Sociobiological Theories of Rape

Earlier, I sided with Steven Pinker and Jerry Coyne, stating that the sexual dimension of rape is painfully obvious. I’ll acknowledge that this may be offensive due to the scientific illiteracy surrounding the nature of this topic. The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that biological explanations can help us judge right from wrong, but nature is not our moral compass.

Susan Brownmiller is widely credited with changing the public opinion on rape, stating that "rape is a crime not of lust, but of violence and power." Many have used her statement to oppose evolutionary theories, but she never claimed that there weren't any biological influences. She never said that rape didn't contain a sexual component. She said that sex was secondary to violence and control.

I've defined rape as sexual intercourse obtained without consent. You’ll find it conveniently located in the cesspool. However, this definition is limited. It doesn't cover all the features of rape, but it is problematic to assume that all the features share the same cause.

To be continued…

 

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can we just go ahead and close this thread now? we all know where its going to end up we can just skip the bullshit in the middle.

 

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Sounds like you have in mind a thred which ant necessarly politically corect... but honest.!!!

 

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"Feminist" is becoming a derogatory term. Gee, I wonder why?

Scientific illiteracy is compounding the problem. Evolutionary theorists are not masking misogyny or trivializing male aggression. An attempt to understand the behavior of men and patriarchy does not in any way absolve men of their responsibility. Both perspectives focus on power and sex.

"An evolutionary approach to understanding the origins of patriarchy is valuable for two reasons. First, it goes one step further than conventional feminist analyses in searching for the origins of male motivation to gain power over females. That is, evolutionary theory not only considers how men exercise power over woman, but also investigates the deeper question of why males want power over females in the first place, which feminists tend to take as a given."

Despicable, yes, but not inexplicable.

"The coercion hypothesis is consistent with feminist and sociological perspectives in arguing that rape is intrinsically related to male social and physical dominance over females."

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/i...Week 5/Evolution of Patriarchy Smuts 1995.pdf

 

So... if the big stink is over men wanting power over women... and using rape as a method to get it...

What about men raping other men? Or women raping men? Or men/women raping animals? Or children?

 

?? Are you arguing against the evolutionary argument? Those latter examples are taken, in my experience, as falsifying it. Trooper's cite, above, implicates power structure but poses the question as to why men would want power over women. It's certainly a functional refinement that never occurred to me. Or maybe in groping around for some kind of biological significance I grazed it in my incoherence.

 

Every time you eat, is it to stay alive, or because it taste good? Every time you have sex, is it to reproduce, or because it feels good?

Male bonding isn't just a way to get together in order to oppress females. Men create hierarchies and rankings among themselves. Sex, power, and control feel good.

It’s not biological determinism for crying out loud. It’s an evolutionary, comparative method to understand human behavior. It’s a moderate approach with twenty two of the authors being female. But for some goddamn reason, everyone here completely rejects any scientific contributions, which may provide a clearer picture of the enormity of the problem. They may be able to reveal significant socioecological factors that exacerbate sexual aggression against women, but to engage in such discussion immediately brands one as a misogynist and a rape-enabler.

Is this a science forum or a political forum where everyone denies, denies, denies, and lies?

BTW, lying lips are unsuitable to a leader. You lied and you know it. Closing the thread was a wise choice for you, not me.

 

James didn't engage in the "rape enabler" or "advocate" accusations that I ever saw.

 

My joke on this point is primal envy, that somewhere deep down men know they are a genetic mutation that serves a purpose and becomes useless. Look back at the old deities, or, rather, the fecund mother goddess. There is an assertion that is somewhat consistent though not absolute, that men rose to power after they figured out they had a role in reproduction; the anthropologist putting this forward cited an ethnological report from Australia about a tribal group where women happened to be in charge and the belief just happened to be that something about the wind made them pregnant.

None of which is definitive, but I've been making the joke more in the last few years because human beings can now create mammalian offspring using the genetic material from two ova. Men are damn near officially useless.

And look at the changes we bring to the world; while modern civilization can often assert to rely less on violence to effect change than its societal ancestry, the fact remains that minority control over communal affairs (i.e., men are the statistical minority but also the empowered majority) thrives on competition, which, in turn, would in a reckless psychoanalysis suggest we're still overcompensating for the primal disappointment of being a utilitarian adaptation. The possibility of obsolescence would not sit well with men. But who knows, if we go "pneumatic" as Huxley depicted, maybe the warring men will finally chill out.

Right. Anyway, in a more realistic context, there is still the proposition that the male evolutionary specialization includes competition; it isn't enough simply to have, but must instead be won. The rape phenomenon and rape culture would, in this framework, be symptomatic.

 

I'm no psychologist, so my outlook is more direct: the story of sex precedes man and in a fair number of primates males rape because they're strong enough to get away with it, which they're strong enough to do because they have to fend off other males. Other species, though, even with size advantage, display. Black widow females eat their male mates. Why? Because they can. Simple exploitation of the size advantage. Angler fish males attach to their females. I don't think they do it because they're fulfilling some kind of inferiority complex, it's just biology and size differential. In humans, we have a complicated forebrain riding over our based impulses - and my joke on that is that it rides, amusingly, literally over the 'lizard brain' - like a social lubricant, by which we connive and justify. I'm not sure where the mass of the 'person' resides - again, no psychiatrist - but the point of Trooper's cite above:

is interesting and conceivable. The relation or its potential is essentially uniform in humans - there are exceptions; matriarchal populations here and there, which stack up with such an hypothesis I'm not sure how - and so it has the semblance of a framework which, as I said previously, I think I had touched on in my blind graspings.

There's a line of thinking in quantitative genetics regarding the architecture of life-history traits: the heritability of such traits is normally estimated to approach zero because simple and direct selection on what is effectively the finalised expression of fitness means that the genes underlying life-history should be fixed, uniform. If you show up at the breeding group too early, the predators eat you. Too late and there are no mates or spots left. One theory at least is that the general genetic invariance of fitness traits may be underlain by that of other traits, such as morphology: this might give life to alternate evolutionary strategies, with larger, stronger individuals having strategy X and smaller ones Y, which is in fact observed in other taxa. Maybe the essential inequality of the sexual dynamic in humans is related to that. Maybe the psychology of man enables one or the other; those who think they can exercise sch power, do. It doesn't excuse it - the element of essence to the sociologists among us - because these same forebrains are capable of quite a lot of social rendering; personal taxes, wedlock, Facebook, etc. I don't think anyone's genetics is incapable of handling do not rape any more than they are capable of handling do not murder or do not steal. And by that measure, circumstances permitting, perhaps anyone at all is capable of any crime at all - there are various sensationalist examples here and there. The devolution of the entire issue to 'power' like a totem seems almost to deny all causation. But, in the case of such a 'biological imperative' in humans, such causation is probably unprovable anyway - and unimportant since it would be the unity of the male-female social narrative. It would also be unimportant in the legal sense: "the genes made me do it" (which is a statistical nonsense) is answered by "well, everyone is that way, then, so why are you so special?". We do not, for instance, invoke biological urges to theft in defense even though if it could ever be so argued for sexual assault it could surely be argued for theft. Why? Because no one has established such a precedent. Our slippery forebrains have not invented such a specific defense, probably because it would not be believed. Yet. But more miscomprehension is surely coming. Bells centres - I think - her responses around the Pandora's box such a concept would create. Maybe it would, because simple points are not really understood anyway. For years, people really believed that lemmings actually threw themselves off cliffs rather than being herded off them by Disney executives, or fired from a turntable.

Well, with enough technology, anyone is replaceable. (Or perhaps that's the lizard brain; see below.) But while we're on the subject, it's time for the biologist to ask the penultimate question of the sociologist: why do you examine all phenomena from the workings of the human mind, using models derived from the likes of Freud? You might answer well ask yourself the same question and you'll have your answer but the conception you give in your first paragraph - a joke but you do throw explanatory elements into it - is essentially psychosexual, is it not? But surely the problem must precede mankind, not to any practical point. This also:

As a statistician, I'd say that the wealthy or truly empowered minority is the real empowered majority, since the 52-48 split on sex in humans isn't a great majority, but I take your point.

It's conceivable. Do I feel a chill in my bones at the suggestion that we are tools only? If I were an IPA, or some other (actual) misogynist, would my forebrain now rush to recalculate a response at the insistence of the baser urges? But perhaps my resistance to psychological explanations is my training.

Agreed. Or perhaps 'winning' is employed when 'having' is interfered with. Can complete conversion of the human psyche be achieved in this matter? Probably; I'd say yes, even. There are systems by which this could be accomplished, but that is the work of politicians, the electorate and the law. So, no.

I thank you for your succinct and eloquent summary.

 

I have eaten for sustenance, and eaten because I liked what was in front of me, even when I wasn't hungry.
I've not had sex yet with the intent to reproduce, mainly because my wife and I aren't quite ready for children (financially we aren't prepared yet).
However, at no time, ever, have I used sex as a means to 'get my own way' with her, nor has she done so with me. We don't use sex to punish one another, or to gain control over the other, and in fact we make quite the effort to ensure that we are enjoying each other as much as we are ourselves.

So... your claim then is that men are conditioned by evolution and society to have sex in order to appear better than they are?

*shakes head* If that's the case, we may as well just go "brave new world" and render 99.9% of men and women sterile/barren at birth and reserve just a handful for reproductive purposes...

 

Uh…no, you didn’t. This was a lie.

I never said that he did but when you tried to address the accusations, he closed the thread.

If rape consists of verbal or physical coercion, sexual coercion can be viewed as a component of sexual selection. Feminist are quick to point out that the majority of rapes are acquaintance rapes. Stranger rapes are more likely to exhibit symptoms of pathology. Both merit examination but may require separate explanatory models.

Barbara Smuts provided the essential definition of sexual coercion: use of force by a male, or threat of force, that functions to increase the chances that a female will mate with him, and decrease the chances that she will mate with other males.

“Smut’s relationship coercion hypotheses generates at least three predictions that distinguish it from Thornhill’s hypothesis of a “rape-specific adaptation”:

1. Men who rape should not necessarily be of low status or sexually unsuccessful;

2. A single act of forced sex does not necessarily lead to a high probability of conception, nor does the rapist necessarily expect it to, but may be more commonly associated with ongoing anticipated male-female intimate relationships; and

3. Forced sex should occur in the context of other coercive behaviors. Such as verbal coercion, mate guarding, or control of female sexual and social freedom, and nonsexual aggression.

A disturbing aspect of the relationship coercion hypothesis is that it implies a certain degree of female weakness and lack of control over their own sexuality, as well as a tendency to acquiesce to or be duped by male coercive tactics. On the one hand, this hypothesis does assume a generally weak bargaining position for women in one-on-one interactions. As in most other primate species, human males exhibit superior body size and strength to females. Furthermore, as even opponents of the biological view agree, this differential tends to be supported by male-male alliances and other sociocultural practices that reinforce male economic and political control over females.”

SEXUAL COERCION IN PRIMATES AND HUMANS: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression against Females. Edited by Martin N. Muller and Richard W. Wrangham. Harvard University Press, 2009.

 

Interesting... I've never performed an act of "forced sex", nor have I used any kind of coercion against my wife... and yet, after several years, I am her one and only mate...

Unless... I guess you could claim Marriage to be a form of coercion *shrug*

It would seem to me, at least, that you would be far better off "wooing" and "wedding" your preferred mate, rather than trying to force them to copulate with you - after all, in wild primates, life spans are a few decades at most... where as humans are living to over a century.

And I must bring up the point again- this theory seems to entirely forget that men rape other men, women rape men, and women rape women... not to mention the rape against children who are incapable (not mature enough) of bearing progeny.

 

If you're going to critique it, you should probably read the book first.

If I don’t acknowledge your presence, or answer your dumb questions, will my thread get cesspooled again?

 

No - but if you intend to make an argument from a book, you must quote the relevant portions of it. If you make an argument, then your defense of said argument is "well you didn't read the book, so I'm ignoring you", then yes - it will get cesspooled again.

 

Men rape other men, women, children, even animals to assert their dominance and control where they lack confidence in their ability to lead, but it also can be a release of stress/aggression and it can also be out of a need o be close to someone regardless of whether or not the subject is willing. Women rape for different reasons, usually caused by a feeling of a lack of control in their own lives or in retaliation for a wrong done to them but who they can't take revenge for, they will just inflict it on another weaker person as an attempted form of catharsis. Men and women differ in the way that males tend to be physically aggressive to assert themselves, women tend to do it for more emotional reasons.

I think that the reasons why rape culture exists so heavily in Japan is because there is so much equality in Japan that males have been displaced at the top of the pile. The video games, manga, hentai that exists tries to give that power back to the males virtually so that they don't act out on those natural urges physically. I haven't studied the psychology of that but it might work if you have a rich imagination and don't have high levels of testosterone.

That said, regardless of all those things most men as a societal construct will single out a breeding female and attempt to mate with her several times to produce offspring. That's the nature part.

 

Thank you, Liebling.

I did.

 

Then what was the purpose of this post?