The Unwelcome Truth about Rape

[TheywontletmehavethenameIwant]

I thought I'd post a link to this interesting article, it's likely to be received with hostility by those who bother to read it.

But I think it makes important points and might call for a complete rethink on how we as a society think of 'rape', especially in these day of increased VAWG. We can't protect against it if we can't identify it.

The Scientists Persecuted for Their Rape Research

"In their work, Thornhill and Palmer excuse nothing and absolve no one. They simply remind people that sexual violence has something to do with biology and that ignoring that fact means—at best—misunderstanding the nature of rape and, at worst, harming victims. In the face of such heresy, the outrage machine went into overdrive. There were defamatory articles, bad-faith readings, insults, and even threats from which the researchers needed police protection. At the end of it all, both their lives had been irreparably damaged."

Poorly written article which does not cover the relevant perspectives. The women raped as part of wars and civil unrest are raped to dehumanise and humiliate. It’s not about sexual desire.

And for ethnic cleansing reasons too - to impregnate the women and girls. 😢

I have read about conflicts where soldiers have been given viagra to facilitate the rape of captive women. Editing to add: which strengthens the previous post that rape in conflict is not about normal sexual desire. It is firmly violence perpetrated on one side by the other.

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.

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.

On the contrary, rape as deliberate promotion of sexual reproduction using the aggressors' genes is a strong vindication of their theory that rape may have an evolutionary basis in successful reproduction. "Sexual" definitely includes reproduction as well as sexual desire.

(With the apparently necessary disclaimer that an evolutionary basis is no kind of excuse for a criminal act.)

Interesting read thank you for posting it @TheywontletmehavethenameIwant.
It would seem that the book burning gender idealogs didn't start the cancellation craze but merely adapted it to their cause

I am familiar with Thornhill and Palmer’s work on this and it’s fairly typical evo psych, hardly groundbreaking, and there was definitely a suggestion that women can “prevent” rape, and that policy should reflect this. Obviously they shouldn’t have been treated like that for presenting their research though and I agree it’s an early example of cancel culture.

does their research touch on male on male rape at all?

I also agree with Marie.

There is always power involved, because however much it’s motivated purely by sexual desire the rapist knows they can’t have the sex they want to without exercising it, and they will generally know they are violating the victim’s right to consent over what happens to their (generally her) body. People tend to grasp this much more easily when they think about male rape.

Try again. Young and teenaged boys were raped in Ukraine by invading Russian troops. Ukraine is not unique in this respect.

X posted with @Theeyeballsinthesky and no I don’t think they focus much on male on male rape.

Yes, any primitive tribe that practised forced impregnation of the women of rival tribes would have a reproductive advantage, so it's not surprising such behaviour is common in wartime.

The calculation is different for an individual man in peacetime, because a rape strategy and a cooperative strategy can both pay off (the latter because it increases the chances of progeny surviving to reproductive age). I don't find it unbelievable that there are some men who are genetically inclined to rape, which will express itself as finding sexual pleasure in violent, coerced, or deceptive sex. A paraphilia, in other words.

I don't find useful the concept of rape as a last resort: for these men, it's a first resort.

I don't think the fact that individual behaviour is reproductively counterproductive (rape of males, rape and murder of females) means that the tendency to it can't be linked to ancestors whose reproductive success rested on coercive mating strategies.

I guess that doesn't support their theory of sexual attraction being a large factor 🤷🏻‍♀️

What but sexual satisfaction could explain such revolting behaviour? There are many other awful ways to humiliate and dominate men than raping them.

Culturally, it’s a powerful
and evocative humiliation and in war it’s often not just about humiliation of the rape victims but their people.

Quite. I have read their paper, I can’t remember if it’s mentioned or not but it certainly isn’t the focus.

It depends on what you think the article was about, my take was because we have refused to accept there might be a biological reason for rape, our strategies to try and defend against it have failed.

Men who have invaded a country are away from home, their initial impulse to rape any women they come across is just as likely to be because they haven't had a chance to satisfy their sexual needs as to have anything to to with the wider picture of humiliating their 'enemy'.

If sexual desire is the ultimate focus of rape rather than power and control how do they explain the age range of female victims, from tiny babies to women in their 90s?

Or are we to conclude that men, or should it be the male sex rapes just because they can and anything else is secondary?

It can be an evolved trait and be about power. Species have evolved lots of strategies for establishing dominance. Understanding these is key to understanding the behaviours of social species (like humans).

I think you could easily construct an argument from an evopsych perspective that says men tend to want to dominate others and they especially tend to want to dominate women. That would very much put human males in line with many other male mammals. If you were to identify that as an (evolved) trait of human male psychology then it surely becomes highly questionable to think that that trait suddenly becomes irrelevant when rape happens.

It does though open up another, scarier possibility - that male sexual behaviours are often about dominance over women even when violence or overt violations of consent are not involved. Men can be exerting power over women even when they appear to be acting perfectly nice. I wonder what the scientists in the article would think of that conclusion?

We need a classical nod.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_the_Sabine_women

Even if rape victims were evenly distributed across age groups as you suggest, I'm not sure why you would think that meant it wasn't about sexual desire. That seems to be quite a leap.

So what are the “strategies” you think would be better? ISTR Thornhill and Palmer’s suggestions were pretty shitty in terms of victim blaming and putting the responsibility on women to “protect” themselves by not making themselves targets by wearing “provocative” clothes. Have you actually read their book itself?

What but sexual desire could explain it, sexual desires come in all shapes and sizes, some men have what I would consider perverted desires.