Interesting post and strong logic. Speaking from first-hand knowledge: two women in my family had experience with attempted rape in one case, and rape in the other. Both occurred in Washington D.C., the first in a park, the other in the lobby of an apartment building late at night. In the attempted rape in the park, she was with a friend, they both screamed and managed to run away but not before she suffered a broken nose. In the other case, the rapist held a gun to her head. In both cases the threat and the potential for serious harm was great. Faced with a gun, resistance would be foolish or reckless in most cases. In historical times (i.e., before guns), a knife to the throat would be hardly less threatening. Even without a weapon many men man can be overpoweringly dangerous to most women. In short, it seems to me the most parsimonious explanation for not "resisting" is the same as for any of us faced with the alternative of serious bodily harm or even death. While it may be true that "most" rapists do not kill their victims, one can say the same about victims of robbery at gunpoint and such. The correct response is to comply.
Interesting post. A thought comes to mind. If many 'marital like' relationships started with 'rape' then those women who were least harmed (both physical and emotional harm) by this would likely successfully rear more children. Is this an explanation for 'Stockholm Syndrome'? I suspect most of those traits would likely not be localised on the X chromosome so what are the implications of them propagating through a population?
A second more tangential following thought: how often does the western 'romantic' trope of marriage starting with a couple 'in love' play out? Both my wife and I were pretty delusional (in love?) when we began our relationship. She looked to me as something of a 'white knight' and I 'lusted'. While we understood marriage facilitated raising children (a common goal of ours), we had next to no appreciation of how our relationship would evolve.
I believe Stockholm syndrome is very common among rape victims, during the time it happens. Few talk about it, but I'm thinking of the gang rape victim in my previous post who recounted that while it happened, she wanted her rapists to like her. I think that is a very common reaction. When an act of coercion happens, the victim is so focused on the whims of the perpetrator that it borders on sympathy. I wouldn't be surprised if male victims of coercion of any kind reported something similar.
I think you have a very important point about modern marriages. Many relationships are in fact at least semi-rationally arranged by the parties themselves. I see nothing strange in that: passionate love exists, but it is also an over-used myth. I think that essentially, what makes sex tolerable or even pleasurable for a woman is mostly not passionate love. It is a combination of physical attraction and trust. If people who have those feelings for each other are having sex, I think we are living in a perfect world on that point.
There are a lot of complexities to this, and I don't claim to begin to understand it all. Two items that occur to me:
Human infants' faces more strongly resemble their fathers than their mothers. It's widely believed that this is to provide evidence to the mother's husband that the child is his and prevent him from killing it. In any case, infanticide selective on various factors has been ubiquitous in human history.
There is a historical account that I've read of part of Temüjin's (Genghis Khan's) life. Presumably it was a modern translation of a history written at about that time. It mentioned that Temüjin's wife had been abducted, and at the time of the birth of Temüjin's first son, "she had only been raped, as she had not yet come to love him".
Equating arranged marriage with rape surprised me.
Uniquely, in Europe the Church requested the consent of the bride for marriage at least as a formality.
"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."
France had primogeniture so the husband's inheritance would go to the rapist's child which I doubt he appreciated and he had probably to disown the child.
An interesting case is that of the main wife of Genghis Khan, Borte, who was captured by a foe when Temujin was still a minor leader. His first born Jochi was always suspected to be the result of rape but Genghis treated him as his son and he was probably right if a modern genetic study was correct.
>>Equating arranged marriage with rape surprised me.
Uniquely, in Europe the Church requested the consent of the bride for marriage at least as a formality.
Forced marriage and rape are not equal in every aspect. But I think that on an emotional level, forced marriage, or even some arranged marriages with a formally consenting bride, are similar to what is called rape today. Today, women are supposed to avoid having sex with men they do not desire. When such men force them to have sex with them anyway, it is called rape. In the past, women had sex with undesirable men on a regular basis, so they somehow had to get used to it.
>>France had primogeniture so the husband's inheritance would go to the rapist's child which I doubt he appreciated and he had probably to disown the child.
Yes, and in this case it did (whomever was the father). Jean de Carrouges died just a decade after the birth of his first son, in battle in present-day Bulgaria (obviously retirement wasn't a thing by then, he was about 66 years old). Years later, Marguerite gave most of the estate to their firstborn son. As far as I know, the couple have no known descendants by now, in contrast to Jacques le Gris, who has descendants who can defend his innocence today.
Jean and Marguerite only had sons. Having a daughter could have brought some better luck on the genetic level, since daughters also inherited through their dowries.
It's refreshing to see woman who speak about this topic calmly and rationally (to a point, it is a touchy subject, and for good reason).
Woman have sex with man for many reasons, and some of them are not great.
Consider this example:
One of this reasons is that she want to have children and he is a good man, and he probably will be a good father. If woman however did not consider him to be attractive, and do it with him only to have children is she being raped? After all, she is not physically atracted to him, and when she will have enough children she will stop sleeping with him completely (and might even start to cheat on him with men she consider attractive, or she simply have low libido and will stop having sex at all- after all she got what she wanted).
I also ignore the fact that in this potential scenario man in question have every right to feel cheated- he was used by her and than he is stuck in sexless relationship with her (because he loves his children and don't want to leave them, also if he does he will be painted by society as monster for leaving his children and tearing family apart "only" because of lack of sex).
I'm sorry for such rambling but I am not sure what I wanted to write to you, but something seemed off to me. Maybe the point is that "consent" alone is not a good criteria for deciding whether someting is rape or not because woman consent to sex with men for many reasons, and some of them aren't good? Now I see that my post is not directly linked to topic but it is close enough (i hope) that you will not consider it to be waste of time.
I think that philosophically, the best way to define rape is as theft of someone's value as a sexual object. That definition holds over time. Before individualism, a woman's sexual value belonged to men around her. So rape was theft from them. Nowadays, a woman's sexual value belongs to her. She can exchange it against someone else's sexual value, money or something else she wants. If someone uses her sexually without paying what she demands, it counts as rape. As long as she accepts the things she gets in exchange, whichever they are, it is not rape.
I think your example is a mundane but tragic case of deception. If the man went into the deal believing he was signing up for family, partnership and sex and only got the family part, it is deception if his female partner knew that from the beginning but didn't tell.
Of course, women, like men, don't fully understand their motivations. They enter into relationships for a cluster of reasons, most of them at least partly unconscious. The desire for family and children is typically a strong motivation. Doubtless women sometimes (often? usually?) believe they "love" the man they're marrying, but sometimes discover at some point that he's not sexually appealing. Happens to men too. It's a cliche about couples that the early passion tends to fade. That doesn't mean that either side entered the relationship with the intent to mislead.
Especially from the side of women that is extremely common (I wrote about it here https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/fifty-shades-of-apes). Women actually seem to have a preference for sexual novelty that is more compelling than that of men: Men tend to feel a desire for sexual variety, while still being attracted to their wives. Women very often lose most or all of the desire for their husbands when they become too familiar.
That is not deception, only psychology. Still, I suspect that the best thing the average woman could do for her marriage is to try to find a way around that phenomenon.
Seems like both sexes have aspects of their natures to "overcome". As you have said, our genes are the legacy of ancestors who reproduced successfully, not ancestors who maximized conjugal happiness. And there are numerous variables that go into the latter. What's the role of physical health and fitness? Of open communications about emotional (and sexual) needs and desires? Women are less reliably orgasmic than men. What proportion of men are interested in, and willing to, accommodate those differences?
First i will start from last point- both sexes deploy deception if it suits them, so it's not that i pass judgment on anyone. In my opinion this is fruit of sexual freedom- some will abuse it to achieve their gains at the expense of someone else.
Your more interesting, first point.. well i'm not sure about this definition. My main concern revolve around question who determine whether female sexual value was stolen from her. Individualism might imply that woman herself determine this.
In my opinion it is too subjective criterium.
I will throw one more example to highlight this.
Let's say that there is Dave. Dave is student of unimpressive subject (history, for example) at the university. On party Dave meet Rachel who's currently single and is looking for relationship. Dave talk her into sex with him. Part of this talk was claim that he is student of law on prestigious university.
After the deed was done Rachel found out that he tricked her and she is upset, she might even think he raped her. After all, she wanted secure realtionship with promising young lawyer, and all she got is potential history teacher. For his part he is open toward potential relationship, but it doesn't change the fact that he deceived her.
Did he raped her? According to your definition yes, but i have gut feeling that while he was deceitful scumbag, he did not raped her.
I think the theft analogy works rather well here. Let's assume Rachel gets so tired of the deceitful scumbags she meets that she thinks she needs to talk to a therapeut. She finds a nice woman called Jennifer, who says she is a psychologist. Rachel enjoys talking with Jennifer enough to buy a therapy session every week for half a year. Then Rachel finds out that Jennifer is not really a psychologist - she is just good at talking.
If Rachel had known that Jennifer was not really a psychologist, she would never have paid her all that money for talking. Does that mean that Jennifer stole Rachel's money? Not really. Jennifer actually provided a services and Rachel agreed to pay for it at the time. Jennifer is not guilty of theft, but of fraud.
According to the same logic, Dave is not guilty of rape, but of fraud.
This is an interesting topic, with so many subtle questions. If you are having sex with someone out of a reasons other than attraction, maybe mostly from social expectation and pressure, but without complaint, maybe even faking enthusiasm to the point that your partner thinks you like it, are you being raped, or do we need another word for this?
I think it is instructive to look at it from the husbands perspective as well. In an arranged marriage, a man may have ended up with a wife he is not attracted to at all, he may even be gay (over time untold numbers of gays men must have been forced into arranged marriages). But social pressure and the expectation of fathering offspring may still compel him to have sex with his assigned wife. Is he being raped?
>>If you are having sex with someone out of a reasons other than attraction, maybe mostly from social expectation and pressure, but without complaint, maybe even faking enthusiasm to the point that your partner thinks you like it, are you being raped, or do we need another word for this?
Juridically it is not called rape when someone is having sex for social reasons. Consent is consent until the consequence of not consenting is being victim of a crime. Philosophically, it is a justified question where the limit should be drawn between rape and just an unpleasant sexual experience. I once knew a man who said he had been the victim of sexual coercion because he once travelled a long way to meet a woman who was much uglier in reality than in her pictures. She threatened to out him as impotent if he didn't have sex with her. He also didn't have anywhere to go really, because he had signed up to spend the week-end with her. A typical example of using social expectations.
However, my focus in the blog post above was psychological rather than philosophical. Today, women are supposed to say no to sex when they don't feel like it. To knowingly have sex with someone who doesn't feel like it without offering an acceptable bribe as compensation is called rape today, more or less. What I'm trying to do is to trace the historical origins of what would have been rape today. Juridically, having sex with someone out of social expectations without any realistic escape route was something completely different five hundred years ago. But emotionally, it should not be that different from what is called rape today. For that reason I find it useful to trace the emotional response to what is today called "rape" to the emotional response to what was called "a proper marriage" yesterday.
Yes. But we have the puzzling fact that most men do not rape (I will write more about that later). Men on average have a consent preference: For example, only a minority of men who watch pornography chooses to watch rape pornography, significantly fewer than among women. That makes me suspect that being a rapist was a rather bad evolutionary strategy in the past, or at least a strategy of limited use. It seems to have worked great for Gengis Khan. But if it worked great in general, men on average wouldn't be so inhibited from walking around and raping people. For that reason I'm not sure if having a rapist son would count as a plus or a minus in evolutionary terms.
I agree that the fact that most men are not rapists is itself very interesting! It probably relates to 1. the fact that pregnancy is unlikely after only a single reproductive event, but more, to 2. the reproductive importance of pair bonding and provisioning, and most of all to 3. the way women have had some control over pregnancy even since ancient times. Even if you do catch a damsel behind the temple of Astarte and she "agrees" to sex wth you because of "the implication," she will likely start hankering for large quantities of nabruqqu and wine, and avoid the hell out of Astarte's temple in the future. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortifacient#History
Lately there's a discussion raging in the US about the right to choose an abortion lately, and this aspect is always forgotten; I think a woman has an *obligation* to abort an unwanted pregnancy inflicted on her by sexual coersion. If women is raped and carries the resulting child to full term, she is acting in such a way that encourages this to happen again.
> (I will write more about that later)
OK, yes, right, but please at least give us some time to recover first! I realize primate sexuality is your thing, I really do, but at *least* get Anders to write a post about hexagons or something first. Nobody ever sexually assaulted a hexagon - not even in Abbot's _Flatland!_
>>I think a woman has an *obligation* to abort an unwanted pregnancy inflicted on her by sexual coersion. If women is raped and carries the resulting child to full term, she is acting in such a way that encourages this to happen again.
Good luck with selling in that one. You're even worse than me!
>>OK, yes, right, but please at least give us some time to recover first! I realize primate sexuality is your thing, I really do, but at *least* get Anders to write a post about hexagons or something first. Nobody ever sexually assaulted a hexagon - not even in Abbot's _Flatland!_
Ha ha, yes, I will do my best. Unfortunately he has become a bit off lately, after I insisted we should start paid subscriptions as an option. He only wanted to start paid subscriptions if he was allowed to tell everyone that our blog is not really worth paying for. I said that was a deal-breaker and that our blog actually is worth paying for. Then he said that it is my blog and not his and he has no opinion about it... I hope he gets back, but the summer is another complicating factor. Anders is a notoriously unproductive writer in the summer.
> Good luck with selling in that one. You're even worse than me!
I figured that out about twenty years ago. In my experience, people will screech and scream about problems needing a solution, but not a solution that actually *solves* things, no; more a solution that lets them use some arbitrary notion of morality to *blame* people they don't like.
But I don't endorse any moral system, and I'm not saying anyone *has* to do this, or whatever. I'm just saying that when in my life there has been some person who made me feel really, really bad, and I didn't like that, and there were something I could do to make it less likely others would go through with this hard experience, well, I've made an effort to do the thing that made it so that it were less likely others would go through that experience in the future. Isn't this just, like, the way a nice person does things? You know?
> He only wanted to start paid subscriptions if he was allowed to tell everyone that our blog is not really worth paying for... Anders is a notoriously unproductive writer in the summer.
Anders is a riddle wrapped in an enigma. Summer is hard for me too, but mostly because daylight makes me emotionally flat; if I had Starlight Savings Time I'd be better off. You should tell him I said that what he should be doing is writing articles saying "Ha ha ha, it's summer now and I get everything I want, also give me all of your money. Furthermore here is an article about 18th century refrigeration systems, and spoiler alert There Was No Sexual Coercion Among Refrigerators At That Time." (No need to pay me royalties, that's a free idea I just gave him)
>>I'm just saying that when in my life there has been some person who made me feel really, really bad, and I didn't like that, and there were something I could do to make it less likely others would go through with this hard experience, well, I've made an effort to do the thing that made it so that it were less likely others would go through that experience in the future.
That is a difficult problem. Are people then supposed to have fewer children if they dislike any of their parents or in-laws?
>>Anders is a riddle wrapped in an enigma.
Yes, I must be lucky. They say that people who form romantic couples normally get a bit too familiar with each other x months or years into a relationship. In that light, an enigmatic partner should be ideal.
But the reason why Anders doesn't write very much in the summer is not enigmatic at all: It spells kids and work. When it is not summer, the kids are in school and the toddler spends four hours a day in daycare. In the summer, we are full-time dictators. We are also have more work to do with construction and gardening than in the colder seasons. Summer simply is working time here.
> That is a difficult problem. Are people then supposed to have fewer children if they dislike any of their parents or in-laws?
Well, in fairness that is definitely not what happened with me. However I did scrutinize poor Soon To Be Mrs. Apple Pie *very* carefully after meeting her mother. Luckily the problems in our parents seemed mostly unique to each side of the family, and ultimately I decided who we are will have more of an impact on our children than who our parents were.
> Summer simply is working time here.
Oh! I should have realized. Although we're pretty busy lately, summer is an easier time for us; there's no daycare the rest of the year, but older children at home in summer do a lot help out with the youngest. And of course I'm looking forward to all the apples coming up, but they're a hobby for me rather than a vocation.
Evolutionary biologists and psychologists point out that the diversity of genetic traits ensures that the genes and their hosts (people) are around to enable adaptation to whatever the current conditions might be. But the prevalence of various genes and traits is in a constantly shifting equilibrium. In a homogeneous society with a high level of trust, it pays to be a sociopath because you can easily manipulate others if everyone's trusting. But iff too many are sociopaths trust falls and the society becomes dysfunctional. Similarly, in a mating market where all the men are gentlemen and never mislead, a rapist would find easy victims. Being a rapist is perhaps a bad strategy in most environments, but in conditions of war and social chaos, the rapists have a field day. So genes that are conducive to sociopathy, or a willingness to rape, will likely never disappear, even if they are statistically rare.
Some conditions, like schizophrenia, result from spontaneous mutations. These traits will never disappear without ubiquitous genetic engineering. But rape could be made very rare even in a high-trust, homogeneous society if the sexual success of rapists were pushed towards zero, and ways could be discovered to reduce the emotional abuse of children.
To clarify, rape would likely be lower in high trust societies, but would not disappear, because the greater the trust, the greater is the advantage to someone who exploits the trust of others. Nordic countries used to have low levels of violent crime, including (maybe especially) rape, but I understand it has risen with the influx of immigrants not acculturated to the "high trust" values.
I haven't read the linked article, but does the study control for the fact that victims of emotional abuse are disproportionately in communities with higher levels of social disfunction?
That particular study was carried out in Finland, and the authors explicitly admit that they didn't look at demographic variables like SES. I would take it as a given that all kinds of social dysfunction tend to co-occur.
Incidentally, do you have data or measures on trust levels in a country? Things like Individualism and Postmaterialism have been studied in large scale surveys carried out by IBM computing and the WVS, but I don't know what data trust comes from, or how exactly trust would be defined except as one of those two related cultural dimensions.
Another good piece. The word "choose" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, as in your previous work the word "want". The fury of the husband has always been tinged with the suspicion that she may have chosen>wanted>desired the rapist, and the so-called beta males further back were banding together not so much to defend women against undesired rape but to impose a more regularized (and possibly less desired) form.
I saw an anti-(statutory)rape poster showing a d*sneyesque princess dreaming about her prince coming and raping her. I saw it on the internet so it may have been a parody of ineffectual anti-rape posters rather than one itself. Regardless, the entire effect of the poster, if serious, relied upon horror of the word 'rape' itself. For most of history, an older higher-class man coming along and paying her parents to take her away was a better thing to have happen (on the odds) than her other options. The poster falls flat not just because of a culture that supposedly has glorified rape for millennia but genetics, as you describe.
The real confusion, though, is linguistic. "Rape" and "consent" in their modern forms are words almost entirely without meaning. As you've described, stranger rape historically was less one crime than a fusion of two crimes: a property crime and a social crime. A father or husband's property is damaged and a woman experiences a social loss that may have very negative consequences for her (as social losses often do). At some point we lost the property-crime aspect and added a consent aspect -- before losing the social aspect as well.
Scott Alexander describes similar linguistic problems as confusing edge and central cases. His example is that the central case of murder is the thing that can happen to an adult -- a stranger comes up from behind and does lethal harm. Our instinctive horror of murder comes from the fact that this could happen to us or the people we love. Yes, in a very real sense you can use the same word to describe abortion, but expecting this use of it to excite the same universal horror is a mistake. In history, the perhaps-fictitious central case is where a father and fiance both simultaneously suffer a property crime from a genetically low-quality male forcing himself on a very unwilling, undesirous, and virtuously struggling maiden, who subsequently perhaps kills herself. Her father and the man she loved (who loved her) are devastated. This central example may actually have happened zero times for all we know -- ancient literature is as filled with propaganda as our is -- but regardless the horror we experience at this does not cleanly transfer to edge cases. What if the rapist is better genetically and she does not love him but does desire him? What if the father set up the rape because the young couple was in the process of eloping against his wishes? What if the high-quality and desired rapist is himself also the loved fiance, whose premature passions cause harm to all three (spoiler alerts for a certain famous norwegian novel)? Etc.
It's a bit unfair to expect women to try hard not to be raped when there's no coherent thing we want them to fight not to have.
>>It's a bit unfair to expect women to try hard not to be raped when there's no coherent thing we want them to fight not to have.
Exactly! A few hundred years ago, the very bad thing with rape was supposed to be to have had sex outside approved social norms. Today, the very bad thing with rape is supposed to be to have sex with a person, on an occasion or in a way that doesn't feel right. Only the reaction is supposed to be the same (wild and violent).
Right; part of the problem appears to be that girls are never warned "Don't leave your friends behind, and especially don't go into a situation where you'll have trouble saying no even if you don't want sex, like being alone with him at his house, or doing drugs together."
I don't know of women who had pleasant first times as teenagers; what I do know is a lot of people who commit suicide as adults.
Interesting post and strong logic. Speaking from first-hand knowledge: two women in my family had experience with attempted rape in one case, and rape in the other. Both occurred in Washington D.C., the first in a park, the other in the lobby of an apartment building late at night. In the attempted rape in the park, she was with a friend, they both screamed and managed to run away but not before she suffered a broken nose. In the other case, the rapist held a gun to her head. In both cases the threat and the potential for serious harm was great. Faced with a gun, resistance would be foolish or reckless in most cases. In historical times (i.e., before guns), a knife to the throat would be hardly less threatening. Even without a weapon many men man can be overpoweringly dangerous to most women. In short, it seems to me the most parsimonious explanation for not "resisting" is the same as for any of us faced with the alternative of serious bodily harm or even death. While it may be true that "most" rapists do not kill their victims, one can say the same about victims of robbery at gunpoint and such. The correct response is to comply.
Interesting post. A thought comes to mind. If many 'marital like' relationships started with 'rape' then those women who were least harmed (both physical and emotional harm) by this would likely successfully rear more children. Is this an explanation for 'Stockholm Syndrome'? I suspect most of those traits would likely not be localised on the X chromosome so what are the implications of them propagating through a population?
A second more tangential following thought: how often does the western 'romantic' trope of marriage starting with a couple 'in love' play out? Both my wife and I were pretty delusional (in love?) when we began our relationship. She looked to me as something of a 'white knight' and I 'lusted'. While we understood marriage facilitated raising children (a common goal of ours), we had next to no appreciation of how our relationship would evolve.
I believe Stockholm syndrome is very common among rape victims, during the time it happens. Few talk about it, but I'm thinking of the gang rape victim in my previous post who recounted that while it happened, she wanted her rapists to like her. I think that is a very common reaction. When an act of coercion happens, the victim is so focused on the whims of the perpetrator that it borders on sympathy. I wouldn't be surprised if male victims of coercion of any kind reported something similar.
I think you have a very important point about modern marriages. Many relationships are in fact at least semi-rationally arranged by the parties themselves. I see nothing strange in that: passionate love exists, but it is also an over-used myth. I think that essentially, what makes sex tolerable or even pleasurable for a woman is mostly not passionate love. It is a combination of physical attraction and trust. If people who have those feelings for each other are having sex, I think we are living in a perfect world on that point.
After 30 years I am still sobered by the trust my wife places in me.
There are a lot of complexities to this, and I don't claim to begin to understand it all. Two items that occur to me:
Human infants' faces more strongly resemble their fathers than their mothers. It's widely believed that this is to provide evidence to the mother's husband that the child is his and prevent him from killing it. In any case, infanticide selective on various factors has been ubiquitous in human history.
There is a historical account that I've read of part of Temüjin's (Genghis Khan's) life. Presumably it was a modern translation of a history written at about that time. It mentioned that Temüjin's wife had been abducted, and at the time of the birth of Temüjin's first son, "she had only been raped, as she had not yet come to love him".
Equating arranged marriage with rape surprised me.
Uniquely, in Europe the Church requested the consent of the bride for marriage at least as a formality.
"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."
France had primogeniture so the husband's inheritance would go to the rapist's child which I doubt he appreciated and he had probably to disown the child.
An interesting case is that of the main wife of Genghis Khan, Borte, who was captured by a foe when Temujin was still a minor leader. His first born Jochi was always suspected to be the result of rape but Genghis treated him as his son and he was probably right if a modern genetic study was correct.
>>Equating arranged marriage with rape surprised me.
Uniquely, in Europe the Church requested the consent of the bride for marriage at least as a formality.
Forced marriage and rape are not equal in every aspect. But I think that on an emotional level, forced marriage, or even some arranged marriages with a formally consenting bride, are similar to what is called rape today. Today, women are supposed to avoid having sex with men they do not desire. When such men force them to have sex with them anyway, it is called rape. In the past, women had sex with undesirable men on a regular basis, so they somehow had to get used to it.
>>France had primogeniture so the husband's inheritance would go to the rapist's child which I doubt he appreciated and he had probably to disown the child.
Yes, and in this case it did (whomever was the father). Jean de Carrouges died just a decade after the birth of his first son, in battle in present-day Bulgaria (obviously retirement wasn't a thing by then, he was about 66 years old). Years later, Marguerite gave most of the estate to their firstborn son. As far as I know, the couple have no known descendants by now, in contrast to Jacques le Gris, who has descendants who can defend his innocence today.
Jean and Marguerite only had sons. Having a daughter could have brought some better luck on the genetic level, since daughters also inherited through their dowries.
It's refreshing to see woman who speak about this topic calmly and rationally (to a point, it is a touchy subject, and for good reason).
Woman have sex with man for many reasons, and some of them are not great.
Consider this example:
One of this reasons is that she want to have children and he is a good man, and he probably will be a good father. If woman however did not consider him to be attractive, and do it with him only to have children is she being raped? After all, she is not physically atracted to him, and when she will have enough children she will stop sleeping with him completely (and might even start to cheat on him with men she consider attractive, or she simply have low libido and will stop having sex at all- after all she got what she wanted).
I also ignore the fact that in this potential scenario man in question have every right to feel cheated- he was used by her and than he is stuck in sexless relationship with her (because he loves his children and don't want to leave them, also if he does he will be painted by society as monster for leaving his children and tearing family apart "only" because of lack of sex).
I'm sorry for such rambling but I am not sure what I wanted to write to you, but something seemed off to me. Maybe the point is that "consent" alone is not a good criteria for deciding whether someting is rape or not because woman consent to sex with men for many reasons, and some of them aren't good? Now I see that my post is not directly linked to topic but it is close enough (i hope) that you will not consider it to be waste of time.
I think that philosophically, the best way to define rape is as theft of someone's value as a sexual object. That definition holds over time. Before individualism, a woman's sexual value belonged to men around her. So rape was theft from them. Nowadays, a woman's sexual value belongs to her. She can exchange it against someone else's sexual value, money or something else she wants. If someone uses her sexually without paying what she demands, it counts as rape. As long as she accepts the things she gets in exchange, whichever they are, it is not rape.
I think your example is a mundane but tragic case of deception. If the man went into the deal believing he was signing up for family, partnership and sex and only got the family part, it is deception if his female partner knew that from the beginning but didn't tell.
Of course, women, like men, don't fully understand their motivations. They enter into relationships for a cluster of reasons, most of them at least partly unconscious. The desire for family and children is typically a strong motivation. Doubtless women sometimes (often? usually?) believe they "love" the man they're marrying, but sometimes discover at some point that he's not sexually appealing. Happens to men too. It's a cliche about couples that the early passion tends to fade. That doesn't mean that either side entered the relationship with the intent to mislead.
Especially from the side of women that is extremely common (I wrote about it here https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/fifty-shades-of-apes). Women actually seem to have a preference for sexual novelty that is more compelling than that of men: Men tend to feel a desire for sexual variety, while still being attracted to their wives. Women very often lose most or all of the desire for their husbands when they become too familiar.
That is not deception, only psychology. Still, I suspect that the best thing the average woman could do for her marriage is to try to find a way around that phenomenon.
Seems like both sexes have aspects of their natures to "overcome". As you have said, our genes are the legacy of ancestors who reproduced successfully, not ancestors who maximized conjugal happiness. And there are numerous variables that go into the latter. What's the role of physical health and fitness? Of open communications about emotional (and sexual) needs and desires? Women are less reliably orgasmic than men. What proportion of men are interested in, and willing to, accommodate those differences?
First i will start from last point- both sexes deploy deception if it suits them, so it's not that i pass judgment on anyone. In my opinion this is fruit of sexual freedom- some will abuse it to achieve their gains at the expense of someone else.
Your more interesting, first point.. well i'm not sure about this definition. My main concern revolve around question who determine whether female sexual value was stolen from her. Individualism might imply that woman herself determine this.
In my opinion it is too subjective criterium.
I will throw one more example to highlight this.
Let's say that there is Dave. Dave is student of unimpressive subject (history, for example) at the university. On party Dave meet Rachel who's currently single and is looking for relationship. Dave talk her into sex with him. Part of this talk was claim that he is student of law on prestigious university.
After the deed was done Rachel found out that he tricked her and she is upset, she might even think he raped her. After all, she wanted secure realtionship with promising young lawyer, and all she got is potential history teacher. For his part he is open toward potential relationship, but it doesn't change the fact that he deceived her.
Did he raped her? According to your definition yes, but i have gut feeling that while he was deceitful scumbag, he did not raped her.
I think the theft analogy works rather well here. Let's assume Rachel gets so tired of the deceitful scumbags she meets that she thinks she needs to talk to a therapeut. She finds a nice woman called Jennifer, who says she is a psychologist. Rachel enjoys talking with Jennifer enough to buy a therapy session every week for half a year. Then Rachel finds out that Jennifer is not really a psychologist - she is just good at talking.
If Rachel had known that Jennifer was not really a psychologist, she would never have paid her all that money for talking. Does that mean that Jennifer stole Rachel's money? Not really. Jennifer actually provided a services and Rachel agreed to pay for it at the time. Jennifer is not guilty of theft, but of fraud.
According to the same logic, Dave is not guilty of rape, but of fraud.
This is an interesting topic, with so many subtle questions. If you are having sex with someone out of a reasons other than attraction, maybe mostly from social expectation and pressure, but without complaint, maybe even faking enthusiasm to the point that your partner thinks you like it, are you being raped, or do we need another word for this?
I think it is instructive to look at it from the husbands perspective as well. In an arranged marriage, a man may have ended up with a wife he is not attracted to at all, he may even be gay (over time untold numbers of gays men must have been forced into arranged marriages). But social pressure and the expectation of fathering offspring may still compel him to have sex with his assigned wife. Is he being raped?
>>If you are having sex with someone out of a reasons other than attraction, maybe mostly from social expectation and pressure, but without complaint, maybe even faking enthusiasm to the point that your partner thinks you like it, are you being raped, or do we need another word for this?
Juridically it is not called rape when someone is having sex for social reasons. Consent is consent until the consequence of not consenting is being victim of a crime. Philosophically, it is a justified question where the limit should be drawn between rape and just an unpleasant sexual experience. I once knew a man who said he had been the victim of sexual coercion because he once travelled a long way to meet a woman who was much uglier in reality than in her pictures. She threatened to out him as impotent if he didn't have sex with her. He also didn't have anywhere to go really, because he had signed up to spend the week-end with her. A typical example of using social expectations.
However, my focus in the blog post above was psychological rather than philosophical. Today, women are supposed to say no to sex when they don't feel like it. To knowingly have sex with someone who doesn't feel like it without offering an acceptable bribe as compensation is called rape today, more or less. What I'm trying to do is to trace the historical origins of what would have been rape today. Juridically, having sex with someone out of social expectations without any realistic escape route was something completely different five hundred years ago. But emotionally, it should not be that different from what is called rape today. For that reason I find it useful to trace the emotional response to what is today called "rape" to the emotional response to what was called "a proper marriage" yesterday.
One more complication: mixing genes with an effective rapist might also be beneficial for reproductive success of a woman.
Yes. But we have the puzzling fact that most men do not rape (I will write more about that later). Men on average have a consent preference: For example, only a minority of men who watch pornography chooses to watch rape pornography, significantly fewer than among women. That makes me suspect that being a rapist was a rather bad evolutionary strategy in the past, or at least a strategy of limited use. It seems to have worked great for Gengis Khan. But if it worked great in general, men on average wouldn't be so inhibited from walking around and raping people. For that reason I'm not sure if having a rapist son would count as a plus or a minus in evolutionary terms.
I agree that the fact that most men are not rapists is itself very interesting! It probably relates to 1. the fact that pregnancy is unlikely after only a single reproductive event, but more, to 2. the reproductive importance of pair bonding and provisioning, and most of all to 3. the way women have had some control over pregnancy even since ancient times. Even if you do catch a damsel behind the temple of Astarte and she "agrees" to sex wth you because of "the implication," she will likely start hankering for large quantities of nabruqqu and wine, and avoid the hell out of Astarte's temple in the future. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortifacient#History
Lately there's a discussion raging in the US about the right to choose an abortion lately, and this aspect is always forgotten; I think a woman has an *obligation* to abort an unwanted pregnancy inflicted on her by sexual coersion. If women is raped and carries the resulting child to full term, she is acting in such a way that encourages this to happen again.
> (I will write more about that later)
OK, yes, right, but please at least give us some time to recover first! I realize primate sexuality is your thing, I really do, but at *least* get Anders to write a post about hexagons or something first. Nobody ever sexually assaulted a hexagon - not even in Abbot's _Flatland!_
>>I think a woman has an *obligation* to abort an unwanted pregnancy inflicted on her by sexual coersion. If women is raped and carries the resulting child to full term, she is acting in such a way that encourages this to happen again.
Good luck with selling in that one. You're even worse than me!
>>OK, yes, right, but please at least give us some time to recover first! I realize primate sexuality is your thing, I really do, but at *least* get Anders to write a post about hexagons or something first. Nobody ever sexually assaulted a hexagon - not even in Abbot's _Flatland!_
Ha ha, yes, I will do my best. Unfortunately he has become a bit off lately, after I insisted we should start paid subscriptions as an option. He only wanted to start paid subscriptions if he was allowed to tell everyone that our blog is not really worth paying for. I said that was a deal-breaker and that our blog actually is worth paying for. Then he said that it is my blog and not his and he has no opinion about it... I hope he gets back, but the summer is another complicating factor. Anders is a notoriously unproductive writer in the summer.
> Good luck with selling in that one. You're even worse than me!
I figured that out about twenty years ago. In my experience, people will screech and scream about problems needing a solution, but not a solution that actually *solves* things, no; more a solution that lets them use some arbitrary notion of morality to *blame* people they don't like.
But I don't endorse any moral system, and I'm not saying anyone *has* to do this, or whatever. I'm just saying that when in my life there has been some person who made me feel really, really bad, and I didn't like that, and there were something I could do to make it less likely others would go through with this hard experience, well, I've made an effort to do the thing that made it so that it were less likely others would go through that experience in the future. Isn't this just, like, the way a nice person does things? You know?
> He only wanted to start paid subscriptions if he was allowed to tell everyone that our blog is not really worth paying for... Anders is a notoriously unproductive writer in the summer.
Anders is a riddle wrapped in an enigma. Summer is hard for me too, but mostly because daylight makes me emotionally flat; if I had Starlight Savings Time I'd be better off. You should tell him I said that what he should be doing is writing articles saying "Ha ha ha, it's summer now and I get everything I want, also give me all of your money. Furthermore here is an article about 18th century refrigeration systems, and spoiler alert There Was No Sexual Coercion Among Refrigerators At That Time." (No need to pay me royalties, that's a free idea I just gave him)
>>I'm just saying that when in my life there has been some person who made me feel really, really bad, and I didn't like that, and there were something I could do to make it less likely others would go through with this hard experience, well, I've made an effort to do the thing that made it so that it were less likely others would go through that experience in the future.
That is a difficult problem. Are people then supposed to have fewer children if they dislike any of their parents or in-laws?
>>Anders is a riddle wrapped in an enigma.
Yes, I must be lucky. They say that people who form romantic couples normally get a bit too familiar with each other x months or years into a relationship. In that light, an enigmatic partner should be ideal.
But the reason why Anders doesn't write very much in the summer is not enigmatic at all: It spells kids and work. When it is not summer, the kids are in school and the toddler spends four hours a day in daycare. In the summer, we are full-time dictators. We are also have more work to do with construction and gardening than in the colder seasons. Summer simply is working time here.
> That is a difficult problem. Are people then supposed to have fewer children if they dislike any of their parents or in-laws?
Well, in fairness that is definitely not what happened with me. However I did scrutinize poor Soon To Be Mrs. Apple Pie *very* carefully after meeting her mother. Luckily the problems in our parents seemed mostly unique to each side of the family, and ultimately I decided who we are will have more of an impact on our children than who our parents were.
> Summer simply is working time here.
Oh! I should have realized. Although we're pretty busy lately, summer is an easier time for us; there's no daycare the rest of the year, but older children at home in summer do a lot help out with the youngest. And of course I'm looking forward to all the apples coming up, but they're a hobby for me rather than a vocation.
Evolutionary biologists and psychologists point out that the diversity of genetic traits ensures that the genes and their hosts (people) are around to enable adaptation to whatever the current conditions might be. But the prevalence of various genes and traits is in a constantly shifting equilibrium. In a homogeneous society with a high level of trust, it pays to be a sociopath because you can easily manipulate others if everyone's trusting. But iff too many are sociopaths trust falls and the society becomes dysfunctional. Similarly, in a mating market where all the men are gentlemen and never mislead, a rapist would find easy victims. Being a rapist is perhaps a bad strategy in most environments, but in conditions of war and social chaos, the rapists have a field day. So genes that are conducive to sociopathy, or a willingness to rape, will likely never disappear, even if they are statistically rare.
Some conditions, like schizophrenia, result from spontaneous mutations. These traits will never disappear without ubiquitous genetic engineering. But rape could be made very rare even in a high-trust, homogeneous society if the sexual success of rapists were pushed towards zero, and ways could be discovered to reduce the emotional abuse of children.
(It turns out that childhood emotional abuse is a common precursor to being sexually victimized in adulthood - see https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Patrizia-Pezzoli-2/publication/334266658_Child_Maltreatment_and_Adult_Sexual_Assault_Victimization_Genetic_and_Environmental_Associations/links/617bca130be8ec17a943b0e3/Child-Maltreatment-and-Adult-Sexual-Assault-Victimization-Genetic-and-Environmental-Associations.pdf )
To clarify, rape would likely be lower in high trust societies, but would not disappear, because the greater the trust, the greater is the advantage to someone who exploits the trust of others. Nordic countries used to have low levels of violent crime, including (maybe especially) rape, but I understand it has risen with the influx of immigrants not acculturated to the "high trust" values.
I haven't read the linked article, but does the study control for the fact that victims of emotional abuse are disproportionately in communities with higher levels of social disfunction?
That particular study was carried out in Finland, and the authors explicitly admit that they didn't look at demographic variables like SES. I would take it as a given that all kinds of social dysfunction tend to co-occur.
Incidentally, do you have data or measures on trust levels in a country? Things like Individualism and Postmaterialism have been studied in large scale surveys carried out by IBM computing and the WVS, but I don't know what data trust comes from, or how exactly trust would be defined except as one of those two related cultural dimensions.
I don't recall where I read about trust levels, but I just asked ChatGPT (enhanced with Bing search) and got this: https://chat.openai.com/share/51db5b5a-314e-4e93-b8ae-4a654faf476b.
Another good piece. The word "choose" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, as in your previous work the word "want". The fury of the husband has always been tinged with the suspicion that she may have chosen>wanted>desired the rapist, and the so-called beta males further back were banding together not so much to defend women against undesired rape but to impose a more regularized (and possibly less desired) form.
I saw an anti-(statutory)rape poster showing a d*sneyesque princess dreaming about her prince coming and raping her. I saw it on the internet so it may have been a parody of ineffectual anti-rape posters rather than one itself. Regardless, the entire effect of the poster, if serious, relied upon horror of the word 'rape' itself. For most of history, an older higher-class man coming along and paying her parents to take her away was a better thing to have happen (on the odds) than her other options. The poster falls flat not just because of a culture that supposedly has glorified rape for millennia but genetics, as you describe.
The real confusion, though, is linguistic. "Rape" and "consent" in their modern forms are words almost entirely without meaning. As you've described, stranger rape historically was less one crime than a fusion of two crimes: a property crime and a social crime. A father or husband's property is damaged and a woman experiences a social loss that may have very negative consequences for her (as social losses often do). At some point we lost the property-crime aspect and added a consent aspect -- before losing the social aspect as well.
Scott Alexander describes similar linguistic problems as confusing edge and central cases. His example is that the central case of murder is the thing that can happen to an adult -- a stranger comes up from behind and does lethal harm. Our instinctive horror of murder comes from the fact that this could happen to us or the people we love. Yes, in a very real sense you can use the same word to describe abortion, but expecting this use of it to excite the same universal horror is a mistake. In history, the perhaps-fictitious central case is where a father and fiance both simultaneously suffer a property crime from a genetically low-quality male forcing himself on a very unwilling, undesirous, and virtuously struggling maiden, who subsequently perhaps kills herself. Her father and the man she loved (who loved her) are devastated. This central example may actually have happened zero times for all we know -- ancient literature is as filled with propaganda as our is -- but regardless the horror we experience at this does not cleanly transfer to edge cases. What if the rapist is better genetically and she does not love him but does desire him? What if the father set up the rape because the young couple was in the process of eloping against his wishes? What if the high-quality and desired rapist is himself also the loved fiance, whose premature passions cause harm to all three (spoiler alerts for a certain famous norwegian novel)? Etc.
It's a bit unfair to expect women to try hard not to be raped when there's no coherent thing we want them to fight not to have.
>>It's a bit unfair to expect women to try hard not to be raped when there's no coherent thing we want them to fight not to have.
Exactly! A few hundred years ago, the very bad thing with rape was supposed to be to have had sex outside approved social norms. Today, the very bad thing with rape is supposed to be to have sex with a person, on an occasion or in a way that doesn't feel right. Only the reaction is supposed to be the same (wild and violent).
Right; part of the problem appears to be that girls are never warned "Don't leave your friends behind, and especially don't go into a situation where you'll have trouble saying no even if you don't want sex, like being alone with him at his house, or doing drugs together."
I don't know of women who had pleasant first times as teenagers; what I do know is a lot of people who commit suicide as adults.