here at a legitimate academic conference. Of course they didn’t delve into the falsity of the charges against Bailey or my refutation of them. What could they say? My findings were all documented.
Then of course there were predictable claims about my position: A non-queer person could never understand the reality of queer people. My work could silence trans women in the academy, women who allegedly lacked the privilege I allegedly had. One identity card after another was thrown down—which only made sense in a “feminist” room where you win simply by having the most identity cards. I found myself thinking that Women’s Studies is about as sophisticated a game as Go Fish.
Most maddening, one of the panelists actually had a few interesting critiques of my work. For example, she took me to task for not adequately exploring the ways in which Bailey deployed the socially powerful term science even while putting forth sometimes oversimplified accounts of identity. She complained that, in my write-up of the Bailey history, I did not accord transgender people the kind of humanizing narrative attention I had accorded intersex people in my earlier work. I found myself going crazy with frustration that I could not, in this audience, engage or even acknowledge interesting criticism, because of the taping by James and Conway, because of all the stupid politicking being allowed to happen in the name of feminism. And what kind of feminism?
During all this, one young woman seated next to me remarked to her friend that this Dreger woman sure is terrible. I leaned over and whispered to her that I am that Dreger woman and that I did not recognize the person the panelists were describing. She turned away as though she had just met an armed skinhead wanted for murder. I just sighed.
At the end, there was a little time left for Q&A. I turned around to see the first person called upon: a tall trans woman, sitting near the back of the room. Here we go, I thought, more piling on. I braced myself for the next blow. Instead, the woman stood up and said this:
[I am] Rosa Lee Klaneski, [from] Trinity College. I cite Alice Dreger’s academically rigorous work all the time in my own work. She doesn’t know who I am, but I know who she is. And I am just wondering—and I’m a transgender person myself—what gives any transgender person the right to abrogate someone else’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech just because they hold an unpopular minority view? In my opinion [regarding] the person that you are arguing against [meaning Bailey], I completely agree with you. Bunk. Ridiculous science. And should be classified as such. I got that. What gives us the right to censor it just because we don’t like it?
Stunned, I turned back to see how the panel would respond. Predictably, they argued that the panel didn’t constitute censorship. How was this panel censoring people like Bailey or me? But I thought, come on. The note on the door, the Web pages, the video camera, and what so many sex researchers had said to me: that no one in sex research will touch male-to-female transsexualism with a ten-foot pole anymore. Which must have been just what Conway meant to do. And there was Conway, “mentoring” Ryan and taking it all in.
Then suddenly the session was out of time, and it seemed pretty much over. I went to the back of the room to Rosa Lee Klaneski, and shook her hand.
“You’re right,” I said, holding back tears, “I don’t know who you are, but I would like to know you. Can I buy you a drink in the bar downstairs?” She answered with a smile that I could certainly buy her a cranberry juice with soda water and lime. At that moment, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Andrea James go up to my friend April Herndon, my former graduate student who had also worked on ISNA’s staff during my last year. James had clearly been doing her research; she seemed to know just who April was and to know of her relationships to me. I’d been so careful not to sit with April, lest she get in their sights, but my decoy had not worked. James seemed to be trying to corner her into saying something politically incorrect. The camera must have surely been pointed our way. I pulled on April’s sleeve and told her to just walk away. Otherwise we’d all be on YouTube by evening, positioned as oppressors to all trans women.
Rosa, April, and I left the conference room and started to walk down toward the hotel bar with a fourth woman whom we knew from intersex work and who had insisted on coming with us. But as we made our way, James suddenly came up to me.
“Alice, honey,” she said to me, towering over me, “I’m not done with you. In fact, I haven’t even started with you.” She said she was still going to prove Bailey had lied in his book. “I’m going to ruin your career.”
In a split second, Rosa stepped between us, and calmly spoke as if to me, though clearly actually speaking to James. “Alice,” she said, “the legal definition of assault does not require that a person touch you. You can call the police right now and report assault.”
At that, James hastily stepped away.
We went down to the hotel bar. It was the middle of the day, and yet after arranging nonalcoholic drinks for the other three, I ordered a gin and tonic for myself, and then another. As the sedative washed over my brain, Rosa told us about herself, mentioning that she had a degree in women’s studies but was tired of the bullshit of the field. She was finishing her master’s degree in public policy now, writing about her own experience of trying to change the sex on her driver’s license without being forced into medical procedures she didn’t want. She had some radical ideas about how to harness capitalism to push for transgender rights. Enough of the liberal feminist and queer rights rhetoric; it was time to use the existing economic system and work through for-profit institutions to make the world safe for trans people. In the meantime, while she finished her master’s, Rosa was working in the pawn industry in Connecticut. I got the sense that the guys in the business had had to accept her as a transgender woman because they had enough business smarts to know they needed her.
Rosa told me that she was also an up-and-coming poker player and was working on a nutritional supplement designed to help players concentrate better. She slipped me a sample packet of her product across the table, and I put it in my bag, wondering if I should pop it now. I wanted to be able to focus—to remember this. For there Rosa sat, rattling on, just so funny and calm and kind and independent-minded and smart and brave.
When it came time to leave, Rosa said a warm good-bye and added, “Seriously, you let me know if you need anything.” With her positive reputation in the pawn business, she had, you know, good connections with guys who know how to handle little problems. “You just let me know if you need anything. A sympathetic ear. A little protection.” She paused. “A slightly used big-screen TV?” Her mischievous smile made me wonder if she was serious.
• • •
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI, after talking for hours with Craig Palmer, I went on to talk to the other interviewees I’d arranged to meet, but I found it hard to concentrate. I kept doing a really weird math: What’s worse, having your work denounced by an act of Congress or trying to help prevent rape only to be accused of fomenting it? What’s more terrifying, being charged with having sex with a research subject or getting a lesson in how to check for bombs wired to your car? And who is the real feminist, the one who reflexively sides with people who’ve been historically downtrodden or the one who does so only after checking the facts?
And then a reactionary calculus question emerged: Is there anything too dangerous to study? Should there be any limits? What if, in order to prove how important truth seeking is, we made a point of studying the most dangerous ideas imaginable? What if we even really studied race and IQ?
Yeah, apparently I was now getting drunk on the idea of absolute intellectual freedom. I mean, I could see that no good and much harm could come out of certain scientific pursuits. (Oh, like studying race and IQ.) And yet, I kept thinking: What if we became unafraid of all questions? Unbridled in our support of the investigation of “dangerous” ideas? What if we came together in the ivory towers, barricaded the doors, and looked at the skies?
Never before that trip to Columbia had I felt a burning sense of being an academic. Never before had the profession felt to me holy in the way it was beginning to feel now. I found myself becoming bizarrely sentimental about donning my PhD robe and hood, those leftover symbols of the monasteries from which universities had emerged. Those monks had been about a supernatural truth. We must be all about earthly truth. And our pursuit of the truth would be our pursuit of justice, our defense of democracy. We would not allow the DeLays of the world to stop us. We would not put up with the American Psychological Association and the National Women’s Studies Association kowtowing to identity politics. The identity that mattered to us would be our identity as academics, as truth seekers.
And of course we would not naively believe that any of us could find the truth alone. We must honestly assess each other’s work. This, I had long taught my students in history-of-science classes, was the genius of science: the ideal of peer review. The light of many minds. Not coincidentally, this was also the genius of modern democracy, I suddenly realized in Missouri—the Show Me State. The Enlightenment brought us both science and democracy. The Founding Fathers had understood the usefulness of the scientific review model. The three-branched system of government, with its checks and balances, the jury system, a Supreme Court with multiple justices approved by multiple representatives—these institutions were meant to do just what the review process of a good journal is meant to do: Weed out the bad, leaving the good.
But could we do it? Could we manage it in an era of moneyed interests—defense contractors and drug companies and oil monopolies (and Conways) financially manipulating the systems in ways we couldn’t even see? Could we do it in an era when the Internet allowed people like James to create “truth” through clever marketing strategies? Could we take back an academy that had allowed itself to become so beholden to external funding, identity politics, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and conniving legislators?
As we had talked in his office, Craig Palmer had said of his experiences: “From all this, I’ve learned more about the human species and how it can do things like lynch mobs and genocide and stuff. I’m not sure I’m glad to have that knowledge. One of my colleagues asked if the experience had lowered my view of the media. And I said no, it’s lowered my view of the species.”
Yet as I sat in the Columbia airport in the predawn dark of Halloween 2008, waiting for my early morning flight home, I felt strangely hopeful. I meditated on the actions of one woman long ago, a woman whose name I didn’t even know: the woman who had been Craig Palmer’s dean in Colorado when all hell broke loose. Craig had been in a nontenure line, utterly vulnerable. With all that bad publicity, all the trouble with the threats of violence, it would have been easy for his university administrators to cut their losses by cutting Craig loose. It was not as if they weren’t getting letters calling for him to resign or be fired. And what had his dean done? She had defended his academic freedom.
They called for the passengers on our flight. I went through the metal detector and out the door that led to the tarmac where our plane waited. In the earliest light of the day, I looked up to see a great big plane right next to our little one, and I stopped in stunned surprise. It was Obama’s campaign plane, Change We Can Believe In.
“Can I take a picture for my son?” I asked the Secret Service agent standing there.
“If you hurry,” he said, taking my suitcase and smiling broadly.
In four more days, I thought to myself, the people will peer-review. And this man will be our president—this intelligent, well-read man, this man who speaks of restoring science to its rightful place. Restore the scientific process; restore democracy. This is what we needed—to develop a core identity as American academics, the people who would make sure a Galileo was never again put under house arrest for making challenging claims about who we really are. Make people understand the difference between a self-serving personal narrative and an empirical study that had undergone rigorous peer review. Teach people why they all should want to be like academics saying “show me” at every step of the way.
I stuck my camera phone in my pocket and took back my bag from the Secret Service agent. And I stepped onto that little prop plane positively high.