A Natural History of Rape?

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.

I see from the other thread that you are into Evopsych, and it appears from answers in this thread that you are in close with at least one of the authors of this rape adaptation theory. So let me start by making some general critiques...In my opinion evopsych has a tendency towards equivocation which is not useful for either psychology or biology.How about defining what evolution and adaptation and advantage mean to evopsych. From looking at your posts I see you using those terms in the most general way, and not how they are used in the scientific theory of evolution. Yet at the same time trying to gain credibility by sounding like that's what you are talking about.For example I could talk about the evolution of my next movie. It can be posed as a process of adaptation to new circumstances, with some decisions based on advantages they held for success... This does not make my movie a product of evolution.We can then step backward to talk about the evolution of cinema as an artform. Again, we use the same kind of terms... This does not make the state of cinema a product of evolution.We can then talk about art as a form of expression used for reproductive advantage. Again, with the same terms... This does not make art itself a product of evolution (though we are at least getting closer).What you (and authors such as Thornhill) are doing is deconstructing particular human action using terms ANALOGOUS to the mechanisms of biological evolution, and backing up this deconstruction with scientific statistics to decorate it with a plausibility it does not have in reality.

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Actually the women in Gotschall study were not taking any precautions of birth control and had expressed interest in having a baby.

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I will now try and find this specific study. It sounds rather strange: a study that somehow compared pregnancy rates between women being raped, with women going out to get pregnant during one night stands (are you for real?), and stranger still to make conclusions regarding the motivation of men commiting rapes from such a study. This is very suspect, and if you have a link I'd appreciate it.

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under the right situations there is significant advantage that can be gained.

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Just because YOU can see an advantage does not make it so. In fact, I am sort of dumbfounded how this became an inheritable behavioral mechanism because of advantage in reproduction, when there would have been no way for early rapists (when the mechanism formed?) to know if they succeeded or not.Correct me if I'm wrong, but your theory kind of hinges on their knowing that statistical advantage, unless yours is a lamarckian theory that because a guy produced a kid during a rape, the kid inherited some rape behavior proclivity?To me it seems pretty simple. Humans are driven to engage in sexual activity. Evolution has produced this drive this for reproductive success. It may also have driven visual and hormonal cues for sexual attraction... undoubtedly the state of being able to reproduce would contain a larger number of those cues.But RAPE is a form of human activity. Some men driven by desire to engage in sexual activity, and frustrated in their goal, may take it by force.Yet that is the same for any other biologically motivated pursuit (ex. food, air, shelter). Force is simply an optional behavior, or tool, applied by an individual given the situation. Choosing to apply force in a sexual situation does not make it evolutionarily different than applying it elsewhere... and certainly talking about longterm advantages, rather than short term (gratification) is superfluous.And what's more, human minds have developed the ability to desire more than simple sexual activity, not to mention using sexual gratification (or conquest) to replace "success" in other endeavours.Thus while evolutionary cues may certainly influence who a person finds attractive, and so targets, the fact that a person chooses sex as an instrument of achieving pyschological dominance over another, or for psychological gratification in place of something else, is NOT linked to evolutionary strategems for creating reproductive mechanisms.I think it is to hold too hard to a pet theory when one plays down the reality that many rapists had no immediate interest in the sex so much as the end humiliation or dominance, and some went on to torture and murder those victims, in order to focus on the choice of who they find attractive.Yes, evolution may dictate that those within reproductive cycles are the most attractive, and so who a person is likely to target, but it is not evolutionary mechanisms regarding reproduction which say to go and use force to gain sex... and further to torture and kill.

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Again rape is a circumstance dependent adaptation. It is most frequently found in raids and wars where these effects are least likely to be significant.

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I find this particularly questionable. Raids and wars are the removal of social norms. In that state it is not surprising to find gratification of all sorts of desires at the business end of a weapon.You are correct to point out that rape is circumstance dependent. That means it is a choice defined by a situation. But adaptational? Only to the situation.

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Why would a woman feel more humiliated with vaginal intercourse and not anal or oral? Women do suffer significantly more post-traumatic stress after vaginal rapes than other forms. This correlates with a large number of other factors that indicate that variables that increase the likely hood of conception are the major intensifiers of a rape.

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I have not disputed that women feel there reproductive organs are more personal and so an invasion of them would be more personal. What I do not understand is how that in any way shape or form implies that reproductive advantage is the motive for rape. If anything it seems to underscore why rapists hoping to humiliate their victim, in order to address power issues, would use vaginal sex.

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But if all of these societies have similar or even identical trigger events for when, how and to who the rape is committed it suggest a functional adaptation. The fact that most people have hands does not simply imply that there is a barrier to developing fins.

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I do not believe that across cultures it has been shown that who gets raped is the same, as even within this country rapists will have their own particular differences with regard to choosing victims.Generally women of reproductive age? Okay. Attraction to people of reproductive age may be driven by evolutionary mechanisms, but the fact that people choose to victimize (particularly in a sexual way) people they find attractive does not seem to require that level of mechanism.

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The grip strength is only seen after reading scenarios or watching scenarios of sexual coercion. You don’t just have it all the time, or simply by watching a boxing match. If it were only aggression why would it be so specific?

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Okay I really need a way to find this study. So you are saying that there is a study which shows that the grip strength of women is increased ONLY when reading or watching scenes of sexual coercion and when AT their sexual peak?I'd still say that doesn't suggest anything about the nature of rape. In fact if it is such a reproductive advantage, why wouldn't women have adapted to NOT resist rape? If reproduction is the end goal of sex, and your statement about reproduction with one night stands is correct, then rape is an advantage for women just as much as for men.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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Can you explain the pattern a little more clearly? I didn't understand your paragraph. Which group has the higher trauma?

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I tried explaining this again a couple times, should I expand again?

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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.

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Why would it require men who had failed to achieve sexual access other ways? Rape is a circumstance dependent adaptation, and the circumstances when its cost out weight its benefits are very precise and rare. Individuals who did abandoned the courting rituals normal to the species would certainly not have an advantage. And if rape offers an advantage (it certainly does lead to pregnancies) those who never raped would be at a slight disadvantage and over long periods of time the slight advantage to the potential rapist could lead to wide spread of the adaptation.

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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.

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Lets see some evidence for why you think rape is purely social. Why is it universal to all human cultural and across all of known human history? At some point wouldn't there be a cultural that didn't create the monsters? Any man will show almost identical penile response to a sex scene of either consensual or non-consensual sex. Is this excitement purely a social construct raised into male’s heads? I have avoided using a lot of the adjectives that people have being using about the rape adaptation theory. But the social theory seems to be straining a whole lot more than anyone wants to admit.

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Also your model doesn't explain why some rapes end in murder.

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Tiny percentage of rapes end in murder, there is always the tails of the bell curve for any trait.Your model doesn't describe why most rapes exhibit little to no physical violence beyond what is used to restrain the women.

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.

An adaptation is a trait that increases survival or reproductive success. In order for an adaptation to be qualified as most likely evolved it must also exhibit a functional design. There has to be something to the trait that suggests it was suited for the benefit it gives. Also the trait should be common to most members of the species. Context dependent adaptations will not always show complete universality because of the context dependent part. But for example the Tiger salamander cannibal morph is clearly an evolved adaptation but it expresses itself only in SOME members of the species under only VERY specific circumstances.So if you don’t have a direct DNA strand that describes a behavior or trait how do you go about trying to figure out if it is an adaptation or not? Especially if it is context dependent. The salamander adaptation they simply took members of the salamanders and put them in environments they thought would trigger the morph. They correlated the factors and discovered the causes. You can’t do this with humans and rape. Instead you have to ask what are the advantages, what are the costs, under what circumstances would the cost out weigh the benefits, and under what circumstances would the benefits out weigh the cost. You then look to see if most rapes occur cross culturally when the reproductive benefits out weigh the reproductive cost.If you could demonstrate that rape is localized to only a few cultures and is not a human universal it cannot be an adaptation. I don’t think anyone here is really trying to argue this point. So the next area to focus on is does rape provide a reproductive advantage?The Gottshall study was quoted because crashfrog had made the statement that he doubted there was any significant chance that rape could produce a child. I cannot find an electronic copy of the article but here is a summation of what they did (and thanks for questioning my ‘reality’ I am not sure metaphysical theory is exactly on topic).Gottschall examined the results of National Violence against Women Survey, a study by the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The women studied were phoned at random and interviewed about their experiences. The Gottschalls focused on 405 women who had suffered a single incidence of penile-vaginal rape at some point between the ages of 12 and 45. Of these, 6.4 per cent became pregnant. But that figure jumped to nearly 8 per cent when the researchers allowed for the women who’d been using birth control-US government statistics show that 1 in 5 of the women in the sample were likely to have been using the pill or an IUD.
To complete the comparison, the Gottschalls needed to know how many women in that age group get pregnant from one-night stands and other one-off acts of consensual sex. The answer-reported this year in a separate study by Allen Wilcox, head of the epidemiology branch of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences-was a mere 3.1 per cent.My phrase wanting to get pregnant was unfortunate, you can’t apply that motivation to all the women but they were women who were NOT using birth control either during the time of rape or during one-night stands.This demonstrates that rape is ATLEAST if not more of an effective mating strategy than single one-night stands or extra-pair copulations. And these behaviors have an even richer literature about their cross-cultural occurrences.So rape can offer a reproductive advantage.What are the cost/benefit factors? The benefit is increased reproductive success, on the order of 8-10% if you rape reproductive age women (why does everyone keep placing this age range at 12-50 it is MUCH smaller primarily 18-25 with tails declining rapidly off of that, at 35 women have lost a significant amount of their potential fertility). But the costs are fairly significant. Rape is a horrible act for the victims. It removes one of the corner stones of sexual selection theoryfemale choice. It’s also a huge liability to the family and loved ones of the victims and any one she is romantically involved with. If you are caught you will suffer some of the most horrendous revenge.If it were an adaptive trait you would expect to see men raping women at peak fertility. They would rape most frequently when the chances of being caught, or the ability of family/loved ones to retaliate is limited. This is why most rapes performed in the world and through out history have been during times of war. Conquered groups lack the ability to retaliate against the rapist actions. And the rapist certainly are focusing on reproductive age females.You keep talking like the fact that men are raping women that they find attractive is a meaningless statement, why in the social/power/humiliation theory would there be such a strong emphasis on this attraction? Unless of course a large component of the rape is about sex and sexual excitement.Some of your other statements are very curious. You seem to suggest that men need to beware of the statistical advantage of rape in order to reap its advantage? No organism needs to know that a behavior has a statistical advantage in order for the trait to evolve. Nor is it Lamarckian in anyway. There is some mechanism for inheriting reproductive strategies. I am not convinced it’s a DNA strand but I am not convinced DNA is the end all of end all anyway. If extra-pair copulation, long term and short term mating strategies can all have developed in the EEA so could rape. What is the exact mechanism that passes it along? I am not sure, but I don’t think we know the exact mechanism for almost any trait.Also the statement that women would have just as much a reproductive advantage as men in rape exhibits some poor understanding of sexual selection. The goal is not simply offspring but high quality offspring with a high quality mate. And in species that form pair-bonds offspring with good paternal investors is also important. Rape removes this female choice mechanism. It is the exact opposite of what evolution has programmed in most species. A lot of species have females that mate with a wide variety of males, but almost all of them have some mechanisms of cryptic choice, hell sperm competition alone is a form of cryptic choice that requires little to nothing on the part of the female. But selective mating is just as an effective, if not more effective mating strategy and it is what has evolved in humans. Rape circumvents the reproductive advantages of the greatest tool women have. It offers NO advantage and has huge costs.I am still at a lost for how you guys really think a power/humiliation model of rape necessitates the kind of patterns we see in how rapes are performed.

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.

I will answer a couple more points tonight then 'crash' out for the night .

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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 impregnate women - that is, men who have courted women and convinced them to bear their child. Wouldn't you?

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Not necessarily. If I was arguing that rape is the primary reproductive strategy men use I would have to argue that it was superior or on par with every strategy they use. I agree that courting a female is THE best and most effective strategy and that’s why it is the primary strategy used. But men and women have certainly used single mating opportunities as a form of strategy. the Extra-Pair copulation studies are rich in evidence in predicting what kind of males women have affairs with, under what circumstances, and even the types and frequencies of orgasms she will have. If this mating strategies could evolve because of the slight advantages they offer than rape could too because it is at least as effective.Also men do not have to WANT to get a women pregnant. The ultimate purpose of sex is offspring but the proximate reasons for sex is a oxytocin (okay okay I am simplifying for rhetorical effect its late). That means men will have sex with women without any intent of having a child. But evolutionarily speaking the reason they have sex is reproductive success. Same can be said for rape, the ultimate cause of why rape even exists could be the reproductive advantage it allotted while the proximate causes can be a whole host of other factors that have nothing to do with reproduction.

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You're overlooking the fact that most rape is acquaintance rape - the victim knows her rapist in the majority of cases. That doesn't sound like a situation where the rapist expects to get away with it, but rather a situation where the rapist feels entitled to sex.

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Help me out here, do you have a source for the breakdown of what kinds of rape are most frequent, I would say that reported rapes would be biased towards occurrences where the female knew the rapist. I would also say that world wide rape is far more common in war and raids than even date rape.

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]

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An adaptation is a trait that increases survival or reproductive success. In order for an adaptation to be qualified as most likely evolved it must also exhibit a functional design.

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It also has to be something that can be passed on. You are arguing that it is evolved because it gives a reproductive advantage. So how does the choice of the use of force get passed on as a trait to its offspring?In fact, how did the first being rape a partner? If it was choice then, why would it not be the same choice now?The Tiger Salamander example, assuming it is an inherited trait, could very well be an example of adapted inhibition. So perhaps the salamanders started as cannibals, but developed sensitivities (taste or smell?) to NOT eat each other (that would tend to be an advantage), and only under certain circumstances can this be overcome.Actually I am uncertain why you cannot put humans into a rape experiment. As long as you had controls to stop a rape before it occurs, why could humans not be put into "trigger" situations?That Gottshall study seems terribly problematic, and your use of the phrase "wanting to get pregnant" was unfortunate as it was dead wrong. One night stands are not the same as couples trying to get pregnant.

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This demonstrates that rape is ATLEAST if not more of an effective mating strategy than single one-night stands or extra-pair copulations. And these behaviors have an even richer literature about their cross-cultural occurrences... So rape can offer a reproductive advantage.

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You are moving way too quickly from results of a random phone survey to conclusions of reproductive advantage, especially ones so significant that it would be "selected for" by evolutionary processes.

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(why does everyone keep placing this age range at 12-50 it is MUCH smaller primarily 18-25 with tails declining rapidly off of that, at 35 women have lost a significant amount of their potential fertility)

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The reason why I mentioned that range is because you were talking about men being attracted to females during heights of their cycles, and choice driven by desire to reproduce. If these are true then we should see a spread across the full reproductive cycle of women.If you are correct that the actual range seen is 18-25, then I'd say culture has a lot to do with it, more so in fact than reproductive desire. Girls between 13-18 have extremely high hormonal outputs, I would think more so than around 25.The idea that girls become sexual objects at 18 is purely cultural.

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If it were an adaptive trait you would expect to see men raping women at peak fertility. They would rape most frequently when the chances of being caught, or the ability of family/loved ones to retaliate is limited.

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I'm sorry but men would also rape women at peak fertility and when the ability to be caught is limited, whether it was adaptive or not.I think crashfrog hit this on the head when he asked what you thought rape would look like if it was not a product of evolution. I don't see why it would be any different.

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This is why most rapes performed in the world and through out history have been during times of war. Conquered groups lack the ability to retaliate against the rapist actions. And the rapist certainly are focusing on reproductive age females.

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All sorts of power trips are worked out during wars. The people involved are juiced up on adrenaline and the consciousness of imminent death, as well as being in a state with few if any moral restraints, and as you point out anyone to stand in their way.I guess what I would like to see is a study which shows that pregnancy rates of those raped during an invasion are higher than the wives of those same men who commited the rapes when they were back at home, and that the offspring of rapes engaged in increased rates of rape.I think the war-rape connection is extremely flawed as you have currently outlined it.

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You keep talking like the fact that men are raping women that they find attractive is a meaningless statement, why in the social/power/humiliation theory would there be such a strong emphasis on this attraction? Unless of course a large component of the rape is about sex and sexual excitement.

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Sexual attraction may very well be regulated by evolutionary mechanisms. But why would the power-humiliation theory require anything but that. They want to make the unobtainable objects of their desire suffer, or submit to their will.Yeah, I'll bet sexual attraction may help a burglar decide to rape one girl rather than another, but that does not mean the rape itself was decided by an evolutionary mechanism to heighten reproductive success.

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You seem to suggest that men need to beware of the statistical advantage of rape in order to reap its advantage? No organism needs to know that a behavior has a statistical advantage in order for the trait to evolve.

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They do not need to "know" if what we were talking about is a physical change that is passed down to the offspring that gives that child a reproductive advantage. But what physical change occured and was passed on?What you are discussing appears to be an adaptation of choice, this versus that, for increased advantage. But how is choice passed on other than intellectually?

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Rape circumvents the reproductive advantages of the greatest tool women have. It offers NO advantage and has huge costs.

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I hate to say this but this seems contradictory to your theory. So rape is an advantage to men, but NOT to women? If its going to be a trait selected because of reproductive advantage that means a REAL reproductive advantage and so everyone... especially if your point is that women conceive at greater rates when they don't have a choice in the matter.

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I am still at a lost for how you guys really think a power/humiliation model of rape necessitates the kind of patterns we see in how rapes are performed.

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Heheheh. The power/humiliation model fits perfectly with HOW they are performed. The only thing it does not automatically determine is WHO will be raped. That can be decided by rules of attraction.I do not understand why you feel that rape must necessitate anything beyond how an individual reacts to a specific situation. Use of force to obtain what one desires is always an option, why is force used for sex any different than the other uses of force? And why can people not use sexual gratification for other than reproductive purposes?

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hell sperm competition

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As an aside, that could make a great title for a porno.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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

Just a heads up I haven't abandoned my arguments yet . I have been wrapping up midterms and some of my own research the last week or so. I am going to work on my replies and hope to have them up by this weekend. I have gone around looking for research to help bring in some more stats and less platitudes. I found a copy of the Gotschall study on pregnancy frequency on PDF and those interested I can e-mail the copy providing its for educational purposes only, ect. ect. ect.Also Gotschall has a study in-press, or soon to be, about rape frequencies around the world in relation to what context they take place under. Hopefully this will help address the question of crashfrog and I. He is supposed to e-mail me a copy and I will take a look. I will post the findings/method but its not yet gone to publication.

Pity the lowly newbie if I've missed something here, but I have a couple of difficulties. It seems to me that arguing from pregnancy rates and police blotters may or may not make a point about impregnation as a motive for rape in the populations studied, but a positive correlation is far from making the case for "adaptation".Rape is culturally defined. It may be universal in some senses, but not in all. The victim of statutory rape in one culture may be another's old maid. In the US a generation ago, there was no such thing as spousal rape. It would seem that this difficulty could be avoided by speaking of "forced insemination" rather than rape. That might do violence to the authors' intention. but for a discussion of rape's adaptive properties I think it is spot on.The salient question has been touched on here but not answered. What is the reproductive advantage to the female of forced insemination? The human infant is completely helpless for two years at the minimum. Absent the protection of the father and/or his band expectation of survival is significantly lowered; the next male up the road is likely to kill a competetor's offspring. Increased fertility with forced insemination might be beneficial in increasing biodiversity, but then human sexuality is uniquely evolved to reflect the long acculturation period human infants need. The lack of estrus in human females makes it more likely for them to mate successfully with partners with whom they share intimate knowledge.