Rape and evolution

Should be an interesting thread, NJ. Thank you. I don't think you're largely wrong about most of the mammal world, but primates, including humans, have to be understood to be the exception, here, for a number of reasons.Primate females have clitorises, for instance, and experience the same pleasurable sensation of orgasm that males do, which they can achieve at any time, even during their non-fertile period. Primates are the only mammals that do not experience estrous*; rather, primates ovulate cryptically (that is, without obvious physical indications, even to the female herself) and are receptive to physical intercourse at any time. (At least, they are with me. Hot-cha-cha!)The long and the short of all of this - the cryptic ovulation, the capacity for the female orgasm, even the fact that it's pretty hard for primates to actually concieve during intercourse (less than 1 in 500 penetrative acts between fertile individuals will result in a conception) - is that, clearly, sex among the primate species does not have the primary purpose of reproduction, but rather, causing pleasure and promoting pair-bonding behaviors.Therefore, since the purpose of sex in primates is not reproduction but rather fostering social unity, rape as a behavior works against the rapist and costs him far more in the loss of social resources than he gains in terms of producing more offspring. After all, the rapist has absolutely no idea when the woman is actually fertile. He's literally taking a shot in the dark, if you will. (Not to make light of the tragedy of rape, of course.)*In fact, while you're right that your housecat probably doesn't derive pleasure from mating, estrous is a good reason to conclude that what's going on isn't really rape. In most species, males show no interest in mating behaviors until a nearby female undergoes the hormonal signaling changes of estrous, at which point, they approach the female and try to achieve sexual access. Even in these species, clearly the female wields considerable control over whether or not mating occurs, so to describe what's going on as "rape" doesn't seem appropriate.

Yeah, but it's not because women want guys who treat them like shit; it's because bad guys have a lot of techniques for manipulating women.

Bonobos, my friend. Seriously. You won't be able to watch the clips in mixed company, let's just say that. As a suggestion - this is not "research" you probably want to do at work. Yeah, but they're not using sex to enforce social contracts or to promote pair-bonding and unity. In fact relatively few animals pair-bond at all, or have any use for the male as parent after mating.Primates are social in a much more complex way than other mammals. Part of that is sex. Another part of it is our expressive faces, and our facility with communication and with handling financial transactions. (Recent research has shown that bonobos and other chimpanzees percieve a sense of fairness in transactions, reacting negatively when they observe another individual getting a better deal for a trade - say, a wooden token for a grape or piece of banana - than they themselves got.) It's not clear to me which primate species you're referring to. And it would probably be better for the discussion if we weren't simply relying on behaviors you saw at the zoo, but rather, actual peer-reviewed research in primate ethology. I'm not saying you don't know what you're talking about, or that you're lying - simply that you're not approaching these matters with the trained eye of a primate anthropologist. It can be difficult to really understand the social structure of a species from the observations of a layperson. I mean, if somebody came to your job, wouldn't they see that there's an alpha male who tells everybody what to do, when to eat, and has his pick of secretaries to mate with? Would it be accurate to extend from that fact that you and your wife don't have consensual, mutually pleasurable sex?Probably not. (I hope not.) I'm wary about accepting this assumption as true with no corroborating evidence. I certainly wouldn't attempt to derive some kind of universal truth from it. I mean, what's the scientific definition of a guy who's an asshole? How would you measure assholeness?Moreover - what makes you think you have to be an asshole to commit rape? The nice guys can be rapists too - in fact I'd say that happens more often.

Thank you for the corrections.

I confess I'm still not seeing the problem. If morals are relative and arbitrary then we don't need any reason to say that something is immoral besides the fact that we agree that we want it to be immoral.People who try to attack relative morality don't understand that their attacks work both ways. Sure, there's no objective basis for asserting that such-and-such a behavior is "immoral"; but there's also no objective basis to conclude that we can't say that things are immoral without an objective basis. In other words - maybe there's no objective reason for me to say that rape is immoral, but nobody else has an objective basis to stop me from saying that, either.Ultimately morality comes down to what we decide to enforce. The fact that rape may or may not be a successful strategy for circumventing female mate choice isn't relevant to that. We could be programmed for rape, but that's not relevant to us as a society saying that we don't want people to rape.

You mean, it appears to be... random chance?Different organisms adapt to their environment in different ways. Evolution doesn't optimize or proceed towards a specific goal. Behavior is a fuzzy thing, and it would be rare, I think, to use behavior to construct hierarchies of inheritance. We would expect similar or related behaviors between related species, so you see all the various species of penguin with really similar behavior. Sure, but that hierarchy isn't the sole determinant of mate choice, like it is in pride-structured felines, for instance - where females won't mate with anybody but the pride leader or his coalition.We see much the same pattern in humans, of course - "dominant" males may have "better" or more mates, but everybody else gets some, too. Isn't it possible that you're simply misreading the situation? Call it the "why is daddy hurting mommy?" effect - eroticism and erotic pleasure may or may not be apparent to the unexperienced eye.Clearly, in primates, female mate choice is occurring. (It's hard to imagine a sexual species where the females have absolutely no power to choose mates; the evolutionary cost to females would be unbearable.) Female primates regularly reject unsuitable suitors. So clearly rape isn't de rigeur as I think you're suggesting. Do animals have sex for fun? Primates are having way too much sex for it to be otherwise. That seems obvious to me. If the females aren't having a pleasureable experience, what motive do they have to allow males to mate with them? They don't have to, from what we can tell.

None of us consider that exoneration, which should be more than clear by now. Can you explain how that's supposed to be exoneration?

I would suggest that the fact that the prison environment (where superior status and dominance over inferiors is viewed as essential to survival) is more conducive to male-on-male rape than, say, an all-boy boarding school, or summer camp, or a firehouse, indicates that rape is an expression of power and dominance rather than simply a sexual outlet. I would suggest that rape is a dominating action expressed in a sexual mode. Obviously, the rapist's individual sexual preferences are going to come into play, but power and dominance are still at the root of it. A commonly-citied statistic (that I'm too tired to look up) informs us that a majority of rapists are usually in sexual relationships, already.

Yes, exactly. Where else does the sense of male sexual entitlement you refer to come from, except a desire to assert dominance over the woman?

Indeed. It's a violation of parsimony to propose a "rape gene" when it's obvious that we live in a society where:1) Rape as a crime is relatively safe for the rapist, due to its very low prosecution rate
2) Our first impulse is to shield rapists from prosecution by victim blaming and slut-shaming
3) Men are told they're entitled to sex with a woman if they do certain things for the woman, or the woman acts or is dressed in a certain way; and that rape is a crime women need to prevent by staying home, or staying sober, or not being dressed in a certain way, because men are powerless to prevent themselves from raping.In the light of all that, it hardly makes sense to leap to a conclusion of genetic influence when there's a whole bucketload of societal influence staring us in the face. It's believed that rape is about power simply because it's obvious that our society informs us that rape is the punishment women receive for certain behaviors.