Amanda Marcotte says of Jesse Bering's giddy claim that women are just chock-full of evolved defenses against rape. (Especially, what a surprise, rape by African American men.) After nicely dismantling Bering's more credulous claims she digs into what I think is the real reason anti-feminists are so enthusiastic about this kind of stuff.
Think about the perceived benefits to many if rape is programmed into men, and a function of horniness and biology and not of violence and misogyny. Just right off the bat, it means that they can throw up their hands in the air, treating rape like it’s an inevitable problem and there’s nothing they can do about it. But more importantly, they get an excuse to support the main benefit they perceive in rape culture, which is that it puts all responsibility for rape in the hands of the victims, and therefore used to shame and control female sexuality. After all, the argument here is that men are naturally disposed to rape and women are naturally disposed to protect themselves. Therefore, the responsibility is shifted towards women, the only gender who has been given any control. This, in turn, can be used as an excuse to restrict women’s movements and choices, and to, a la Naomi Wolf, say they had it coming if they engage in casual sex. It also gives men cover to do a lot of abusive things that fall short of rape, saying they can’t help themselves, a freedom a lot of men would like to reserve for themselves. (Such as, say, cheating while reserving the right not to be cheated on.) Of course, a lot of men aren’t willing to be portrayed as out-of-control beasts, but clearly some figure that’s a reasonable price to pay to get these benefits.
Source: Pandagon
I think that's about right. On the one hand the paradigm that drives these assessments puts the responsibility for rape, and consequently the blame, on victims rather than perpetrators. Which sucks for them in self-evidently bitter, heartless, and unfair ways.
I'd just add that this whole idea of men being reflexively (and now allegedly genetically!) uncontrollable beasts is pretty new. Prior to maybe 250 years ago (coinciding roughly with the Protestant Revolution) and going back at least as far as Hammurabi most of Indo-European civilization believed that men were naturally moral and even chaste while women's child-hungry wombs made them amoral, promiscuous, sexually aggressive. And in much of the world this is still considered true. For instance if evolutionary psychology had emerged in Darwin's Day, or if he'd written in India, China, or, say, Egypt, Iran, or eastern Europe or western Asia Evolutionary Psychologists almost certainly would drawn different (though probably no less topical and gender-constructed) conclusions about women's and men's behavior.
Call it just one more indication of the bankruptcy of contemporary patriarchy. And while you're at it call it an important caveat for some of the more... enthusiastic proclamations by evolutionary psychologists. Or at least of those who merely think they're evolutionary psychology.