Female sexuality

[Monkeytrousers]

hello and welcome

Can I ask a question?

I have read many (though not all) of the posts here with much interest and I have to say I have learned a lot. Thank you.

My question is about rape. There are many reasons/explanations/factors/theories about why men rape. What about those who do not? In evolutionary terms how do you account for these men?

Ps I apologise if this has been covered already.

As for men raping fertile women, I don't think men need to be socialized to find fertile women attractive.

Say in a population of humans the males varied in the age of the women they found attractive. Some men preferred women who happened to be of a fertile age, others preferred older women. These preferences would have a corresponding genetic representation/basis/coding in the respective males. The males who preferred older females would not have offspring to pass the preference onto genetically. End of preference.

So this really becomes a question of how much is genetically carried down the generations and how much can be brought about by being taught. I don't think being taught can override what I believe is a genetic preference here. It no doubt can be modified and maybe altered in some circumstances but I would think a genetically routed attraction to signs of fertility in females has the longest of histories.

v good q Yama

Etin thanks.
re anglerfish
"The male is only necessary as a sperm producer so in this case he's pretty well reduced to gonads and staying attached to the female means no need to keep searching."
isn't this true of all deep sea fish?

f*ck, is this like your worst nightmare where all the undergrads turn up, but they're 39 and think they're really really clever?

I just wnated to say although I have trouble following, I keep coming back to read more, this is great.

So don;t think your audience is dwindling, we are all here lurking.

I might ask another question in a few days.

"These preferences would have a corresponding genetic representation/basis/coding in the respective males."

really? not a snirky 'really' but a real 'really'.
Would their sexual prefs be genetically encoded?

Or more likely to do with their relationships wiht mothers/grandmothers/desire to prolong carefree sex etc etc

am i sounding arsey yet?

yama re.men who don't rape. Some say that virtually all men will rape in the 'right' circumstances. Or it is the strategy they will use if other attempts at seduction fail.
I think there is an increase in rape when the likelihood of being punished is reduced eg soldiers during war or the men who are not at war taking advantage of the fact that the fit males are not around to 'protect' their female family members.

I've seen things written about studies where 20-30% of male college students said they would rape if they knew for sure the could get away with it.

But that's still the majority who said they would not rape.

The big problem re. rapes in relationships is that those very same two people are also having consensual sex.
I think that it is very possible that at least in some cases the male does not believe he has raped the woman - though she definitely knows she has been raped. Studies have shown that men read 'sex' in all sorts of interactions with females even when there is absolutely no expression of sexual interest on the part of the female. The male really thinks he is getting the come on even when not. And if, deep down, men think that females always want sex as men do, because sex is always good, then they're not going to 'get' why a woman does not want sex.

Again, this is about the male being more primed for sex. Just hearing female voices can arouse men, and a smile from a female is read as sexual interest by men. It's amazing really that the sexes could be so ignorant of how each is experiencing the same situation.

A personal anecdote - as a young woman I was conversing with a guy about philosophy and whatnot (I was a student back then and enjoyed that sort of thing). I wasn't attracted to him but was very much enjoying the coversation. Now, this sounds crazy now but I went back to his flat because I just wanted to talk more.
He dropped his trousers and somehow I managed to talk my way out of the situation, except that that may not have been how I got away. I learned the next day that he in fact had recently been accused of rape - some poor woman had run screaming from his flat not long before. This is probably why he backed off.

Now, it may seem a stupid thing to do but it also shows how differently males and females read situations and respond to each other. To me he was just a human who I was enjoying being with. To him I must have been a dead cert!

But if as women we face it that a 'rapist' is not a rarity but even a fairly normal male, normally reading sex into interactions with females in general, we could better avoid the actual horror of having to fight one off.

I think we also need to look at where the line is between pressurized into sex and rape.

I'm worried now because this brings in the problem of the flirting resistence and real resistence. And many female animals 'run' to test the males.
Trying to debate rape becomes very tough at this point. I'm taking a break now!

But just add that I think that there may be something people don't openly address - why women would NOT want sex. If sex is fun and good etc, why say no? Or, at least, why say no when men would never say no in that situation? And this is where evolution comes in - it explains why women are not men when it comes to sex. Why women are discriminating What difference does being constantly fertile (male) and only occasionally fertile (female) make? In fact, why the sexes are different and why, though we have contraception, those differences persist.

OBM re. genetic encoding - we accept it for earlier species, the encoding of responses to signals of fertility. Would you accept genetic encoding for early hominids? The problem is when humans started to override this and why.

This is where the argument is and we'll have to come back to that later.

Yama - human males provide more ?parental investment than many other males in other species, (I think Etin mentioned the correlation between sexual dimorphism somewhere above). This is because due to our brain size, human females give birth to helpless infants (in comparison to other apes) and the mother and infant need as much help as possible to survive. It?s interesting to note that humans do this specifically because they walk on two legs, and thus the birth canal is narrower than in other apes ? human woman pay a price in painful birth because of our capacity to walk on our hind legs! Anyway, it is in a males interest to stick around, for many reasons, first one being to make sure they are his kids he is investing in and also to heighten the likelihood of his child surviving to reproduce itself. Pair bonding (love) facilitates this.

If a man rapes a woman, it is also a risky enterprise - if he is caught by the woman's kin/guardian/spouse, societal sanctions which might be as little as to make him a figure of fun or a beating (or imprisonment in places which have such things in place). he also risks the female deserting the infant, or neglecting it so it does not thrive (which if she has other children she may do - though again these are very subtle mechanisms and the woman rarely 'sets out' to neglect) or the woman might be abandoned by her long term mate (as is sadly common for rape victims) as they sometimes see the rape (especially if no palpable injury is present to show how fiercely she fought) as an act of infidelity rather than an assault.

In some cultures though, if a woman is raped, she is encouraged to marry her attacker as she is seen as ?damaged goods?, no longer a virgin and so her value (and options) go down. In some cultures, brides are bought and a man possesses his wife; many marriages are based on this dynamic.

It has also been observed in the West that women are more likely to continue to date a man who has assaulted them in an ?acquaintance rape? scenario ? that?s not to say it is common, but that it happens.

Does that help start to build up a picture, at least?

re 'running' yes - some women like to play hard to get, it turns them on to play with the stereotypes and men like to play at chasing.

I hate to say it, but to read those signals correctly takes a bit of familiarity and trust.

Oh and good WIki link re. sexual dimorphism, MT

Everyone knows about some species of female spider eating the male during copulation? They do this as an investment for their future offspring. It is possible that they would never run into a female again, so they deposit the sperm and give her a nutritious meal at the same time.

In some insect species, the sperm is only released after the head is bitten off!

Etin - technical question; Genetic encodng/imprinting? Different things yes?

I'm off to bed now. Night!

Sorry; it's genomic imprinting isn't it - not genetic - durr!

Absolute last post for now but wondering how many women have sex when they don't really want it compared to men?
How many of us have been in situations where we've had sex but possibly wondered how far the male would ahave pushed it if we'd put up more resistence.
AND how the fact that often females, with some seducing by the male, gradually turn from not wanting sex to wanting sex.

As mentioned before, when we're ovulating, and sometimes at other times, we may feel 'primed' and capable of humping any male that moves. But at other times we need romancing and seducing and to feel generally good about the man and the situation. Sometimes we don't necessarily know ourselves if we'll move easily from a 'not interested' to a 'yeah, interested now'.

But there are of course times when it's a definite 'no' too. Female sexuality is more complex than that of the male. We need to incorporate this into our understanding of how and why rape is so horrendously common.

But if as women we face it that a 'rapist' is not a rarity but even a fairly normal male, normally reading sex into interactions with females in general, we could better avoid the actual horror of having to fight one off.

already know they're normal - but I think disagree with why.
just thinking now why i would break taboos... I always know why I've done it.
unless... unless.. rape isn't actually a taboo?

sorry will be dipping in and out now till w/e, though very stimulating in gen.

Etin and Monkeytrousers thanks for all your erudite posts - it all now seems a much simpler issue than I had thought - basically men rape because and when they can in the absence of sufficient restraining factors.

OBM my perception is that rape is basically taboo in our society - I believe that the majority of men (but of course by no means all) in countries where there is reasonable social stability and a reasonable female influence on society are sufficiently socialised that they stand to lose too much both in terms of their social status and their personal relationships to transgress this boundary.

I think the real problems come where this social structure breaks down, and particularly where you have all male subcultures where the rape taboo is turned on its head so that rape actually confers social status on the rapist. This must be one of the reasons that rape numbers become horrifyingly high in war and in prisons.

So I think the challenge for us as women is to do whatever we can to preserve social stability (which to my mind means working towards social equality), and to use our influence through our careers, our democratic rights, our campaigning, and through the way that we educate our children, to ensure that as many men as possible have a vested interest in not breaking the taboo.

off for the first part of w/e will check in when get back!

You are so right Kittock re social stablity - we should never forget that the rights of women are very fragile and held in place by such stablity (we shouldn't take them so much for granted!) - and as you rightly highlighted, this is demonstrated by rape stats going through the roof in times of war or even natural disaster - at any time when stablity is threatened.

So... does this mean that we agree with Andrea Dworkin re. 'All men are rapists' (or is this not what she was referring to?)

So is rape something you think we just have to tolerate because we're women, MT?

You appear to be arguing that men just can't help themselves.

Dworkin never said that all men are rapists.

Didn't she? What did she say then? (I mean, did she say something along those lines?)

She said that patriarchal society had a hard time telling the difference between sex and rape and often views them as one and the same (even though that's not how rape victims experience it) and that male violence against women including sexual violence was at the root of male oppression of women.

You can read her here:

www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/OnlineLibrary.html

I think this idea that men can't help themselves is abhorrent. It's like claiming that racists can't help themselves attack people of colour. Rape is a dominance device, not a reproductive device. Men will rape men, elderly women and children both boys and girls. If offspring arise from any of these attacks it's by luck not because of judgement or instinct.

They will also rape in pairs or gangs, a much more common form of rape than people realise.

Good link, thanks

Hold on, Elizabetth, we're not saying let men keep on raping. What we're trying to do is get to grips with the different biologies of the sexes and the different behaviours that were selected for in the sexes and, even though it may be that males have been willing and able to coerce females into sex, we're trying to point out why it is so very damaging to females to be coerced ie not have a choice about mating.

We evolved to devour as much sugar and fat we could get hold of. Now it kills us. We know why we want to eat the stuff that ruins our health and knowing this might help us deal with it better, not just go on gorging.

Have to dash off but will be back later.