Sex, Culture, and the Biology of Rape: Toward Explanation and Prevention

Some light leisure reading (as of this time last year, it was so hard to find an article on sex and rape. Almost everything was the PC mantra of power):

Sex, Culture, and the Biology of Rape: Toward Explanation and Prevention (Owen Jones, 1999)

"Wholesale exclusion of life science perspectives may very well come at the cost of inaccuracy - and the impediments to rape prevention that inaccurate or incomplete theories of causation might occasion. For it is unclear that the costs of believing something to be true, when it is not, necessarily exceed the costs of believing something not to be true, when it is."

"The majority of these [feminist and sociological] perspectives, however, grow from the central idea that rape is the consequence of: (a) social traditions that reflect male power and dominance, on one hand, and female powerlessness and exploitation, on the other; (b) socially stratified and unequal gender roles; and (c) cultural attitudes and assumptions about men, women, and rape. In this view, patriarchal culture socializes males to be potential rapists. And because rape reflects systemic political and power imbalances between men and women, rape is largely reconceptualized from a ''sex'' crime (motivated by sexual desire) to a ''violent'' crime (motivated by misogyny)."

"It is pointless to conceptualize any law-relevant behavior as the product of nature... or of nurture... is like asking whether the area of a field is determined by its length or by its width."

"This contextualized and systemic understanding of human behavior affords law little predictive power about the behavior of a single, identified human individual. (In like fashion, even useful meteorology affords little predictive power about the movement of a single cloud.)"

"While I recognize... the sin of anthropomorphizing nonhuman behavior, I am persuaded that the inverse - what Frans de Waal terms ''anthropodenial'' (the overzealous rejection of likely commonalities in behavioral processes between humans and other animals) - is an equally insidious danger, equally likely to flaw analysis."

"There is considerable evidence for the existence of rape in other species... reviewing studies of insects; birds; fish; frogs, toads, and lizards; a worm species; plants; elephant seals; and several nonhuman primates; and concluding that rape appears to take place in all but the worms and plants"

"Among wild orangutan populations, rape accounts for one-third to one-half or more of all copulations."

"In both nonhuman and human animals, it is extremely rare for raped females to be killed, and quite rare for them to be injured in ways that prevent possible conception and birth. In humans, rape-murders are exceedingly rare (for example, occuring in only 7 rapes out of 1223 in one study, and 1 of 646 in another study). According to a recent report by the National Victim Center, over two-thirds of rape victims report no physical injures, 24% report minor physical injures, and only 4% sustain serious physical injures."

"It may be tempting to attribute the storng sex bias among [rape] perpetrators to anatomical differences alone. However, the same bias is present even in species lacking larger and stronger males. And the bias similarly obtains not only among species such as mammals in which an aroused penis is generally necessary for copulation, but also among species... in which males have no penises."

[On scorpionfly mating] "Large brains are not required for sophisticated, algorithmic predispositions such as: ''If in possession of a dead insect, court; if no insect. spit and court; if no success, attempt rape; repeat.'' That is, within a very tiny, nonsentient brain, contitional mating predispositions can evolve."

"When the female orangutan's ability to flee an approacing male is experimentally manipulated in captivity, the very same male orangutan who will be extremely unaggressive and solicitous of a female who can physically escape him, will generally grab and rape a struggling female if she cannot escape him."

"In a 1983 study by Randy and Nancy Thronhill of 10,315 rape victims, eighty-five percent were less than thirty-six years old, in sharp contrast to the female population at large."

"In one study, the ages of raped females ranged from 1 to 88, with the mode at 14" (!)

"The Thornhills found that ''[r]eproductive-age victims [of sexual assault] were overwhelmingly more often victims of penile-vaginal intercourse than were victims in the other age categories.'' Moreover, the likelihood of penile-vaginal intercourse during sexual assault exceeded 90% when the victim was of potentially reproductive age (twelve to forty-four) [and 46% otherwise]"

"''Reproductive-age victims were significantly more psychologicall traumatized by rape than pre-reproductive-age girls (0-11) or post-reproductive-age women (45+)''... By contrast, when psychological trauma experienced by female victims of robbery is analyzed by victim's age, older victims are more traumatized than younger victims."

"As early as 1979, several researchers noted that penile-vaginal intercourse is associated with adjustment problems in female rape victims more frequently than is any other variable relating to sexual acts [including rectal intercourse]... non-reproductive-aged females are... more equally traumatized by penile-vaginal intercourse and other forms of sexual assault."

"Rapists are disproportionately young, postpubescent males. Studies often show a median age of twenty-five, with only a small percentage of rapists over thirty. Note that this has remained true, over time, even as different male cohorts age."

"In one study of 887 incidents of robbery... the average age of female robbery victims was thirty-five years old, the average age of rape-robbery victims was significantly lower: less than twenty-eight years old."


"These particular objections, common to many works dismissive of biobehavioral reasoning... are likely to cloud accurate assessment, probing critique, and constructive law-relevant interdisciplinary synthesis. I categorize these misunderstandings as:

A. The Error of the False Dichotomy;
B. The Error of the Damning Determinism;
C. The Error of the Causal Correlate;
D. The Error of the Manifest Motive;
E. The Error of the Sponsoring Species;
F. The Error of the Single Society;
G. The Error of the Failed Fornicators;
H. The Argument from Specious Spontaneity;
I. The Argument from Substitute Sex;
J. The Argument from Inconceivable Conception;
K. The Argument from Modern Maladaptiveness;
L. The Argument from Incomplete Explanation; and
M. ''Ought Is'' Errors"


"If rape is significant correlated with attitudes dismissive of female autonomy, for example, an evolutionary perspective suggests why such attitudes are likely to manifest, in part, in forced copulation, rather than in any of a whole host of other nonsexual activities (say, forced tattoos, forced sushi, or forced motorcycle-washing)."

"Genetic determinism, as it is popularly understood and feared, is a social construct, a mythical state of mind attributed to behavioral biologists (typically without citation), and then cathartically demolished."


"Consumers of rape scholarship, such as legal thinkers, should not mistake claims about the meanings of rape to be facts about the causes of rape. Meaning is a construct created by the analyst and offered in hope that its characterization of an act is somehow insightful."

Meaning?! Wth.

Someone: a feminist reading on rape (wahtever it is) - may not really address the rape problem as well as say, socio economic or maybe biuological factors can

i mean it's interesting sure, to hear twhat the feminists say (maybe :P) but how does that help us

it's the reason why i dont really like lietrature
because i see no purpose and meaning in the academic study of it

i mean sure a good novel is didatic and makes u think but why do i need to talk about a feminist, marxist, psycholinguistic, whatever perspective of it

well it makes u a better writer for one. but then again u dont need to be in lit to be a good writer. :P
i'm sure there are science ppl who write well too!

and seriously so what if we find out that gasp, jane austen actually had marxist threads running throughout her novel
*shrug*


"Evidence proffered in support of these [PC] conclusions about motivation typically extrapolates from a small number of individual (and admittedly powerful) rape episodes without convincingly demonstrating, or often even attempting to demonstrate, that the parts are truly representative of the whole - that what was correlated with some rapes is correlated, generally, with most or all rapes."

"Sex could be a vehicle for aggression, as commonly assumed and asserted, or aggression could be a vehicle for sex... Similarly, it could be that rape is an epiphenomenon of sociocultural messages that devalue women. But it could also be the case that devaluing women is simply a precondition for rape... that does not automatically mean that rape is primarily a vehicle for expressing lack of respect, any more than eating is primarily a vehicle for expressing chewing."

"''The most common and least violent of rapists are usually solitary, socially inadequate men with low self-esteem, whose primary aim is to reassure themselves of their sexual adequacy and masculinity by exercising power over their victim. When interviewed months or years later, they typically report the fantasy that the women they rape will fall in love with them, and their behavior during the rape reflects this fantasy: They tend to kiss and fondle their victims, to compliment them on their beauty, to avoid violence, and to become distressed if the woman becomes too manifestly upset or struggles too much.''"

"The urge to eat can exist quite independently of any conscious motive to acquire nutrition, and the urge to have sex can exist quite independently of any conscious motive to reproduce."

"Despite continued popular belief that Margaret Mead and Peggy Reeves Sanday discovered societies where rape was unknown, it has been demonstrated convincingly that this is untrue... ''In West Sumatra, one of the reputed 'rape-free' societies... 19 per 1 million females''... Samoa, which Margaret Mead reported in the 1930s to be essentially rape free, has since been shown to have an official rape rate twice as high as that for the United States."

[On men with consensual sex partners not raping] "In the white-fronted bee-eater bird... raping males... often have contemporaneously willing and reproductive mates... ''Most patrons of prostitutes, adult bookstores, and adult movie theatres are married men, but this is not considered evidence for lack of sexual motivation.''"

"Critics of the theories of evolutionary influences on patterns of rape quite frequently fault them for failing to explain all incidences... Since the evolutionary theories have never claimed even to explain all instances of penile-vaginal rape (what theory, life science or social science, explains all instances of any human behavior?), it is nonsensical to fault them for not explaining more."

"Allison and Wrightsman, for example, argue that biologically-based theories are unlikely to be true, because they fail to explain many instances of rape... Yet the major theme of the book is that in all likelihood rapists differ from one another, and that different rape scenarios require different explanations."

"This reasoning from counter-examples fails without recourse to frequency distributions. In statistical terms, it emphasizes the range and ignores the median."

"The Moralistic Fallacy, in mirror image [to the Naturalistic Fallacy], is committed whenever one assumes that ''is'' follows from ''ought,'' such that what ought to be is what is."

"Rather surprisingly, the overwhelming bulk of rape literature never articulates, or attempts to test, testable predictions... many of these apparent patterns of data... are seemingly not predicted by popular sociocultural theories of rape alone."

"Hostility, sex-role stereotypes, and exploitative intent cannot explain [why rape is an overwhelmingly male behavior across species], because these are functions of higher cognitive capacities, not exhibited by many species in which males rape."

"The overwhelming absence of major physical damage in humans [rape victims] is particularly odd, given: (a) the possible penalties (rape is one of the three most harshly punished crimes in most societies), (b) the typical use of some force to overcome victim resistance, (c) the supposed hostility underlying the rape; (d) the extent to which close proximity increases the probability that a victim can identify her attacker to authorities; and (e) the extent to which eliminating the witness could minimize the risk of being caught and punished. Men commonly maim or kill each other during hostile encounters. And they often kill witnesses to severely penalized crimes. Why so little of this with rape?"

"Why does the mean age of rapists remain at about twenty-five over time, when most rapists are never caught or punished? If society alone socializes men to rape, it must also be extremely effective at reversing that process as they age. Otherwise, why would former rapists so uniformly stop raping, and all at about the same age? That is, why do young rapists, almost never apprehended, not become middle-aged and old rapists?... Brownmiller & Mehrhof... attempt to explain this away by asserting, without evidence, that ''[t]he forcible rapists... retires from the field when his legs give out.''"

"Why does the age distribution for raped women differ so markedly from the age distribution of murdered women> If rape were primarily a function of hostility toward women, one would expect the distributions in rape and murder contexts to be quite similar."

"This is a big obstacle to a theory rejecting biology - something akin to explaining how one might begin construction of a building with the twentieth floor."

"Forced copulation in patterns quite similar to that in humans is quite common in the animal kingdom, even among species, such as insects, with precious little capacity to ''learn.''"

"Legal issues [regarding chemical castration include] whether there is a First Amendment right to fantasize sexually."


"It has never been quite clear whether the message for today's men is that they should muster more sympathy or empathy for rape victims. Sympathy risks an objectifying paternalism, because its very essence underscores the distinction between the observed and the observing. Empathy risks the potentially absurd - the spectacle of a man claiming to truly understand, to feel, or to know precisely what it feels like to be a raped woman."

Since men are screwed either way, maybe they should just ignore the problem.


"Male legislators, judges, and prosecutors encouraged to discount or disbelieve the existence of male-female differences may mentally substitute themselves for a rape victim when assessing the reasonableness of her fear of rape or her response to it... since they typically will not experience the same fear of or trauma... they may therefore tend to discount the significance of rape to the average female... In Coker v. Georgia, for example, an all male Supreme Court concluded that the death penalty was a constitutionally impermissible punishment for raping an adult woman."

"Evolutionary analysis reveals potential tensions between anti-prostitution policies and anti-rape policies... In a longitudinal study, Barber found that the conviction rate for rape and attempted rape in the seven-year period following the closure of brothels in the territory of Queensland was triple the rate for the seven-year period prior to the closures. The socio-economic and demographic characteristics of those convicted correlated positively with those of the men who had most frequented brothels during more permissive times. Moreover, the increase was three times the rate of increase for convictions of other violent crimes."

"Despite great theoretical potential for cultural variability, forced penile-vaginal intercourse is an inflammatory and serious offense in every known society. This is true, despite the fact that there are many acts of physical violence (say, cutting off a leg) that are, on average, more physically harmful than rape. All over the planet, rape makes women fearful and angry, and it makes nonraping males who are fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, and friends of the raped female livid to the point of the most extreme forms of violence and retribution-seeking. There is no research of which I am aware to suggest that it has not always been thus. (Even the Coker Court conceded that “[s]hort of homicide, [rape] is the ‘ultimate violation of self.”) Note too that the widest variety of legal systems, including our own, formally proscribe rape with harsh penalties. Although the complexities of the crime, the difficulties of proving lack of consent, and the vicissitudes of local attitudes have often made rape underreported, underprosecuted, and underpunished, convicted rapists still tend to be subject to unusually harsh penalties, including even death. The severity of these penalties is clear when compared to the physical harm typically inflicted, and to the less severe penalties that typically follow from even more physically severe nonsexual harms.

The extraordinarily widespread proscription against rape, coupled with the unusually harsh sanctions rape invokes, requires explanation. Absent evolutionary analysis, a comparative legal historian would need to posit that these legal systems are commonly descended from a legal system present when all early humans lived together, have arisen in separate cultures coincidentally (like so many heads in consecutive coin tosses), or have mimicked each other through ancient, cross-cultural exposure."

Footnote: "Tedeschi and Felson, supra note 116, at 334 (1994) "A cross-cultural survey of 100 societies from the Human Relations Area Files showed that rape is one of the three most heavily punished crimes"