Salon.com > Margaret Wertheim

Born to rape?

Tue, 29 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

It was a figure I kept hearing again and again: 50 percent of South African women can now expect to be raped sometime during their lives. Everywhere I went on a recent visit to the beautiful troubled city of Cape Town, people were talking about rape. An elderly neighbor of the couple I was staying with -- a women in her 80s -- had not long before been brutally raped in her home, then bound and gagged and imprisoned in a closet. Her son had found her several days later, and she died soon afterward in the hospital. After hearing several not dissimilar stories and endless accounts of the endemic rape in the squatter camps and black townships, I began to see that the horrific statistic might just be true.

For the past 30 years, rape has been seen as a byproduct of social conditioning and chaos. According to this line of reasoning, the situation in South Africa must be explained by a complex set of factors including the destruction of traditional tribal cultures, 50 years of apartheid and the aftermath of several centuries of colonial oppression. But a new book challenges such sociocultural accounts of rape and asserts that it is a built-in adaption that has evolved naturally because it confers a reproductive advantage on the men who do it.

Crisis of faith

Fri, 24 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Just in case you were wondering, Purgatory is very much alive. As part of the Catholic Church's jubilee celebrations, Pope John Paul II announced this year that any Christian who gives up drinking or smoking in 2000 will have his or her time in Purgatory lessened. The pontiff's power over the souls in Purgatory was affirmed in medieval times, though very few popes have exercised this right. One who did was Boniface VIII, who in celebration of the 1300 jubilee granted complete pardon from all Purgatorial torment to anyone who died while on pilgrimage to Rome that year. Not everyone approved of such terrestrial dabbling in the hereafter; for some Christians, Boniface's action was a dangerous and illegitimate abuse of power. John Paul II apparently has no such qualms.

As an ex-Catholic girl I was thrilled to hear that the "Middle Kingdom" was still rocking -- it's one of those things that Reformation leaders quickly struck off the register. Yet even in overwhelmingly Protestant America, Purgatory remains a significant feature of our religious landscape. According to a 1997 Yankelovich survey for Time/CNN, three-quarters of Americans (76 percent) believe they are bound for heaven: Most (61 percent) expect to go there directly, but 15 percent expect a sojourn in Purgatory. Only 4 percent see themselves headed for hell.

The code ahead

Thu, 04 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Simon Singh is not a man to shirk a challenge. In 1997 he set out to make a documentary about the solving of the world's most famous (some would say infamous) mathematical problem, Fermat's Last Theorem. Having bamboozled the planet's finest mathematical minds for 350 years, Fermat's challenge had finally been laid to rest by the retiring English mathematician Andrew Wiles. The solution, which took up more than 1,000 pages of densely packed equations, cut a swath through some of the most fiendishly difficult areas in all of math. How on earth could this be presented to a television audience? The marvel is that despite the impenetrability of the math, Singh produced an immensely human and poignant film -- seen in the United States on the PBS series "Nova." He later turned the subject into the bestselling book "Fermat's Enigma," which, he tells me, he wrote as an exercise -- just to see if he could.

Has feminism changed science?

Tue, 22 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

In classic biology textbooks, the story of conception resembles nothing so much as a true-romance novel, in which the bodice-ripping formula of Barbara Cartland et al. is transposed into a cellular-level melodrama starring the virile "active sperm" and the demure "passive egg."

"In these sagas of conception," writes science historian Londa Schiebinger, "the spermatic hero actively pursues the egg, surviving the hostile environment of the vagina and defeating his many rivals." Like Sleeping Beauty, the egg drifts unconsciously in the fallopian tube, waiting to be awakened by the valiant, vital sperm. It is an archetypal story of female passivity enlivened by male energy -- a story as old as Aristotle, and as replete with patronizing overtones.

Since the late 1970s, however, a new generation of biologists has begun to peek behind this suspect veil and, using fresh analyses, to reveal quite a different story, one summed up by the title of a seminal paper, "The Energetic Egg." In this new account the egg, no longer a slumbering princess, becomes an active agent, directing the growth of microvilli (small finger-like projections on its surface) to capture and tether the sperm. Here the egg and sperm are partners, co-activators in the process of conception.