When predators look like good guys
As we witness a parade of society’s most powerful and respected male figures get exposed for engaging in predatory behavior, spanning from groping and workplace harassment to sexual assault and rape, we need to rethink what a predator is.
I recently authored a book about campus sexual assault, and learned an enormous amount about sexual consent and misconduct. I believe we need to accept that predation isn’t simply the work of a tiny subsection of society. Many guys are assaulters, not just a creepy one here or there.
As recently as a few years ago, the general consensus was that this wasn’t the case. An important study formed the basis for this theory; it was promoted in films like “The Hunting Ground,” about campus sexual assault.
The author is David Lisak, a University of Massachusetts clinical psychologist. He took on the question of predation on college campuses and declared he had found the answer to who was committing these bad acts. Over 90% of rapes and attempted rapes, he concluded, were committed by 4% of the male student body, with each offender committing an average of nearly six rapes.
But there was a problem. Researchers at other schools began challenging Lisak’s methodology, and it soon became clear that he’d cut corners. The most egregious of these, according to Reason magazine, was that Lisak’s interviewers didn’t even ask the subjects — who ranged in age from 18 to 71 — if they were college students at all.
In 2015, researchers led by Georgia State University’s Kevin Swartout published a study in JAMA Pediatrics that contradicted some aspects of the serial-rapist theory, finding that while 11% of male college students had engaged in rape since the age of 14, only a small percentage fit Lisak’s serial predator profile.
This study suggested that rape on campus is not primarily driven by a small handful of creeps, but is perpetuated by a broader range of young men who don’t fit our notions of what a predator should look like.
This idea can be deeply unsettling. No one likes to think that their son, brother or friend could be an offender. We’d rather give these good men the benefit of the doubt than seriously consider whether they are capable of predatory behavior. As Hoda Kotb said of Matt Lauer, “I’ve known Matt for 15 years, and I’ve loved him as a friend and as a colleague. It’s hard to reconcile what we are hearing with the man who we know who walks in this building every single day.”
What we need to realize, instead, is that there are many men who are committing all sorts of low-level assaultive acts, like groping, and some committing more violent ones. When trying to identify these potential perpetrators, the important part to understand is that misogyny is often a defining factor.
When I asked experts to tell me who might be a predator, they offered a wide range of predisposing factors: personality traits like impulsivity, narcissism, lack of empathy, adolescent delinquency, enjoyment of casual sex and perceived peer approval or pressure. But all of them said a key factor was hostile attitudes to women.
In my reporting, university administrators presented different versions of the campus rapist. One federal Title IX officer — responsible for vetting sexual assault complaints — compared them at two campuses where she’s worked. At a private northeast university, these guys had a greedy mentality: “She led me on, so I deserve her, because I’m a winner, and I’m entitled to this girl.”
At a lower-ranked Bible Belt school where her fellow staff members’ husbands wouldn’t let their wives travel, some offenders seemed socially awkward and believed that women were inferior to men.
The officer paraphrased this variant as: “She led me on, so I deserve her, because she’s only a woman, only a vessel, on this planet to serve my needs.”
The undercurrent that unites that thinking is misogyny.
Ending rampant sexual harassment and assault, whether on campus or in wider society, requires fighting the cognitive dissonance that tells us good guys don’t rape.
And it probably means changing our attitude toward consensual sex, too. For the most part, the college guys that I interviewed said that they understood that pushing girls into sex was wrong.
But they still did it far too often — comforted, no doubt, by the easy excuse that they weren’t soulless predators.