Chris Jepson: On behalf of all women

It has been observed that if a man has a daughter he becomes more concerned with issues of equality, fairness and violence. He is more apt to consider reproductive choice for women as a fundamental human right. From an historical perspective the better a society is for women, the better it is for men.

I’ve often wondered where does discrimination and violence against women originate? Is it something innate within our species that have men marginalizing and/or raping women with relative ease? Where does that disregard come from?

More fundamental: how does it happen? We’re all born of mothers — men and women alike. The first person to hold us, to nourish us, to love us is a woman. How can this be our origins yet a decade and a half or so later, that very same son will drug and rape some other woman’s collegiate daughter? How can man — born of woman — harm other women? Have men no imaginations? That woman you injure is someone else’s mother or sister or aunt or daughter. Is violence then acceptable to your sister, to your mother?

No woman intentionally raises a son to harm women. I use the word intentionally with intention. Of course, the rare schizophrenic mother may so damage her son as to create (contribute to) the “monster” TV crime shows seemingly require for viewership, but do not most mothers shower love and affection on their sons? Where then, if statistics on say, campus rape are to believed, does violence against women originate?

If rape is occurring on America’s college campuses to the degree it is reported, what does that say about the alleged benefits of education? Are our sons arriving as college freshmen already “conditioned” to harm women?

We are a gnarly, violent and tenacious species, genetically developed to be tribal in our outlook. That we (you and I) are here is testimony to our ancestors’ resolve to survive. The history of our species supports a thesis of an “us vs. them” world. We rally around our team, our tribe and marginalize others. That is what we do and have done to survive. I have a theory (just mine) that when groups of men (a Greek fraternity or a squad of combatants) collectively rape a woman (or women), there is a genetic component at work marginalizing “that” woman as an “other.”

Where does that leave us as a society? Our species is inherently aggressive (by evolutionary design). Oh, we’ll cooperate, particularly in a tribal setting, but it is obvious to the most casual human observer that otherwise “good” people will do “bad” things. Particularly to those we deem as “others.”

Our society has become highly sexualized. This, in and of itself, is a manifestation of what “we” are, both male and female. We experience sex as both exhilarating and validating. Again, this is genetics at, um, play. I am of mixed-mind as to what degree human sexuality contributes to violence against women. That is grist for another column.

This is what I believe: For society to improve for women (for all of us), women need to forcefully speak-up regarding unacceptable male (and female) behavior. Unwanted aggression — in any form — needs to be clearly identified and articulated as intolerable. And society needs to continuously educate itself as to how “good” men interact with all women. And any male behavior short of the “ideal” is repudiated, with offenders ostracized, shunned and/or appropriately punished.

We’d be fools—and wrong—to expect anything less.