Letters to the Editor
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Not surprising coming from ABC
On Friday night, after ABC showed the Tom Cruise interview, they did a segment on the numbers of sexual assaults on cruise ships that have gone unreported by the media and the cruise lines themselves. While a voiceover mentions the lack of safety for women who are preyed upon by crew members and other passengers who go on cruises with the sole intent of finding victims, the video footage was closeups of young women's behinds in tiny bikini bottoms and short skirts getting in and out of the swimming pools and walking around. It was as if they were implying through video that young women were flaunting it in front of men who might not be able to handle it and yet the victims of the assaults that were featured in the segment were a 12 year old girl and a woman who appeared to be in her 40s.
ABC's sexual titillation in a story about violent rape was disturbing.
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Al, Muslims haven't solved the problem
By totally restricting access to women unless you are married to them, denying women all legal rights, punishing *women* for sexual transgressions but giving men free passes (to the point of whipping women who brought rape charges because they admitted to having sex, but did not have four male witnesses to prove that the act was *rape*), and cracking down on homosexuality, Muslims have actually created a horrific powderkeg in which women get raped all the time but don't ever dare admit it because their families will kill them for it, and men cannot get sex unless they have status. It is destructive to the reproductive fitness of *everyone* in that society except the highest-status males, and produces men who, unable to get access to any form of sex, turn violent and can easily be channeled into terrorism or soldiering.
Let us consider the sociobiology of honor killings. You invest 18 years in a daughter. Admittedly, you don't invest as much as you invest in her brothers, because she's not as valuable in society, but you've fed, clothed and housed her. Your payoff for this should be that she can marry a high-status male and have your grandchildren, who will then be high-status and able to reproduce freely. So instead she runs off with a low-status male in a love match and won't do what you told her. Now, you can recognize that her offspring won't be as valuable as they would have otherwise been and therefore the situation is not ideal, but she can still *have* offspring so she can still return on your investment... or you can kill her, thus flushing everything you invested down the toilet. In Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, the solution is "kill her." How does this make any damn sense from a sociobio perspective? It doesn't. It's even worse when they kill her for being raped. Okay, she's not a virgin anymore, no one will marry her and you've lost your reproductive investment. She can still contribute to the well-being of her brothers' and sisters' families -- an adult who can perform child care tasks without having children of her own will increase the reproductive fitness of the family she lives with. Meanwhile, why are you not killing the rapist? He's the one who destroyed your investment, made your daughter useless for the purpose you raised her for, and he's not getting penalized at all.
All this, of course, factors out the psychological toll on human beings who are raised to think it's a good idea to murder family members for any reason, and simply looks at the pure economics of the reproductive strategies. Honor killings are *terrible* ideas from a sociobio perspective. There is no possible justification for them. All they do is control and terrorize women, which fits into the culture's larger strategy of funneling all female sexuality to the high-status males only. The strategy of honor killing is actively *bad* for the family that practices it; they do it because their culture tells them to, and their culture is organized solely around the reproductive fitness of high-status males.
So no, Muslims haven't remotely solved the problem (and actually, more accurately, none of this has anything to do with Islam because it comes from the pre-Islamic tribal periods in that part of the world.) Giving men total control over their women and denying women the right to support themselves even if they are widows or divorcees, harms reproductive fitness as well, because resources in the hands of women get funneled to their children, whereas resources in the hands of men don't to nearly the same extent. (There's a story about Osama bin Laden forcing his wife to feed their young infant with a spoon in over 100-degree weather when the kid was seriously dehydrated.) It's amazing, in fact, when you look at it, how many cultures get people to participate in behavior that is actively pernicious to their own reproductive *or* economic interests. In general, sociobio suggests that women should live in matrilineal clans and be supported by brothers and female kin, and fathers should have fairly minimal input into the raising of their children but also fairly minimal needs to provide for them, and both men and women have absolute freedom to reproduce at will. Oddly enough, no human culture currently does this.
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Al, Old Man...
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if any young women are flirting with you, they're being kindly. And as long as I am making wild generalizations, I'll say that eldery men are very non-threatening to young women, in the same way gay men are, and what you perceive as some sort of homage to your sexy status as a septugenarian is probably just a harmless way to indulge an old person's ego and make him happy. I wouldn't read anything into it. I work with a lot of 60ish men and the idea that any of them may think my joking and attentiveness is anything more than affectionate respect of a grandfatherly person makes me laugh.
Anyway, why does status have to be at play here? 18-22 year old male athletes are usually quite attractive. I mean, no one ever got rich playing lacrosse. I secretly envy a woman that young who knows a good sexual opportunity when she sees it. By the time most of us realize that we missed out on being "slutty" in college, it's too late and we're already old married ladies.