To Borrow a Moment
Evolving: "Little girl has learned a lesson, today; she has a value." (Floater)
Bells said:
Of course there is a sexual dimension to rape, since rape involves a forced sex act. But to rely solely on that and disregarding what rapists get out rape, is dangerous. Men don't rape because they simply feel like getting some or because they are horny. Men who rape do so because they can take what they want, and they don't care if she says no. And yes, I do disagree with him because I have seen and experienced enough to know first hand that rape is about power and domination.
If I might take the moment to wonder about a few things.
It frequently occurs that something strikes me amiss about the assertion of the sexual dimension about rape, and in truth that point has been resolving a little more clearly since we were asked to consider a chimpanzee humping a frog to death.
The sex act? Something about this presupposition bugs me.
To wit:
• A friend who is a therapeutic psychologist explaining that his cat "kills the mouse and then fucks the corpse"; this is not the first time I've heard the proposition about mammals getting off on their kills. Additionally, it very nearly makes sense, given the overlap in belligerent and sexual behaviors about testosterone.
• There is also a story about this same guy, in younger years, attempting to have sex with a tree while on drugs.
• I believe you're familiar with my assertion that a three-way with two guys simultaneously on a woman is actually a homosexual encounter between two men using a female human being as a sex toy.
I think of other examples; is there such thing as "distal sexual assault", insofar as if, say, the point of behaving explicitly sexually in public is because being witnessed by others is a thrill? I mean, if it's just the orgasm, whatever; but there are organized events and places for this sort of behavior―finger-banging your partner on the terrace at the baseball park is a bit more dubious, because I'm pretty sure they didn't ask other people's consent to be used as sexual enhancement tools.
While it isn't that rape lacks a sexual dimension, I do wonder why we would presume that sexual dimension is some manner of intercourse?
More specifically, the sexual dimension is
internal; it isn't actually about the other person. That is, in a rape it would seem the sexual dimension is achieving orgasm, and the question of rape as an act of power over another individual is answered by the requirement of their participation. If it was just about the orgasm, masturbation would suffice.
Any number of paraphilias have nothing to do with copulation itself; a pure rapist who gets off specifically on raping is a paraphiliac.
The other person is merely a tool;
instrumenti genus vocale was Varro's rendering of the "talking tool" status of Athenian slaves.
From an evolutionary standpoint, human males did not specialize to specifically deliver seed to females in estrus; the advantageous behavior seems to be to deliver as much seed as possible in hopes that every once in a while it's around and into a female in estrus. This would seem to suggest that orgasm is the point, not copulation.
I would however, testify to a particular challenge I experienced in the context of my own masculinity; my generation has witnessed a couple of assertions of some notion in and of itself being "sexist". I put the word in quotes not to doubt it, but because I haven't heard such formulations for a while, and, honestly, there are myriad formulations.
Oh, hey, there we go; sorry, it's actually still unwieldy to me in general, but how about a specific? It's only been recently I've been chipping away at the idea of "women's rights"; it's problematic for
me to establish the boundary. But it took about a month after ... I can't remember the issue but it wasn't so long ago. Probably during Obamacare and the whole birth control argument. But the last time I encountered the discussion between feminists about "women's rights" versus "human rights", and the question of whether or not campaigning for "women's rights" reinforces the effective reservation separate from human rights, it only took about a month before it clicked. Yeah, go ahead and roll your eyes at a fucking
month; like I said, it's a particular challenge I experienced in the context of my own masculinity. And no, forty years of conditioning
isn't an excuse.
Still, though, it occurs to me that the difference between copulation and orgasm in any context asserting evolutionary considerations of rape behavior in general and its acute misogynsitic manifestation in every society on Earth would be an incredibly important distinction.
Thus:
• Copulation as the evolutionary drive inherently includes an obligation of female participation.
• Orgasm as the evolutionary drive does not.
And, true, we can envision a difference between orgasm-seeking in primal anarchy and, well, the mere proposition of civilized society. And in civilized society, rape is a cultural definition. I mean, I
perceive the basic idea of rape among fruit flies, in which the reproductive drive includes deceiving the female and requires attacking the competition. But it's
Drosphilia. Attacking a superior male not to steal his food but to pick up its scent in order to attempt to deceive a female as if the weaker male actually has food of his own to offer is certainly a rape scenario, but ...
really? I don't deny that my friend apparently raped a tree while on acid, but something about saying that seems to denigrate the word. I mean, come on, what am I supposed to say about penile spines? That is, I get it, it really looks and sounds like rape, but they're
cats, and apparently nature is such that ... I mean ...
penile spines.
So I find myself in mind of the proposition that rape is a social construct; then again, this is an idea that is easily, widely, and enthusiastically abused. But at some point, someone asserted something and it stuck. The proposition of rape emerged into the human heritage, and as long as we're mucking around the borders of evolutionary notions we might reasonably suggest there's a reason the assertion of rape stuck. The species is better off defining rape than not. We've had enough time; if this didn't work, it would have broken by now. Instead, the more we secure logical and observable boundaries about rape and its empowerment, it really does seem our societies improve greatly.
And that's the thing about the question of orgasm or copulation.
And it's also the problem about evolutionary psychology applied in the context of sociobiological demand for and empowerment of inequality.
Evolutionary psychology is not in and of itself an inherently terrible idea; like any psychology it can be easily exploited, and if evolutionary psychology is in fact psychology it can itself be psychoanalyzed.
But just like liberating women within the context of traditional marriage is arguably inherently sexist―one of the contexts from that misty once upon the eighties―it seems to me that any assertion of evolutionary psychology including copulation as the primary sociobiological driver is inherently faulty for presuming the male sexual behavior of delivering seed functionally requires female participation. We have specifically evolved otherwise.
Evolutionary outcome: Humans organize collectively into societies more or less assesrting civilization.
Evolutionary outcome: Humans have universally, within their societies, defined rules for sexual propriety.
Evolutionary outcome: Human males are not specialized to deliver seed specifically to females in estrus, but specifically to deliver seed.
This weird trend asserting evolutionary psychological and sociobiological contexts for rape would seem to be actually
dangerous; to the one, it asserts an evolutionary explanation for sexual belligerence in human males, but, to the other, seems to ignore evolution itself.
One more note on evolution: Men are about to become implicitly extraneous; human beings have already achieved a viable unique organism from two female mammalian gametes. Yes, it requires a laboratory to do so, but it would serve any sociobiological or evolutionary address of sexual behavior in humans very well to remember a basic reality:
The Y chromosome is a mutation that became an advantageous adaptation; its sole purpose in existing is to perpetuate the X chromosome.
So if we
really want to get into evolutionary psychology, maybe one of the advocates can wake me up when we get to masculine perceptions of existential inadequacy.