Ed Felien writes: "But, if I may tempt effrontery to the point of arrogance and try to further decipher Wizard Marks' mind, I think the basic argument she is making is the one first posited by Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will.� That ovacular work (seminal seems out of place) defines rape as standing between theft and assault.� It may be the work Mr. Kahn was so disparagingly referring to when he talked of outdated feminist notions.
"Does that help?" Bill Kahn gives up: Yes, Brownmiller's work has colored the way many people view phenomena of sexual coercion flying in the face of what is ultimately going on. Proximately, a man or woman who has been raped may feel bolstered by such views, as in going to church or praying to make the best of a bad lot, but it explains nothing to say that "rape is about power" over and over again. We have laws against rape because societal norms preclude these behaviors more and more, but whatever perverted ideology rapists and rape scholars espouse, it is behavior that springs from billions of years of evolution. I tend to disparage work that has no basis in fact, and, unfortunately, the field is full of it. The book I cited looks at the phenomena across many species of animals. For Orangs, rape is pretty much normal mating; a big male maintains a territory and jumps any female in estrous on encountering her within it. Langurs and other primates essentially do the same, sometimes murdering any offspring a female might have with her who are unlikely to be his offspring (Remind you of any crimes committed by step parents?). In the Chimpanzee and Benobo (the great apes thought to be most similar to us) mating is different still. In the former, closely related males lord over females that stumble into the groups as they travel through territories feeding. In the latter, sex would seem to be less focused on mating than as a socializing exercise similar to grooming in other species of apes, baboons, and monkeys. My point was simply that we have behavioral drives that are not rational, but can be controlled through reason, provided you don't fill the minds of folks with all manner of irrelevant tripe about sexual behavior. Looking at prostitution, rape, and other aberrant behavior in terms of evolutionary biology can help one to sort out truth from fancy in scholarly works on the subject. I certainly did not mean to trivialize the experience and knowledge of any men or women on this list, only to focus it on the ultimate reasons that rape is prevalent today and may never be rare unless we realize as a society that such behavior is coded in our human genome. There are roles for all of us to make the act as much as a hypothetical as any sort of behavior might be, regardless of any genetic predispositions any of us might have. You can recognize streets of Minneapolis are different from the Pleistocene environments of our origins as a species, but our behaviors cut off from the current cultural paradigms are probably not that different from what they were hundreds of thousands of years ago, i.e., we're capable of doing what would seem like pretty awful stuff today, but hopefully our parents, schools, and society at large influenced us in a way that provides for the rights of others, i.e., we have responsibilities to others. I'm unlikely to comment on this matter further because, although I feel it is a perfectly acceptable list topic for us, folks don't seem to be very capable of understanding such an approach due to deeply held biases. Thank you Ed Felien. Perhaps folks on the list would be interested in a more light hearted work for the general public on evolutionary biology; it is called "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice for All Creation" but the name of the author escapes me. Bill Kahn Prospect Park "there is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair"--Albert Einstein� REMINDERS: 1. Be civil! Please read the NEW RULES at http://www.e-democracy.org/rules. If you think a member is in violation, contact the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[email protected] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
