This piece will be my weekly op/ed for newspapers in my very red congressional district (VA-06).
The recent spate of stories about prominent sexual predators has been disturbing. But also, for me, educational. The stories showed me that I hadn’t understood before how deeply upsetting, even damaging, these experiences are for the women.
Often, as women told their stories on TV, they would begin their telling with composure. But soon the traumatic nature of these experiences would become evident in their faces, their voices, often in their tears.
The intensity of the feeling surprised me.
These were not, generally, stories of actual rape. More often it was groping and forced kisses and attempts to pressure the women into greater sexual intimacy. And generally, some years had passed since these assaults had happened. But the distress remained fresh and powerful.
As a man, I’d understood that women dislike uninvited sexual advances. I’d understood that women resent when men disrespect their boundaries and their right to refuse sexual intimacy of any degree. But what I saw on TV revealed that I had failed to understand how deep those feelings go.
So that got me pondering why, for women, these sexual assaults register at such a traumatic level. And now I think I see a good answer.
The key to that understanding can be excavated from an idea I expressed in a piece published here in September. That piece –titled “The Sacred Space of Lovers”– proposed that “our nature has been crafted to find fulfillment” in those “experiences when, as lovers, we can bring together kindness and pleasure, integrity and beauty, body and soul.”
We find deepest fulfillment, and contact the sacred, I suggested, in those things that have best served to further the life of our kind. And the relationship between lovers has been crucial to that perpetuation of our species.
Ideally, the life-serving connection between lovers has served human life not just through “making babies” but also by laying the foundation for “loving and stable families”—the kind of family life that helps children grow up strong and whole, able to replicate such sacred relationships themselves when they grow up to have families of their own.
That sacred space is at the ideal end of the human spectrum. The sexual predator is at the other.
In terms of the “crafting” of our nature, less ideal scenarios can arise due to the fact that -- when it comes to passing along life to the next generation – there’s a stark asymmetry between the situations of male and female.
While that “sacred space” is about mutuality (a symmetry of caring and kindness and commitment between two lovers, in it together), it is only the female who is inescapably bound to the potential offspring—through pregnancy and birth and presumably onward from there.
(Producing the next generation has never been all that sexual contact has been about, but it is that dimension – which ancestrally made the stakes quite high -- that has largely shaped our sexual nature.)
It is in the nature of things that -- whereas motherhood always entails a major investment – fatherhood can take different paths: it can be about building a family, but it can also be a fleeting, opportunistic thing.
This creates the possibility of women being victimized by sexually predatory men. And it explains why the nature of the human female would be so crafted as to experience sexual assault – of any degree – as profoundly traumatic.
There are biological reasons why, traditionally, it has been the role of the female to choose carefully whom to accept as a potential father of her children. Since our kind first began, that choice – with whom to have a lovers’ relationship -- has been one of the most important for a woman to make: she must ask, will this man be someone who will faithfully help protect and nurture a family?
The sexual predator is precisely the kind of man with whom a woman does not want any kind of sexual contact. His behavior is selfish and cruel, and it shows him uninterested in building the kind of relationship around which a loving and stable family can grow.
Thus, as the heir to countless generations of human experience, with matters of future survival on the line, it is no wonder that the human female responds to sexual trespass with such intense distress.
With the inscribing of survival-related ancestral experience onto the inborn nature of the human female, every forced sexual contact represents the threat of rape. Every rape represents the threat of pregnancy. Every pregnancy represents a major investment for a woman in how she passes her kind along to the future. And the ancestral experience that has shaped us says that the sexual predator is the very worst kind of person with whom to make such an investment.
For the same reason that “the sacred space of lovers” affords one of life’s most fulfilling experiences, the assault from a sexual predator is experienced by a woman as acutely, powerfully unacceptable. Both the intense fulfillment and the intense aversion enhance the prospects of the next generation.
And so the women, telling their stories, show how deeply rooted in the human story this issue of sexual assault is. And, in a society that respects and cares about its women, this underscores how important it is to teach its men to respect the sexual boundaries of women.
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Andy Schmookler – award-winning author and former candidate for Congress in VA-06 – is writing a series titled “A Better Human Story,” which can be found at http://abetterhumanstory.org/.