Jandila comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Douglas_Reay 09 September 2012 04:41AM

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Comment author: Vaniver 09 September 2012 10:17:02PM 7 points [-]

Trigger warning: more mechanical discussion of nonconsensual sex.

The odds of insemination are lower

On a per-act basis, rapes are about twice as likely to result in pregnancy than consensual sex. I suspect that you're right that various fertility-boosting measures don't happen during rape and this effect is due primarily to selection effects (who rapes, who is raped, and when the rape happens), but the net result is still that rapes are a decent reproductive strategy (if the rapist can get away with it).

Rape has been prevalent throughout human history, but forced copulation doesn't seem to be a leading or even closely-tailing human reproductive strategy.

This seems really unlikely in the context of marriages before the Enlightenment, or in the context of wars and raids (where women were a resource like any other).

Comment author: [deleted] 10 September 2012 02:19:58AM 2 points [-]

but the net result is still that rapes are a decent reproductive strategy (if the rapist can get away with it).

They touch on the statistics further down -- it's believed to be due to the fact that, in the case of consensual sex, the woman is more likely to have control over when in their fertility cycle the act occurs.

This seems really unlikely in the context of marriages before the Enlightenment, or in the context of wars and raids (where women were a resource like any other).

Different cultures have had very different approaches to marriage throughout history; they still often do. Anyway, I'm talking about the claim that rape is an evolutionary adaptation from the ancestral environment, couched as a reproductive strategy -- Neolithic Eurasia is a bit too recent to be germane to my argument.