This article is adapted from Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West, published by Radix.
https://archive.ph/ShorL
We've all heard the feminist pronouncement, Rape isn’t about sex—it's about power. For extreme feminists, sex isn’t really about sex either—but also “power.” Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005), one the most influential and iconic feminist theorists, once claimed, with regard to heterosexual romance: “In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.” This implies, in effect, that all men who are interested in having sex, and thus procreating, or at least fornicating, should be viewed as “rapists.” Moreover, according to Dworkin, it seems that all inter-gender sexual intercourse inherently involves the rape of a female. If she has been “seduced,” through the male advertising his status and behaving in a chivalrous manner, it is as much rape as if the woman was grabbed off the street and assaulted in a dark alleyway. In effect, Dworkin is arguing that sex, for women, is always rape, and if they consent to it, they must have been manipulated. Dworkin stated this more directly in discussing the nature of sexual intercourse: “Intercourse remains a means, or the means, of physiologically making a woman inferior: communicating to her, cell by cell, her own inferior status . . . pushing and thrusting until she gives in.”1 Dworkin argued that sex is inherently degrading to women because their being penetrated inherently involves abject submission:
Andrea Dworkin (2000), Source: New York Times
Dworkin's theorizing on love, rape, and power came to a head, so to speak, when she publicly announced in 1999, in the pages of The Guardian, no less, that she had been raped in a Paris hotel, after allegedly being drugged by a young bartender, who spiked her drinks. According to Dworkin, she blacked out, and, when she awoke, she realized that she’d been raped, even though she had no memory of the act.3
Her claim was met with a incredulity. Dworkin’s physical hideousness made it difficult for many to believe her story. Even those who supported Dworkin conceded that she was physically repellent. Katherine Viner wrote in The Guardian:
According to Viner, Dworkin’s account of her rape was questioned by some journalists, who asked why Dworkin hadn’t reported the incident to the police, and how she could be so certain that she had been sexually assaulted if she was drugged at the time. She claimed, as evidence, that she suffered vaginal pain, bleeding, infection (which only be from the ‘rape’ because she otherwise not had sex for a very long time), had a bruise on her breast and “deep gashes” on her leg. But as she had not reported any of this, there was only her word to go on. “But the undercurrent,” writes Viner, “tapping into the myths that Dworkin herself had so carefully undermined in her work, was this: how could she be raped? She’s old, she’s fat, she’s ugly. As if anyone still thought that rape was about sex and not about power.”
In fact, Dworkin’s critics, most of them female, raised serious questions about Dworkin’s story that were never answered. Why did Dworkin never go to hospital if she was seriously injured? If this was because she couldn’t bear reliving the ordeal of the rape—which she would presumably have had to explain to the doctors—then why did she publicly write about what happened in British magazines only a year later? If Dworkin is so passionately against rape, then why did she not report this bartender at her hotel—whom she claimed raped her—to the police, so he couldn’t claim any more innocent victims? Another critic noted that, in her recollections, Dworkin recalled going through a mental checklist of points that get you raped, “no short skirt . . . I didn’t drink a lot,” concluding none applied to her and thus wondering why she had been raped. In a sense, she was conceding that rape is about sex, not just “power.” Another female commentator concluded that Dworkin had simply lost her mind.5
A plausible explanation to such questions, consistent with evidence from evolutionary psychology, would go entirely against the dogmas of radical feminism. Firstly, it is inaccurate to claim that rape is about nothing more than “power.” It is, in evolutionary terms, about passing on your genes, and men are more likely, therefore, to rape females who are attractive and young (implying genetic health and fertility). It would be a waste of bio-energetic resources to rape an old, unattractive woman.
Psychologist Lee Ellis, in reviewing a large number of studies, concludes that as women are attracted to high-status males, low-status males will tend to adopt a strategy of passing on their genes through rape.6 In particular, their situation will favor gang rape, as this affords the rapist the protection of a gang, diluting the risk of being attacked by the female’s relatives, and it means that the victim can be more easily overpowered. Moreover, according to biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer’s literature review, there is evidence that rape elevates the likelihood of a woman becoming pregnant, because the rapist produces more semen to compensate for the possibility that somebody else may have recently had sex with the victim.7 This is because it was specifically those who gang- raped who tended to pass on their genes, and if you are part of a rape-gang, you are engaging in sperm competition, so it makes sense to produce more semen. Further, any woman you rape—unless you know her personally—may have had sex with other people recently, so it again makes sense for more ejaculate to be produced during rape than during consensual sex. Ellis has conducted a detailed literature review that shows that being a low-status, single male is a key predictor of being a rapist and that predatory rapists—opportunists who do not know their victims well or at all—tend to be of particularly low status.8 It is simply incredible to suggest that the only motivation for males to rape females is to have “power” over them.
In light of this understanding, females would be evolved to have sex with desirable males; if males needed to resort to rape, they would likely be undesirable, so rape would stand as a violation from a female perspective.9 That said, it has been found that men are more aroused by violent or sadomasochistic sexual encounters than by normal sexual encounters. This is likely because, in pre-history, males who raped passed on more of their genes; since rape is a fusion of sex and violence, it would make sense for men to be acutely aroused by sexual violence.10 In line with this, some studies indicate that in sado-masochistic sexual relationships, males are more likely to be aroused by taking the sadistic or dominant role, while females are more aroused by taking the submissive or masochistic role.11 The fact that there is some crossover—that males may have both sadistic and masochistic fantasies—also makes sense. It relates to the so-called “Life History Model.”12
Briefly, Life History Strategy (LHS) involves the trade-off between copulation and investment in offspring; this occurs throughout the animal kingdom. Oysters, for instance, generate half a billion offspring in a typical year and take no notice of them at all: some get fertilized, most don’t; some offspring survive, most don’t; the species goes on. This is a particularly “fast” LHS. Mammals, on the other hand, invest much more energy in their children: bonding with them and caring for them for relatively long periods. These species pursue relatively a “slow” LHS.
Generally, a fast LHS is a suite of physical and mental traits that develop in an easy but unstable ecology, in which you must respond to sudden unpredictable challenges by being extremely aggressive. A fast LHS is called an r-strategy, while a slow LHS is known as a K-strategy. People who follow an r-strategy “live for the now.” They live fast and die young, because they could be wiped out at any moment. Therefore, they invest a great deal of energy in copulation but very little in their partners and nurturing any offspring. K-strategists are adapted to a predictable yet harsh (and thus competitive) ecology, in which offspring who are insufficiently nurtured could all simply die. Thus, they “live slow and die old” and direct energy away from copulation and towards nurture, of both their partner and offspring.
A fast Life History Strategy male may fantasize about being dominated by a female, as the fact of her dominance would prove that she was genetically fit, though, as with a female rape fantasy, it would be a dominance that he ultimately controlled. Females are also much more likely than males to be aroused by the idea of being sexually dominated than by the idea of sexually dominating others.13 Indeed, there is evidence that a large majority (two thirds) of women report having had sexual fantasies in which they are raped. The specifically arousing dimension to this was being forced into sex by a highly powerful male against whom they must struggle, but ultimately relent. Part of the motivation for this fantasy, it was found, was that they, the females, were so alluring that dominant males simply couldn’t keep their hands off them. The fantasy was to be ravished by a dangerous alpha male, who, in effect, the female eventually tames, as in classic romance novels. It is a self-esteem boosting fantasy, as the rapist is aroused by his victim’s looks.14
Both males and females have rape fantasies, though males are likely to fantasize about raping a desirable female, while females are more likely to fantasize about being raped by a dominant man.15 This makes sense in evolutionary terms. In pre-history, the males who passed on their genes to the greatest extent would have defeated other tribes in war and would have forcefully dominated their women. In other words, males who violently took what they wanted dominated the gene pool, including impregnating women whether the women were willing or not. Males who raped women, as long as they got away with it, would pass on more of their genes. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, violent males of the kind who would engage in rape would be attractive, because they would reach the top of the hierarchy and would generally have constituted an attractive mate from an adaptive perspective.
Let us assume that the rape, or at least subsequent intercourse with the rapist, would bear offspring. Let us also assume that this offspring would have at least the same probability of reaching adulthood as the offspring of the woman’s consensual mate. This is likely, as men in the position to rape in prehistory were either stronger or, in some other sense, in a position of power, and that typically entails greater resources. Even though having children by her rapist does not necessarily increase the woman’s number of offspring, it would still increase the woman’s fitness, by means of her genes being propagated to more women in the next generation by her rapist’s son, who would inherit his father’s violent, dominant traits. Such males would tend to reach the top of the hierarchy in prehistory, as attested to in studies of hunter-gatherer tribes, and would have the highest genetic fitness.16 (However, low-status males might want to rape but find it hard to get away with it in communities where everyone knows each other. Thus, they could only get away with it as part of a gang).
In this context, women would want to fight off to the very last all sexual advances from all males, such that only the fittest male could attain them. They would have done this physically and also by creating female groups in which women who received little investment from their male partners protected each other and “alloparented” each other’s offspring (that is, shared in partnering duties, even of non-kin). In a sense, this struggle—which could even take the form of an actual fight— would be a test of the male’s fitness, which he would ultimately win, rendering any further female resistance futile. Once this rape would be completed, and assuming that her previous mate, if she had one, was eliminated, it would be adaptive to succumb to this oppression, unpleasant as it may be, to increase the fitness of her child. From an evolutionary perspective, females who were capable of putting up a fight, and who followed this strategy, would be impregnated by the fittest males, meaning that their genes would be more likely to propagate. It is this conflict between being subject to force and violence, and that of propagating one’s genes, which might help explain women’s contradictory reactions to rape and sexual coercion. It could be argued that females who ultimately submitted to rape—and even eroticized it—would be more likely to survive the struggle. Thus, it would make sense for females to fantasize about rape—but only rape at the hands of an extremely fit male. To accept rape in general would mean impregnation by unfit males and the likely collapse of the female’s genetic line. Perhaps this situation can be compared to sperm selection. The female immune system fights off half a billion spermatozoa such that only the fittest sperm fertilizes the egg. And even this sperm is fought off until the very final moment.
These findings have fascinating implications. The nature of the “rape fantasies” outlined is consistent with females who follow a fast Life History Strategy. They want to be regarded as irresistible expressly due to their physical qualities, and they want to be dominated by a male who is attractive solely because of his own highly masculine traits, which are indicative of genetic quality and his ability to defend them in an unstable ecology. Consistent with this, it has been found that evidence of “sociosexuality” (that is, promiscuity) predicts having rape fantasies in females (again, where the victim is so alluring that the rapist cannot keep their hands of her).17 Sociosexuality—investment of energy in promiscuous sex—is a central component of a fast LHS. And it has been shown that the more socially dominant a female is—and in that sense the more masculine she is—the more likely she is to fantasize about being raped. It has been suggested that this is adaptive because it allows dominant females to be attracted to dominant males, who would, it might be argued, be evolved to the same unstable ecology.18
Feminists are, on average, physically and mentally masculinized, and there is also evidence that they are more socially dominant than non-feminists.19 So we would expect feminists to be particularly likely to reject male domination over their lives—but also particularly likely to have intense fantasies about being raped. In fact, as noted earlier, one study has found a weak but significant correlation between strength of “feminist” identification and having fantasies about rape.20 This would be consistent with the evidence that patriarchy selects for socially submissive women.21 Patriarchy both reflects and elevates a more K-strategy ecology (a group-selected ecology), in which males invest in their offspring and energy is directed away from copulation and towards nurture, and in which a more cooperative group develops, where certain alphas are less dominant. It would follow that non-feminists, who accepted “patriarchy” (briefly: a system of male control over female sexuality that allays male fear of cuckoldry) would be less likely to fantasize about rape and more likely to fantasize about males being kind and loving. In line with this, “sex guilt” (which would be associated with religiousness and thus patriarchy) is negatively correlated with rape fantasies, whereas being easily sexually aroused—“erotophilia”—is positively associated with them.22
All of this implies that “feminism” is an evolutionary strategy, adopted, initially, by r-strategy females, though ones who might have been high in mutational load. Feminism acts to psychologically crush and repel the males, so that only the genetically strongest males might overcome it.
This is, however, not the final word on Dworkin, or the recurring female type that she embodies. For Dworkin not only fantasied about rape but published and promoted her fantasies to other women. She actively attempted to equate all sex with her violent imaginings, and, within her social context, undermined and demoralized love, sex, and romance—and, indeed, reproduction itself. In other words, she was anti-social to the point of nihilism. There was a word for such females, whose outlook and very existence was undermining of group fitness—a “witch.”
1
Quoted in Katharine Viner, “‘She Never Hated Men,’” The Guardian, April 12, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/apr/12/gender.highereducation.
2
Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1987).
3
Dworkin, “They Took My Body From Me and Used It,” The Guardian, June 2, 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jun/02/society.
4
Katherine Viner, “She Never Hated Men,” The Guardian, April 12, 2005, https://www,theguardian.com/books/2005/apr/12/gender.highereducation.
5
Julia Gracen, “Andrea Dworkin in Agony,” Salon, September 20, 2000, http://www.salon.com/2000/09/20/dworkin/.
6
Lee Ellis, Theories of Rape: Inquiries into the Causes of Sexual Aggression (New York: Hemisphere Publishing, 1989), 53.
7
Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001), 174.
8
Ellis, Theories of Rape, op cit., 53.
9
Thornhill and Palmer, A Natural History of Rape, op cit., 148-149.
10
Ibid., 76.
11
Nele de Neef, Violette Coppens, Wim Huys, and Manuel Morrens, “Bondage-Discipline, Dominance-Submission and Sadomasochism (BDSM) from an Integrative Biopsychosocial Perspective: A Systematic Review,” Sexual Medicine, 7 (2019): 129-144.
12
See J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishing, 1995); Edward Dutton, Making Sense of Race (Whitefish: Washington Summit, 2020), Chapter 6.
13
Jenny Bivona, Joseph Critelli, and Michael Clark, “Women’s Rape Fantasies: An Empirical Evaluation of the Major Explanations,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 41 (2012): 1107-1119.
14
John Bancroft, Human Sexuality and Its Problems (New York: Elsevier, 2009), Chapter 9.
15
Patricia Hawley and William Hensley, “Social Dominance and Forceful Submission Fantasies: Feminine Pathology or Power?” Journal of Sex Research, 46 (2019): 568-585.
16
Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö: The Fierce People (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.
17
Bivona, Critelli, and Clark, “Women’s Rape Fantasies,” op cit.
18
Hawley and Hensley, “Social Dominance and Forceful Submission Fantasies,” op cit.
19
Alyssa Zucker and Laina Bay-Cheng, “Minding the Gap Between Feminist Identity and Attitudes: The Behavioral and Ideological Divide Between Feminists and Non-Labelers,” Journal of Personality, 78 (2010): 1895-1924.
20
Julie Schulman and Sharon Horne, “Guilty or Not? A Path Model of Women’s Sexual Force Fantasies,” Journal of Sex Research, 43 (2006): 368-377.
21
Meneloas Apostolou, Sexual Selection Under Parental Choice: The Evolution of Human Mating Behaviour (Hove: Psychology Press, 2014).
22
Ibid.
https://archive.ph/ShorL
We've all heard the feminist pronouncement, Rape isn’t about sex—it's about power. For extreme feminists, sex isn’t really about sex either—but also “power.” Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005), one the most influential and iconic feminist theorists, once claimed, with regard to heterosexual romance: “In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.” This implies, in effect, that all men who are interested in having sex, and thus procreating, or at least fornicating, should be viewed as “rapists.” Moreover, according to Dworkin, it seems that all inter-gender sexual intercourse inherently involves the rape of a female. If she has been “seduced,” through the male advertising his status and behaving in a chivalrous manner, it is as much rape as if the woman was grabbed off the street and assaulted in a dark alleyway. In effect, Dworkin is arguing that sex, for women, is always rape, and if they consent to it, they must have been manipulated. Dworkin stated this more directly in discussing the nature of sexual intercourse: “Intercourse remains a means, or the means, of physiologically making a woman inferior: communicating to her, cell by cell, her own inferior status . . . pushing and thrusting until she gives in.”1 Dworkin argued that sex is inherently degrading to women because their being penetrated inherently involves abject submission:
This being the case, Dworkin wants to stop men and women who love each other from expressing intimacy through sexual intercourse; she, indeed, wants to stop people from having sex at all. Dworkin’s ideology, if taken seriously, would thus lead to nothing less than the end of humanity, though when pressed, she used verbosity and evasive tactics to avoid this inevitable logical conclusion.
One Night in Paris
Andrea Dworkin (2000), Source: New York Times
Dworkin's theorizing on love, rape, and power came to a head, so to speak, when she publicly announced in 1999, in the pages of The Guardian, no less, that she had been raped in a Paris hotel, after allegedly being drugged by a young bartender, who spiked her drinks. According to Dworkin, she blacked out, and, when she awoke, she realized that she’d been raped, even though she had no memory of the act.3
Her claim was met with a incredulity. Dworkin’s physical hideousness made it difficult for many to believe her story. Even those who supported Dworkin conceded that she was physically repellent. Katherine Viner wrote in The Guardian:
“Millie Tant” is a feminist cartoon character in the British satirical magazine Viz. Viner quotes British commentator Mimi Spencer as having written: “The only visibly hairy woman at the forefront of feminism today appears to be Andrea Dworkin, and she looks as though she neither waxes nor washes, nor flushes nor flosses, and thus doesn’t really count.” She didn’t count, it is implied, because of how she looked; she only cared about rape because no man could fancy her.
According to Viner, Dworkin’s account of her rape was questioned by some journalists, who asked why Dworkin hadn’t reported the incident to the police, and how she could be so certain that she had been sexually assaulted if she was drugged at the time. She claimed, as evidence, that she suffered vaginal pain, bleeding, infection (which only be from the ‘rape’ because she otherwise not had sex for a very long time), had a bruise on her breast and “deep gashes” on her leg. But as she had not reported any of this, there was only her word to go on. “But the undercurrent,” writes Viner, “tapping into the myths that Dworkin herself had so carefully undermined in her work, was this: how could she be raped? She’s old, she’s fat, she’s ugly. As if anyone still thought that rape was about sex and not about power.”
In fact, Dworkin’s critics, most of them female, raised serious questions about Dworkin’s story that were never answered. Why did Dworkin never go to hospital if she was seriously injured? If this was because she couldn’t bear reliving the ordeal of the rape—which she would presumably have had to explain to the doctors—then why did she publicly write about what happened in British magazines only a year later? If Dworkin is so passionately against rape, then why did she not report this bartender at her hotel—whom she claimed raped her—to the police, so he couldn’t claim any more innocent victims? Another critic noted that, in her recollections, Dworkin recalled going through a mental checklist of points that get you raped, “no short skirt . . . I didn’t drink a lot,” concluding none applied to her and thus wondering why she had been raped. In a sense, she was conceding that rape is about sex, not just “power.” Another female commentator concluded that Dworkin had simply lost her mind.5
The Evolutionary Psychology of Rape and Rape Fantasies
Dworkin’s mental state aside, important questions remain regarding rape. Why is it ubiquitous throughout human history? Additionally, why would someone like Dworkin potentially lie or, indeed, fantasize about being raped?A plausible explanation to such questions, consistent with evidence from evolutionary psychology, would go entirely against the dogmas of radical feminism. Firstly, it is inaccurate to claim that rape is about nothing more than “power.” It is, in evolutionary terms, about passing on your genes, and men are more likely, therefore, to rape females who are attractive and young (implying genetic health and fertility). It would be a waste of bio-energetic resources to rape an old, unattractive woman.
Psychologist Lee Ellis, in reviewing a large number of studies, concludes that as women are attracted to high-status males, low-status males will tend to adopt a strategy of passing on their genes through rape.6 In particular, their situation will favor gang rape, as this affords the rapist the protection of a gang, diluting the risk of being attacked by the female’s relatives, and it means that the victim can be more easily overpowered. Moreover, according to biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer’s literature review, there is evidence that rape elevates the likelihood of a woman becoming pregnant, because the rapist produces more semen to compensate for the possibility that somebody else may have recently had sex with the victim.7 This is because it was specifically those who gang- raped who tended to pass on their genes, and if you are part of a rape-gang, you are engaging in sperm competition, so it makes sense to produce more semen. Further, any woman you rape—unless you know her personally—may have had sex with other people recently, so it again makes sense for more ejaculate to be produced during rape than during consensual sex. Ellis has conducted a detailed literature review that shows that being a low-status, single male is a key predictor of being a rapist and that predatory rapists—opportunists who do not know their victims well or at all—tend to be of particularly low status.8 It is simply incredible to suggest that the only motivation for males to rape females is to have “power” over them.
In light of this understanding, females would be evolved to have sex with desirable males; if males needed to resort to rape, they would likely be undesirable, so rape would stand as a violation from a female perspective.9 That said, it has been found that men are more aroused by violent or sadomasochistic sexual encounters than by normal sexual encounters. This is likely because, in pre-history, males who raped passed on more of their genes; since rape is a fusion of sex and violence, it would make sense for men to be acutely aroused by sexual violence.10 In line with this, some studies indicate that in sado-masochistic sexual relationships, males are more likely to be aroused by taking the sadistic or dominant role, while females are more aroused by taking the submissive or masochistic role.11 The fact that there is some crossover—that males may have both sadistic and masochistic fantasies—also makes sense. It relates to the so-called “Life History Model.”12
Briefly, Life History Strategy (LHS) involves the trade-off between copulation and investment in offspring; this occurs throughout the animal kingdom. Oysters, for instance, generate half a billion offspring in a typical year and take no notice of them at all: some get fertilized, most don’t; some offspring survive, most don’t; the species goes on. This is a particularly “fast” LHS. Mammals, on the other hand, invest much more energy in their children: bonding with them and caring for them for relatively long periods. These species pursue relatively a “slow” LHS.
Generally, a fast LHS is a suite of physical and mental traits that develop in an easy but unstable ecology, in which you must respond to sudden unpredictable challenges by being extremely aggressive. A fast LHS is called an r-strategy, while a slow LHS is known as a K-strategy. People who follow an r-strategy “live for the now.” They live fast and die young, because they could be wiped out at any moment. Therefore, they invest a great deal of energy in copulation but very little in their partners and nurturing any offspring. K-strategists are adapted to a predictable yet harsh (and thus competitive) ecology, in which offspring who are insufficiently nurtured could all simply die. Thus, they “live slow and die old” and direct energy away from copulation and towards nurture, of both their partner and offspring.
A fast Life History Strategy male may fantasize about being dominated by a female, as the fact of her dominance would prove that she was genetically fit, though, as with a female rape fantasy, it would be a dominance that he ultimately controlled. Females are also much more likely than males to be aroused by the idea of being sexually dominated than by the idea of sexually dominating others.13 Indeed, there is evidence that a large majority (two thirds) of women report having had sexual fantasies in which they are raped. The specifically arousing dimension to this was being forced into sex by a highly powerful male against whom they must struggle, but ultimately relent. Part of the motivation for this fantasy, it was found, was that they, the females, were so alluring that dominant males simply couldn’t keep their hands off them. The fantasy was to be ravished by a dangerous alpha male, who, in effect, the female eventually tames, as in classic romance novels. It is a self-esteem boosting fantasy, as the rapist is aroused by his victim’s looks.14
Both males and females have rape fantasies, though males are likely to fantasize about raping a desirable female, while females are more likely to fantasize about being raped by a dominant man.15 This makes sense in evolutionary terms. In pre-history, the males who passed on their genes to the greatest extent would have defeated other tribes in war and would have forcefully dominated their women. In other words, males who violently took what they wanted dominated the gene pool, including impregnating women whether the women were willing or not. Males who raped women, as long as they got away with it, would pass on more of their genes. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, violent males of the kind who would engage in rape would be attractive, because they would reach the top of the hierarchy and would generally have constituted an attractive mate from an adaptive perspective.
Let us assume that the rape, or at least subsequent intercourse with the rapist, would bear offspring. Let us also assume that this offspring would have at least the same probability of reaching adulthood as the offspring of the woman’s consensual mate. This is likely, as men in the position to rape in prehistory were either stronger or, in some other sense, in a position of power, and that typically entails greater resources. Even though having children by her rapist does not necessarily increase the woman’s number of offspring, it would still increase the woman’s fitness, by means of her genes being propagated to more women in the next generation by her rapist’s son, who would inherit his father’s violent, dominant traits. Such males would tend to reach the top of the hierarchy in prehistory, as attested to in studies of hunter-gatherer tribes, and would have the highest genetic fitness.16 (However, low-status males might want to rape but find it hard to get away with it in communities where everyone knows each other. Thus, they could only get away with it as part of a gang).
In this context, women would want to fight off to the very last all sexual advances from all males, such that only the fittest male could attain them. They would have done this physically and also by creating female groups in which women who received little investment from their male partners protected each other and “alloparented” each other’s offspring (that is, shared in partnering duties, even of non-kin). In a sense, this struggle—which could even take the form of an actual fight— would be a test of the male’s fitness, which he would ultimately win, rendering any further female resistance futile. Once this rape would be completed, and assuming that her previous mate, if she had one, was eliminated, it would be adaptive to succumb to this oppression, unpleasant as it may be, to increase the fitness of her child. From an evolutionary perspective, females who were capable of putting up a fight, and who followed this strategy, would be impregnated by the fittest males, meaning that their genes would be more likely to propagate. It is this conflict between being subject to force and violence, and that of propagating one’s genes, which might help explain women’s contradictory reactions to rape and sexual coercion. It could be argued that females who ultimately submitted to rape—and even eroticized it—would be more likely to survive the struggle. Thus, it would make sense for females to fantasize about rape—but only rape at the hands of an extremely fit male. To accept rape in general would mean impregnation by unfit males and the likely collapse of the female’s genetic line. Perhaps this situation can be compared to sperm selection. The female immune system fights off half a billion spermatozoa such that only the fittest sperm fertilizes the egg. And even this sperm is fought off until the very final moment.
These findings have fascinating implications. The nature of the “rape fantasies” outlined is consistent with females who follow a fast Life History Strategy. They want to be regarded as irresistible expressly due to their physical qualities, and they want to be dominated by a male who is attractive solely because of his own highly masculine traits, which are indicative of genetic quality and his ability to defend them in an unstable ecology. Consistent with this, it has been found that evidence of “sociosexuality” (that is, promiscuity) predicts having rape fantasies in females (again, where the victim is so alluring that the rapist cannot keep their hands of her).17 Sociosexuality—investment of energy in promiscuous sex—is a central component of a fast LHS. And it has been shown that the more socially dominant a female is—and in that sense the more masculine she is—the more likely she is to fantasize about being raped. It has been suggested that this is adaptive because it allows dominant females to be attracted to dominant males, who would, it might be argued, be evolved to the same unstable ecology.18
Feminists are, on average, physically and mentally masculinized, and there is also evidence that they are more socially dominant than non-feminists.19 So we would expect feminists to be particularly likely to reject male domination over their lives—but also particularly likely to have intense fantasies about being raped. In fact, as noted earlier, one study has found a weak but significant correlation between strength of “feminist” identification and having fantasies about rape.20 This would be consistent with the evidence that patriarchy selects for socially submissive women.21 Patriarchy both reflects and elevates a more K-strategy ecology (a group-selected ecology), in which males invest in their offspring and energy is directed away from copulation and towards nurture, and in which a more cooperative group develops, where certain alphas are less dominant. It would follow that non-feminists, who accepted “patriarchy” (briefly: a system of male control over female sexuality that allays male fear of cuckoldry) would be less likely to fantasize about rape and more likely to fantasize about males being kind and loving. In line with this, “sex guilt” (which would be associated with religiousness and thus patriarchy) is negatively correlated with rape fantasies, whereas being easily sexually aroused—“erotophilia”—is positively associated with them.22
All of this implies that “feminism” is an evolutionary strategy, adopted, initially, by r-strategy females, though ones who might have been high in mutational load. Feminism acts to psychologically crush and repel the males, so that only the genetically strongest males might overcome it.
Waking the Witch
With all of this in mind, a likely interpretation of Dworkin’s rape account is that she was a fantasist who—as a socially dominant female and a feminist—entertained potent fantasies of being raped. As an extreme outlier feminist, it would make sense that her rape fantasies were both frequent and particularly intense and violent. This would have created cognitive dissonance, which she might have coped with by convincing herself that she hadn’t merely fantasied about being raped but that it had actually occurred. The fact that she regarded all sex as rape may have been an honest description of how she felt. When she fantasized about sex, she fantasized about rape, for only that aroused her.This is, however, not the final word on Dworkin, or the recurring female type that she embodies. For Dworkin not only fantasied about rape but published and promoted her fantasies to other women. She actively attempted to equate all sex with her violent imaginings, and, within her social context, undermined and demoralized love, sex, and romance—and, indeed, reproduction itself. In other words, she was anti-social to the point of nihilism. There was a word for such females, whose outlook and very existence was undermining of group fitness—a “witch.”
1
Quoted in Katharine Viner, “‘She Never Hated Men,’” The Guardian, April 12, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/apr/12/gender.highereducation.
2
Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1987).
3
Dworkin, “They Took My Body From Me and Used It,” The Guardian, June 2, 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jun/02/society.
4
Katherine Viner, “She Never Hated Men,” The Guardian, April 12, 2005, https://www,theguardian.com/books/2005/apr/12/gender.highereducation.
5
Julia Gracen, “Andrea Dworkin in Agony,” Salon, September 20, 2000, http://www.salon.com/2000/09/20/dworkin/.
6
Lee Ellis, Theories of Rape: Inquiries into the Causes of Sexual Aggression (New York: Hemisphere Publishing, 1989), 53.
7
Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001), 174.
8
Ellis, Theories of Rape, op cit., 53.
9
Thornhill and Palmer, A Natural History of Rape, op cit., 148-149.
10
Ibid., 76.
11
Nele de Neef, Violette Coppens, Wim Huys, and Manuel Morrens, “Bondage-Discipline, Dominance-Submission and Sadomasochism (BDSM) from an Integrative Biopsychosocial Perspective: A Systematic Review,” Sexual Medicine, 7 (2019): 129-144.
12
See J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishing, 1995); Edward Dutton, Making Sense of Race (Whitefish: Washington Summit, 2020), Chapter 6.
13
Jenny Bivona, Joseph Critelli, and Michael Clark, “Women’s Rape Fantasies: An Empirical Evaluation of the Major Explanations,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 41 (2012): 1107-1119.
14
John Bancroft, Human Sexuality and Its Problems (New York: Elsevier, 2009), Chapter 9.
15
Patricia Hawley and William Hensley, “Social Dominance and Forceful Submission Fantasies: Feminine Pathology or Power?” Journal of Sex Research, 46 (2019): 568-585.
16
Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö: The Fierce People (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.
17
Bivona, Critelli, and Clark, “Women’s Rape Fantasies,” op cit.
18
Hawley and Hensley, “Social Dominance and Forceful Submission Fantasies,” op cit.
19
Alyssa Zucker and Laina Bay-Cheng, “Minding the Gap Between Feminist Identity and Attitudes: The Behavioral and Ideological Divide Between Feminists and Non-Labelers,” Journal of Personality, 78 (2010): 1895-1924.
20
Julie Schulman and Sharon Horne, “Guilty or Not? A Path Model of Women’s Sexual Force Fantasies,” Journal of Sex Research, 43 (2006): 368-377.
21
Meneloas Apostolou, Sexual Selection Under Parental Choice: The Evolution of Human Mating Behaviour (Hove: Psychology Press, 2014).
22
Ibid.
