Yes and Yes.
At the federal level, rape is defined as “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim”. It was specifically reworded to that in 2012 to include males. Prior to that it was “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will”, which seems like an oddly euphemistic way of writing a law.
I too had no idea what that was supposed to mean, I thought it meant Truly weird especially after reading the scenario about a gilled species laying eggs in a pond. Is it triggering or is it weird.
What if your species is like our fish species where the parents die post spawn? Having your only chance at leaving the desired offspring seems to up the offense considerably.
I would advise reading up on the mating behavior of African Cichlids. Mouth brooders, they care for their young quite a bit more than you are describing, but they choose their mates in crowded and competitive conditions. The males have several tricky methods of getting females to let them fertilize eggs. It’s quite fascinating.
In your scenario I would expect both male and female to immediately turn tail and begin frantically sweeping the intruder’s milt away while the chosen male inseminates. There would be no way of knowing how many eggs ended up being his, but he wouldn’t just be motionless.
As for the society, a lot depends on their overall mores. Are they a trickster-worshiping group that would revel in the derring-do? Or are the a staid, traditional society in which mating is considered something of a sacred ritual? You said a female chooses her mate, how are female rights treated in general? Has there ever been a female head of state? Is her choice considered to be absolute?
If female choice is considered absolute, then I would say this is a crime worse than rape. Contrary to what has been said above, in terms of evolution, the formation and carrying of eggs is quite expensive. Trade-offs are made between carrying them longer, making them bigger or making more of them, fertilizing inside or outside of the body, and so on. Likewise the attraction of mates literally forms the bodies and behavior of males in most species. To allow trickster mating would mean upcoming changes in bodies and personalities and eventual speciation. I would think in a sentient fish species this would be the act of a psychopath.
I mean, traditionally, rape meant a women was spoiled and wouldn’t be able to marry a desirable man. So i think there’s a lot of overlap.
I agree that it would be a serious crime. I just think that that species is different enough from us that the way they think about crime and transgressions in general would be very different from how we think about it. Take murder. We consider it a very serious crime to kill a child. But that species presumably has an enormous mortality rate of its larvae, and i doubt it would be considered a crime at all if an adult killed a few larvae going about it’s daily life.
Imagine that everything about your body and how your mind worked was centered on getting to do the chance to do one thing. All your life choices, all your behavior, everything, your entire existence was all about getting the chance to do this, and then somebody crept up and stole your chance.
I suppose your answer does have validity if males mate hundreds of times in their lives. But the OP supposes that females choose their mates, so I think that’s unlikely. It seems like an honor to procreate for males.
It’s that an answer to me? I think it would likely be a very serious crime. I just don’t think it makes sense to call it “rape”.
I agree with that. I thought you were arguing against my calling it “much worse” by the standards of that society.
In my scenario, there are, or can be, multiple males. The choice-thief is just explicitly not one of them.
OK, this actually phrases it better. When I said a form of rape in the OP, I was angling for the question of whether this was still a sex crime.
On thinking about it further, we’re positing that the aliens have something that we could consider a society, with laws and cultural mores and so on. But it’s hard to imagine how that could even exist in an R-selected species, and I think we need to figure that out before we can answer the question. It might be something like the Kreely, from Schlock Mercenary, for instance: Each mating produces many larvae, but the larvae don’t become fully sentient unless they’re exposed to certain key microbes at a certain stage of their life, and typically only a couple of larvae do so. Kreelies don’t particularly prize their pre-sentient offspring, and have no moral objection to selling them to other species as pets or food, but once they start becoming sentient, they’re as attached to them as we are to our young.
Yes, they do.
While they are definitely sentient, The juveniles here are also definitely not sapient yet.
My inspirations (besides salmon) were a combo of the Kreely, the Dwellers from Banks’ The Algebraist and most especially the Lithians in Blish’s A Case of Conscience
We don’t know that they get only one chance, though. Maybe they do this every year, and are long lived. And we don’t know how important reproducing is to individuals, or to these particular individuals — it varies quite a bit in humans. @MrDibble?
I agree that it would be a crime, and a crime involving sex; but that it wouldn’t map neatly onto our crime of rape. I think they might have trouble really understanding what rape means to humans.
Ever seen the fit an American man throws if he’s forced to miss the SuperBowl?
They don’t do it every year, but it’s also not a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
It’s as important to them as having kids is to humans.
No, actually. But we probably know different people.
And these aren’t humans we’re talking about. Whether this is something they’d throw a fit about, and if so what sort of fit, seems to me to be what @MrDibble is trying to figure out.
They definitely will throw a fit about it - it is some kind of violation of choice. It’s what kind of fit I’m not sure of.
In other words, crucially important to some, strongly avoided by a minority but by a significant number, and considered ‘well, if it happens, it happens’ by some others; but important enough to most for it to be protected by the society?
Though it occurs to me that this seems separated from the other reasons humans have to have sex; so it seems to me there’d be quite a lot of societal difference. Presumably there’d be no equivalent of marriage or romantic relationships; or if there is, it’s not connected to the act of reproduction in anything like the way it is in humans.
I don’t see that. We’re told that females choose their partners. Why wouldn’t a female’s chosen partner be in a relationship with her equivalent to marriage?
But if they’re like Kreelies, then they might not regard spawning as the act equivalent to how we view reproduction; they might reserve that status for the process of granting sapience. Pre-sapient young do have a value to them, but it’s a value that can be assigned a monetary value (as evidenced by the fact that they have no issue with selling pre-sapient young). So interfering with that stage of the process, in whatever way, might be only a property crime, not a personal crime.
To repeat - multiple chosen male fertilizers, not one. If there’s a human equivalent, it would be polycules, because males will fertilize multiple females, too.