If you are a male who thinks rape is about sex, not power

The BBQ Pit
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The Other Waldo Pepper, your friend the strawman may believe that no rapists are motivated in any way by sexual desire and that all rapists have the primary goal of inflicting physical pain on their victims. But I have not made that argument, Hazelwood has not made that argument, and none of the authors of the many articles I have read and cited (but that you have chosen to ignore) have made that argument. Even the famous catchphrase that inspired this thread doesn’t claim that rape is about pain, it says that rape is about power.

I’m sure the PRRs of the world appreciate your efforts to defend their honor, but the few pages on Google Books that you’ve read on the subject should be enough to make it clear that although these men may not want to *hurt *their victims they do want to *control *them. “Hazelwood’s [sic] proffered PRR traits” specifically includes having a weapon and using it to control the victim. I know you saw this because you quoted from the list item right above it on the same page (132). It’s obvious why you didn’t want to quote the bit about weapons as a control technique, it completely undermines the point you were trying to make, but I’m not sure why you thought you’d be able to get away with it. It’s very easy for me to check your cites.

Incidentally, that list is not supposed to be an exhaustive list of PRR traits. It’s part of a guide to techniques for questioning a suspect. It also was not written by Hazelwood. It’s easy to miss this kind of thing if you’re merely doing a Google Books keyword search and cherry-picking phrases that seem to support your position, but Chapter 8 of Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation was written by Michael Napier.

There’s really no excuse for this kind of shoddy research and outright dishonesty. The fact that you’re doing it in an attempt to make rapists look better is particularly disgusting. If it’s really so important to you to “win”, by all means consider yourself the “winner” here. I want nothing more to do with you.

Apologies to Measure for Measure and anyone else who wanted to continue discussing this issue honestly. Were the subject something different I would probably just ignore TGWP and carry on, but this has been a long thread already and I don’t have the stomach for it anymore. I’m not sure if the case studies in Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation are really worse than the ones I’ve seen before or if it just seems that way because I’ve reached my limit, but either way I’m not willing to keep on spending my recreational reading time on this kind of thing.

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But you swapped in the claim that “not one of them, nor any other study on the subject that I have ever seen or heard of, asserts that there are rapists who are just very, very horny and do not possess any desire to hurt, dominate, or control their victims.” So it’s not just about power; your claim can be educated away if we find a rapist who possesses some alleged desire to control but does not “possess any desire to hurt, dominate, or control their victims.”

Your reading comprehension needs work.

Look closely: I was referring to their fantasy, and so were you. Let’s take it from the top:

See, you started off that part I’d quoted with a quick "even their fantasies". I replied to that – copy-and-pasted it, even – before moving on to a quick list of traits that builds up to "fantasizes as consenting contact". That’s the fantasy of a consensual encounter, which retains its signature aspect even if we include the factor that includes the phrase “she willingly gives in”.

I’m merely saying the PRR’s fantasy – and stay with me now, because this will get tricky – can pair up with a lack of intent to physically harm the victim to do something the PRR doesn’t consider to be harm, but that’s not the point; the key is that “even their fantasies” don’t need to involve what you falsely claimed they involved.

Now, yes, if we move on to a completely unrelated point, we’ll of course find that when actualizing a fantasy that involves consenting contact, the PRR uses weapons as a control technique. That’s my point: they use that stuff as a means to an end, like a robber who only wants the money and uses a weapon to get it – but it’s not a part the end itself. The goal stems from a fantasy of consent and willing participation; it’s built around a belief and intent that rule out harm; some means to that end then gets brought in.

I find that emphasizes the analogy to someone who only wants the money and ultimately brings in a gun when stealing it: we’re told what the PRR fantasizes, and we’re told how he gets it, and it’s a helpful distinction.

Yes, we’ve heard it before, Lamia; you said you were “through playing along” days ago, we’ll alert the media that you’ve reached your limit now – and it’s TOWP, which is as slipshod as the points you’re dropping in a huff: you say that some rapists who inflict pain “get off” on it in a sexual sense, and some want to hurt their victims because they’re angry, and others just think it’s fun to hurt others – and then you quit the debate when someone points out that yet others don’t believe they’re harming others, sure as they lack the intent to cause harm. You stated that PRRs say and do things that would be normal in a consensual relationship, but do so while ignoring their victims’ protests – and then say you’ve reached your limit when, one post later, it’s again brought to your attention that PRRs are the most likely to compromise or negotiate with their victims.

You can’t face up to your mistakes? Not even with a weak excuse?

Here, look, I’ll show you a weak excuse:

First off, I’m not doing it in an attempt to make them look better; I find them equally reprehensible whether they’re motivated by a desire for power or a desire for sex. The excuse for my shoddiness in this regard is my thoroughgoing contempt for Hazelwood; I found his assertions ludicrous partway through, and treated the whole thing pretty dismissively thereafter. I still think the whole book should be treated pretty dismissively, but you’re right that a different writer listed the traits in question.

Those traits still back my claim, of course. And what Hazelwood wrote still backs it likewise. Either way, the fantasy is of consent and the belief follows suit and the intent does as well – and the rapist uses some means to that end. But confusing the means with the end is folly. It’s a mistake.

I’ve admitted my mistake. Can you admit yours?

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Um, largely because I’m working off of a low base of knowledge.

I really, truly hate to admit this, but I’m getting some sympathy for some of the rough characterizations that I attacked on pages ~5,6 etc of this thread. That article I read --which was very calm and hardly graphic at all-- freaked me out somewhat. What I’m saying is that I found it a lot easier to think about this topic abstractly before I was exposed to a few of the details (in one measly article!). I can easily see how heavy exposure to this topic might send some people (me, for example) over the edge.

Anyway, I still believe that sexual assault has something to do with, um sex. But uh yes it feels obvious now there are other factors at play.
Back to Pinker. I guess my only point is that rape is common in the animal world, and is common in certain societies and situations (warfare). It’s unsurprising that (for example) certain low status male might pursue a biological imperative in this way. (Then again, men from all socioeconomic groups engage in sexual assault, so this is only an example.) Whether sex offenders are better treated by encouraging a particular type of therapeutic introspection, by learning impulse control or simply by spending some hard time in a cold cell is an empirical matter.

The Other Waldo Pepper: If I’m correct, the Hazelwood book you referenced was directed at law enforcement. I doubt whether that literature is based upon especially rigorous science: psychology is a young field and evidence based practice compromises a smaller share of it. But detectives need their guidelines, and a rough typology of sexual offenders might be helpful, even if the description of their motives isn’t especially accurate. The chapter you referenced was about profiling – catching crooks-- not psychology. I suspect that rigorous psychological research on motive may not exist yet anyway.

That said, I’ll opine based upon some of the quotes in the .pdf that I linked to that some (all?) PRRs are world class bullshit artists. I understand that females who physically resist rape in any fashion are less apt to be raped. PRRs may simply be telling their victims what they want to hear, to discourage resistance, and make the crime safer for the perpetrator. But the rape strategy might tell us less about the underlying motivation than we think.

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Well, as Lamia pointed out, I was actually referencing two separate chapters. They both said the same thing with regard to my point, though: the PRR’s fantasy is of a consenting relationship/the PRR fantasizes as consenting contact; no intent to punish or degrade, least likely to physically injure,“is afraid that he is going to physically hurt a victim”/no intent to physically harm, does not consider the rape as harm; has no conscious intent to degrade and traumatize/ “did not verbally abuse her … did not physically abuse her … just wanted to make her happy … desires to please her” – in short and in sum, he’s “driven by the relational component (consensual) of his complex and ritualistic fantasy”.

It’s all a rich tapestry, but the point again and again – in both chapters – is that the PRR’s fantasy is of consensual sex, complete with a lack of intent to harm and a reluctance to engage in an activity “that escalates the possibility of confrontation and physical violence, which, in turn, corrupts his fantasy of a consenting relationship”; he instead engages in activities bent towards “fueling his fantasy of the victim’s willingness to be with him.”

What conclusions should we take from that?

Again, though, I’d then have to ask what sort of hypothetical evidence could ever falsify the claim. I mean, if some guy really does just want sex and uses a threat of force to get it, could anything establish that he was merely using said threat as a means to said end?

Take, say, the Hazelwood excerpt’s Case #4: “He never struck his victims, but relied instead upon threats or the presence of a weapon. In several instances, upon encountering resistance, he left the scene rather than resort to physical violence to obtain victim compliance.” Okay, fine: possibly he’s a guy who gets off on issuing threats, and possibly he just wants to make the crime as safe as possible for himself. But what else could he have done as evidence that he’s like unto a robber who’s truly just in it for the cash and only half-heartedly brandishes a gun as a means to that end?

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The Other Waldo Pepper: Well one problem is that the book is presenting a broad characterization designed for law enforcement and social services, as opposed to a case study for academic psychologists. I would be concerned if weak science was used in a court room. But at the investigative stage, we’re really just working with probabilities. It’s not like criminal profiling is a pure science anyway, AFAIK. It’s just all we have.

Separately, the “Just in it for the orgasm” explanation seems incomplete.[1] You need a story for why someone would pass over masturbation, prostitution purchase and meeting somebody cute in favor of rape, which risks incarceration. Or rather, you would have to see how such an explanation would fit an actual case study. I’m not saying that it couldn’t be done: the world is large after all. But I suspect that framing the question is trickier than it appears and the benefits of such study are dubious. Specifying pathological motivation is at best one element of the broader goal of rape prevention.
[1] And once you allow for a fantasy, then you’re admitting a more complicated story anyway – you’re considering something other than a guy who is merely very aroused.

ETA: Again though, my link did document some cases that fit the PRR profile and contained explicit threats of violence along the lines of “I don’t want to hurt you but…” Disturbingly creepy. I can’t judge proportions though it was implied that these cases were typical.

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Again, though: if that’s all we have, and it just points to PRRs who lack the intent to harm and leave the scene rather than resort to physical violence, then, okay, sure, granted, the state of the art may well only be weak evidence against the “rape is about power, not sex” hypothesis, but (a) what further evidence do we need, and (b) what kind of weak evidence do we have that every rape is about power and not sex?

Well, first off, “prostitution purchase” also carries with it the risk of incarceration, even leaving aside rapists who lack money (or impulse control or good decision-making skills or whatever). That said, though, you of course zero in on the PRR’s driving motivation later on: “once you allow for a fantasy, then you’re admitting a more complicated story anyway – you’re considering something other than a guy who is merely very aroused.” That’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough; just what is the PRR’s fantasy?

As near as I can tell, the signature aspect of the PRR fantasy is that it’s of a consenting relationship. He fantasizes consenting contact. So what that his fantasy thus requires a more complicated story? So what that some extra aspect is in play? The question is whether that “something other” brings power into it; it wouldn’t if the extra aspect were a foot fetish, or a need to call out his mother’s name, or whatever; why, then, should a fantasy based around willingness and consent automatically mean he’s a power junkie?

But that’s my point: what’s our best shot at reaching that goal? Do we help or hinder investigators by specifying that all rapists are motivated by a desire for power? Say you want to track one down, or predict where he’ll strike next; you can already describe what he does; would things be improved by assigning the same motivation to a man who never uses violence and a man who only ever uses violence? One rapist fantasizes consent and lacks an intent to harm; another fantasizes otherwise and has an intent to harm; what goal do we serve by painting each motivation with the same broad brush?

I’m not interested in typical; one counterexample suffices.

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Sex without a meaningful exchange of power is a delusion that blinds us to realities, both those of our sexual natures and of the essential power discourse between all people. Rape, as such, is legally wrong and even dehumanizing; at the same time, consensual sex that does not in some way degrade our humanity is vapid and empty.

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Another one of my long posts, I’m afraid…

While there have been a great many interesting comments, I feel that we have not even begun to reach into the roots of the fundamental basis of rape and why the OP and those who share her views – as well as some others – are so deeply mistaken. “Sex” and “power” are the names we apply to higher levels of semantic abstraction than what’s actually driving these behaviors at the root. And that is biology and evolution.

First, my bona fides, if you will. I’m a liberal Democrat, and if feminism is defined as holding that it is a moral imperative that women be treated equally under the law and in business and in all other situations where they are or have been discriminated against, then I am most avowedly a feminist.

But in Against Our Will, Brownmiller insisted that only humans commit rape. In this she is as profoundly wrong as in many other of her factually unfounded assertions.

Rape is, in fact, common among many species. A strong case in point is the high levels of rape seen among mallard ducks. These ducks typically pair off into a monogamous couple early in the season, and their behavior clearly indicates that this is a shared and “happy” decision. When the two finally mate, the experience is gentle, mutual, and clearly desired by both partners.

But it is not uncommon for a male mallard stranger to suddenly appear out of the sky and, not to put too fine a point on it, rape the shit out of the just-inseminated female. The male mate often tries to defend the female if only a single strange male is trying to rape his “bride”, but he doesn’t always succeed. The rapist tries – and often successfully – to forcibly copulate without any courtship rituals, and he departs after the heinous deed without even the obligatory post-coital head-pumping.

There’s far worse possibilities for the freshly-raped female. If there is not a single attacker but a group of them, they gang-rape the shit out of her, taking turns over and over and over. It’s not uncommon in these circumstances for the rapists to hold the terror-stricken female’s head underwater so that she can’t fight back as well, which often leads to her drowning. But they don’t stop raping her just because she’s dead. The frenzy often continues on.

If she survives the gang-rape, we see the most horrible of horribles (at least in human terms, though likely in whatever we might consider duck “terms” as well). If the attacker’s behavior indicates that the rapes have been successful, the victim’s mate performs a rather ungallant – well, hideous is how I’d put it – act: He proceeds to rape the shit out of her himself!

There is little to distinguish mallard duck rape from human rape except for that which goes on in humans’ cerebral cortex (making the experience far, far worse, judging from what raped women say and suffer through for quite some time). The thing is, our complex notions of sex and power never enter into the ducks’ situation nor the humans’, again except at the highest levels of our language-based consciousness. So the key to understanding human rape is to first understand mallard duck and other species’ rape.

When trying to understand duck and human rape, one must look first and foremost at the evolutionary history and the circumstances of this behavior. It’s not about power and it’s not about sex: It’s about reproductive strategies. Don’t confuse reproduction with sex; sex is merely the means towards the fiercely deep and thoroughgoing biological mandate of maximizing one’s evolutionary, genetic fitness. Were it not for the fact that sex and sexual desire are mere instruments of our incredibly powerful inherited bedrock evolutionary mechanisms for enhancing our genetic fitness, we couldn’t explain why humans and many other species engage in homosexual rape. That’s also the flaw in the fairly common belief that pornography is sexist and demeans women as a whole: The existence of gay porn reveals the fallacies in such a view, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Now, I hasten to add once again that I well understand and acknowledge that humans’ concept and experience of rape is highly cerebral and is powerfully influenced by culture. But many other posts have dealt with that aspect perfectly well and I don’t see the point in echoing them. It is the fundamentals which have not been sufficiently addressed.

So, consider this: The number of mallard rapes – especially gang-rapes – are well-correlated with the number of un-mated males. In that situation, which is rather common, males substantially outnumber females. As such, those males’ genetic heritage will be utterly lost if they do not copulate, so rape is actually an adaptive behavior! It increases these males’ genes within the gene pool from zero to whatever they can accomplish with rape, which is what their (and our) biology is continually pressing every individual to do. That explains the gang-rape and the awful mate-rape behaviors as no other possible alternative can accomplish: There’s always a chance that one of a rapist’s sperm will get through and meld with the female’s eggs. So rape is an adaptive behavior within the biological world.

And since humans – whatever else we may be – are part of the biological world, we need to apply the lessons we learned from mallard ducks to the task of understanding human rape. And the human parallels are striking indeed.

During the India-Pakistan war over Bangladesh, many thousands of Hindu women were raped by Pakistani soldiers. The most horrible part of their fate was that these women were almost always rejected by husband and family as a result. And we know of the despicable so-called “honor” killings, which also can only be explained at the root in terms of the biological mandates of evolutionary fitness. This is clearly a cultural pattern, but the cultural pattern is merely the top level of paint, so to speak, on top of our biological and evolutionary heritage.

Human cultures often elevates biological imperatives into layers of nice and pretty symbologies, such as it does with courtship (well, dating, anyway), nuptials, and marriage. These are adaptive behaviors that society delights in, and for powerful – if often unseen – evolutionary reasons. But other times we try valiantly to disempower and dilute these powerful forces with negative symbologies, and while I’m sure we all agree this is often highly laudable and well worth the effort, good intentions will inevitably be for naught in a certain number and type of cases. We call the agents of these cultural failures “criminals” or “deviants” or “perverts” or what have you, but barring deliberate genetic engineering, they’ll always be with us.

In sum, sex and power are words we use to try to speak of and understand that which is almost always unseen and misunderstood: Our evolutionary fitness-enhancing biological drives.

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Evidence please.

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Perhaps I should add that I differ slightly with The Bith Shuffle and like minds in this thread as well as with Pinker, et al.

I find evolutionary psychology much too speculative at this point in its development. And the very popular evolutionary psychological notion of “massive modularity” – which Pinker and Tooby et al. strongly support – has been utterly refuted by Jerry Fodor in his spectacular logical triumph: The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way

No, I support sociobiology instead, which is fundamentally different from evolutionary psychology. Although many are of the opinion that “evolutionary psychology” is little more than a re-branding of sociobiology, I strongly disagree with that assessment. Where evolutionary psychology goes so seriously off-track in my opinion is in its goal of seeking to explain specific behaviors in a manner that has been at least lightly mocked as being essentially the equivalent of Kipling’s Just So stories.

An even greater error is in EP’s attempt to link specific behaviors to specific mental “modules”. The kind of modularity that EP’s argue for strikes me as logically impossible; I agree with Fodor on that.

Sociobiology is stronger in my view because it has a much more modest scope. It concentrates on sexual and reproductive strategies and behaviors in humans and the rest of the animal kingdom arising from evolutionary processes, rather than trying to tackle all behaviors, and it further concentrates much more wisely on trying to discover the root genetic contributions of these behaviors that lie below any cultural trappings. Sociobiology has been stupidly attacked by and from the laughably obsolete views that the science amounts to the promotion of “genetic determinism”, as if E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins aren’t fully aware of how the environment and culture are layered upon the biological substratum beneath!

The ludicrous silliness of the charge of “genetic determinism” also underlie what’s been called the “Naturalistic Fallacy”; i.e., that sociobiology claims that since certain behaviors are natural and adaptive, that somehow makes them morally right or justified! This is a logical fallacy sometimes known as a “category error”, and should be dismissed as utter nonsense.

Outside of that distinction, I mostly agree with The Bith Shuffle, who is making a lot of sense.

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Then you didn’t understand it and the true depth and breadth of all its various ramifications! But perhaps that’s because there was so little exposition there. Consider it in light of my post here: Rape isn’t about sex -or- power

Non-sequitur alert! Non-sequitur alert!

The issue isn’t about how we should “regard” rapists or baby-murderers! It’s about understanding the nature, origin, and context of these behaviors. To correctly point out that rape is at root a consequence of a deep-seated genetic drive to enhance one’s evolutionary fitness and is but one reproductive strategy to accomplish the goal of projecting one’s genes into the future is in no possible sense a cultural or ethical endorsement of that behavior! Sheesh!

The issue concerns whether the behavior of rape is more about power or sex or whether, as I argue, it’s neither and is instead far more fundamental than those high-level concepts. It is in no way, shape, or form about how society views or judges or “regards” those behaviors!

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:smack: :dubious:

There are many different reproductive strategies, but they are not all operant in all individuals; not in all men and not in all women. As in the case of mallard ducks, the mainstream strategy of pair-bonding and mate-mate reproduction and the cooperative rearing of offspring will always be the most common strategy because it is the strategy that is most likely to yield by far the best outcome (that outcome being the maximum possible genetic contribution of both partners to the gene pool and hence in the future). But in the sub-case where there’s an overabundance of un-paired male mallard ducks, the odds of that mainstream strategy being successful in those specific individuals changes greatly, such that rape suddenly becomes their very best – in fact their only – bet! Thus, those individuals are more likely to act on that strategy variant.

But that’s a very long way indeed from saying that all male mallards will rape if given the chance! Seriously, wtf?

Note that consciousness and deliberate choice never enters into the equation. Note also that it is very, very common for humans to employ their minds (“unconsciously”, to use a sloppy term) in crafting high-level rationalizations for what their biology is demanding them to do near or just below the level of full awareness. But these rationalizations crumble in most people after they’ve obeyed these hidden but strident whisperings and then we find ourselves racked with (thoroughly justified) guilt.

It is in that where lies the whole mystery and tragedy of the human condition.

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Nonsense! The “viscerally impleasant [sic]” aspect is that male-male rape is all about forcible anal intrusion. If it were not for this aspect, it would not be nearly as big a deal – relatively few men would be all that traumatized by receiving a forced blow-job, even from another man.

No, most men have a lot of deep-seated anxieties and revulsion concerning anal penetration, at least those in Western societies (I can’t speak about other societies). And they’d be just as traumatized if a woman raped them by forcible anal penetration, so it is definitely not first and foremost that it’s another man who is raping them. And this goes to the heart of your flawed general premise concerning power and rape.

I’ve been gay all my life and I strongly dislike anal insertion in either direction. And I’m far from alone. Statistical measurements new and old confirm that approximately 50% of Western – especially American – gay men never engage in anal sex in their entire sexual lives.

Furthermore, in my seventh and eighth grade Catholic school class, nearly every single boy played sexual games with other boys, and even most of the most macho and popular boys went in for mutual masturbation and not uncommonly vigorous oral sex (I thought I was in Heaven!). This kind of thing is fairly common in boy scout camping trips, too. This is a well-known and common sexual behavior in adolescent boys, so the idea that homosexual contact among males is “viscerally unpleasant” is just plain wrong. But the very thought of anal sex was much too off-putting if not out and out revolting, at least to we Midwestern American boys. If it happened, I never heard anyone admit it.

Such behaviors taper off fairly quickly as the boy matures, and by the time they’re adults they’ll strenuously insist they never did anything of the sort, as all but one of my 7’th & 8’th grade partners now swears :wink:

But the reason male-male rape is so traumatic is first and foremost because it involves anal penetration, not primarily because it is another man doing it.

Now, jailhouse and sailing-related male rape is an altogether freakishly artificial environment that has no parallel in the natural world. It is only for this reason that power and dominance issues enter into such rapes. But don’t believe for one minute that there’s no sexual enjoyment or that the same sexual dynamics that arise from reproductive fitness-seeking behavior aren’t at the root of it!

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There are a host of ancillary philosophical and other scientific-theoretical issues that would have to be resolved here:

• do we mutually agree that there is such a thing as free will, consciousness, and deliberate choice in general, such that a given behavior can be pointed to and designated as an exception to that general rule?

• in a highly social species such as our own, to what extent does evolutionary biology favor the survival of traits that contribute to the survival and reproductive prowess of the individual if & when those same traits are a detriment to the survival and niche-efficacy of the group? it is unfair to say that conventional evolutionary bio — and sociobiology — tends to focus overly much on the former consideration?

• do we assume that you have been won over to my point of view with regards to involuntary psychiatric treatment & incarceration, such that for a given population even if there is a statistically higher likelihood of members of that population engaging in antisocial behavior you do not support laws and policies that treat individual members of that population differently? if so, I’m all in favor of consistency myself and will accept that as a premise.

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Instead of increasing the nesting level further in this post, I’ll just point to my previous reply for context.

Those are thoughtful questions, AHunter3, and I thank you for raising them. I’ll do my best to answer them.

I’ve given this question a lot of thought, but I’m afraid I’m not entirely clear precisely how to answer it. The philosophical quagmire regarding free will is so deep and complex that getting into it here would likely result in the biggest thread-napping I’ve ever seen. I’ve spent years delving into that topic, and all I can say here briefly is that all proposed solutions have philosophical, logical, and practical problems.

Instead, I’ll just explain my position as that of a soft determinist, which I’ll define here as someone who holds that free will is only an illusion, but a useful one in the human social context. As such, I also hold that, while no one is ultimately logically or morally responsible for their thoughts and acts in that we are incapable of creating de novo event chains, the variety of social deterrents against undesirable behaviors (such as approbations, stigma, and punishment) serve useful social purposes in that they, too, importantly contribute to the human universe of deterministic inputs to human event chains. In sum, enlightened punishment is vital even though we’re not ultimately responsible for our behavior.

Note that this does not conform with many definitions of “compatibilism”, even though I’ve often seen the term “compatibilist” conflated with “soft determinism”.

Here it is extremely critical to emphasize that evolution acts only on individuals! While there has been some small amount of legitimate scientific progress towards trying to determine and measure some kind of role of evolution in groups or even entire species, to the best of my knowledge there’s not yet been any findings that could survive even a peer review committee, let alone among significant numbers of evolutionary biologists. If my knowledge is accurate (and I’d be fascinated to learn that it’s not), there is as yet no scientific basis for believing that evolution plays any role at all in group survival or adaptation or niche-efficacy.

So, yes, I think it is extremely unfair to say that “evolutionary bio — and sociobiology — tends to focus overly much” on individual evolutionary fitness and individual behavior.

I’m going to take up your third question in a separate post, because it seems to me to be something of a thread hijacking, or at least a largely independent offshoot of this thread.

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Frankly, this question baffles me. Would you be so kind as to elaborate more on what you’re trying to get at with this one?

I’ve voluntarily placed myself in mental hospitals three times and agreed to take the prescribed meds while there. One was for the powerful, overwhelming determination to kill myself that was not related to any life event, and because I still had the cognitive wherewithal to realize that didn’t make any sense, I’m extremely happy with that decision (not the least of which reason being that I wouldn’t be writing this otherwise).

The other two times I committed myself because I was far too happy and upbeat, in which again I recognized myself that quite a few very loud alarm bells were pealing in the attic. On the most recent of those occasions, I wrote a 70+ page autobiographical email (I’ve gone through a couple of screenplay-worthy major life events), but though my illness was powerfully manifest, I nevertheless had enough social cognition and concomitant awareness of potentially negative psycho-social consequences left to know to only send that email to three very close friends.

The point being that while there are many instances where people are aware they desperately need major mental health treatments, very often the individuals are not aware of this! In those cases, I am very strongly of the opinion that they should be involuntarily treated, subject most emphatically to thoughtful and wise scientific medical and legal oversight. Alas, thoughtfulness and wisdom cannot be adequately codified, with results that threaten damage to the families of the severely mentally ill at least as much, if not more, than the ill person him or herself.

Allow me to relate a true story relating to this issue. The brother of my friend R. had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic (I’m aware of the many controversies regarding this label and the diagnostic criteria, but please allow me to employ those common terms for simple clarity’s sake). He been involuntarily committed and treated with forced medication several times, which worked splendidly. But as a consequence of the meds, he recovered sufficiently such that he passed the release criteria, whereupon he was “freed from treatment”. As is so often the case, he stopped taking his meds immediately, and consequently soon returned to being the bizarrely non-rational threat he posed to his family and others.

The law protected him much more than it did his family, and when the law didn’t set him free, the insurance companies effectively “freed him from treatment” when they stopped paying his bills.

His delusions and threatening behavior had frequently been a nightmare to his parents and to R., which in turn had devastated the entire family dynamic and all their psychological health. Life was a horror show whenever my friend’s brother was out in society, whether he was at home or not, because he always refused to take his meds whenever he was free. Can this truly be justified primarily because the severely ill person doesn’t like taking his meds?

When Ryan’s brother was “freed from treatment” for the last time, he returned home to live with his widowed mother. She loved him but was also terrified of him and went to the police and the mental health authorities crying and begging for her son to be committed once more, but again, the law protected him much more than his mother, for they said the law allowed them no alternative.

Some time passed.

He butchered her with an ax.

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My own wording of my stance on free will varies quite a bit because I have not managed to congeal it into a form that I’m really ready to sign off on. It’s certainly closer to “free will” but there is a great deal of “the answer is ‘mu’ the question itself is phrased wrong with tacit assumptions”… but I’m not ready to point to what those tacit assumptions are. Certainly I consider myself to be doing things “for a reason” even as I also and simultaneously consider myself to be acting of free will; the reason is not the cause and at the same time who I myself am is not “me right now, an instantaneous me with no history” and also not “me just me an individual distinguished from any connections”. I’m enough of a sociologist (and a generic “contextualist”) to think an overwhelming portion of what average everyday folks attribute to their own individual heads is actually “the culture thinking” or “the species thinking” or even things yet larger in scope than that… but that there is nonetheless consciousness and volition even if it is not located quite where we tend to think it is located.

Compared to most folks on this board (which skews towards hard sciences) I attribute more of human behavior to social-cultural abstractions that inher in our heads and less of it to our phenotype at any level; but rather than thinking of it as “how much of what is in the bucket is water and how much is salt, as a percent or in grams” sort of composite I think of it in terms of “how much of the area of the square is due to its length and how much to its width” — in both cases none, because it’s all about the intersection.

I will say that culture (patriarchy) is why men rape. And yet I will also say that there exists no societal structure (hypothetical or otherwise) that would yield a reciprocal/inverted system in which women would rape men and men would be at risk of rape and it would all mean the same thing except with the sexes reversed. So indeed there is a hardwired component.

With regards to behavior per se it is very difficult to separate potential from how that potential is made manifest when it can only be made manifest in a social context.

I do think that in order to rape, one must not only desire sex but must also harbor a position within a spectrum of mindsets that meshes with such a behavior. It’s not horniness. And I think that to say “it’s a reproductive strategy” is to punt. It’s like saying the behavior of the molecules that constitute the body of the rapist can behave in a certain fashion resulting in a rape. It’s not an explication. At the level of intention it is not relevant.

I am out of my domain but I think this is not so, or even if it is so at the raw level of the gene it is not so in practice. It has been proposed that longevity is selected for by virtue of the greater likelihood of individual A surviving to produce progeny if the grandparents of individual A are alive to provide additional childrearing / support to enhance the care provided for by the parents. Outliving one’s own reproductive years cannot directly contribute to one’s own likelihood of passing on one’s genes but in a social context, in a group environment of interactions and relationships, it can nevertheless do so indirectly. Whether you accept that specific example as a valid explanation of longevity is beside the point: in that KIND of way I think characteristics can be selected for or against. If your GROUP does not survive because your behavioral characteristics are disruptive, your progeny will be breathing air in a world without nurture and protection and will probably not survive. Or will be far less likely to do so than a similar individual in a GROUP in which a similar parent’s behavioral characteristics are compatible with interactions and interdependencies that promote social cohesion and group survival.

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Similar logic could be used to argue that IF males, as a group, are innately inclined to rape if given the opportunity (even if NOT ALL individual males are so inclined), we should impose a male curfew and tightly control male behavior. Which was the post to which you responded upthread.

I myself am not supporting either position. I am totally in favor of psychos having the complete freedom to refuse unwanted psychiatric treatment (even if as a GROUP stats might show that letting us do so is at least marginally more risky to the rest of you), and I am also in favor of males not being treated as potential rapists (even if as a GROUP males would appear to be the ones who do nearly all the raping and even if we have some kind of evolutionary propensity to rape).

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I’m afraid I’m one of only two people still with this thread, so I will take this on myself.

I must say that your post is so deeply veiled behind mind-bogglingly metaphysical inanities that it surpasseth all understanding. Or, to put in the popular vernacular, WTF?

What do you mean by “a meaningful exchange of power”?

What do you mean by “a delusion that blinds us to realities”?

What do you mean by your pluralizing the word “reality”?

What alternative “realites” do you contend exist, and what is your rational justification for asserting that they exist?

How do we have sex in these alternative realities?

Is sex there “hotter” than here? If so, how do we get there?

Are there alternative sexual techniques in these alternative realities that don’t work in non-alternative reality? Or should that be pluralized also?

How, exactly, does “sex without a meaningful exchange of power” constitute a “delusion”?

How, exactly, does that alleged “delusion” of “sex without a meaningful exchange of power” blind us to those alternative realities?

What, exactly, constitutes the “essential power discourse between all people”?

What makes it essential?

Does this involve a massive, “all-person” orgy of some kind?

If so, when’s that scheduled to begin?

Should the males wear condoms to this event?

What safe sex rules of engagement apply?

What languages will this discourse employ, and will there be translators available?

Will we be allowed to have sex with the translators, too? Or will our “delusions” “blind us” to their presence?
Once you’ve satisfactorily answered all those questions, we can move on to addressing exactly what you mean when you say “consensual sex that does not in some way degrade our humanity is vapid and empty”.

I look forward to your replies! Especially about when the orgy will begin.

380

I’m going to break up my response into two separate posts because there’s so much involved here that separation makes good practical sense to me. I’m also going to tackle the second question first so that there’s more of a context for replying more productively to the first question.

I need to emphasize an absolutely essential point if you are to understand why your premise regarding longevity is correct while at the same time it demonstrates that evolution acts only on individuals, or more accurately, only on genes and collections of genes. To the very best of my knowledge, there is no scientifically valid foundation for any belief in any legitimate kind of group selection, whether biological, sociobiological, and perhaps not even sociological (but I admit that I’m not very knowledgeable in that area at all, so I recognize that my knowledge is quite limited in that regard).

Sociology / social science is absolutely a fully legitimate scientific endeavor, but it operates at a very different level of abstraction than the other two domains, and it employs a very different set of what might be called heuristics, assumptions, working strategies, logical and linguistic categories, jargon (which is essential in all sciences), and perhaps even different worldviews. Sociology must try to take into account the very foggy realm of social concepts and perceptions and attitudes and beliefs and motivations and all the rest of the bizarre menagerie of human emotions, social dynamics, and the distorting effects of human consciousness. I can only compliment those who willingly enter that morass and try to sort through it for their intellectual courage; I am reluctant to enter very deeply into all that fog, but I’ll try my best to follow you.

So, back to the central issue. What you are referring to is called the “kin-selection hypothesis” and I am a very strong advocate of that view. It also represents by far the most compelling explanation for the persistence of homosexuality as a genetic natural phenomenon widespread throughout nature, which is what I will focus on in my response.

The existence and persistence of homosexuality in many thousands of species, including homo sapiens, has actually been denied, ignored, or hidden for centuries, but once Bruce Bagemihl brought animal homosexuality to Fundamentalism-imperiling center stage with conclusive evidence in his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, that’s no longer an option.

Kin-selection posits that an individual doesn’t have to actually reproduce in order to propagate at least a portion of their genes and alleles into the future. Instead, if their genetic-based behaviors serve to increase the representation of their kin’s genes within the gene pool, that works pretty well too, and so the genes that code for for a predisposition for that behavior get carried forward along with the rest. There’s no other possible explanation for the ever-steady persistence of those behaviors that we see all around us. Thus, homosexuality must be genetic in origin.

In humans, the genetic basis for homosexuality has somewhat unexpectedly been discovered to act on the mother of the individual, rather than in the individual itself (there may still be genes that code for homosexuality in the individual’s genome, but they haven’t been as conclusively established as has the genetic role acting in the mother). The genes only create a predisposition towards homosexual behavior; a predisposition that will not produce actual homosexuality unless other conditions are met, most or all of which are likely to be environmental.

The homosexual behavior that the genes end up producing in humans is such that the presence of one or more homosexuals in a kin grouping tends to increase the genetic presence of the homosexual’s kin, and the more closely related the homosexual individual is to the beneficiaries of their actions (such as contributing the equivalent calories of what their mate would consume if they had one, contributing to physical protection of their closer kin, contributing to education of the kin, and so forth), the more direct and personal are these contributions. Thus, the closer the genetic relationship, the more direct the contributions are. and thus the closer the genetic relationship, the more the number of the homosexual’s kin-shared genes and alleles will be present in the gene pool.

But does that translate into some kind of “group” evolutionary selection? No! Absolutely not!

This is because, in the end, it is neither the group nor even the component individuals that natural selection technically operates on. It is the specific genes and alleles in the gene pool that are acted upon by evolutionary processes! Group selection is very probably impossible. I can’t say it actually is impossible because nature is nothing if not hideously complex and difficult to pin down, and the essential tentativeness of all good science must never be denied.