The Biden:
PEORIA, Ill. — Vice President Joe Biden, speaking Wednesday at an anti-violence event in central Illinois, called for "educating the whole society" to dispel cultural attitudes that lead to sexual assaults.True that, VP. But let's take a step back and look at Chimpanzees. The men in that very relevant species are in the habit of beating their women for reasons that we, as humans, should not find so strange or alien.Biden was joined by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., at the Center for Prevention of Abuse fundraiser, attended by 1,100 people at the Peoria Civic Center.
The vice president, a former Democratic senator from Delaware, discussed his work to pass the Violence Against Women Act in 1994. In advancing the legislation, Biden said, he had to confront state laws that permitted rape within a marriage and combat cultural assumptions that women "ask to be raped" when they wear short skirts or walk alone late at night.
"No man, no man, no man, under any condition other than self-defense, has the right to raise his hand to a woman. No condition. None. Zero," he said.
Male chimpanzees sometimes show extreme levels of aggression and violence towards females (Muller 2002). Cycling female chimpanzees advertise approaching ovulation with an ano-genital swelling. These swellings make females attractive to males, and males target aggression towards these females. Males also launch apparently unprovoked attacks against non-cycling females and those approaching ovulation. It has been suggested that this aggression may function as sexual coercion whereby the male intimidates the female into biasing her mating effort so that male receives a higher proportion of copulations either immediately, or in the longer term. Females are thought to be vulnerable to such coercion because they are often alone and without allies (Goodall 1986, Smuts and Smuts 1993, Wrangham and Peterson 1996).Because Chimpanzees are our closest relatives, their habits and practices must be matched with our own habits and practices. Human aggression and Chimpanzee aggression should not be so easily or quickly separated. It's great for humans to pass laws that protect women from male aggression; but let's also get to the root of this aggression. That root might be found in the habits and practices of lawless male Chimpanzees.
