“This was one of the most difficult papers to put into words that I’ve ever experienced. Rape and sexual violence are difficult subjects to write about, and I was angry with what I saw as the misappropriation of horrendous experiences for victims by a bunch of pseudo-scientists.”
So, I’m currently reviewing Archaeologies of Gender and Violence (eds Uroš Matić and Bo Jensen 2017); and I came across a (happily favourable) mention of a paper I wrote a long time ago on the use – and, more importantly, the misuse – of rape narratives by evolutionary sociobiologists. The sociobiologists had theorised that rape was understandable as an adaptive mating strategy by males, and made clear that they saw this stretching back into evolutionary prehistory. I see sexual violence as, well, sexual VIOLENCE writ large - violence carried out against women of all ages, children of both sexes from infancy, and men; and as all about power. I was concerned that some of this mangled nonsense from evolutionary sociobiology might permeate some strands of prehistoric archaeology and anthropology.
Anyhow, it also reminded me that I hadn’t yet scanned and posted up this particular paper on my website, so here’s a link to it: ‘The use and misuse of rape in prehistory’, from Indecent Exposure: sexuality, society and the archaeological record (ed Lynne Bevan 2001).
This was one of the most difficult papers to put into words that I've ever experienced writing. Rape and sexual violence are difficult subjects to write about, and I was angry with what I saw as the misappropriation of horrendous experiences for victims by a bunch of pseudo-scientists. But I had to stay painstakingly on track and produce something that had a decently-argued rationale and conclusion.
Ross Samson at least found it readable. In his foreword to the volume, Ross wrote, ‘Eleanor Scott … lets the sociobiologists who posit rape as an adaptive strategy have it with both barrels. I would call it shooting fish in a barrel, except we would have to think of these as maladjusted and highly dangerous fish while seeming to be fairly ordinary, even dull, like goldfish’.
Which brings me to a related interest that I have today, which is about potentially dangerous things being disguised as some kind of new scientific thinking. I'm interested in the use and re-framing of language, notably words like ‘rape’ and ‘violence’; and in the increasing conflation of sex and gender and the re-positioning of what used to be seen as cultural constructions (including varying cultural perceptions of biology, and body modifications) as, simply, biological truths.
There’s a kind of ‘POMO’ (post-modernist) subjugation of narratives going on. It’s sometimes quite POMO-Orwellian, where words mean whatever the appropriator says they mean; and any dissent is regarded almost as a heresy. For some, hurt feelings caused by others’ words (but not their own) equate to ‘literal violence’. It’s a rather confused argument, and it has thrown a bit of a shit bomb into the once vibrant and enlightening field of gender studies.
This in turn reminds me of something I wrote about post-modernist creep into archaeology in Invisible People and Places: writing gender and children into European archaeology (eds J Moore and E Scott 1997). My introductory chapter focused on the (then) relative invisibility of women and children in archaeological narratives. Was post-modernism the latest invisibility trick, I mused. I had found it interesting that just when feminist and gender archaeologies were pushing through into the light, post-modernism had started to butt into archaeological theory and had the potential to chuck feminist and gender critical analyses under the bus. Because, post-modernism told us, nothing is real. So nothing can be ‘right’ or better than anything else. So that really eye-opening new gender-aware archaeological interpretation that’s just been published, that suddenly made sense of everything? Nah – forget it. It’s not any better than the Man-land one that came before. They’re all the same, you see, in their non-objective reality. They’re all as wrong and crap as each other. So feminist critique and gendered revision can’t have any kind of primacy, oh no.
So I rang a small warning bell.
'Therefore, despite my pleasure at the growth of alternative readings of the evidence, I am suspicious of the post-modernist philosophy, because I feel that the apparent deep disillusionment with 'knowable history' is functioning in an interesting way: it may be a mechanism of male intellectual thought functioning (unconsciously?) as a saboteur of all intellectual endeavour. That is, if intellectual life has to stop being ideologically underpinned by the learnt interests of the great white male, then could it be that they're going to make damn sure that no other 'known' intellectual life survives to be experienced by anyone?
And then, over the following twenty years, in the topsy-turvy world of POMO and in a supreme reversal of its own philosophical position, elements of POMO began to claim the primacy of their own truths. It has adeptly exploited the technology of social media. Meanwhile, Derrida, it seems, is for this movement not so much a source of discussion on semiotics, critical thinking and impossibilities - sous rature - but more of handbook on putting things quite literally into a state of erasure. Is it significant that Heidegger's original sous rature world was itself, arguably, not without an influential context of fascism? Possibly. However, it is another aspect of Heidegger's legacy that really does deserve to be re-read and re-heard by the neo-POMOs and all affected - his predictions about the effects on us of technology. As Oxford philosopher Michael Inwood observes,
'In Being and Time he hints that the world itself is out of joint. He elaborated this into an account of how technology threatens to transform the world, and even ourselves, into a stock of resources to be calculated, manipulated and exploited.'
So I am very interested in how the POMO agenda is playing out today - it’s fascinating, but in terms of the 'permitted' language around sex and gender it has also become 'one to watch'. Turning rape and sexual violence, and the language around them with which they are described, into subjects of dodgy pseudo-science and dodgy POMO truthspeak insults victims and de-demonises rapists.
Of course language changes through time. But those changes should not demean academia and the academics being compelled to adopt them.