Why are women so bad at resisting rape?

The ubiquity of marital rape throughout history explains why women did not evolve an instinct to violently resist all rapists

Vasili Vladimirovich Pukirev, Unequal Marriage, 1862, Wikimedia Commons

A week ago I wrote about how easy it is to rape an average woman. Just use the fact that women benefit more from keeping intimate relationships non-violent and civilized, and you're in. It doesn't always work. But it works much more often than it should, both compared to ideals of female behavior and compared to the ideas of mainstream evolutionary psychology.

In evolutionary psychology, the view of rape tends to be: Rape is very damaging to the reproductive outlooks of a woman. She risks wrong paternity if she would get pregnant, no paternal investment from the rapist, less paternal investment from a partner, social ostracism and diminished outlooks on the partner market. For that reason, women should have evolved effective mechanisms to resist sexual coercion, the reasoning goes. For example, in When Men Behave Badly (2021), David Buss builds his reasoning on that assumption.

I think the whole line of thought is fundamentally flawed. Those who say that rape was very damaging to a woman's reproductive outlooks in the past have forgotten about one phenomenon: Marital rape. As a rule in history, women have not been allowed to choose freely whom to marry. That means that innumerous girls and women have been forced to have sex with men who weren't their first choice, or their choice at all. In some present-time traditional cultures, women and girls are still married off to whomever more influential family members like and are legally raped. Why would that thing have been any different in history?

David Buss is very clear that he counts marital rape as rape and nothing else. But apparently, he only does so for present times. Otherwise his assessment of the damage caused by rape would have to be significantly altered. Yes, being raped by an outsider in many cases damages a woman's reproductive outlooks. But being raped by a husband in most cases doesn't. If all cases of marital rapes throughout history are included in the estimate, the damage to the female side from the average case of rape falls dramatically. 

Forced marriages are definitely damaging the reproductive interests of women. The point of forced marriages is to coerce a female, and sometimes a male, into a union that is more beneficial for the family and society at large than for the individuals involved. Cousin marriage is a classic example: A cousin tends to be a suboptimal partner for the individual, but cousin marriage is nevertheless a very common way for families to get along and communities to stick together¹. But the damage is caused by the marriage in itself and all the other opportunities it blocks. Not by the specific acts of marital rape. 

How to adapt to coercion

Imagine it yourself: You are 13 years old. You hope for a future with children and grandchildren (almost everyone  in your society does). It is your wedding night, in bed with a man you didn't choose yourself. He is not attractive the way you dreamt of. You don't like the way he smells. Now he obviously thinks that he is going to penetrate you, which, besides, hurts like hell. What do you do?

1. Bite him! Kick him! Scratch him!

2. Comply silently

3. Fake a little enthusiasm

If you take alternative A, you will be true to your feelings. But how about the children and grandchildren? If the man doesn't like you, he can become angry and violent. He can also be put off by your resistance and go out and seek other women. In reality, he has other options apart from you. By contrast, if you seek other options, it would be socially acceptable for the man to disown you or even to kill you. If men have a consent preference, which they seem to have, you are not especially attractive when you kick and bite. Either it will anger him, which increases the risk he will become violent. Or it will make him tired of you and seek a better wife, a concubine or a prostitute. 

So in comparison, alternative B or C are less risky. If you get used to being raped by time, it is even better. If you develop a pattern of responsive desire and actually start liking it, your husband might get a renewed interest in you, just when he was starting to feel some ancient urge for sexual variety. Which makes him more loyal and supportive of you and your children.

The right kind of rape

Ideally, nature would create a female who complies to her husband’s rape attempts, but who instinctually resists a non-husband's forced advances. This is what societies all over the world have tried to create: A woman who submits to her legal husband, but violently resists all other men.

Could nature serve society with such women? It seems to have been difficult. An instinct to comply with rape inside marriage and resist rape outside marriage needs to be very specific. Such specific adaptations are not easy for nature to achieve. An adaptation to resist rape by strangers and acquaintances and accommodate rape from well-known men wouldn't do the trick, because in traditional societies, husbands are often nothing more than acquaintances. 

So my guess is that women never evolved any good way to react differently to rapists who are legal husbands and rapists who are breaking social rules. Since marital rape happened so often compared to outsider rape, the meek reaction suited to marital rape prevailed.

This was possible because women's foremost weapon against rape from outsiders was never their own instincts, but social rules. More or less all societies have social rules aiming at reducing the number of occasions when illicit rape or seduction can occur. Such rules result in less pressure on women to defend themselves violently. 

Who was hurt by rape, really?

In When Men Behave Badly, David Buss focuses on the negative effects rape would have on women. That is the normal perspective and I think it is wrong. When discussing the negative effects of rape on women, those effects need to be compared with the negative effects on men other than the rapist. 

The self-domestication hypothesis says that some time in the past, beta males formed coalitions with each other and dethroned alpha males {see for example Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox, 2019}. Among chimpanzees, two or more less strong males can form a coalition against one stronger male and usurp his alpha position together. Humans are capable of much bigger coalitions. In the past, Richard Wrangham and others say, beta males simply killed off men who dominated other men and took their possessions and women. 

This theory implies that women didn't have to run their defense against rapists themselves. If coalitions of beta males killed off men who raped women, that decreased the pressure on women to defend themselves against rapists. If an alpha male went around and raped women and refused to provide anything for the resulting children, that male hurt women's reproductive interests. But he hurt other men's reproductive interests equally much through stealing their reproductive opportunities. And the men had much better means to do away with the offender. 

Always hurtful

In technologically primitive societies, every fertile female tends to belong to a man. Who bore the greater cost when a woman in history was raped: The woman or her rightful guardian?

If a woman had the right to choose her rightful guardian entirely freely, rape by someone else would probably impose a cost on her: Possibly suboptimal genes, no paternal investment. But if she didn't have the right to choose her partner entirely freely, the equation becomes different. Why would the man who happens to own her be better than any other man? If he is her first cousin, which is a very common arrangement, chances are that he is genetically worse for her than an average man. If a woman is raped by a non-partner, she risks getting worse genes than those of her husband, but there is also a chance that she gets better genes than those of her husband. If her husband happens to have some genetic handicap, or is a close relative, forced sex from an outsider could even be an evolutionary advantage for a woman. If her husband finds out, forced sex will have the same effect as infidelity: It risks decreasing his parental investment and might make him violent. But only if he knows about it.

However, a wife being raped by a non-husband very seldom benefits the rightful husband. For this reason, he might be even more interested in defending his wife against rapists than the wife herself. His wife is not entirely uninterested in protecting herself from rape: If she is going to have sex outside of marriage, she should prefer a lover that she chooses herself to any random and non-paying rapist. Even if history has prevented women from choosing, women like to choose. A rapist might also be rough in a harmful way, although few rapists kill their victims. 

But her husband's interest in protecting his wife from rape is in most cases greater than her own interest in not being raped, on a genetical level. Rape is probably usually harmful to the victim. It is always harmful to her husband.

I can find only one possible occasion where rape could possibly benefit a legal husband on a genetic level: couples with fertility problems. For some women, having a second child is easier than having a first child. A certain percentage of modern women who undergo an IVF treatment subsequently conceive naturally (21 percent in this study). Fertility problems also often stem from subfertility in both the woman and the man. Which means that a particular woman can become pregnant more easily with one man than with another. If a barren woman gets raped by a man with great sperm and becomes pregnant, she will give birth to a child that is not her husband's. But subsequently, her chances of giving birth to her husband's children might have increased. 

The most famous possible such example is that of French nobles Jean de Carrouges and Marguerite de Thibouville, who became famous in present time through the book and film The Last Duel. Jean and Marguerite married in 1380, when Jean was about 50 and Marguerite was 18. The couple had no children for five years. Then Marguerite accused a nobleman called Jacques le Gris of having forced himself into her home and raped her, aided by his servant.

About nine months later, Marguerite gave birth to a son. After her husband had won the last legal duel in French history and thus spared her from being burned at the stake for false accusation, she gave birth to two other children.

We can only speculate on the causes of Jean's and Marguerite's initial infertility. Scientifically, Jean's high age could have been a cause. Fertility decline in males is rather little investigated, but it is known that male fertility declines with age. The book The Last Duel by Eric Jager describes the details around Marguerite's first pregnancy in a somewhat confusing way: 

"Not long after Jean returned from Paris and learned of the terrible attack on his wife, Marguerite revealed another secret she had been keeping to herself: she was pregnant."² 

Jean returned from Paris only a few days after the day Marguerite said Jacques Le Gris raped her. A woman who has never been pregnant before can hardly know that she is pregnant earlier than about 14 days after conception. However, "not long after" is not a precise time frame. The exact time of the birth is not known, but Eric Jager estimates the boy was most likely born between early September, nine months after Jean de Carrouges returned from Scotland, and the middle of October, nine months after the alleged rape. It is not impossible that Jacques le Gris actually solved the couple's fertility problem through fathering Marguerite's first child. If so, the Carrouges/Le Gris case would be one of few occasions when a legal husband actually benefited reproductively from his wife getting raped.

Overprotected 

Rape by an outsider was potentially damaging for a woman. But it was even more damaging for her husband. And not only for her husband, but for the husband's relatives as well. Also his parents and siblings had a strong interest in safeguarding the interests of their genes.

For that reason, a legal husband and his family are likely to be even more interested in protecting a wife from rape by outsiders than the wife herself. And actually, don't we see signs of that in traditional societies all over the world? Social norms that force women to limit their lives in terms of chastity are enforced, not seldom by husbands and in-laws. Women have their movement restricted, are covered in uncomfortable and impractical clothes or are guarded by relatives wherever they go. 

If women were doing all of this voluntarily, the socially imposed shame and control wouldn't be necessary. The fact that women need to be oppressed in order to decrease their risk of being raped (or seduced) by outside males below a certain level is telling: If women themselves are allowed to choose, they will choose to take a higher risk of rape and seduction than they are allowed in many traditional societies. 

All in all, husbands' interests in protecting their wives from outsider rape have effectively reduced the evolutionary pressure on females to protect themselves from outsider rape. Husbands' overprotection has actually created a pressure on females to resist overprotective measures. Females have an interest to provide for their children (regardless of who is the father). Such efforts are circumscribed by strong chastity norms. Women typically both have an interest in ensuring paternity security and getting things done. But their balance of interests skews more towards provision and less towards paternity security compared to that of their male partners. 

Ineffective resistance 

I don't in any way claim that women lack adaptations to resist sexual coercion. Also modern Western women, who enjoy great freedom of movement, actually limit themselves quite a bit out of fear of sexual coercion. Free, modern women make many calculations between the benefits of doing one thing or another versus the risk of sexual coercion.

The only thing I claim is that women's evolved adaptations against sexual coercion are patchy, ineffective and prone to bold trade-offs. Much more so than is normally acknowledged in evolutionary psychology. 

I think evolutionary psychology should stop upholding myths about the ideally adapted woman. The intentions behind such reasoning is almost always benevolent, but it results nonetheless in subtle victim-blaming. Perpetuating the idea that women have evolved ingenious defense mechanisms against rape labels the women who fail to react ingeniously as somehow deficient. They aren't. They are just the result of a fascinatingly complex evolutionary history consisting of an array of trade-offs. Like all of us are.

1. See for example Napoleon Chagnon's research on the reproductive success of Yanomamö people. He found that individuals who got married to a first cousin had fewer children than average, but parents whose children were married to cousins had more grandchildren. Getting married to a cousin was bad for oneself but good for one's brothers.

Napoleon A. Chagnon, Robert F. Lynch, Mary K. Shenk,  Mark V. Flinn, Cross-cousin marriage among the Yanomamö shows evidence of parent–offspring conflict and mate competition between brothers, 2017

2. Eric Jager, The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France, 2004, chapter 4, 31 percent