if the mating hurts, why don’t they just go hide somewhere until the heat is over to avoid it? Do they have an urge to hang around males regardless at this time? Or are they essentially too stupid to remember the experience from last time and so sort of get raped again and again?
I really do like cats, and until we lost two, we had three. At one time we had four of them.
But whenever I think about the barbed penises of male cats, I marvel that they manage to reproduce at all!
We don’t know that it does. We know that a cat penis has barbs and that on withdrawal female cats will often howl a bit, hence the speculation that it is painful on some level. However that is only speculation and some have speculated in the opposite direction and wondered if it might be an orgasmic yell. Certainly post-coupling the female doesn’t usually act like she is in pain at all. Often quite the contrary.
Cats are induced ovulators, so hiding would not cut it. And I believe “rape” is a human construct.
I thought I’d read somewhere that while we human folk had assumed, having seen that barbed penis, that feline intercourse must be painful, there was no evidence that the pussycat felt that way about it. I know for sure I read that experiments had been done with kitties in heat, inserting a smooth glass rod, and eliciting the exact same yowls, so the yowls are not screams of pain.
Sure is. Well, until you’ve seen duck gang rapes. Ducks can get pretty violent when they’re in the mood. 
I postulate that actively avoiding sex would have been bred out of the species (although I don’t know for sure).
Well, natural selection sure doesn’t do it–at least, not in humans.
Well female humans have a lot of pain when giving birth. So why does any woman have a second baby? I mean it hurts but there’s some good that comes along with it.
I suppose the OP would have to assume that anyone practicing BDSM is either committing rape or being raped?
Even if we were sure that sex hurt the female cats, pain and pleasure are not mutually exclusive.
Evidently, otherwise there would be no cats.
Stupid cats.
From watching cats in heat, I can say that yes, they do seek out males and do actively work to get attention. On the other hand, I have also seen the males pin the females down.
Have you not had a female cat in heat come up to get petting and immediately turn around to get petting in the “proper place”? (Wasn’t even my cat.)
Isn’t it just as painful for them to avoid males? That is, they get pretty horny and they need the itch to be scratched, so to speak. I know that when I ovulate I often get really horny to the point where it’s distracting and unpleasant.
Cats are induced ovulators. The way their cycle works, they get all the way to right before ovulation, and that’s when they get “in heat” (estrus). That heat lasts about a week, then subsides and starts all over again (if the queen doesn’t get pregnant). During that time, they don’t ovulate. They only ovulate after mating.
Are they horny when the heat starts, though?
Well, that’s the same time they go out and seek males or make “funny poses”.
They have a huge drive to seek out males when they are in heat. If you let them they roam, cry out, and piss everywhere to attract every tom in the area. They also seem to participate pretty enthusiastically in the mating process - they approach toms and ‘present’.
There is no evidence they don’t feel both pleasure and pain during sex (I think it’s pretty certain that it hurts when the penis is withdrawn - it traumatizes the interior of the vagina). It is part of the way cats mate for the males to get rough and try to hold them still with their bodies and teeth, and it’s also par for the course for the females to vocalize during the process. But that doesn’t mean they are ‘raping’ them.
Even humans, with our prefrontal lobes, are often not very good at thinking about the consequences of our actions when it comes to sex. Cats don’t have prefrontal lobes, so they don’t think about the future - they just follow their sex drives.
Many human females make noises that sound very like expressions of pain during intercourse. These often seem to be the ones who say they like it, and seek it out, the most.
Oh, yeah. THAT’S a grant application that must have been fun to fill out.