I think that the pheromone/rape thing is bunk, but the above is just silly. Why would pheromones work cross species? Do the other animals rape eachother?
Certainly not an authority on the subject, but, especially in the US, most people are probably so perfumed/mouthwashed/scrubbed clean/dial-soap deodorized/razor smooth/downy fresh/minty clean that a self-respecting pheromone doesn’t have a chance. If pheromones could be detected, the bearer would probably be regarded as being rather “funky” which is a cultural no-no.
This sig not Y2K compliant. Happy 1900.
Unless you are the rapist, how much can you know about their motives? Rapists are sociopaths, sick people, and are likely not all identical in their upbringing and motives.
Yes, I’ve seen studies of dolphin males pinning a female to the shallow seabed while others force sex on her. I’ve seen videos of rough ape sex, where the male is rebuffed and holds the female down and takes sex anyways.
But no, pheromones probably wouldn’t work across species, or if they did, it’d be chimp -> man, not sheep -> man.
Ubermensh, I would think any study showing that rape is caused by pheromones to be bunk, but I wouldn’t doubt that pheromones do play some role in that specific rapist/victim interaction, making that target more appealing to the rapist.
My next paragraph is not going to be PC, so if you’re sensitive, don’t read it.
Wearing ‘sexy’ clothes is a risk factor in getting raped! If pheromones do causes sexual attraction, then it’s likely that they would also be a factor in rape risk.
This doesn’t mean that the rapist is excused, or that the victim deserved it, but we need to be aware of risks to protect ourselves. I personally never show money while in a rough area of town and I don’t walk through downtown alleys at night. If I was to get mugged, even doing this, the mugger, not me, would be to blame, I don’t dispute this. But if I was mugged, it would be me who was beaten up, and in taking some responsibility for my own safety, I try to reduce risk factors as much as possible.
If pheromones are proven to be a risk factor then perhaps we could get a counteracting pheromone which women could spray on before venturing into a rough area, or even before a business meeting if they wanted to appear less sexual. This is similar to women dressing for whatever role they want to portray; clothes for a hot date aren’t good clothes for jogging at night.
I think one of the problems with rape is that there was no evolutionary problem with it, it would be a valid strategy. Either seduce a women or rape her and your genes get passed on without your having to raise the kid. It’s a problem in the scale of individual people, but for primative man it seems like it would have been a valid strategy. Thus we’re probably conditioned to act upon sexual urges in such a way that is very incompatible with ‘civilized’ society.
Understanding what urges the unconcious mind looks for, and how to fool it, would be one step in avoiding rape. It obviously isn’t enough to catch the rapist and punish them, because the damage is already done and it’s not something that can be undone, like theft. If we can prevent rape from happening, it’s better for everyone.
Well, if pheromones do drive men to rape, I know some perfume copmanies that are going to go belly up.
:::Roger, sell. Sell now damn it!:::
“I should not take bribes and Minister Bal Bahadur KC should not do so either. But if clerks take a bribe of Rs 50-60 after a hard day’s work, it is not an issue.” ----Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, Current Prime Minister of Nepal
and that’s one thing that sparked my theory. companies sell perfume that supposedly attracts the opposite sex. they say these work, but i’ve read no scientific proof that they for sure do (i know i haven’t read .05% of the literature out there though).
and one of my point is that this wouldn’t work if a man casually walked down a street, sensed or ‘smelled’ a pheromone laden woman, and raped her. i highly doubt if pheromones work that way. this would be more of a longer, been around a women who’s ovulating thing. i think the pheromones would have to take a longer time to work than just 2 minutes. now, the rapists might not rape the person whose pheromones he sensed, but again he might.
don’t male dolphins also sometimes batter, or try to have sex with women when the women are swimming with the dolphins?
i guess there could be other ways to study this, but all fail in real world settings. you could see if strippers bring in more money around whatever time of month their pheromones are the strongest. but then you’d have the other women who would throw the results off.
i don’t doubt at all that humans are affected by hormones. look at a sorority house or a female dorm. many, if not all, of the women are in synch (a link is in an eariler post).
Hmmmmmmmm…this is one of the arguments homosexuals use to justify their perversion. So, if animals exhibit homosexual behavior, it’s ok ok for humans, but if animals rape, it’s not ok for humans?
I heard about a report, it may be the same one your talking about. It said that rape was not about power, it was about spreading genes, and that it may have ocurred often thousands of years ago. I don’t agree with the pheromones idea, because it would mean that rapists don’t plan a rape. Rapists seek their victims. i also heard that the way women dress is important. Example: serial killers look for a particular person, they don’t kill anybody. Same goes for rapists, and that would link the spreading of genes–survival of the fitess
I think we as a society like to know why bad things happen. This includes rape. We want to know why someone would hurt someone we care about, or someone innocent. So we search for reasons (pheromones, alcohol, genetics, the way she was dressed, etc). It will not change the fact that it is wrong. And by saying that it is in someone’s genes, or was caused by natural body chemicals is really just going to provide a way for a rapist to say “See? It isn’t my fault.”
If it is evolutionary, then why don’t all men force sex on woman? Because they are capable of stopping their apparently “primal urges.” This means that the rapist did not choose to stop his. And as far as animals go, very few species use sex for pleasure. To them it is for procreation or dominance. Therefore, I think that lends more creedence to rapists using rape as a way to gain power. And I don’t think men are like animals, in that they have an overwhelming desire to pass along their genes by force. Many rapists are married (sometimes happily), and are therefore already capable of passing along their genes that way. I don’t think I have ever heard of a case where a rapist used this as his defense.
The pheromone idea sounds a little far-fetched to me, but if it could be proved then maybe I would give it more credence. But you have to see, that it still doesn’t change it. You can’t prevent possible rapists from living with women (who ovulate), and you can’t prevent women from ovulating. So what does this help?
And the world may not be black and white, but Blue Twilight is not making shit up here. Many men rape for power. My sister’s ex-boyfried raped her for the same reason that he emotionally blackmailed her–he didn’t want her calling the shots. When she broke up with him, he felt the need to rape her so that he could feel in control of the situation. And how about a man who rapes his infant daughter with a hammer? (true case) Do you believe that is sexually gratifying for him?
The fact is, there is something mentally wrong with rapists. They do not function as normal members of society. They do not know wrong from right, and they never will. They need to be removed from society, and we need to stop trying to find excuses for their behavior. That money that you want dedicated to researching whether or not pheromones trigger rape would be much better spent on the victims of the attack. (counseling, trial moneys, etc).
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” --Whitman
Not to pick on you, SINsApple, but your post contained a bunch of points I’d like to respond to:
Just because ALL men don’t do it doesn’t mean the roots are evolutionary. At some level, everything we do can be considered evolutionary (provided you accept the theory of evolution, of course 
). Remember, with the theory of evolution, the goal is for genes to propogate themselves, not for individuals to prosper. The theory is that it is advantageous for the gene pool for some very small amount of rapes (and murders) to occur, even though it is devastating for the individual victims. This holds for animals also- if it wasn’t to the species’s overall advantage, the predisposition would be bred out. The problem we have is that even if this was a useful thing for humans 50000 years ago, it’s probably not useful now- just devastating. Unfortunately, it takes evolution a while to catch up to our quickly changing human condition. The theory further further states that since local culture affects the precise effects of having rapes (and murders), the predisposition isn’t very hard-wired- it can be muted (or amplified) by local cultural conditions, and this ability to adapt to local conditions was evolved, also.
As Cecil said (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_064b.html ), “animals always do it for fun”. It’s unclear how much intent and motivation you can read into animal actions. The bottom line (according to the theory), is that they do it because they’ve evolved to behave that way, because it’s best for the species (not necessarily for individuals, remember).
Men (and women) are like animals, in the sense that we have evolved with certain pre-dispositions, which are moldable by local culture, upbringing, etc. I’m not sure that you can state than animals tend to pass along their genes by force. Also, with such an (apparently) low level of cognition among most animals, it’s not easy to judge motivations among either party.
Genes don’t merely want to propagate, they want to propagate as much as possible. There is no precedent for this theory as a legal defense (and it’s not intended to be), so you won’t hear of too many rapists trying it.
The pheromone idea seems far-fetched me also.
I’m not aware of any compelling evidence that indicates humans have much (if any) reaction to phermones. Human females have evolved so that it’s difficult to tell when they’re fertile, unlike many other animals. More research is needed.
The word “rape” is used in many (probably too many) contexts. What is needed is a more precise terminology. How useful is a term which groups together the act of sexually assaulting an infant with a hammer and the act of having sex with an unconscious, drunk college student? They are both horrible crimes, but (to me) they are different crimes, presumably with different motivations, root causes, etc.
Now we leave science and enter opinion. Here I happen to agree with you completely. I do think that it is possible some rapists can be cured, but only in some “Star Trek” type super-advanced technology, by manipulating a complex mix of hormones, etc.
I am just presenting the arguments for the evolutionary theory, not whether I personally believe in it or not!
Arjuna34
One thing to keep in mind about the evolutionary rape theory is that it can’t be used to explain the actions of individuals, just groups. A good analog is coin tosses. If you take 1000 pennies and flip them, probability says that about 50% will land tails, and 50% will land heads. Say the 502nd penny comes up heads. You can’t explain why it did in terms of probability theory. The exact reason that particular penny came up heads that time has to do with minute details of wind, dirt on the penny, how it was tossed, etc. Probability theory for this case can only explain aggregate behavior, not individual occurances.
The evolutionary rape theory has the same limitation. You can’t explain a particular case with it- it just predicts (or explains rather) aggregate behaviour.
Arjuna34
Arjuna34:
Do you have a sign up: “My place or yours?”
No, I think all of your points here are well taken.
I don’t understand all these other people, here and elsewhere, who dump subjective questions (which require empathy with the subjects of the question) in with objective ones (which can be linked up with existing models in dispassionate, objective science) – as all the same game and in direct contention.
When one says an animal, human or otherwise, acts sexually (read, effects transfer or attempts to effect transfer of germ cells between sexes) in a certain way in order to maximize its genes in whatever pool, one is not discussing subjective intention / viewing entities teleologically; one is viewing outcomes in an objective phenomenal world which appears scientifically analyzable in a way communicable among cognizing human minds, whether these 1) have no feeling at all for what a rapist or a rape victim experiences from an instance of rape, 2) have communicated with either to the extent of feeling they “understand” empathetically what goes on in such act, or 3) are rapists or rape victims – without feeling need of either 2) or 3).
On the other hand, psychologists and sociologists like to call what they fool with science, but it is clearly not objective science, any great deal more than what novelists write on the same subjects. When you argue about what animal (including human) behaviors are sexual or not, under various situations, you’re invoking some sort of teleological imputation that is outside of objective science. You are saying that, for some reason, of an empathetic or ex(?)pathetic nature, you experience in such entity an act of a will based on a sexual urge you introspectively sense to be in common between you and that entity, or that you sense something of a different nature, including an act being in common with a different drive you yourself experience under different circumstances, e.g., violence associated with sex.
I completely agree with Arjuna34’s explication that the evolutionary analysis is only valid as a logical explanation of a groupwide phenomenon. An attempt at an objective analysis of an individual sexual or otherwise-attributed phenomenon would have to dig into rather detailed objective study of the CNSs of the subject species, to the extent of tagging a collection of nerve tracts and cortices as stereotypically of sexual function in individuals of that species considered to be “normal”, and then attempting to relate activities in these to same in various neural-signal routes in various individuals of the same species whose behavior is to be considered “abnormal”, which in the case of civilized humans would include those exhibiting sexual or violent forms of behavior, phrased in objective terms, that correlate to subjectively defined acts proscribed in the particular civilized human culture. All of which would never break through to such as Blue Twilight, but. . .
I’m at a loss as to how to put a discussion of the mentioned babies-and-hammers association across in a tasteful way, but if this subject is one of insertion of an inanimate object into any orifice of a baby, which act is accompanied by any expressions of sexual gratification found otherwise only in common with acts of a sexual nature, despite a lack in the analyzer of any feeling of how this act could elicit sexual gratification in a person, it would seem that the analyzer should relate relate the act to such gratification. It’s also difficult to see how fire and sex relate, but apparently they do in a quite small number of persons, by some combination of neural nature and nurture – not that, on this somewhat subjective level, such an analysis is really objectively scientific.
Ray (I didn’t claim I was going to fix anything. . .but I’ll take it for broke.)
David and Gaudere? Incoming…
All rightie, then, the first question I should ask is: How many human pheromones have been isolated, and how many of these isolated pheromones have been conclusively demonstrated to work as pheromones on humans? And, among those successfully isolated and demonstrated human pheromones, have any been conclusively demonstrated to influence the male sex drive? (Second-rate perfume manufacturers have been creating junk-mail ad campaigns for years claiming to have produced products with pheromones in them – but these mostly use androstenol, which is a pheromone generated by and for pigs, not humans.)
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.