A Natural History of Rape?

I haven't read any of the works you're talking about but I don't know that the case is clear-cut for me. For instance, it hardly seems likely that rape is adaptive in a species where the females are fertile for only about three days out of the month - and it's a different three days for every female. It seems like the odds of getting a random woman pregnant through rape are fairly low.Also I understand that a lot of rapists are people who already enjoy reproductive or sexual opportunity. That suggests that it's more about power than about reproduction. Not to mention the propensity of some rapists to insist on sex acts that are obviously non-procreative.What are they saying, exactly? That there's a "rape gene?" If rape is an adaptive behavior then how is it promulgated?A number of the reviews on Amazon point out that they gloss over a lot of data and fail to address some obvious questions. I guess I'm doubtful that rape in humans is best explained via adaptive factors. I think that the social factors are considerably more influential.

I don't think that there's anything to deal with. The social model is that rape is violence expressed through a "vocabulary" of sexual interaction. So naturally the sexual appetite of the rapist is going to come into play. Women of reproductive age - which is a pretty broad range - are more attractive to most men. And clearly that's an evolutionary result. Most rapists are men. Most men are straight. Not unexpected. Getting back to the sexual appetite of the rapist - most men have a preference for coitus. Yes, that's probably evolutionary. Can you explain the pattern a little more clearly? I didn't understand your paragraph. Which group has the higher trauma?I'm not claiming that evolutionary adaptations don't play a factor in human sexual interaction. Clearly they do. But if rape were an adaptation you would expect rapists to be universally men who had failed to achieve sexual access in any other way. But that doesn't seem to be the case.What I see as the cause of rape is simply antisocial violence being expressed through a "vocabulary" of sexual interaction, which itself is characterized through many traits that are obviously adaptive. But the root cause is still ultimately social.

I think we can bring date rape into it because I believe that there's a similar cause between date rape and violent rape.I believe that violent rape is, as I said, an expression of violence through the "vocabulary" of sexual intercourse. But studies seem to show that rapists choose that vocabulary because they view themselves as sexually frustrated - their actual sexual opportunity fails to match what they expect.Obviously that's a similar situation to a date rapist, who is probably forcing himself on a woman because he feels he's "entitled" to it because he bought the lobster or whatever.In both cases, it's a social situation. We need to remove from male culture the idea that you can do things or give things to a woman that "entitle" you to sex.

Forest for the trees. The real question is, what social factors allowed those men to reinforce each other's belief that coercive sex is ok in that situation?Also your model doesn't explain why some rapes end in murder.

If you could, please. I simply didn't understand it. Yes, and the circumstance you would expect it to be most adaptive in would be as a last resort for mating. But instead most rapists are people already enjoying reproductive access - often with their victim (i.e. date rape, marital rape.) Because all human cultures share certain experiences - eating, mating, dying? If rape isn't social then why is the frequency of rape different between cultures? Funny, you wouldn't notice from a search of PubMed. Universally the papers there ascribe social or cultural roots to the crime of rape.Like I said I'm not trying to deny that rape is colored by the human sexual response, which itself is greatly evolutionary. But ultimately men choose to rape for reasons that are social and preventable.

Why would you expect there to be? The goal of the man is to take the sex that culturally, he thinks he has a right to. Not to injure or kill women.

But according to your study, it only appears to offer an advantage over men who weren't trying to get women pregnant. To determine if it has reproductive advantage you would have to compare it to men who are trying to impregnante women - that is, men who have courted women and convinced them to bear their child. Wouldn't you? You're overlooking the fact that most rape is aquaintance rape - the victim knows her rapist in the majority of cases. That doesn't sound like a situtation where the rapist expects to get away with it, but rather a situation where the rapist feels entitled to sex.

By way of a thought experiment, what would it look like if there was never a reproductive advantage to rape (but no immediately fatal disadvantage either)? Would men ever rape? Not right now, but I'll try to dig one up. From my experience, I would say the opposite - women are much less likely to report the rape if it's somebody they know, because of a number of factors - regard for the rapist, a perception of ambiguity of the situation, etc. Do you have stats? It wouldn't surprise me either way, I guess. I'd like to see some data before I agreed with that.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 03-06-2004]

I thought this was a really great topic, so I'm bumpin' it.

Since I asked I'm going to address some of your points. I don't see how that follows. Firstly, straight men's sexual desire is primarily for reproductive age females. In a human world where rape was not evolutionary but sexual desire obviously was, you would still see rape, when it was perpetrated, perpetrated on reproducive age females because that's what your average rapist, being a man, would be attracted to. Likewise I would expect that, because I would expect to see rapists selecting victims by the same criteria that men select mates, i.e. biological logic. Both of these things happen. Some women are rapists. Some women outside of reproductive age are raped. Not sure what you're looking for, here.So, that's pretty much it. A world where rape is evolutionary looks exactly the same to me as a world where rape is not evolutionary, but merely an expression of violence through the vocabulary of a man's sexual desires (which are themselves evolutionary as well as cultural.) You mention situations where women were taken - were other things taken? Did looting occur? Did rape ever occur in the absence of looting?I submit that the occurance of war rape is not an evolutionary function but rather a consequnce of a greater "free-for-all" attitude prevalent in the lawlessnes following war. It's exactly what I would expect if it were cultural, and exactly what I would not expect if there were a rape gene that was only slightly selected for.Also, as an aside - you keep mentioning the universality of a trait or behavior (rape, in this case) as evidence that it is not cultural. I don't believe that's true. There are many cultural universals because the purpose of culture is always the same, everywhere that there is culture.