Imagine that you are a rapist. There are many types of rapists, but we will put you in a specific box. We will imagine that, without the influence of any substances, you have decided to rape a 24 year old woman after your first five dates with her didn't lead to any sex. It's hard to tell what you're thinking, really, and there's a high chance you won't consider it rape in your head at all. Maybe you consider it fair, after you spent your hard earned money on those five useless dates! Or maybe you think she deserved it for teasing you the whole time.
The question is this: what made you think that this was okay in the first place? You clearly understood the consequences enough to try to hide it, but you didn't do well enough, and you're now sitting around in a prison cell killing time. Outside, unbeknownst to you, several psychologists are feuding over the psychology of a rapists. They become aware of your case, and so several psychologists, all from different schools of thought, interview you to understand your inner psyche.
First, a psychologist introduces herself as Susan Brownmiller. She tells you of the current popular consensus: "rape is about power, not sex". She explains that she wrote about this in her book, called Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape [1], and she'd like to see how this might apply to you. This book played a large part of changing the current opinion of rape to what it is today, after all.
Brownmiller asks if you meant to intimidate the woman. You say that you did. She seems satisfied with this answer. As she wrote in her book, "rape is a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear," and the previous three rapists she interviewed all meant to intimidate the woman too. Brownmiller also wrote that "Indeed, one of the earliest forms of male bonding must have been the gang rape of one woman by a band of marauding men". She does not substantiate this claim, but she says it with all her heart.
Is rape about power? Well, sometimes! But surely not every rape ever is conscious female intimidation. Susan Brownmiller fails to provide any genuine proof of the "rape is power" theory, too. Her nearly 500 page long book simply pushes meanings onto documented rapes and distorts historical information in order to make her point.
Before your next interview, how about reading other interviews with rapists that were slipped through your door by a mysterious stranger? Here are fragments from a lower-class 49 year old man who committed multiple rapes. [2]
"At that particular time it gave me a sense of power, a sense of accomplishing something that I felt I didn’t have the ability to get. You see something or somebody that you want, and you know that under normal circumstances you wouldn’t be able to attract this person, so you take her."
"This was something I wanted, and I felt that I would never be able to make this, and I’ve always been told that this was the thing to have, you know. I wanted this particular kind of person—she was a college girl—but I felt that my social station would make her reject me."
"I wasn’t concerned with her fear. I was only concerned with her body and being able to accomplish something that, given my upbringing, I couldn’t accomplish any other way. I felt elated that I was able to accomplish what I wanted. It gave me power over her. Her feelings didn’t mean anything to me at all. The thing that mattered was the thrill. I wasn’t interested in whether someone else felt, or what they felt. I was only interested in a selfish thing."
"Some had to be coerced, but I didn’t enjoy doing it. It wasn’t a turn-on. I wanted things as easy as I could get them. And if they didn’t give in, I would threaten, and if I had to go through a big hassle, or exert any kind of violence, well, that was nothing for me then, but I didn’t like it."
He was asked if there was a difference between sex with a willing and unwilling partner, and replied that "there was no difference at all".
Power is mentioned, yes, but that last question throws a wrench in things. If there was no difference at all, then how much did that power matter? Was he experiencing sexual desire?
Donald Symons, the man who laughed at Browmiller earlier, walks in. He is the writer of The Evolution of Human Sexuality [3], a book that partially refutes Browmiller's point.
Symons introduces himself as one of the founders of evolutionary psychology. He also informs you that two more evolutionary psychologists were supposed to be here, but seem to be running a bit late. You ask what evolutionary psychology is. He tells you that it tries to identify why humans have psychologically adapted in certain ways by finding what these adaptations are trying to solve. He goes on a tangent, explaining that this school of thought aims to unify psychology and biology together, and that psychology should ultimately be a branch of biology.
He says that very few works had "so inadequately documented its major thesis" as much as Brownmiller's. He believes that feminist perspectives and investigations on rape have mostly made their contributions by documenting the victims's point of view, not the aggressor's. This is important, but this is not all that's needed.
He says that the idea that rape is power may have come from a few sources. He only explains a few of these sources, though, and tells you the rest are on page 211 of his book if you are interested.
1. The modern view of sex is that sex is good, and rape is bad. So, if rape isn't sex, then it removes all cognitive dissonance for others and makes it so rape is no longer about sexual desire.
2. People who write about the motives of rapists seem to frequently equate sexual feelings with impulsive and uncontrollable feelings of lust. These writers may be scared to admit that sex can be a motive for rape, since it may seem like they are condoning rape.
3. Non-rapists are trying to perceive how other minds think despite not thinking this way ourselves. If women desire power, but don't desire to rape, they will deeply struggle and frustrate themselves trying to understand rapists. Men, too, mostly do not rape and do not have rape fantasies. Perhaps the majority of both sexes can hardly understand what is going through a rapist's head.
Symons tries to expand on his point more, but mid sentence, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer rush in together. They apologize profusely, but pick up on what Symons was saying and continue.
In "Why Men Rape" [4], Thornhill and Palmer bring up the idea that evolution selected for males who mated frequently, since mating has low time and energy costs. On the other hand, women have much higher time and energy costs due to the burden of pregnancy and the continued support of the child, so evolution selected for women who chose their mates carefully. Rape occurs across a variety of species, including insects, birds, fish, and more. Scorpionflies specifically developed an appendage that seems specifically made for rape, which holds onto the female's wings during mating to prevent her escaping.
Thornhill asks about your income. You don't make much, just enough to get by, and you live in a small studio apartment. Palmer asks about your social situation. You have a few friends, but you are not especially close to either of them. You aren't a member of any sort of communities or churches, you aren't an especially good worker, and you mostly just spend your free time alone.
"Doesn't that sound like an evolutionary adaptation to you?" Given the fact that women of childbearing age are targeted, that rape occurs across other species, and that women are usually far more sexually selective than men (as well as a range of other facts), rape can be theorized to be something that has evolved across thousands of years and is, in fact, a sexual act. Perhaps this is why you raped - there was no other way to reproduce at all for you! Women are sexually selective, and typically, a men can attract women through resources and social status. If a man does not have resources (money) or social status, just like you, what is he to do? Perhaps rape is the alternative solution.
Now, the other rape interview becomes far more interesting. The offenses he committed don't have to all be explained through power. He didn't especially care if he needed to be violent or threatening towards the woman, but it wasn't the point of it, and he actively disliked it. And, as he said, there was no difference at all between sex with a willing versus unwilling partner. This certainly points to his motives at least partially including sexual drive.
And with that, the three evolutionary psychologists apologize for taking so much of your time, bid you well, and leave.
Another psychologist immediately comes knocking on your cell door. His name is Albert Bandura. He introduces himself and the social learning theory. Social learning theory states a whole lot of things, but what you remember is that behaviors are learned, and can be learned through observation, imitation, modeling, and more. He asks if you were previously sexually abused yourself. You answer that you were groomed by an older woman when you were younger, and that no one around you ever took the issue seriously. The situation went on for months before you wised up to it.
Bandura mentions that a handful of other researchers have looked into this before. In "A social learning theory comparison of sexual victimization" [5], researchers compared two groups of adolescent delinquents. Both groups were sexually victimized themselves, but one group had committed sexual offenses, and another group other offenses. The group that committed sexual offenses was emotionally closer with their perpetrator, experienced more forceful sexual violence, and had suffered through the experience for longer. In other words, the social learning theory seemed to have played a role. It is possible that the sexually offending delinquents were simply imitating behaviors that they had experienced in higher quantities themselves.
He asks about how your father talked of sex. You explain that your father would frequently state that sex is part of the required duties of a wife, and that you'd hear complaints through the door if your mother hadn't satisfied him enough. Under this theory, your father and your old groomer would have modeled this exploitative behavior for you. You are simply applying what you have socially learned.
The guard calls out that visitation hours are running out, and there's only time for one more visitor. Bandura politely excuses himself, and Karl Popper takes his place. He sees your tired face, and he tells you he will not interrogate you any more. He just wants to share something with you that may help clear your jumbled head.
Karl Popper tells you about his principle of falsifiability. This states that if a theory does not have the potential to be proven incorrect by observance or by experimental results, then it is not a valid theory at all. This principle is exactly what makes astrology fall apart, as well as many other pseudoscience fields. Thornhill and Palmer's theory of rape being an evolutionary adaptation for men that have failed the sexual selection game makes sense, but is it provable? A gut reaction might be to ask a rapist, much like how you have been interviewed all day, but this is not necessarily a valid answer. If you ask a child why he eats, he won’t say that he’ll die without food, and needs to process it into nutrients. He’ll simply say that he was hungry. You might ask why he got hungry, and he might say something adjacent to “I saw cupcakes in the window” or “I always get hungry after school”. People do not necessarily understand how what they are doing connects to a base instinct of theirs. A child is the simplest way to prove this point, but this applies to adults and rapists all the same. Evolutionary psychologists aren't stupid, though - they are very well aware of this! It would be an insult to compare the field to astrology, but the point must be made that this theory simply applies existing evidence. Symons himself makes sure to explicitly say that data available does not let them conclude that rape is an evolutionary adaptation, but that the evidence seems to support the idea so far.
Social learning theory also falls weak to this, but not to the same extent. There is clear evidence to show that those who were sexually abused themselves have a higher chance of committing similar offenses. But, as always, correlation does not equal causation. It cannot concretely be proven that being a victim causes you to become an offender yourself, since this would require an experimental study. Creating an experimental study would require one group of people to be sexually abused and the other not, which is very obviously not possible due to major ethical concerns. Not only that, but there are, of course, cases of rape without the rapist being sexually abused himself, or cases where the perpetrator does not fully recall how he was raised or how it might factor into his actions. How can you ethically prove that social learning is what forms rapists?
Visitation hours end, so Popper decides to leave you with light reading. You receive a copy of Theories of Rape [6] by Lee Ellis, and skim through it. Lee Ellis saw the potential of all the three theories that you learned about today, even Brownmiller's power theory! Her book expands on all three, naming and combining them into something more cohesive. Susan Brownmiller's theory that rape is about power is referred to as the feminist theory. All concepts that rely on social learning theory fall under the social learning theory. And, lastly, Donald Symons, Randy Thornhill, and Craig Palmer's ideas make up the evolutionary theory.
Her synthesized theory of rape makes four claims:
1. Sex drive and drive for power can both motivate rape.
2. Behaviors of rape itself are mostly learned behaviors.
3. Males have stronger sex drives than females, and females have evolved tendencies to avoid sex until males have shown clear evidence of commitment to her and any of her potential children.
4. Males have strong variation in their motivation to rape and their tendencies to learn how to rape.
Indeed, all three of these theories seem to be present in your own rape case. You did mean to intimidate the woman. You had no other way to attract women due to no social standing or resources, and had never had normal consensual sex. And, lastly, you learned behaviors of rapists through family and grooming. Does her theory explain your case, then?
Ellis immediately smashes your hopes, and makes a point of saying that no theory is ever definitively true or false. "The most one can ever say for a theory is that it seems to be better than any other theory yet devised for explaining a particular phenomenon." If none of these theories can be true or false, even this synthesized one, what is the point of studying these theories? There are two main purposes.
First, there is use in knowing where to point specific research efforts. If there is a theory that might explain rape, why not make a best effort attempt to at least discredit it? Why not try to find correlations that might show which theory has the highest chance of being correct so far?
Secondly, and arguably more importantly, is the point of studying the motivation behind rape in the first place. If the motivation behind rape is understood, then it can be prevented. Palmer and Thornhill put this as simply as possible: "Unlike many other contentious social issues, such as abortion and homosexual rights, everyone has the same goal regarding rape: to end it". These theories all put together seem to have the absolute highest chance of preventing rape. Wouldn't the motivation of rape be useful for women to know? What if a theory could be proved right by applying the implied solutions that it provides, and seeing if that alone reduces occurrences of rape?
All we know for sure is this: rape is certainly not always about power.
Books:
[1] Against Our Will - Men, Women, and Rape, by Susan Brownmiller
[2] The Politics of Rape: The Victim's Perspective, by Diana E.H. Russell - I am specifically pulling from page 243, which is written by Jack Fremont.
[3] The Evolution of Human Sexuality, by Donald Symons
[6] Theories of Rape - Inquiries into the Causes of Sexual Aggression, by Lee Ellis
Shorter things:
[4] "Why Men Rape", by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer
