So John Derbyshire, in his continuing quest to convince us all he's a pervert*, is back with a defense for his argument that women become saggy old bags after age 20. 15-20, he believes, are their "salad days," assumedly the period when they go best with cherry tomatoes and a light vinaigrette. That was a couple months ago, and he was roundly denounced as a pedophile (is it any surprise he's obsessed with Lolita?). But now he's back, and the boy's got data:
Some of the most vituperative emails I have ever got came in after I made an offhand remark, in one of my monthly NRO diaries, to the effect that very few of us are physically appealing after our salad days, which in the case of women I pegged at ages 15-20. While the storm was raging, biologist Razib Khan over at Gene Expression (forget philosophers, theologians, and even novelists: the only people with interesting things to say about human nature nowadays are the scientists) decided to look up some actual numbers. Reasoning that a rapist is inspired to his passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim, Razib went for rape statistics.
He found a 1992 report (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation) from the National Victim Center showing the age distribution of female rape victims. Sixty percent of the women who reported having been raped were aged 17 or less, divided about equally between women aged 11 to 17 (32 percent) and those under eleven (29 percent). Only six percent were older than 29. When a woman gets past her mid twenties, in fact, her probability of being raped drops off like a continental shelf. If you histogram the figures, you get a peak around ages 12-14.
I'm actually interested in the data here. To start, as others have pointed out, this makes perfect sense: rape is about power, and young women have less of it. Moreover, rapists presumably have some sort of cost-benefit analysis going on, and young women are probably less dangerous, both in terms of physical strength and ability to prosecute.
But putting those aside, the actual statistics themselves aren't yet convincing. Does this data folds in statutory rape? High school seniors dating sophomores and then being sued by the latter's parents? If so, the numbers are going to skew way young, but they won't prove anything close to what Derbyshire thinks they do, because the meaning of the crimes is deeply different. Indeed, what we really need here is the distribution of the rapists. For the numbers to prove Derbyshire's contention, all the offenders would have to be older men assaulting girls in their leafy green prime. But if what we're looking at is a lot of statutory and date rape from younger men, that says absolutely nothing about female "salad days." There's everything violent about a 17-year-old assaulting a 16-year-old, but nothing pedophilic about it, and so Derb's dark desires continue to lack the evidentiary grounding he's searching for.
*Mission accomplished, by the way.
Update: In comments, Dave Weigel writes:
Data Point: "More than half of all rapes of women (54%) occur before age 18; 22% of these rapes occur before age 12. For men, 75% of all rapes occur before age 18, and 48% occur before age 12". Does that mean that boys get too old and saggy even faster than girls?
