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Ok, let's get into the bolts of this.
Evolution - passing on genes and all that. Ok?
So, *if* you're a woman - in this Dawkensian sense - odds-are that it's absolutely in your interests to choose who you reproduce with. If you get raped and wind up having the child of somebody who's genetic material fits poorly with yours or who is just genetically inferior (yes, that term *does* mean something outside of eugenics) one of your shots at passing on your genes is blown, with massive ramifications.
If you're a man, the biological foundation level is affected by rape in the same way it's affected by having the crap beaten out of you: unpleasant, but unless they cut your balls of, less likely to screw up your ability to reproduce in an optimal fashion than if you are a woman who gets raped and then pregnant.
Women have a lot more to lose by being raped in an environment where there is no abortion than men do.
Now, on the prison rape subject: this is almost entirely a monster bred by the government and the state. Male rape after childhood is relatively rare but in close confinement in a consequence-free environment can apparently become endemic. So this is an instance where we're just - as a culture - fucking up royally.
Second point: rape genes. Say you're Joe the Rape Gene, and men carrying you are good at raping women and getting them pregnant, and their sons also carry this gene Joe the Rape Gene. Joe the Rape Gene could, potentially, spread all over the population (no, I'm not arguing for castrating rapists.) :-)
So, in some species, what amounts to rape is more or less how reproduction is done. Dogs, for example, seem to have a very violent sexual culture, if you can call it that. That's Joe the Rape Gene at work.
Now, what we don't know is if Joe the Rape Gene is really there, but **men can successfully pass on their genetic material through rape**. And that means that rape is **directly** wired into evolutionary biology because, bottom line, it can be a reproductive strategy. And there are a lot of biological anomalies around rape like, for example, some women have orgasms while being raped.
Now, at a human level, that just makes no damned sense and frequently tears the women it happens to into tiny little pieces. So why is it happening? By and large, women do not come if they're being coerced into sex at an emotional level, as far as I can tell, so what's going on?
There's a potential model. But, because of the level of squeamishness here, I'm going to be very careful about how I say this. Ok?
Orgasm in females appears to increase the odds of conception by moving sperm towards the cervix - those internal contractions *do stuff.* Furthermore, there's some evidence that women have some control over whether or not they will conceive - sperm is either retained in the vagina, or expelled, depending on factors which (last time I checked) hadn't been identified.
So, think this through: you have a reflex (we'll call it that for now) which increases the odds of pregnancy but which can be triggered by rape.
Hm. Well, it could be an anomaly, one of the bugs in the system, like the way that your optic nerve gives you a huge blind spot, or one of the nerves in Giraffes runs all the way up the neck, loops over a bone, and then goes all the way down again to end a couple of feet from where it started.
Could be.
Or it could be that, at a deep biological level, some female genes identify a successful rapist as a male who's genes are likely to continue to survive in the wild, and therefore predispose her towards orgasm and conception.
Now this is UGLY. You want to talk about things you can't say in public to people and have them still talk to you, feel free to use this as an example.
But as a model it does explain one very, very weird and troubling aspect of rape and it is at least coherent with what we understand of the biological situation. Might be right, might be wrong, but it's certainly an approach to trying to understand one of the worst things in the world.
You can't understand rape without looking at animal models, any more than you can understand homosexuality or the birth of twins without looking at animal models. It matters that there are all kinds of gay animals because it means that whatever is going on is not exclusive to human developmental models or psychology and that's an excellent hedge against the Moral Minority.
Bottom line: if you are walking through a field of cattle, it is important to know if they are cows or bulls because the cows are safe, and the bulls might well kill you.
Strongly gendered species exhibit very strong distinctions between the sexes. Those differences can matter a lot, but species-level averages still tell us very little about particular people.
I think that human beings are nearly as strongly gendered as cattle and much more strongly gendered than, say, cats. Not quite as strongly gendered as deer or gorillas. I don't think that makes me a sexist.
I'm not at all a fan of models of gender which don't acknowledge the biological substrates, and I think that nearly all of the academic theory of gender produced by non-biologists is useless. Personal opinion, but I hope you can understand my perspective a lot better now. I just don't respect these ideas as explanatory models of the world, even if they do make people feel better. |
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