Thank you for the link, OP.
From the article:
Here are a few examples of the arguments they present: the victim’s physical appearance matters to the rapist; rape is first and foremost a sexual act, and only secondarily (and not always) motivated by a desire to dominate, humiliate, or annihilate; rape can be a means for the rapist to transmit his genes; reproductive biology plays a role in sexual coercion. Both researchers hammer home the point that while certain criteria—such as the victim’s age, appearance, and vulnerability—are important to the aggressor and this explains why men rape—this can never excuse rape, much less justify it.
My first thought is - does anyone deny that rape is by definition a sexual act? it is the motivations for the act that are debatable,
And surely it is accepted that rape is sometimes motivated primarily by 'biology', for instance the rape of a specific woman who the rapist knows would never have consensual sex with him?
But whatever the primary motivation, the whole context of such a rape is exercising power over a woman. I don't understand how the researchers think that power is not involved.
In other cases, as we all know, the only specificity sought by the rapist is that his victim is a woman - what she looks like, what she is wearing, who she is, is irrelevant. I don't see how they can build a whole theoretical framework about rape without looking at the range of motivations.
The Thornhill and Palmer affair is an ugly story. It is the story of two researchers who challenged intellectual orthodoxy and found themselves trapped in a world in which rumour counts as proof, the motivations falsely attributed to you matter more than what you actually wrote and people would rather punish men than refute ideas.
Is there an 'intellectual orthodoxy' that says that rape has nothing to do with sex?
Thornhill and Palmer “threatened a consensus that had held firm in intellectual life for a quarter of a century,” writes psychologist Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature_ (2002), the first book to detail the witch hunt.
Now it's a 'witch hunt'! And a reference to a book published in 2002.
I'm not convinced by their narrative of plucky researchers being silenced, not because their theories don't hold up, but because they are 'challenging orthodoxy..'
edited to add that I've seen the other posts now, and agree that rape in war is a very relevant challenge to their theory.