The Broad Brush? Women and Men; Prejudice and Necessity

Trooper:

Can you think of any reasons why Rodger's mental illness might have led him to fixate on his particular hatred of women, in particular?

 

This is possible?

Of course. All the studies and articles and books written about rape are all wrong because they are apparently following a political ideology and is based on a social presupposition. How silly everyone is to say it is about power and dominance. When they could have asked a two bit biologist who hasn't even done a single study about rape, let alone actually read anything about it for the answer.

Really? Where?

Unless of course you are going to apply the very human term and understanding of "rape" on the animal kingdom, where issues such as consent cannot really be applied, since you know, it's a human understanding and construct.

But cite me an instance in the human species where rape.. yes, rape, was biological? And no, I'm not talking about your mate's groping session at the local pub and calling it his need to procreate.

Aren't they the two twits who tried to argue that most rape victims are young attractive women, while disregarding that children and women of all ages are rape victims and that young attractive women make up only like 1/4 to 1/3 of all rape victims, so their argument falls flat on its face just from that alone?

Ah yes, here we go.. A summary of the response to the two dolts:

Thornhill and Palmer's hypothesis is controversial.[3] The authors have claimed that some of the criticism it has received consists of straw man arguments, contradictions, and flawed logic.[4]

Psychology professor Frans de Waal argues that rape involves both sex and violence, and that while A Natural History of Rape serves as a corrective to the dogmatic view that rape is primarily about power, its view that rape is primarily sexually motivated is equally dogmatic. In de Waal's view, Thornhill and Palmer's theory could only be true if men who rape differ genetically from men who do not rape and sire more children than they could without committing rape, and there is no evidence that either of these things is true. He questions why one-third of rape victims are young children and the elderly, too young or too old to reproduce, if rape is about reproduction and why most men do not rape if rape is a smart reproductive strategy. He believes Thornhill and Palmer wrongly describe premature ejaculation and the ability to detect female vulnerability as rape adaptations, when other explanations for them exist.[5]

Evolution, Gender, and Rape, a 2003 book written in response to A Natural History of Rape, compiles the views of twenty-eight scholars opposed to sociobiological theories of rape. One contributor, Michael Kimmel, criticizes Thornhill and Palmer's argument that female rape victims tend to be sexually attractive young women, rather than children or older women, contrary to what would be expected if rapists selected victims based on inability to resist. Kimmel argues that younger women are the least likely to be married and the most likely to be out on dates with men, and therefore are the most likely to be raped because of opportunity arising from social exposure and marital status.[6] Palmer and Thornhill responded in an article in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.[7]

Smith et al. (2001) criticized Thornhill and Palmer's hypothesis that a predisposition to rape in certain circumstances is an evolved psychological adaptation. They developed a fitness cost/benefit mathematical model and populated it with estimates of certain parameters (some parameter estimates were based on studies of the Aché in Paraguay). Their model suggested that generally that only men with a future reproductive value of 1/10th or less of a typical 25-year-old man would have a net positive cost/benefit fitness ratio from committing rape. On the basis of their model and parameter estimates, they suggested that this would make it unlikely that rape generally would have net fitness benefits for most men.[8][9]

Wilson et al. (2003) argue that Thornhill and Palmer use the naturalistic fallacy inappropriately to forestall legitimate discussion about the ethical implications of their theory. According to Thornhill and Palmer, a naturalistic fallacy is to infer ethical conclusions (e.g., rape is good) from (true or false) statements of fact (e.g., rape is natural). Wilson et al. point out that combining a factual statement with an ethical statement to derive an ethical conclusion is standard ethical reasoning, not a naturalistic fallacy, because the moral judgment is not deduced exclusively from the factual statement. They further argue that if one combines Thornhill and Palmer's factual premise that rape increases the fitness of a woman's offspring with the ethical premise that it is right to increase fitness of offspring, the resulting deductively valid conclusion is that rape has also positive effects and that its ethical status is ambiguous. Wilson et al. state that Thornhill and Palmer dismiss all ethical objections with the phrase 'naturalistic fallacy' although "it is Thornhill and Palmer who are thinking fallaciously by using the naturalistic fallacy in this way."[10]

Hamilton (2008) has criticized Thornhill and Palmer's definition of rape as the coerced vaginal penetration of women of reproductive age. He has suggested that the exclusion of male rape, rape on women outside the reproductive age range, murderous rape, and non-vaginal forms of rape virtually guaranteed the confirmation of their hypothesis that rape is an evolved reproductive strategy and not a crime of violence.[11]​

Having read Evolution, Gender and Rape a while ago now, from memory they eviscerated Thornhill and Palmer. And rightly so.

You had clearly stated he was not wrong. Are you now changing your mind?

What more could you expect form a guy who once declared that all the women he had ever met were sluts? So how do you think someone with that kind of mindset is going to approach the subject of rape?

One such example was when Bowser was commenting on his son's relationship problems and how his son had broken up with his girlfriend and he was down about it and the now ex girlfriend wanted to date his best friend.. DarksidZz response:

So is he following a biological urge?

That was just one example from a page I flicked on from his posting history. His previous persons on this site had even more, because he has toned down quite a bit to what he used to be like right at the start under those other names. Be thankful you were spared seeing his photos of his reclining in various poses wearing his satin short pj's..

Actually no. You keep asserting that it must be biological. Without proof while disregarding and ignoring all proof to the contrary.

By asserting a biological reason for why men rape - remember how you discounted power and dominance through the use of rape as violence because you felt that this could simply be achieved by other means, and as such, rape must be biological - you create a reason for rape. An excuse if you will. As such, by declaring a biological reason for rape, all men become potential rapists. Automatically. It means that all men have the biological wiring to rape women. But we know this is not the case. When you commented on how a rapist is able to maintain an erection and used that as evidence of the biological aspect of rape, you know, the 'he's horny and saw an opportunity or opening' argument you tried to use several time (remember the moose you kept going on about?) - that isn't because he is horny or has the biological impulse to impregnate or simply relieve himself. Because for most men, forcing someone would literally be an absolute turn off.

This has been studied and explained so many times, that I find you argument that it is biological to be frankly ridiculous. Because your biological argument also fails to take into account the various age groups of rape victims, their gender and their sexuality. When you tried to render it to a situation of simple convenience - such as how you tried to argue prison rape - where you argued that if a heterosexual guy is without sex for a long time, then even another guy would provide some relief - so you break it down to being just about sex. When it is clear that it is not. Prison rape is about power, dominance and ownership.

They are ignorant when they try to argue for a biological reason for rape. In discussions in the rape thread, you even had issues saying the word "rape", declaring there must be another term for the biological aspect of it. This is what rape apologists and defenders do. They try to call it something else so that it becomes something else.

Why not discuss what rape victims suffer. It is about them, remember. They are the ones who suffer from it. Why do you think their experiences should be ignored?

Oh so you are denying your own argument in the other thread now?

Oh is that what you did?

I wrote 3 lines about prison rape as a hypothetical and made it clear it was a hypothetical. You turned it into an ongoing soap opera and kept referring back to it repeatedly even when there was no need to and even when I commented that you were going too far with it.

See, I am not misrepresenting you. All of us who were unfortunate enough to read your pathetic display all saw the exact same thing. That you were arguing that rape was biological and not always about the power and dominance, because as you claimed, if it was just about that, then that could be proven in other ways..

And what a shame you completely and utterly ignore and disregard the rest of the article that completely disagreed with your biological imperative argument.

Get it now? Or are you going to keep misrepresenting that as well?

Of course. They could have just asked a two bit biologist his opinion...

I mean since you are so superior and without even having studied rape, you have given the reason of why men rape based on your mere opinion...

All the countless scientists, world bodies, medical and psychiatric and psychological bodies must all be wrong.

And dismissing the doctors who have worked with rape survivors, dismissing the scientists who have studied rape as a weapon and tool of war, who have written countless of papers on the issue because well, what the fuck would they know? They obviously do not know what they are talking about. Just better to listen to a two bit so called biologist hack because he simply cannot be wrong.

Yes GeoffP, lets forget all that we actually know and simply rely on your great conceited head up your backside self and disregard everything that is actually known on the subject and just take your word for it...

Well considering you have provided nothing but your say so and a review of a book you have never read and a book that has been widely laughed at and mocked for its inconsistency and inaccuracies, and considering you have openly admitted to never even having studied rape, rape culture, rape victims, how or why men rape, the dynamics of rape, stranger rape, spousal rape, child rape, date rape, incest, the specific psychological mindsets of rapists, types of rapists, and I have and have done so, do you really want to go there?

Your version of context is to alter reality entirely, which you clearly have done once again. I provide the quote in full as per the response. You delete parts of it to add in your context and deliberately alter it. And considering how much time you spent trying to convince me that "rape" is not really the correct term because it is biological, I am surprised you can even spell the word "ethics", let alone understand its meaning.

So why bring it up as an example of aggression and try to tie it in to the biological need to have sex? There is no connection.

And what did you provide? Ah yes, your comments about a book review.. About a book that was widely laughed at for its inaccuracies and idiocy. And that was it.

Of course you are going to claim that I did not and cannot prove anything. Because you are such a hack that you deliberately misrepresent what is provided. And fantasies about you? It was a stupid hypothetical that you dragged on for pages. I wrote like 3-4 lines as a hypothetical and you kept making it into this sick and twisted soap opera and kept referring to it in ways that were wholly inappropriate even after you were told that you needed to stop. And you want to complain about sick fantasies about you? You wrote most of it.

Proposal of a scenario of prison rape... It was a hypothetical. You're the guy who is so full of defending hypothetical when it's about abortions yet when it's about prison rape, you get all huffy after you are caught out repeatedly turning the scenario into an ongoing sexual and descriptive soap opera, to the point of telling us how "Bubba" was sweating and shaking with agreement to your claims of biological imperative to rape? Really GeoffP? You are that much of a dishonest hack as to go there?

I wrote 3 to 4 lines. You wrote post after post building up on those 3 to 4 lines. Over and over again.

And it just kept going. As I later noted, you had become obsessed with Bubba..

See, when you try to rename it and re-invent it, you dismiss it. It stops being "rape".

How is it libel?

You are the one trying to re-invent rape and redefine it to suit a biological and sexual imperative, even in the face of absolute evidence to the contrary. Not my fault that rapists and their supporters often try to argue the same point. Go to any women's hate sites run by men who support the likes of Elliot Rodger, you'll find the exact same argument you tried to make in the rape thread. That's not my fault or anyone else's GeoffP. But yours. Don't want to sound like that? Then stop spouting the same drivel. Simple really.

 

Why or how in the world would you think his hatred of women - ie his misogyny - trivialises his crime? Would you say that saying the cause of a shooting in a Synagogue which saw people killed was the shooter's anti-semitism trivialises the crime of murder, for example? Or do you believe that misogyny so not worthy of attention that to conclude that was the root cause just makes the crime banal and ordinary?

And how can you think mental illness does not trivialise the crime of murder? Especially when you factor in that mental illness often absolves the killer of any responsibility for his crime...

 

Yes. And insanity is often the reason many walk.

Pay particular attention to the word "often"... Then read what you quoted.. I know, it's tricky. In other words, if someone is insane, they are often not found guilty and thus, deemed to not be responsible for the crime they committed. Get it? Yes?

Now, diversion aside..

"Why or how in the world would you think his hatred of women - ie his misogyny - trivialises his crime? Would you say that saying the cause of a shooting in a Synagogue which saw people killed was the shooter's anti-semitism trivialises the crime of murder, for example?"

Could you answer this please?

 

It is used often enough. My rapist won't even make it into a court room. The deal was done before it even got to court. He was deemed too mentally unstable to face trial, but not mentally unstable enough to have 50/50 custody of his kids or to work, etc, so the charges were dropped. Go figure that one out. I have seen that happen too many times to count.

Of course there is. Are you saying that anyone who hates women has to be mentally ill?

Interesting.. But then you go on and argue why it must be biological in origin..

Do you even understand what you write anymore?

For example:

I actually felt my breakfast rise up into my throat reading that!

Are you fucking kidding me?

And you get worse..

Alternate model to why men rape? One that embraces biological and even in some ways, environmental triggers..

Which would mean that rape is entirely preventable for the rape victim. Especially when you use that kind of language. What the hell is wrong with you?

Actually, right now, you only sound like a sociopath.

Would you say it would seem tautological to say that sexual assault towards babies, children, the same sex, the elderly would parallel the act of forcible copulation? Is that sexual also?

Which animal species uses sex as a weapon or tool to terrorise and harm others?

And it gets worse..

That is because research has been done, and it was found that you are wrong. But hey, what do they know?

I agree with you James. It is disgusting!

Considering how you have gleefully redefined and re-classified rape in your previous post, you are in no position to be insulting anyone at the moment.

Which animal, aside from humans, uses rape as a weapon and tool to terrorise and harm their victims?

They were invalidated simply for the fact that they based their premise on their incorrect assertion that rape is predominantly against young and attractive women. It is not. Because by their telling, rape had become a biological urge to breed, to force their semen into as many women who could give birth to their children as possible. So they entirely ignored and left out how this is not true since so many of people who clearly cannot have children are also rape victims.

I mean I get your disdain for social science, even for medicine if your sneering comments about doctors who study and report rape in war zones is anything to go by, but really, you are a hack.

Against whom?

You? Are you going to deny he did not say those words? Against DarksidZz? You are going to defend the rape apologist and rape promoter even more?

Cute. The exact same argument made by Thornhill and Palmer after dozens of scientists soundly smashed their claims to smithereens...

I am. Which is why I reiterate that you are doing your best to find excuses for rape. Why is that?

When you argue for biological triggers, that is what it is reduced to. The dangers with arguing for biological impetus is that you need to provide proof of how it was selectively weeded out of some parts of the population. Since a biological trigger would entail, for example, like Thornhill and Palmer tried to argue, the biological need to breed. So it would not be selectively bred out of the human population that easily. Those triggers would exist in all males to varying degrees. Which would render all men as being possible rapists.

Actually it does. When you try to redefine it and alter the language and even attempt to rename it, you do re-invent it. You do turn it into something else. And the consequence of that is that the very act becomes something else, something that can be excused and defended. This is what happens when you try to propose an "alternate model" to rape.

See, you you can't even be honest about how you conducted yourself in that thread and you are trying to alter your input and your persona.. Tell me, GeoffP, is rape an issue worth ridicule? Which biological trigger has resulted in your seeing rape as being something worth making fun of?

But you have argued for biological triggers and even proposed that you were presenting an "alternate model", so it was why you are downplaying the power issues with rape. And you did it with such glee.

In short, you are arguing that rape (you could barely bring yourself to even use the word, by the way) is simply caused by a biological urge to fuck and that this could be affected by environmental triggers.

There are no words to express my absolute disgust of you as a human being right now. Absolutely none. I have seen so many rapists try and use that argument, that really, it had become laughable.

There is no libel. You might try to argue that there is, but there is no libel.

You do know that english is not my first language, yes? That I did not learn to speak or write english until I was in my teens? Or are you going to mansplain this to me as well as you just tried to mansplain rape to me?

But then again, you are simply a hack of a supposed biologist who claims to be a scientist, but who has also knowingly and willingly disregarded years of research into rape, even classified them as being incorrect.. Because you are so full of yourself and you believe that your alternative model for rape, oh no, sorry, "forced copulation", has to be correct, since you are the one who came up with it.

One of my colleagues recently asked me if you had daughters and how he hoped you did not, because really, the reasons are obvious - imagine this poor girl having to come to you if she has been raped or needs an abortion?.. And he is right. You are one sick puppy.

 

I'm sorry, who are you to be scoring anyone?

What? Because I and just about everyone who isn't a rape apologist disagrees that rape and sexual violence is not set off or caused (fully or in part) by biological triggers, that you think you are somehow superior to everyone who disagrees with your personal opinion?

It is when you read something that is wholly and completely utter drivel.

Oh believe me, man who has taken on the mantle of defending rape, I do.

You tell me..

You are the one who brought it up in the first place. You know, in the post where you were trying to downplay the issues of power and dominance in rape because you felt it needed to be downplayed so that you could argue the alternate model..

Just as everyone will now see you as the guy who just told a rape victim that when her rapist broke into her home, pinned her down and raped her while asking her how she liked it now and calling her a bitch, slut and whore was really caused by biological triggers and not his desire to dominate, terrify and abuse me in the worst way possible. That, sir is why you are a sociopath.

Explain the biological triggers for that, smart guy? Go on, I dare you.

Read the question, smart guy.

I asked, now pay attention..

"Which animal species uses sex as a weapon or tool to terrorise and harm others?"

Would you like me to use smaller words? The primate examples you provided do not use sex as a tool or weapon to terrorise and harm others. I'll word it this way.. Which animal species, aside from humans, use sex and the mere threat of sex, to terrorise and harm others? I'll make it easier for you. I'll ask the question in terms of warfare and war. Which animal species, aside from humans, use sex to cause fear, to cause harm as a tool and weapon of war?

Is that clear enough for you?

See, I have an unfair advantage here. Or more to the point, your attempt to make rape into being about just sex is not something that will go down well here.

As for the research.. Hundreds of pages of research was provided in the rape thread. Now, certainly, why would you bother reading it when your version of research is to refer to a much discredited book..

"Rape - The price of coercive sexuality" by LMG Clark and DJ Lewis.

"Behavioural characteristics of rapists" by Marita P. McCabea & Michelle Wauchope.

"Rape as a Weapon of Genocide" by Allison Ruby Reid-Cunningham

"Case Study of Rape in Contemporary China - A Cultural-Historical Analysis of Gender and Power Differentials" by Vincent E. Gil and Allen F. Anderson

"Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC)" by Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern


I could go on and on.

What you provided in regards to the animal kingdom was certain primates that use violence and a couple that use forcible sex to breed - usually seen in primates that lead a very solitary existence. You have then tried to relate this to the human species as proof of biological triggers to have sex or rape. Which completely disregards the very simple fact that rape is not to breed, and the very simple fact that the majority of rape victims are incapable of having children. In regards to rape in war zones, in Bosnia for example, where soldiers were encouraged to rape to impregnate the captive Bosnian women to make babies, it was not out of the desire to breed, but it was used as a tool of war to dominate and humiliate the opposing side and most of all, it was used as a form of genocide, one that the opposition could not control, but instead, had to live with the humiliation of how these soliders owned and raped their women and soiled them forever. This is about power, domination and humiliation.

Sadly, it is not. But nice try.

The whole premise of rape caused by biology as you and your ilk try to argue is that you distinctly and repeatedly refuse and cannot account for the facts of child rape, elderly rape, same sex rape. Which is why you and people who believe like you are often laughed at and completely discredited.

What's the matter? Can't cope with someone who doesn't fawn over your greatness?

One of the most disgusting traits that you have on this site is your intellectual dishonesty.

Cite or retract what? That you defended a guy's view of rape.. A guy who claimed that the only women he knew are sluts and who then recommended to a fellow member that his son should just drug and rape his ex-girlfriend?

Dude, you openly did it, even after you saw Fraggle, Tiassa and my response to this individual. You jumped in with eyes wide open. Don't start whining that you and your sick perverted attempts to redefine rape has been caught out.

No, what is sad is your dishonesty. But not unusual.

What is your area of expertise again?

See, I have over 15 years of working with rape victims, cases of rape and I am a victim of rape. What qualifications do you have again? I mean you can try and explain libel to me, but you are also the one trying to convince everyone that rape has biological triggers and is kind of about sex, because if it was about power and dominance, that can be achieved in other ways.. And in doing so, you have cited a work that has been greatly and widely discredited and panned by all.. I don't really see you getting far with that argument right now.. At all.

Once again, the moment you start using the excuses you have provided for rape in this thread, you have provided a reason for rape. A validation and an attempt to redefine it the very language used to define and explain it. In short, you are darksidZz. The only difference is that while he explains biological triggers using common terms, you use scientific terms and think that makes it more palatable and acceptable.

No actually. I did not. You are the one who embellished and turned it into something sick and funny, even after it was pointed out to you, you kept doing it. Which leads me to question what it is about you that would lead you to do that?

I want you to sit down and actually think about that statement and consider just how and why you might be wrong.

Just as you are the only one responsible for your argument in this thread and in the rape thread where you defended a rape apologist in the hope that you would get a fight out of it.

See, what makes you a hack is that you consistently fail to acknowledge or recognise the years of research that has gone into understanding rape. Instead, out of the blue and after having admitted that you have no knowledge of it, you demand that it has to simply be about sex. You then try to deny this while re-affirming the exact same argument as your defense. As I said, there are no words to express my disgust at you right now, for a variety of reasons.

I actually do have two sons. And you can be certain that they will not be brought up to believe that rape, that having sex with someone without consent is caused by biological (and environmental) triggers. In other words, I am not bringing my sons up to believe that their sex and thus, their hereditary biology, means that they can feel entitled to rape. But I can see how you would have a problem with that. And that's fine.

That's okay. See, the response to that is that you're just the guy who downplayed rape and all that it entails because it doesn't advance your 'alternate model'.

And what an 'alternate model' it is..

Women, gather round, read carefully, because this gay man—who once, long ago, feigned sexual interest in your bodies—is about to shine a spotlight on some hidden truths about your natural design. It's by no means a perfect system, but evolution has endowed you with some extraordinary, almost preternatural abilities to prevent your own sexual assault. And these abilities are especially pronounced when you're ovulating.

Although it can certainly take other forms, rape will be defined throughout this article as the use of force, or threat of force, to achieve penile-vaginal penetration of a woman without her consent. Whether or not human males evolved to rape women is, to put it mildly, a controversial topic. The flames were fanned especially with the publication, about a decade ago, of Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer's A Natural History of Rape, which presented evidence of what appear to be biological adaptations in human males (as well as males of many other species) specialized for forcibly coercing females into copulation. They argued that rape is an adaptive behavior in certain contexts; for example, when consensual partners are unavailable. There is some evidence that convicted rapists are physically unattractive, at least as judged by women on the basis of their mug shots. And spousal rape is most likely to occur when the husband finds out (or suspects) his wife has been unfaithful, suggesting that he is attempting to supplant another man's seed. (In fact, the distinctive, mushroom-capped shape of the human penis is designed to perform the specialized function of removing competitors' sperm, which indicates an ancestral history of females having sex with multiple males within a 24-hr period.) Furthermore, UCLA psychologist Neil Malamuth and his colleagues found that one-third of men admit that they would engage in some type of sexual coercion if they could be assured they would suffer no negative consequences, and many report having related masturbatory fantasies.
​

Their findings were, to be honest, hysterical.. Now, while most are laughing hysterically, oh sorry, digesting with all seriousness at the biological reasons for rape detailed by the very authors and the book you so proudly brought up earlier, using the same arguments for biological triggers for rape that you have been arguing for with your "alternate theory", let's carry on, shall we? Because this gets better..

Thornhill and Palmer, Malamuth, and the many other investigators studying rape through an evolutionary lens, take great pains to point out that "adaptive" does not mean "justifiable," but rather only mechanistically viable. Yet dilettante followers may still be inclined to detect a misogyny in these investigations that simply is not there. As University of Michigan psychologist William McKibbin and his colleagues write in a 2008 piece for the Review of General Psychology, "No sensible person would argue that a scientist researching the causes of cancer is thereby justifying or promoting cancer. Yet some people argue that investigating rape from an evolutionary perspective justifies or legitimizes rape."

The unfortunate demonization of this brand of inquiry is rooted in the fallacy of biological determinism (according to which men are programmed by their genes to rape and have no free will to do otherwise) and the naturalistic fallacy (that because rape is natural it must be acceptable). These are resoundingly false assumptions that reveal a profound ignorance of evolutionary biology. Yet the purpose of the remaining article is not to belabor that tired ideological dispute, but to look at things from the female genetic point of view. We've heard the argument that men may have evolved to sexually assault women. Have women evolved to protect themselves from men?
​

Sound familiar, smart one?

While it's debatable that a rape module lurks in the male brain, there is absolutely no question that rape is a distressingly common occurrence in our species. One study from 1992 found that about 13 percent of American women are raped; the real number is almost certainly higher since so many sexual assaults go unreported. And aside from its self-evident harms, there is no question that rape seriously impairs a woman's reproductive interests. To say that rape pregnancies are costly to a woman's genetic success would be an enormous understatement. Not only do such conceptions completely undermine the female's mate selection—and so the quality of her offsprings' genes—but rapists are unlikely to stick around and help raise children, putting such children at a significant disadvantage. In short, it's a catastrophic mess from the vantage point of the mother's genes.

Given the enormity of this adaptive problem for ancestral women, it is plausible that human females would have evolved a set of counter-adaptations to protect them from being raped, and that these anti-rape adaptations would be activated, specifically, during the woman's most fertile period, the periovulatory phase of her reproductive cycle. So with the foregoing theoretical sketch in mind, I now present to you an up-to-date list of four empirically validated "phase dependent female rape-avoidance mechanisms:"
​

Well it's only natural, is it not? After all, if men evolved to rape as per those who argue the 'biology' argument, or your "alternate theory", it is only natural that women will have developed defense mechanisms to prevent and thwart their would be rapists.. This, I assume, would also apply to marital rape which the authors who support your contention have advised, would only happen if the husband thought his wife was having sex with another man and so, his raping her with his penis shaped to remove the other's semen from her vagina is only ensuring the continuation of his familial line. Because this is biology after all and biology is the need and expectation of ensuring that you breed.. Now, onto women and how we evolved to prevent and avoid rape as prescribed by the likes of you..

1. When threatened by sexual assault, ovulating women display a measurable increase in physical strength. In 2002, SUNY-Albany psychologists Sandra Petralia and Gordon Gallup had 192 female undergraduate students read a story about either a female character being stalked by a suspicious male stranger in a parking lot (ending with: "As she inserts the key into her car door she feels his cold hand on her shoulder …") or a similar story in which the female character is surrounded by happy people on a warm summer's day (ending with: "She starts her car, adjusts the stereo, and as she pulls out of the parking lot those nearby can hear her music blasting"). The researchers measured the handgrip strength of each participant before and after she read the story, and compared the scores. Petralia and Gallup also knew from the results of a urine-based ovulation test kit where in their reproductive cycles each participant was, so the researchers could differentiate among women in the menstrual, follicular, ovulatory, and luteal phases. A fifth group consisted of those women who were on contraceptives at the time of the study. The results were unambiguous: Only the ovulating women who read the sexual assault scenario exhibited an increase in handgrip strength. Ovulating women who read the control passage and nonovulatory women who read the sexual assault material grasped with the same intensity as before.

2. Ovulating women overestimate strange males' probability of being rapists. Add this one to a growing list of adaptive cognitive biases—evolved psychological distortions that orient people toward strategic decision-making. These findings come from a 2007 report by Christine Garver-Apgar and her colleagues. "When the costs of being sexually victimized are highest," reason these investigators, "women should shift their perceptions to decrease false negative errors at the expense of making more false positive errors. Thus, we predicted that women perceive men as more sexually coercive at fertile points of their cycle than at non-fertile points." The researchers showed 169 normally ovulating women videotaped interviews with various men and asked them to rate the men on several dimensions, including their tendencies toward sexual aggression, kindness, or faithfulness. The more fertile the woman was at the time of her judging, the more likely she was to describe the men as "sexually coercive." Ovulating women didn't see these men as being less kind, faithful, or likely to commit—only more inclined to rape them.

3. Ovulating women play it safe by avoiding situations that place them at increased risk of being raped. Fending off would-be rapists and pigeonholing strange men as potential sex fiends sounds exhausting—wouldn't it make more sense to avoid dangerous places and unknown males altogether? That is exactly what ovulating women tend to do. At least two studies have demonstrated that women at the peak of their fertility are less likely than their peers to have engaged in high-risk activities such as walking alone in a park or forest, letting a stranger into the house, or stopping their cars in a remote place over the preceding 24 hours. Importantly, as German investigators Arndt Bröder and Natalia Hohmann established, ovulating women are not less active in general—they're still busy shopping, going to church, visiting friends, and so on—but they avoid doing those things that make them sexually vulnerable.

4. Women become more racist when they're ovulating. At least white American ovulating women do when it comes to thinking about black American men. Those are the jaw-dropping, politically incorrect findings of Michigan State University's Carlos Navarrete and colleagues. White, undergraduate females were evaluated for race bias using several variants of an implicit association test, which asks participants to perform a word-matching task that indicates the relative accessibility of certain stereotypes. The women who happened to be ovulating scored especially high when it came to fear of black (as opposed to white) men, a fact that the authors interpret as reflecting an evolved disposition to avoid so-called "out-group males," who "may not have been subject to the same social controls as in-group members and would have constituted a threat in antagonistic situations." In this case, skin color serves as a convenient marker of group identity. (The authors concede that people of different skin colors came into contact with one another only in recent times, evolutionarily speaking, but propose that any physical trait that serves to demarcate an out-group member would be processed by ovulating females as a sort of "hazard heuristic.") Stereotypes about the particular out-group being prone to violence may also play a role, so, at least in American society, cultural transmission works alongside evolutionary biology in promoting racism. It remains unclear if the same race bias occurs in ovulating women from other races: Do black women show heightened fear of white men?
​

I guess the 1 in 6 women who are raped, not to mention the countless men and children who are raped, simply did not evolve to have a better hand grip, simply view all men as being rapists when ovulating (again, this just disregards children, males and the elderly who fall outside of this group), who avoid being alone and who are less active while ovulating (yeah, I know, men, children and the elderly and women who cannot ovulate, for example, just fall outside of this group and so just don't count) and are not racist towards black men (this also discounts people of other races and people who are not ovulating women)...

Well I must say, I feel somewhat let down by my genetic heritage..

Your biological trigger argument is what the anti-rape crowd, as the author goes on to describe such nonsense, often resort to. Stand proud, smart man. Stand proud.

And you should. Because even politicians are using the biology and the fact that men evolved to be stronger than women to excuse rape, and he even used abortion as a reason - a cause that goes right to your heart, does it not? Then of course we have the politician who declared that women are able to shut down their reproductive cycle if they are raped.. The ways in which people use biology to further their cause is truly astounding. And I am not even touching on the one who declared that a pregnancy that results from rape - you know, the biological reason that men rape is to spread their seed - is because it's what God intended..

Enjoy what you sow, GeoffP.. Reap it well. Because this is the ideology you support when you try to alter the actual reality of rape to fit into your "alternative theory".

 

Oh look, some more on rape and your "alternate theory" which demands that rape has biological triggers..

“A Natural History of Rape: The Biological Basis of Sexual Coercion” sets out a strictly Darwinian view. Writing recently in the Sciences, the authors, biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer, state their position bluntly: “We fervently believe that, just as the leopard’s spots and the giraffe’s elongated neck are the results of aeons of past Darwinian selection, so is rape.” Elsewhere they proclaim: “There is no doubt that rape has evolutionary — and hence genetic — origins.” If so, South Africa must be a hothouse for such genes.

As the latest salvo from the burgeoning “evolutionary psychology” movement, the book is a symptom of an increasingly heated border war — the fight over who controls the intellectual territory of human behavior. Traditionally, the study of what people do and why they do it has been the domain of the social sciences — cultural anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and political scientists — but increasingly, evolutionary biologists are claiming that the key to human behavior lies not in our culture and social structures but in our biological makeup. In the case of “A Natural History of Rape,” this is more than just a rhetorical battle; our whole approach to rape prevention is potentially at stake.

Ground zero for Thornhill and Palmer is the notion that rape is a strategy for helping males to procreate. Central to their argument is a rather Aristotelian distinction between what they call “ultimate” and “proximate” causes. While they acknowledge there may be social situations that enhance the likelihood of a man raping, according to them these must always be understood as just the immediate or proximate cause of his actions. Underlying all such causes, they say, is the ultimate cause, which is a biologically built-in mechanism. In other words, whatever cultural conditions prevail, the “true” explanation for rape — and in their view the only legitimate explanation — is to be found in a man’s genes.

In support of their evolutionary view, Thornhill and Palmer point out that the majority of rape victims are young women at the peak of their fertility and hence of their child-bearing potential. Why? At great length they explain that Darwinian evolution would have selected for mechanisms in males that would target these young women for rape. Since, in their view, procreation is the “ultimate” goal driving rape, it is only logical that this sexual strategy would focus on women at their reproductive zenith.

To corroborate this view the authors assert that studies have proven that it is women of child-bearing age who suffer the most psychological trauma in the aftermath of rape. Child rape victims and elderly victims supposedly suffer less because, although they have been physically violated, their reproductive potential has not been compromised. To quote: “The more a woman’s reproductive success would have contributed to the genetic success of her mate or her relatives in evolutionary history, the greater the suffering of those individuals is likely to be after she is raped.” It is married women in particular, they say, who suffer most from mental anguish after rape because a married woman risks reprisal or even rejection from her husband and his relatives.

Feminist arguments against all this will be thrashed out at length elsewhere — and rightly so — but what astonishes me as a veteran science writer and someone trained as a physicist, is what mind-bogglingly sloppy science this constitutes. To steal a quip from Anthony Lane, I’ve had bowls of spaghetti that were more tightly structured than this argument.

For a start, although the authors never say so explicitly, their text is suffused with the assumption that U.S. patterns of rape are universal. A 1992 national study they cite reported that 13 percent of American women over the age of 18 say they have been raped. The study did not include any figures for those under 18, but with this group included the total percentage may actually be higher. The same study reports that 29 percent of adult women surveyed were under the age of 11 at the time they were raped. Another study (not cited by the authors) has reported that 45 percent of rape victims were under 16. Since rape of children and teenagers is on the rise, the researchers I spoke with all expressed the view that the overall percentage of rape in America was now higher than 13 percent — perhaps as high as 20 percent, several suggested. But even at 13 percent that’s one in seven women, and this is still far higher than in many other societies, says Peggy Reeve Sanday, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is an expert on rape and the author of “A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape” and “Fraternity Gang Rape.”

As the author of a cross-cultural study on rape in 95 different tribal societies, Sanday stresses that its incidence varies wildly from culture to culture and there are many societies in which rape is rare. Far from being the norm, she says, America is one of the most rape-prone of all contemporary cultures. If the biological imperative to rape is as powerful, and as universal, as Thornhill and Palmer insist, why does its frequency vary so much from culture to culture?

Mary Cameron, an anthropologist at Auburn University, points to another flaw in Thornhill and Palmer’s thesis: “It doesn’t begin to account for male-male rape, or incest,” neither of which confer any evolutionary advantage. If, by the authors’ own admission, almost one-third of rapes are inflicted on children under 11, it is hard to see how reproductive imperatives could possibly be responsible.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, a research biologist at Brown University, questions the very foundation of Thornhill and Palmer’s thesis: “If rape is about reproduction,” she says, “then how many rapes end in pregnancy? I’d want to see the data on that.” Such figures are notably absent from “A Natural History of Rape.” And there could well be other explanations for the fact that the majority of rape victims are young women of peak child-bearing age. After all, most rapists are themselves young men and they may simply be raping within their peer group.

Particularly woolly is the authors’ claim that women of child-bearing age suffer from more psychological trauma than children or elderly rape victims. In perhaps the book’s most eyebrow-raising chapter the authors try to convince us that this is a proven fact, but I must say I found their “evidence” entirely underwhelming. Children who have been raped can suffer a lifetime of psychological scarring (in addition to serious physical harm), and an informal poll of my female friends suggests that for many women there are few more traumatic prospects than the thought of being raped in the heightened physical vulnerability of our old age.

Trying to quantify a human being’s anguish and measure it against the suffering of another is the sort of notion that ought to make any sensible scientist run screaming from the room. It’s not just that it’s repugnant to say that a raped 7-year-old feels less pain than a raped 21-year-old, it’s also simply daft to insist that any such “objective” comparison can be made. The whole exercise is reminiscent of medieval attempts to quantify sin.

Furthermore, while the authors are right that married rape victims may indeed fear reprisal from their husbands or relatives, the very fact that the consequences of rape are so much worse in some societies than they are in others indicates that we’re talking about cultural forces here. For example, religious women in Muslim communities probably fear this more than secular women in America; it’s the difference between a fundamentalist and a liberal value system — not biology. Do the authors of “The Natural History of Rape” have any clear understanding of the distinction? Thornhill and Palmer might just as well assert that black men in the Bronx feel nervous around the NYPD because they’re hard-wired to dread authority figures.

All of which raises the question of scientific standards. To quote Fausto-Sterling: “When you make a hypothesis you really need to be able to back that up with data.” Yet data is just what is missing from this book. As with so many other neo-Darwinian accounts of human behavior now being offered by proponents of the new “evolutionary psychology” movement, Thornhill and Palmer’s analysis of rape relies not on hard evidence, as they would have us believe, but on speculative flights of fancy. Taking a leaf from Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Jay Gould has dubbed such theories “just-so-stories.” (His point being that they have not a whit more validity than Kipling’s fanciful tales of how the leopard got its spots and the tiger its stripes.)

For most of its 150-year history, evolutionary biology has relied on careful field work, but now, says Fausto-Sterling, “What you have is this new group of ‘evolutionary psychologists’ who have very different standards of proof.” Thornhill and Palmer are part of this movement, which is in effect E.O. Wilson’s old “sociobiology” under a new name. Although still in its infancy, the movement is rapidly gaining adherents, to the consternation of many scientists — most notably Gould, who has written at length on the patent inadequacies of much of this work.

The social agenda behind “A Natural History of Rape” comes into clearer focus as the authors claim that not only is evolutionary theory the only way to understand why men rape, but the only way to understand how to combat this heinous crime. Having offered their explanation for the former they end their book with a suggested program for the latter. Since, according to them, all men — by their very nature — are potential rapists, they advocate that young men be required to attend a rape education course before being granted a driver’s license. By stressing the evolutionary basis of rape, these courses would teach men where such urges come from and thus empower them to resist those urges.
​

But then, what can they all possibly know?

Children, men, the elderly.. We can just disregard them because they don't actually fit into the biological causes of rape. So they cannot really be victims if one looks at rape biological.

So they are out.

As the article notes, hacks like you and your ilk who try to argue for the biological triggers for rape often lack one vital component. Data. Instead, it is mere supposition, not based on reality at all. Just personal opinion.

According to Thornhill and Palmer, social science approaches to rape are not simply wrongheaded; by not being based on a “true” understanding of the problem, such strategies “may actually increase it.” We are offered no explanation of why this may be so, but again and again we are told that as long as the “social sciences view of rape” prevails the problem will never be solved. Their hearts on their sleeves, the authors write: “In addressing the question of rape, the choice between the politically constructed answers of social science and the evidentiary answers of evolutionary biology is essentially a choice between ideology and knowledge. As scientists who would like to see rape eradicated from human life, we sincerely hope that truth will prevail.”​

Which is exactly what you tried to argue when you whined that the study for rape and arguments against rape had more "political impetus". When you tried to discredit social sciences as being incapable of investigating rape properly and that it should be up to biologists to do so..

But what is “truth”? For Thornhill and Palmer, as for most evolutionary psychologists, it is a Platonic reality untainted by social or political force, a reality that only “pure” and “unadulterated” science can discover. But how “pure” can science ever be when it’s dealing with such complex and politically charged issues as rape? And how “scientific” can Thornhill and Palmer’s own assertions be when they’re based on interpretations of data that can’t be subjected to rigorous testing? The history of biology — when the science has been extrapolated to explain human behavior — is riddled with ideology posing as science, as Fausto-Sterling’s “Myths of Gender” and her current book, “Sexing the Body,” as well as Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” have shown. Ideology posing as science was also at the heart of the eugenics movement — both here in the United States, and more devastatingly in Nazi Germany. To paraphrase philosopher of science Donna Haraway, biology is politics by another name.

The ideological proof in Thornhill and Palmer’s pudding is clear from the fact that although they devote several chapters to berating social scientists’ understanding of rape, they give us no analysis whatsoever of the actual rape prevention programs and strategies arising from that understanding. With mantralike frequency they tell us that current approaches to rape prevention are wrong, but by what criteria? By what standards are they evaluating those programs?

It only stands to reason that before you dismiss a program as ineffective you should check its results to make sure that it doesn’t actually work. But despite the cloak of disinterested, objective science Thornhill and Palmer have wrapped around their work, they’re not really interested in the facts or a careful, cautious weighing of all evidence. The powerful irrational emotions underlying “A Natural History of Rape” and other similarly reductionist theories indicate how close the mania for evolutionary psychology comes to religious fundamentalism. While the Christian fundamentalist takes the Bible as his foundational text, insisting on the most literal interpretation, so these new scientific fundamentalists insist on the most doggedly literal interpretation of their chosen “text.” Here the “words” are not those of the Hebrew scriptures, but the codons of the DNA chain — which take on for them an almost divine status.

It goes without saying that Thornhill and Palmer’s book does women an immense disservice. But even more depressing to me is the disservice these authors do to science. Over the past decade the once-golden image of science has been sorely tarnished and there is a growing perception that scientists are an arrogant elite, many of whom are out of touch with ordinary people’s lives. When books like this offer up such a sloppy, illogical and downright lazy analysis of such a complex social problem they only help to fuel that perception. If this is the kind of rubbish that “science” turns out, is it any wonder people are turning away?​

Your argument for biological triggers is bunk science. Your continued demands that it be considered as being correct, and that all evidence to the contrary should be ignored, is not even comical. It's sick and twisted. Because people who make such arguments often attempt to excuse rape, which can be seen by your defense of the man who advocated for rape. If you don't want to come across as the creepy dude trying to find excuses regarding rape, then perhaps you should refrain from making arguments that make you look that way.

Declaring that rape happens in the animal kingdom is just a ploy often used by rape apologists. Why? Because it is often used to legitimise the reason to rape. Which is why I asked you to name which species uses sex as a tool or weapon to cause terror and fear in their enemies? I'll give you a hint. Only humans do that. Can you understand why your argument that rape is biological and that your proof is that it occurs in the animal kingdom falls flat on its face?

Your "alternative theory" about rape has been touted by rape apologists for years and discredited by scientists for even longer. So your continued attempts to argue the exact same argument - of biological triggers for rape - is worrisome, because by its very nature, it disregards a large portion of rape victims. Your defense of it just makes you look like a sociopath. Your manner of posting just makes you look like an arse.