Arbogast

Yall seem pretty ignorant of human history if you havent read countless accounts of a victorious army raping and pillaging after a victory.

Lets take a more modern example, that is clearly and undebatably documented, the Soviet Occupation of Eastern Germany in 1945.

A huge number of German women became pregnant and bore the children of Soviet soldiers due to rape.

God Fearing Atheist

Could rape take place without sexual desire, Rick? Isnt sexual arousal of the rapist the one common factor in all rapes? Isnt it possible for sexual desire to be the only proximate cause?

Even the studies you mentioned (in particular, Groth et al) make quite clear in their selected quotes from interviews that rapists, if only in part, are guided by sexual desire. In another study he did (Groth, 1979), we find rapists saying things like "I just wanted to have sex with her and that was all", or "you could see her nipples and breasts and, you know, they were just waiting for me..." He even admits that his "power rapist", the most common type, "may report that his behavior was prompted by a desire for sexual gratification". I noticed that the abstracts of those studies you quoted said similar things. Indeed, Smithyman's meta-survey (1978) found that 84% of rapists reported sexual motivation as the proximate cause of rape solely, or in part.

Your problem, though, is confusing the proximate with the ultimate. For example, the proximate cause of running away from an attacker is an emotional sense of fear; it acts on the short-term. But why do we feel fear when attacked? Ultimately, its an adaptive mechanism for keeping us out of trouble; that is, it increase reproductive fitness.

What, then, is the ultimate cause of rape? Can you explain its evolution to me? For what purpose, or as a by-product of what, do men *ultimately* use rape as control or as a display of power?

Can you make sense of these unusal rape patterns for me? Can you tell me why it is that reproductive females are raped more? Why they are more subject to penile-vaginal penetration? Why men more often ejaculate when raping these individuals in this way? Can you tell me why excessive physical abuse during a rape is rare (that is, beyond what is necessary to carry out the act?) Hell, can you tell me why this desire for domination is manifested as a *sexual act* at all? These are all very curious things, which, in the light of what we know about evolution, cannot be explained as you would like.

-GFA

God Fearing Atheist

Yes. Men also respond to the costs and benifits, making war-time a particularly bad situation for women owing to the decreased threat of prosecution, fewer mates around, etc.

There has been some suggestion that human males have evolved a general "rape-cost-benifit" mechanism, but I think its probably just another manifestion of a general human mechanism to measure these sort of things.

-GFA

God Fearing Atheist

Tara,

Thornhill and Palmer have responded to their critics on a number of occassions. You can see responses here and here.

-GFA

pz

Not at all. Rape happens all the time. It has happened on a massive scale in human history.

What you seem to be missing is the crucial point: that does not mean that it is a heritable trait, that it is selectively advantageous, or that it has even had any significant impact on our evolutionary history.

I would also add that the reproductive success of that victorious army would probably have been much higher if they'd stayed home, tended to their farms and families, and plowed their wives every night.

God Fearing Atheist

But Rick, there *is* an evolutionary explaination for everything we do: we are *only* the results of our genes and their environment!

Are all of these things adaptive? Of course not. Are they all the result of Darwinian mechanisms, or a by-product of such? Absolutely.

-GFA

God Fearing Atheist

Heres a paper on non-human rape you guys might enjoy.

-GFA

Tara

Correct me if I'm wrong Dr. Rick, but the point you and “pz” were making was that although nature brought about everything that we are, so everything we do is “natural”, that doesn't mean every behavior we have is a result of natural selection. Some behaviors are not even heritable and some are heritable but have not been naturally selected. Psychosis for example is heritable, but not beneficial to the species survival, and was therefore not a product of natural selection. So because psychosis was not naturally selected. I'm good with that. But is it wrong to say psychosis is "a result of evolution". We did evolve and the behaviors associated with psychosis are a behavior we exhibit.

God Fearing Atheist

Not everything we are in *adaptive*, but its all the result of evolution.

-GFA

Koyaanisqatsi

Actually, I did in my first post. The one you responded to initially, but apparently did not read this part:

Does forceful coupling occur? Yes, it does. Do any of these animals have the same kind of complex psychological makeup as humans? Doubtful, but who knows? I don't speak scorpionfish.

Perhaps there needs to be a further (and carefull) delineation here between sexual frustration due to an aggressively anti-sex culture that nonetheless sells sexuality by the boatloads, such as we see in the US, that may partially explain to some degree what's commonly referred to as "date rape" and rape; a violent act of dominance (that, as others have pointed out, also applies to men who rape other men and women who rape men and women who rape women)?

It's one thing to be a sexually repressed teenager who took advantage of an unconscious woman at a party; it's another thing to be a sexually repressed teenager who took advantage of a woman by causing her to become unconscious for the express purpose of raping her; and it's another thing to be a sexually repressed predator of the nature of most convicted rapists; etc., etc.

It's all "rape" no matter how you slice it, of course, but these are all complex psychological problems and certainly share at least one thing in common that has almost nothing to do with procreation that I can see; the derailment of empathy in the abusers (not to mention the psychological damage inflicted upon the victims).

Is it a sliding scale? Does the rapist who tears a vagina with a broken bottle or knife start out as a "date rapist"? Possibly, but I've never seen any studies that demonstrates this, but that's not the point.

The only thing I have seen is the consistency of the underlying psychological disfunction of the abusers. If you would like to also discuss the possible psychological disfunction in scorpionfish mentality, by all means, but to compare the two without such considerations is untenable, IMO.

The same kinds of caveats can be applied to any discussion of what happened to various militarized communities throughout history. The lack of empathy for others is central to anything a militarized community does, not just rape.

In our own country, slave masters who raped their slaves did so for myriad psychological reasons, none of which, IMO, were procreative. If a slave master wanted more slaves, then all he need do (to put it in disgusting, yet appropriate terms) would be to "breed" his "herd." He wouldn't need to impregnate them in order to do this, so there was probably a more psychological reason behind such events (again, going right back to dominance and asserting aggressive control).

Don't forget that it's only been in the last century of human evolution that women have even been considered as anything other than property; as equals to men, and that is still (unfortunately) primarily on paper and only in the Western "civilization" and has in depressingly little ways been ingrained yet in the collective psyche, which goes more to the "spoils of war" angle that God Fearing is coming from.

But all of these are subtley different qualities of socio-psychological conditioning and malfunction, so to conflate all of them under the umbrella "rape" is not justified, simply because one misunderstands the common element. It is not the insertion of a penis into a vagina. That is a common element, but not the relevant common element, or, again, there wouldn't be male on male rape and female on male rape and female on female rape.

If I have been brought up in a war environment and forced myself to commit attrocious acts of violence and aggression against an enemy during my most formative years and told that I am to rape the women in order to "spread the seed of the empire," if you will, then we're discussing an entirely different series of psychological "events" taking place than a person in a peaceful environment who nonetheless hunts women (or men) in order to assert dominance over them in this manner, yes?

Arguably, the term "rape" didn't even become a crime of any importance in our culture until women fought back (and by that I don't necessarily mean during the attack; though that was a conditional element in our courts for decades and is still argued) and only that comparitively recently in human history and by no means globablly, so you have to factor in all of that as well, yes?

Regardless, it still all ultimately goes back to empathy for others and little to nothing to do with a penis being forcibly injected into a vagina in any more relevant fashion than a knife being injected into a gut or a bullet being fired from a gun or a fist being used to beat down an innocent.

These are all acts of aggression regardless of the weapon used.