Why men rape

We fervently believe that, just as the leopard's spots and the giraffe's elongated neck are the result of aeons of past Darwinian selection, so also is rape. The rape-prevention measures that are being taught to police officers, lawyers, parents, college students and potential rapists are based on the prevailing social-science view, and are therefore doomed to fail.

The Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is the most powerful scientific theory that applies to living things. As long as efforts to prevent rape remain uninformed by that theory, they will continue to be handicapped by ideas about human nature that are fundamentally inadequate. We believe that only by acknowledging the evolutionary roots of rape can prevention tactics be devised that really work.

The mechanics of the phenomenon are simple: animals born without traits that led to reproduction died out, whereas the ones that reproduced the most succeeded in conveying their genes to posterity. Crudely speaking, sex feels good because over evolutionary time the animals that liked having sex created more offspring than the animals that didn't. Their mysterious and tangled permutations have inspired flights of literary genius throughout the ages, from Oedipus Rex to Portnoy's Complaint.

And a quick perusal of the personal-growth section of any bookstore--past such titles as Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and You Just Don't Understand --is enough to show that one reason sex is so complicated is that men and women perceive it so differently.

Is that the case only because boys and girls receive different messages during their upbringing? Or, as we believe, do those differences between the sexes go deeper? Whereas fathers can share the responsibilities of child rearing, they do not have to. Like most of their male counterparts in the rest of the animal kingdom, human males can reproduce successfully with a minimal expenditure of time and energy; once the brief act of sexual intercourse is completed, their contribution can cease.

By contrast, the minimum effort required for a woman to reproduce successfully includes nine months of pregnancy and a painful childbirth. Typically, ancestral females also had to devote themselves to prolonged breast-feeding and many years of child care if they were to ensure the survival of their genes. In short, a man can have many children, with little inconvenience to himself; a woman can have only a few, and with great effort. Given the low cost in time and energy that mating entails for the male, selection favored males who mated frequently.

By contrast, selection favored females who gave careful consideration to their choice of a mate; that way, the high costs of mating for the female would be undertaken under circumstances that were most likely to produce healthy offspring.

The result is that men show greater interest than women do in having a variety of sexual partners and in having casual sex without investment or commitment. That commonplace observation has been confirmed by many empirical studies. The evolutionary psychologist David M.

Buss of the University of Texas at Austin, for instance, has found that women around the world use wealth, status and earning potential as major criteria in selecting a mate, and that they value those attributes in mates more than men do. People do not necessarily have sex because they want children, and they certainly do not conduct thorough cost-benefit analyses before taking a partner to bed. As Darwin made clear, individual organisms merely serve as the instruments of evolution.

Men today find young women attractive because during human evolutionary history the males who preferred prepubescent girls or women too old to conceive were outreproduced by the males who were drawn to females of high reproductive potential.

And women today prefer successful men because the females who passed on the most genes, and thereby became our ancestors, were the ones who carefully selected partners who could best support their offspring.

That is why, as the anthropologist Donald Symons of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has observed, people everywhere understand sex as "something females have that males want. But people are far from unique in that regard: the males of most animal species spend much of their energies attracting, wooing and securing sexual partners. The male woodcock, for instance, performs a dramatic display each spring at mating time, soaring high into the air and then tumbling to the ground.

Male fireflies are even flashier, blinking like neon signs. The male bowerbird builds a veritable honeymoon cottage: an intricate, sculpted nest that he decorates with flowers and other colorful bric-a-brac. Male deer and antelope lock antlers in a display of brute strength to compete for females.

Depending on the species, he dances, fans his feathers or offers gifts of food. In the nursery web spider, the food gift is an attempt to distract the female, who otherwise might literally devour her partner during the sex act.

The common thread that binds nearly all animal species seems to be that males are willing to abandon all sense and decorum, even to risk their lives, in the frantic quest for sex.

In some animal species, moreover, rape is commonplace. In many scorpionfly species, for instance--insects that one of us Thornhill has studied in depth--males have two well-formulated strategies for mating.

Either they offer the female a nuptial gift a mass of hardened saliva they have produced, or a dead insect or they chase a female and take her by force. Called the notal organ, it is a clamp on the top of the male's abdomen with which he can grab on to one of the female's forewings during mating, to prevent her escape. Besides rape, the notal organ does not appear to have any other function. For example, when the notal organs of males are experimentally covered with beeswax, to keep them from functioning, the males cannot rape.

Such males still mate successfully, however, when they are allowed to present nuptial gifts to females. Men in all classes violate women with whom they work. Rarely do women place themselves in danger. Marital rape is no uncommon, but is often ignored. Society tends to blame the victim, even when she is a child. Who rapes? Just as we can have fixed ideas about victims, we have them about perpetrators as well. Are all men capable of rape? In my own life, I cannot accept this.

Here is what one man said when I asked him if he thought he could imagine raping someone. I can imagine murdering, but not raping. Murder is worse than rape, I know, but there are lots of reasons to do it.

If I were in a state of out-of-control rage, if someone were threatening to harm me or someone else, if killing someone were the only way to avoid some terrible catastrophe I know, this is a weird, weird paragraph. But think about it — there is no reasonable reason to rape.

Do you ever need to rape someone to stop any other crime? The only people who openly justify rape are those who run blatantly woman-hating societies, where women are objects. In my days of clarity and righteousness as a college student, I wholeheartedly believed the conventional feminist wisdom that men objectify women in order to rape them. Social scientists Alan Fiske and Tage Rai have studied the moral motivations of violence. Rape often has a twisted value component.

You value your own needs more than your victim. You want to teach someone a lesson. You want to feel powerful. You feel you deserve to humiliate someone.

All these values and emotions only apply to other people. Italian footballers in the country's top league, Serie A, took to the pitch with red streaks on their faces as part of a call to end violence against women. In Italy, women were killed through domestic violence, up 0. Trauma surgeon Maria Grazia Vantadori in Milan came up with the idea to show the X-rays of domestic violence abuse victims at the hospital. So any of these could be any woman," she said.

Only a handful of countries in Europe, including Germany and Belgium, define rape as sex without consent. Other countries often require proof of intimidation or violence. Spain, Italy, Greece and France — among many other countries — do not legally define rape as sex without consent. Earlier this month, Spaniards took to the streets to protest a Barcelona court decision that sentenced five of six men accused of gang-raping a year-old girl to 10 to 12 years in prison for sexually abusing the minor — but acquitted them of the more serious charge of rape.

In Malaga, Spain, protesters took part in a 'Caminata del Silencio' Walk of silence on November 25 to denounce femicide and sexual violence against women. Each placard contains the names of all women who were killed by their partners in Spain so far this year. Visit the new DW website Take a look at the beta version of dw. Go to the new dw. More info OK. Wrong language?

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Science The psychology of a rapist Sexual assault is always traumatizing and demeaning for its victims. However, studies show that rapists have some common characteristics: - a lack of empathy - narcissism - feelings of hostility towards women Toxic masculinity Sherry Hamby, a research professor of psychology at the University of the South in the US state of Tennessee, told DW that "sexual assault is not about sexual gratification or sexual interest, but more about dominating people.