Tools of war: Why cannibalism has disappeared but rape hasn’t
You know the story of the pretty girl dressed in questionable clothing who walks into the woods and speaks a little too freely to a leering wolf. “All the better to eat you with, my dear,” the Wolf says to explain his large, sharp teeth to Little Red Riding Hood. The fairytale, a childhood staple with multiple iterations, began in the oral tradition and was first written down by Charles Perrault in 1697. Perrault’s version ends with the wolf first eating Grandma, then Red. “Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies,” the moral of the fairytale clarifies, “should never talk to strangers… They may well provide dinner for a wolf.”
Every adult—and every astute kid—knows what’s really going on in “Little Red Riding Hood,” and it’s a lot creepier than a wolf sitting at the top of the food chain. Audiences recognize that this fairytale is less concerned with literal predation than it is preoccupied with literal rape. But when the anthropomorphized wolf consumes Grandma and Red, “Little Red Riding Hood” conflates eating and rape in a strangely cannibalistic act. In this connection, “Little Red Riding Hood,” whose oral tradition dates to at least 1000 CE, suggests a place we modern humans might look to the demise of one ancient behavior—cannibalism—to find the end of another ancient human behavior—rape.
Rape and cannibalism are not the same—for one thing, rape survivors can tell their own stories, while cannibalized peoples cannot. Another major difference is that while cannibalism has died out in a rich brocade of taboo woven from narrative, religion and sometimes law, rape lives on. The question becomes what cannibalism can teach us about new ways of looking at, understanding and ultimately preventing rape.
However different cannibalism and rape are, they have storied roots in human history. Like rape, cannibalism has often been deployed as a tool of war. “One narrow aspect of the [cannibalism] spectrum is the idea that you are doing it for violence sake, for the power that you have over someone,” says vertebrate zoologist Bill Schutt, author of “Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History.” “Two of the ways you can perform extreme violence is either to rape or to eat somebody, having nothing to do with a ritual, just complete savagery.” This tie raises the question: If ancient (and even modern) humans can learn a taboo against eating people, why can’t we learn a taboo against rape?
There is nothing neat about rape. It’s perpetrated by many different kinds of people, and is motivated by complex reasons. Next to rape’s sprawl, cannibalism is tidy, breaking down into three basic subsets: survival cannibalism, which is eating people to stave off starvation, as the ill-fated Donner party did in the Sierra Mountains in the mid-nineteenth century; endocannibalism, which is the ritualized eating of your own dead; and exocannibalism, which is the eating of people outside your group or clan, usually as part of warfare. Finally—and this is integral to understanding rape—while cannibalism is equal opportunity for all genders, the historic power, economic, and social inequity between men, who perpetrate most rape, and women, who are most rape victims, keeps rape borderline socially acceptable.
Exocannibalism, Schutt argues, “instills fear in your enemy—not only are we killing you, but there’s nothing left. We ate you. We think of you as a hot dog.” In this way, ancient peoples used exocannibalism as a way of utterly annihilating their enemies. This practice of cannibalism-as-war extends to not-so-ancient peoples too—it’s highly likely that the Francs cannibalized Muslim dead in the Syrian city of Ma’arra during the First Crusade, 1095-99. While narratives tried to make it look like survival cannibalism, there’s enough dodginess in contemporary accounts to suggest that the Francs were more cagy than they were hungry. In terms of war, sexual violence has functioned a lot like cannibalism. Both rape and cannibalism were ways for nascent states to consolidate power. Both acts create fear and both have the long-term effect of absorbing one culture into another, cannibalism through consumption and rape through procreation.
The reasoning of people who practice exocannibalism can also look similar to that of rapists. “The core of exocannibalism is the whole idea of the ‘other,’” Schutt says. “If he’s not in your group, then you can do anything to him.” This rationale of irredeemable difference can also motivate rapists and sexual abusers. Rory Newlands, a University of Nevada psychology doctoral student specializing in sexual assault prevention programs, suggests that “places where there was more gender equality, there were fewer rapes and sexual assaults.” Newlands points out, “It’s this divide between, you’re a woman, I’m a man” that can create the psychic space for rape. To see the victim as different and less than you can be as much a part of rape as it was for cannibalism.
Yet while rape abides—the CDC reports that nearly one-fifth of all women are raped, while one in 71 men are—cannibalism has essentially been eradicated. Moreover, it’s only in the past 15,000 years that the majority of humankind stopped being cannibals while some cannibalizing peoples have stopped only in the last fifty years. Indeed, genetic evidence suggests that almost all of us are descended from cannibals. Just as when cows that eat other cows get mad cow disease, people who eat people can develop prion brain diseases. Our ancestors cannibalized, got prion diseases, and these ancient diseases have left marks on our DNA; chances are that you—and I—carry these genetic markers.
People didn’t just eat people for a whim. Cannibalism had evolutionary advantages to ancient homo sapiens and to our kissing cousins, Neanderthals. “If you’re not hung up on the fact that eating your own kind is bad, it’s just another piece of food in front of you,” Schutt suggests. When it comes to eating our own, early humans weren’t different from many animal species, who frequently eat their own. “In every major taxonomic group from microbes to Mormons, cannibalism was quite common,” Schutt says. Indeed, studies suggest that a real paleo diet would have included cannibalism.