Stephen Gaynor

Feminist Legal Theories

Pages 565- 568

Promises and Problems of Biological Explanations: An Evolutionary View of Rape

Sociobiology is based on the premise that some behaviors are at least partly inherited and
can be affected by natural selection. It begins with the idea that behaviors have evolved
over time, similar to the way that physical traits are thought to have evolved. It predicts
therefore that animals will act in ways that have proven to be evolutionarily successful
over time. The discipline seeks to explain behavior as a product of natural selection.
Behavior is therefore seen as an effort to preserve one's genes in the population.

- Rape is not an act of aggression, but of attempted reproduction—that human males have
adapted toward tape as a mating strategy to enhance reproductive success.

- Men want to impregnate as many women as they can and during war situations men
have an intense biological desire to sow their seeds.

- Authors look to the rape that happens across many animal species.

- Not making the argument that what is natural is either inevitable or excusable, but that
an understanding of biological impulses will assist with control and prevention.

Biological anthropology is a branch of anthropology that studies the mechanisms of

biological evolution, genetic inheritance, human adaptability and variation, primatology,
primate morphology, and the fossil record of human evolution.

- Extrapolating from the behavior of insects to humans, with scant data on vertebrates.

- The critique extends to definitions of rape, to misreading data on reproductive success

of rape in humans, and to completely omitting the experiences of rape victims.

Equality Model- It is fundamentally at odds with radical feminism and expresses the
crucial similarities between the male and female sexes.

Cultural Feminism- It is an ideology of a female nature or female essence that attempts to

revalidate what cultural feminists consider undervalued female attributes.

Radical Feminism- is a current within feminism that focuses on the theory of patriarchy
as a system of power that organizes society into a complex of relationships based on an
assumption of male supremacy used to oppress women. Radical feminism aims to
challenge and to overthrow patriarchy by opposing standard gender roles and what they
see as male oppression of women, and calls for a radical reordering of society.

Catherine A. Mackinnon

Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

1. Inequality because of sex defines and situates women as women.

- Sexes not equal because women would not be economically subjected, their
desperation and marginality cultivated, their enforced dependency exploited sexually or
economically. Women would have speech, privacy, authority, respect, and more
resources than they have now. Rape and pornography would be recognized as violations,
and abortion would be both rare and actually guaranteed.

2. Sex discrimination law, with mainstream moral theory sees equality and gender as
issues of sameness and difference.

- Equality is an equivalence not a distinction. Gender is a distinction and not an

equivalence.

- Socially, one tells a woman from a man by their difference. Legally, woman is
discriminated against on the basis of sex only when she can first be said to be the same as
a man.

- A built-in tension thus exists between this concept of equality, which

presupposes sameness, and this concept of sex, which presupposes difference.

3. Equality is comparative in sex discrimination law.

- For differential treatment to be discriminatory, the sexes must first be similarly

situated. This standard applies to sex the broader legal norm of neutrality, the law’s
version of objectivity.