Rape and evolution: A Reply to our critics

Abstract

For the last quarter of a century, attempts to prevent rape have been guided by a widespread social-science explanation that holds that rape’s causation has little, if anything, to do with sexual desire. Instead, it holds that rape is motivated by men’s attempt to dominate and control women. It also contends that rape occurs only when males are taught (by their culture) to rape. In A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (MIT Press, 2000), we scientifically criticize this social-constructionist view of rape. We argue that, although a given rapist may have numerous motivations for committing a rape, social constructionists have not seriously and honestly considered the vast evidence showing that rapists are sexually motivated. Although we agree that culture (that is, social learning, or learning resulting from experience with other members of the same species) plays a significant role in causing rape, we challenge the notion that rape occurs only when males are taught by their culture to rape. The ethnographic record of anthropology indicates that rape occurs in all known cultures. It also occurs in a wide variety of other species in which there is certainly no cultural encouragement of such behavior. We emphasize in our book that the best way to obtain a better understanding of the role of culture in human rape is to approach the subject from the only generally accepted scientific explanation of the behavior of living things: evolution by natural selection. We then show that rape is definitely caused by men’s evolved sexual psychology, and we discuss why this knowledge may be important to society’s efforts to reduce rape.