Rape is partly about sex

I have covered some controversial ground in my past posts, and here I may be going a step further. But controversial subjects benefit from inquiry to discover truth as much as less controversial ones, and perhaps it is even more important.

In this post I want to look at possible causes. Why would a man rape a woman? The reasons for a civilized person not to are overwhelming. It is violence at the expense of another person. There is no possible excuse, any more than we can justify killing someone just because they made us angry. And yet sometimes men do. What might lie beneath?

Common to all mammals is the strong tendency for males to have sex with any willing female who looks like she might possibly be fertile. This is clearly understood by evolutionary biology. Sperm is cheap, the mating act is short, and the evolutionary advantage to leaving an extra descendant is enormous. Willingness on the part of the female is not a criterion because male mammals are inherently polite, but because most male mammals cannot force a female to have sex if she is not willing. Apparently orangutans can and do. Ducks are not mammals but they do too.

Human males too will tend to have sex with any willing female. Throughout history and in all cultures, they too do not always require female willingness. Men can sometimes force sex through a physical struggle (sort of like orangutans), but human intelligence has (unfortunately in this case) opened the method of threats of violence if the woman resists. He can make the threat, she can understand his ability to carry it out and know it is credible, so the threat can be effective.

Affirmative consent is not part of our evolutionary past. Men will pay for sex, men will lie for sex, and some men will sometimes use threats or force to get sex. Rape is an act of violence, there is no doubt about that. But there is an additional feminist assertion that it has nothing to do with sex. I have never heard any evidence for this. (Can one get pregnant from violence alone?) Why is the formulation appealing? I suspect the <"war mentality"> applies, and since sex is sometimes enjoyable and a good thing, rape must be severed from that lest anyone view it as slightly less evil by association.

There are plenty of other ways to be violent and exert control. Why choose one with a sexual form? Evo psych has an answer. Rape has a reasonable chance of creating a descendant, and it seems likely that some tendency for men to consider it an option is part of our biological heritage.

Of course within the bounds of past human societies, rape could be very dangerous to a man. The victim's male kin might make him pay dearly and even kill him. In today's society it also might give rise to legal penalties, though far less often than it should. It is within situations of social chaos such as war that rape is especially likely.

Thornhill and Palmer wrote a book titled "A Natural History of Rape", published in the year 2000. It made the same sort of arguments I made above and was highly controversial, to say the least. I read it and the science seemed solid to me. The few scientific-level criticisms made by others seemed weak. The criticisms I read were overwhelmingly of the form, "I hate the conclusions, so it must be false." The authors were vilified, though in what they wrote and their actions in their outside lives, the two authors are clearly against rape.

If we accept some biological roots to rape, how might it affect male thinking? If some man who's on the fence about raping a woman considers that it might be part of his human heritage and crosses the line, that would be really, really unfortunate. Yet I am unwilling to suppress the truth just because it could be misused. The awareness might also let him distinguish innate urges from his better self and choose the latter to guide his actions.

Here's another example of how it could have a positive effect. Suppose a man has just had a verbal fight with his long-time partner. He knows that she has absolutely no interest in sex, and yet perhaps he feels in himself some desire to have sex with her anyway. Should he be horrified and hate himself? Perhaps it's better to stifle his awareness of all his feelings if they ever include something like that? But losing touch with one's feelings is bad. On the other hand, if he accepts this analysis, he might recognize that such feelings are part of his heritage, and that he can notice them, put them aside, and then do the right thing. He can then notice other feelings like anger, grief, and shame that might have played a part in the argument, and improve his relationship.

Rape is a terrible crime. There is far too much of it. Police often do not take it seriously. I am eager to hear of practical policy initiatives for how we can reduce its prevalence. But it is not totally divorced from human sexuality.