Rape

Okay, this topic doesn't get a cute musically themed title. Like the cheating post, this is a darker subject. Lets get to it.

So we've established that the race to pass on our genes isn't nice and is very selective. That means few winners and even more losers. Have you noticed that attractive people have attractive partners? When Brad Pitt left Jennifer Aniston, he hooked up with Angelina Jolie, not Susan Boyle. (Then again, Jude Law left Sienna Miller for their nanny, so some men are just whores.) Then there is Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. Nice people but not models. Then there is Lyall Lovett. Is he seeing anyone?

Sometimes, people don't find that special someone. I'm not saying that Lyall Lovett is a rapist (he's a singer and rich and famous, so he can get women) but many men get left out in the cold. Rapists tend not to be the most attractive or popular men. If they ever want to have sex, they have to force it. Its like in that SUBLIME song: "If it wasn't for date rape, I'd never get laid."

Back to the animals, especially the scorpion flies. Male scorpion flies have many ways of attracting females. They prove themselves by finding dead insects to give to her, or steal dead bugs from spiders webs or use their drool to make fake insects to trick the female.

Lets say a male cant do any of those things and the females are ignoring him. They resort to rape. The male will wait until a female passes by, grab her with his abdomen and hold her down while he mates with her. The female violently fights back the whole time. Most of the time the female escapes before the male successfully rapes her and when he does mate with her, she always lays fewer eggs. Its unknown if the female somehow makes it so she lays fewer eggs or if the male just produces less sperm and fertilizes fewer eggs.

Rape is obviously a violent, terrible act against women. Its humiliating and unforgivable. But that is nature. Nature doesn't care if you are humiliated. Feminists rightfully denounce rape and call for all sorts of laws and ways to protect women. Where they differ from evolutionary theory is that feminists say that rape is purely about men dominating women through violence and fear. They correctly say that rapists target the vulnerable and defenseless. While its not politically correct to say this, women are smaller and weaker than men and sometimes its good to have male protection.

Women aged 20 to 24 are most likely to be raped. Eighty percent of rape victims are under age 30, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN). These women are young and many are likely unmarried. They are also in the most fertile time in their lives. Women often out live their husbands, leaving many elderly women defenseless. Yet older women are much less likely to be raped than younger women. It would seem that fertility may have an influence on whom rapists choose to target. (On the other hand, 15% of rape victims are younger than age 12, and are just as unable to reproduce as women over 60.)

In the years 2004 and 2005, 64,080 women were raped in the United States. From those rapes, over 3,000 pregnancies resulted. The odds of getting pregnant after one act of unprotected sex is 5%, and given the possibility that some victims were likely on the Pill or were infertile or were not raped vaginally, the number could have been much higher.

There is a important point to be made there. While women who are sexually assaulted are often young, they are not always raped in such a way to cause pregnancy. This is a blow to the "rape is a means to pregnancy" theory espoused by evolutionary biologists and is more proof for feminists who say rape is a means of humiliating women. This shows how difficult it is to study biology's effect on human behavior. We are not purely driven by biology as animals are.

Sources:
Watson, Lyall. Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil. Harper Collins, 1995.
http://www.endabuse.org/content/action_center/detail/754
http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims