> Bondage/domination/submission: Okay, I admit I don’t have a good just-so explanation for this one. Maybe it’s more psychological - people who have been told that sex is shameful can only fully appreciate it if they feel like a victim who’s been forced into it (and so carries no guilt). And people who have been told they’re undesirable and nobody could ever really love them can only fully appreciate it if their partner is a victim who has no choice in the matter.
I assume masochism/submissiveness at least is a rape adaptation. Rape is very stressful (citation needed) and it seems to me that the ability to find it at least complicatedly enjoyable could greatly improve your life outcomes, especially if you're going to spend a lot of time with your captor afterwards.
I feel pretty confident that people who are into BDSM don't like getting raped any more than vanilla people. (For example, go see what people on r/BDSMAdvice have to say when it happens to them).
As someone with a lot of experience in BDSM circles, I am essentially certain that bdsm folk are on average more aroused by rape than non bdsm folk, even if that amount is low and everyone is still obviously very against it in practice. But I mean - con non-con is a thing for a reason.
CNC is, certainly! Fantasies are as well. But when it *actually* happens people don't seem to report having had a good time to any degree, and indeed report considerable distress.
Perhaps in a different cultural setting it would be different; there are, after all, historical cultures that carry out ritual abductions of brides. But I don't think rape victims in our culture secretly enjoy the real thing.
A lot of these conversations, I think, have in them a background concern that any acknowledgement of "being sexually assaulted" as a kink would constitute a moral justification for rapists, which is obviously a very reasonable concern given that "she was asking for it" is a phrase that's been in the cultural lexicon since forever. Such discussion also risks accidentally minimizing the trauma of the victim, which is real and deserves respect. This is especially a concern that active BDSM practitioners are going to have, since the survival of their communities relies greatly on not being perceived as a bunch of rapist weirdos (which is a significant danger.)
I'm not sure what to do about that; "bodily autonomy" is always a right regardless of if someone is aroused by the idea or action of it being violated.
EDIT: For context, I'm fairly certain that "being sexually assaulted in some specific fashion" is, in fact, a kink some people both have and have very complicated and nuanced feelings about.
Most boys (and I guess some girls too) at some point enjoy fantasies about being a war hero, or having war adventures. However, very few of them would enjoy actual war. That is because in a fantasy you can all the perks of the situation (usually at lower intensity than the real thing, but still some) without any downsides (like heorism and excitement of the battle without actual possibility of death, mutilation, and sense of guilt from killing other people.
Note that "cultural glorification of war is an adaptation intended to make people happier with being drafted" is a pretty standard take. War is still bad (in part because of our modern circumstances, it was legitimately less harrowing and more useful in pre-modern times), and glorification of violence doesn't mean you won't get PTSD, but in some contexts that glorification does help with real war fighting.
They are not saying BDSM folk enjoy being raped, just that they are more aroused. Arousal responses are involuntary, and most people can remember a time that they were aroused, but not enjoying it. From things like blue balls and awkward boners, to sexual assault.
I say this from a bit if experience. I've been sexually assaulted in a relatively minor way before, groped, in the middle of class, by someone I was not attracted to. I felt myself get angry, embarrassed, depressed, but still aroused. I really disliked it at the time, but even now, remembering it as a fantasy is pleasant. Feelings are complicated, and sexual assault can be wrong, even if the victim becomes aroused.
I think if you turn this over the right way, it's self-evident they do.
Are people who are into getting raped more likely to be into BDSM, on average? I think the answer is obviously yes. Then if everyone else, BDSM fans or not, is EQUALLY into getting raped (fair assumption?), then statistically you're going to find more people who are into getting raped at a BDSM convention* than random other convention. I think.
* OTOH I'm guessing there'd be even more at an "anti-BDSM" convention.
I think the desire to submit occurs when you like certain things but are also ashamed of those things. With your hands tied (literally) you can enjoy the things guilt-free, it’s not like you could have resisted.
Or, maybe even simpler, because of attraction to a Big Strong Man.
Humiliation fetishes though, that’s what I don’t understand.
This might or might not be relevant. I remember reading in one of the essays of Gould about struggles of Christian theologians with explaining animal suffering. While you can always say, yes we have it hard but we will be rewarded in Heaven, and also it makes us better, and so on. However, even this dubious stuff does not apply to animals which do not have immortal souls, and even (probably) lack mental faculties to elevate their suffering to something lofty. Their suffering is totally senseless. Of course one can always try to claim that they lack self-consciousness, but this is a hard sell to any pet owners. So their other solution was to claim that actually prey animals enjoy being hunted and killed. So why a deer tries to escape the wolves? Well, obviously because it enjoys being chased. I guess while this idea seems outlandish, it did not came from nowhere. I guess some people may have fantasies about being hunted and killed. And why not? When we fear something replaying it in our imagination, focusing on plesant aspects of it (perhaps even in sexual context) can relieve the tension. And this is not limited to sexual contexts. After all many people enjoy horror stories and films, and even children like being frightened (within limits of course).
> I guess some people may have fantasies about being hunted and killed.
I regret to inform you that this is, in fact, a thing - closely allied to the furry community and I believe called "primal play" or something. Though of course in practice it amounts to something closer to CNC, the supposed hunt being sublimated into sex.
Since I learned there is a paraphilia called dendrophilia (yes, it means being sexually aroused by trees... wtf?), I will not astonished by any fetish. And in this case, the issue of, ehem, splinters aside, I cannot even begin to imagine where it comes from.
Think about other stuff people find sexy, or even just emotionally intense, then figure out how trees might be conceptually associated. "Wood" as a euphemism, or correct pronunciation of the Latin word for pine tree. For a less goofy angle, the sense of awe at natural beauty of particularly impressive trees is enough to inspire numerous shinto shrines. Archetypal "out in the woods" setting, isolated from civilizing influences, has trees in a literally load-bearing role, and plenty of fairy tales set there have a sexual subtext - to say nothing of all the outright porn involving hiding behind a bush or leaning against a trunk. Anatomy of the tree itself has features which could be interpreted as limbs and even orifices, at least on a loose geometric level - which is apparently quite sufficient, given how bizarre fetish-optimized artistic depictions of actual humans can get.
Not a dendrophile myself, to be clear, and haven't validated any of this with those who are, just brainstorming ways it might work from first principles.
Wild-eyed speculation: I wonder if these aren't commitment signals. I think part of the appeal for the dominant partner in these relationships/activities is something along the lines of "my partner will endure pain/humiliation to be with me; they're really into me" and then evolution programs your brain to find this arousing/rewarding so that you will stick with this person and have lots of procreative sex with them. That's good! But then this programming can be hacked by evolution programming someone else to actually enjoy the pain/humiliation inflicted on them; it signals commitment to the sadist, but really the masochist would be happy with anyone with similar proclivities. Thus the sadist is sort of tricked into a greater commitment to the relationship, which ultimately benefits the mashochist.
Again, this is all speculation on my part; I'm not really any sort of kinkster. I find it enjoyable to fantasize about fetish-y stuff but it doesn't really interest me in realy life.
I think there’s a simpler part where it’s about decision fatigue and feeling taken care of. There’s a reason that the fanciest restaurants do a prix fixe menu where the customer has no choice about what they’re getting - it’s to free you up to enjoy your conversation and the food rather than having to make another stressful decision after a day of being CEO or whatever, and also make you feel like you put your trust in a chef who knows your needs and will take care of you.
This isn't quite a counter-point to what you're saying, but close enough to one that I figured I'd put it in here: While it doesn't necessarily look like it's a lot of work, it definitely can be. Mine ties into masochism, and there's a lot of managing your own body posture involved, and navigating the space between "the last micro-action was technically not pleasurable, but I can handle it" and "this is generally too much right now" with a deep respect for the person that's handling you.
Generally speaking, if you're not restrained in a given moment, there's a lot of feedback to give to the person dominating you - you'll want to touch them in reaffirming ways and be supportive, because they're ironically in a pretty psychologically vulnerable position. As an incomplete example: if your dominant partner does something silly and you burst out laughing because you didn't have self-control, that can be rather damaging to their desire to take the reins again.
If you go to a restaurant and you don't like the food, you can leave a one star rating and not tip the waiter. If you submit to someone and you don't like the things they're doing to your body, you should IMO take *some* responsibility for it, think deeply about whether you can accept their choices for recurring interaction (and err on the side of granting them their choices), and respectfully talk it through with them - tell them what you liked, what you'd prefer less off, what's in the category of "didn't technically like, but can handle, and enjoy on a meta-level that you enjoy it, so feel free to sprinkle it in sometimes", etc, as reaffirmingly and gently as possible.
I suppose this could also be phrased as advice for subs: "Look out for your domme; make sure they're comfortable at all times."
As a submissive, data point: Shame doesn't play into it at all for me. If you ask my friends who's most comfortable talking about sex, it's me. I bring it up as a casual topic like other people bring up video games they've been playing (but, yes, I do try to make sure the people I'm talking to don't mind, sex is a squick topic for a lot of people).
For me, it's the 'thrill' of being helpless and at someone's mercy.
The best way to think of this may be of being on a roller-coaster. You can't get off, you're at the whim of the ups and downs and all those curves throwing your body around, but while it's hitting some buttons in your brain that are making your body respond with stress (raising your heartrate, etc) is, on some level, really exhilerating!
Being restrained (be it just by bodily force, or by ropes, etc) is a lot like that. There's a deep sense of risk, it requires a lot of trust (and forgiveness, and communication, which new submissives sometimes don't realise), but it's very rewarding.
I've had people say that from the other side, yeah. It's like a horror movie or a scary story. Look at the popularity of 'evil' tropes--stereotypical bikers, black, Nazis (usually with the swastikas removed), goatees, skulls, I'm sure you can think of others.
There's this aspect of not having responsibility as well.
This might just be a stereotype, but it's been said that a lot of people who actually wield a lot of power and responsibility have been into submission - because it allows them to experience not being in charge at all for a while.
Wasn't there a bit of evidence recently, that human males generally become physically and mentally aroused by perceiving sexual things, but human females often only become physically aroused (i.e., things like vaginal lubrication, but without an accompanying desire to participate)?
"Shame over sex" seems contradicted by the flagrantly shameless BDSM scene with its in-person clubs and public kink.
"Sadism/domination as a response to feeling undesirable" doesn't fit the dominants I know, including my wife. If anything, being able to "get away" with being mean seems to confirm their sense of desirability.
"Rape adaption" *may* explain some M/f as a way to hack the female body's defence systems which - I've read - can switch on physical arousal to prevent damage (it's important that in the nasty real world, physical arousal isn't the same as consent or pleasure). However, it doesn't explain F/m dynamics. A better general explanation for sexual submission is that finding dominant mates hot is adaptive.
That's certainly another possible interpretation. Or, shameless public kink could be a reaction to having grown up ashamed of being kinky.
However, my impression - sorry, it's hard to find good studies on this sort of thing - is that most kinksters can point back to a pre-sexual stage of their development where they were already showing signs of kinkiness. There are a couple of good mémoires that go into this in detail.
There's also this thing that very dominant "alpha males" are a long-established romantic trope, and historically have been regarded as desirable husbands. So I think that, at least for M/f, BDSM is an extension, or even a conscious firewalling, of a common innate drive.
Yeah, I suspect dominance isn't an automatic turnoff for men the way submission is for women (in 90% of the population anyway). Probably in sub men whatever normally links sexual attraction to dominance detection in women gets turned on for whatever reason. I guess we'll never really know!
I think, in the vanilla world, a lot of women do like being in control, and prefer submissive men as long as that submissiveness is expressed as being a devoted champion and good boyfriend/husband; most of us don't actually look weak or wimpish, our submissiveness is defined by where our centre is.
There are reasons why this doesn't translate to lots of kinky dominant women, and most of these are the fault of male submissives.
Yes, I agree. Currently it's fashionable to leap to blame the guy.
However, in this case it's the fault of the malesub for very specific reasons: they tend to approach partners with an off-putting list of detailed fetishes, rather than a proposal to engage in power actual exchange.
BDSM is about control. Its about relinquish control but being able to take it at any time with the concept of consent. Someone with a leadership role ordering around all day likes to relinquish control in bed ; someone who has been raped and who did not process fully the rape will want to reproduce this in private, except that the person can stop the act at any point, which is like regaining control on an event where you did not have any control (the initial rape). Its pretty basic interpretation, but Ockham's razor might be right here.
Women are probably adapted to survive rape by physically becoming lubricated in response to a variety of sexual stimuli, but in women this is generally separate from subjectively perceived mental arousal. Women who like being submissive in a BDSM context are mentally aroused by the situation, while I think women who are raped often get wet but do not perceive themselves as mentally aroused. Dominance and submission is more likely linked to attraction to high-status men and/or related to men usually being hard-coded to be the sexual initiators and women to be the responders. I am suspicious that many submissive men and dominant women have some part of their sexual brain that got flipped to be more like the sexuality of the other gender. I would expect this to be somewhat correlated with queer gender identity or sexual orientation.
> I am suspicious that many submissive men and dominant women have some part of their sexual brain that got flipped to be more like the sexuality of the other gender. I would expect this to be somewhat correlated with queer gender identity or sexual orientation.
There seem to be several styles of Femdom dynamic, some of them very much following traditional gender roles, e.g. the "Mommy Domme" dynamic.
However, you certainly see a lot of what we used to call "gender bending" amongst submissive men, though it's hard to untangle whether this is because on some level they equate "female" to "weak".
Assuming some brains are flipped, this could still be adaptive. On the male side, some of this could be a hardwired Sneaker F*cker strategy. F/m pairings could also have a reproductive advantage, e.g. when food was scarce.
I think BDSM comes from status hierarchy preferences. People have good evolutionary reasons to be attracted to high social status individuals, because status is correlated with genetic and material resources, and both of those are good for your offspring. To judge status, you need to look for reliable status markers. Those markers come in many different varieties - having lots of resources, winning competitions, having lots of attention or respect from others, knowing lots of other high-status people, etc.
But in particular, when someone is telling others what to do (and having them do it), it's very likely that they're high status. And if they're able to treat others badly and get away with it, they must be insanely high status. I think this is where BDSM comes from.
Fetish is technically defined as "a form of sexual desire in which gratification is strongly linked to a particular object or activity or a part of the body other than the sexual organs." Including homosexuality would satisfy neither the technical definition nor common usage.
Breasts are secondary sexual organs so strictly speaking by this definition no, but if it were strong enough and non-central enough in quality, I think some would argue yes
If it comes at the expense of PIV sex, or is necessary for PIV sex to occur, then yes, obviously? Or in mate selection, although it's hard to tell for sure, if a man prefers a woman with a particular type of breasts over a woman who'd have more PIV sex with him, that would seem to indicate that something fetish-like was going on. And then perhaps there's lesser degrees of the fetish, where it doesn't usually interfere, but does tend to affect choices at the margin.
If homosexuality behaved like a fetish, then you wouldn’t expect “homoromanticness” to go along with it; you’d expect gay men to be sexually interested in penises but still romantically interested in women.
Assuming the theory of fetishes here is correct, homosexuality might have a similar explanation, but there are differences too.
Fair point. Is that true though? Do "furries" not have romantic interests closely tied to their sexual interests? It is my understanding that zoöphiles and pedophiles do, but I welcome correction.
Presumably the question relates to non-reproductive sex. If sex in nature is intended to propagate the species, then gay relationships clearly defeat that purpose.
Does it? Wrapping your partner in latex surely does not prevent conception, but it's clearly a fetish. Whereas oral sex is unlikely to result in conception, but is not a fetishistic act.
Scott is talking about sexual imprinting that does not lead to procreation. Oral sex would fall into that category. Latex would be a good example of a misprint as well, since it's not actually related to procreation at all. You can have latex with no conception.
Do you believe this argument sound? Bulls are attracted to cows. Rams are attracted to ewes. Stallions are attracted to mares. Men attracted to any of these would be a fetish.
I assume one of the reasons that this isn't purely hard-coded is because there isn't an answer to what one 'should' be attracted to, from the PoV of evolution, that is both fully general as well as consistent over time.
Depending on which time period and culture a person grows up in, it may be optimal for them to be attracted to different types of people, so a lot of this may be learned during adolescence.
One could imagine an algorithm like "When going through adolescence, I need to determine what I should become attracted to for the best outcomes. Because I cannot test all of the opportunities myself, I will defer to peers to learn as much as I can"
This algorithm probably works well in many societies, but when you hop onto the Internet and the peers which you defer to during adolescence are a niche subculture, you'll start to get pretty different outcomes. The Internet is also very good at spreading memes, so these outcomes may then propagate to more adolescents as they come online, depending on how viral the new set of likes is.
There's a lot of further implications of this if you spend some time thinking about it, and most seem to be trending in the direction that one would predict from this.
You could imagine there are traits which are desirable in a partner like e.g. wealthy & high-status, but these are displayed differently in different cultures and environments, so rather than attempting to hard-code for them, we soft-code an algorithm that attempts to learn them in the test environment
Environment has rapidly changed. I think our algorithms actually do fail for food - there's a lot of extremely unhealthy yet apparently palatable food that we now eat, and if this food had been omnipresent in our ancestral environment, that likely wouldn't be the case. Also, if you literally try to only eat rocks, you will die shortly, whereas no reasonable amount of paraphilia causes this.
There are things like anorexia and bulimia, but I'm not sure if those count.
There's definitely people who like some objectively horrible food (but let's not argue over which these are), because they had it when they were a child and developed a fondness for it. Maybe it's even something that their culture celebrates, but ultimately it derives from what starving peasants had to do to survive another year.
I like marmite because I grew up eating it, but from an objective point of view I suspect it's disgusting.
As a child I took an irrational dislike against baked beans. When I eat them now I can tell they're delicious, but I will still only eat them when forced because my mind believes they're gross, in defiance of my mouth's actual experience eating them.
Sivarajan's right - there *are* some people who eat nondigestible things, and this is categorised as the mental disorder of pica. My understanding is that dirt's more common than rocks, but there's famously a guy who ate a Cessna (obviously he had to chop it up first, and it took him two years, but he did eat all of it).
I mean, usually they eat food as well, but I imagine that's some combination of 1) most people don't want to die and it's common knowledge that not eating food will kill you, so someone who does not like eating food may still do it to avoid dying, 2) the people that still don't eat food will indeed die and therefore stop getting counted in "how many people do this at present" statistics.
There are direct biochemical signs, the kind of thing that evolution can target reasonably easily, that follow within a few hours of eating something that contains actual nutrients (macronutrients at least), as the food is digested. This gives evolution a relatively easy way to reinforce the correct behaviours. With sex, the desired outcome happens much later, not more than a dozen or so times in a lifetime rather than several times per day, and (for males at least) outside the body (and therefore subject to all the complications of basing a drive on high-level concepts).
I think food matches up quite well. The core is getting the right nutrients to stay alive, there's tastes for things like pepper on your food and coffee afterwards which aren't nutrients but are compatible with ingesting things which are, equivalent to dressing up as a furry and having piv sex, and there's people whose intake by mouth is pretty much vodka and oxycontin, which sort of look like eating but aren't and are pretty incompatible
This is especially true for humans because we wear clothing and makeup. What a typical "man" or "woman" looks like in your local culture, in terms of shapes and colours, can literally physically vary quite a bit.
Neanderthals wore clothes, and also practiced skull-deformation. If you're messing with skull shape, you probably figured out rubbing berries on your cheeks. It's hard to tell exactly how old these things are, but modifying our appearance to signal things like group-membership seems to be a pretty ancient drive. I would argue it's probably much older than Homo Sapiens, and the evidence I can find is at least compatible with that theory.
Clothes, probably not until they lost their pelts and had to replace them. Makeup...I think they probably did. If you don't think they did, I'd like to know why. Even mud can be used as makeup.
Yes, but our ancestors were sexual before they were homo sapiens and had the challenge of recognizing appropriate mates along evolution. Even without make up, how these mates looked like changed from one generation to the next.
> There's a lot of further implications of this if you spend some time thinking about it, and most seem to be trending in the direction that one would predict from this.
Could you elaborate more on this? I'm not clear on what you're implying.
Sure. I claim that rape is an evolutionary strategy wired into men, with rewards for the exercise of force on an unwilling woman, and far from the EEA, BDSM fits the bill well enough. For women, the counterstrategy is making sure said exercise of force is sexual and not fatal. (Yes, I realize this explanation doesn't work for dominatrices; evolutionary psychology doesn't have ALL the answers.)
See also: A Natural History of Rape, by Thornhill and Palmer.
Ehhhhhh… that doesn’t obviously tally with BDSM as observed:
1. The big things are generally restriction, and power/powerlessness, not force/violence.
2. There’s no evolutionary reason, on the male side, to ever make the encounter fatal (quite the contrary), so no reason to then go the extra step to avoid it; from a cold evolutionary perspective, the best response is probably to if possible, then go limp.
3. Rape is just a horribly bad reproductive strategy; you’re sacrificing parental investment, and risking death (retaliation from the pair male/peer group in general - if you’d win that fight, you wouldn’t need to rape), and in general in primates it wouldn’t be surprising for any offspring to be killed.
The more likely BDSM explanation is probably a partial/lingering adaptation to primate dominance hierarchies, and/or (for bondage) the thing pikeys/gypsies do where they physically abduct the bride; that or something like it may have been more common for hunter gatherers, or even earlier hominids.
In this case people already hate you and want to kill you, so fear of retaliation is much reduced, and there is not much oportunity for parental investment anyway (in contemporary armies, in premodern ones it was different). But even then you are much better off with a willing partner who will not have an abortion or strangle the child in the crib, and in general treat well and invest in the child. So I think that "rape as a reproduction strategy" is not just morally repulsive, but also a factually wrong explanation. For one thing, there are many cases where soldiers kill the raped women (in fact I remember reading that during rape of Nanjing Japanese soldiers were given permission to rape Chinese women and girls as long as they kill them afterwards, to avoid mixing of races). And secondly, I do not think the raping soldiers think about their reproduction: they relieve the tension and stress of war while punishing and humiliating the local population for their resistance.
I wonder to what degree they were affected by Nazi ideology. They were allies in the war and the Japanese were trying very hard to learn about Western culture so they could be a major power.
It led in some funny directions; after hearing propaganda that the Jews were inhumanly clever manipulators who secretly controlled the business world and the world in general, the Japanese developed a plan to import a few thousand Jews to build business connections and strengthen their industry.
The Nazis nixed it, but apparently about 24000 Jews escaped the Holocaust due to the Nazis spreading conspiracy theories about Jewish power in a culture that didn't really care who killed Christ.
I don't really agree. You are indeed better off with a willing partner, but the fact is that sperm is so cheap that rape doesn't have to be a terribly successful strategy to still have a decent ROI in evolutionary terms. Also, you have to consider that for a sexually active adult female, it likely wouldn't be easy to tell if she became pregnant as a result of the sex she had with her Celtic husband four days ago or the Viking raiders who came and raped here three days ago. As such, it's definitely not any kind of foregone conclusion that a child that's the product of rape is going to be subject to infanticide.
Regarding 2., I agree, but I also submit this is one of those "The rabbit runs faster than the fox" asymmetries: the incentive for a man not to kill his rape partner is weaker than hers not to be killed by him.
And for 3., yes, it is more of a strategy of last resort for low status males.
1. Distinction without a difference, or nearly so. Violence requires differential power. Given the fundamental imprecision of evolutionary psychology, that rounds up to being the same thing.
2. Possibly most mating that happened 50k years ago was actually just forcible rape, and having a physical response that made it enjoyable for the woman could have encouraged pair-bonding, thereby enhancing offspring survival.
3. Just straight disagree. Men are r-strategists and having many lower-quality sexual encounters might be the optimal strategy in some environments. Particularly if a) it's the male's only sexual option or b) the female is likely to recruit another male to raise the child.
But whatever, evo psych is like astrology. You can always make up a story that sounds good.
I think a more correct version would be that males are flexible strategists who are capable of pursuing either or both strategies, as the situation demands. The classic "one wife and a succession of young mistresses" would be the perfect example.
For a lot of these conversations, I think there's an unspoken background belief that rape being evolutionarily selected for is in some way a moral justification for it. But it's not.
It's going to be a lot like theft or murdering rivals: often reproductively advantageous *if* you can get away with it.
> For a lot of these conversations, I think there's an unspoken background belief that rape being evolutionarily selected for is in some way a moral justification for it.
In some places on the Internet, sure, but I doubt that it's here.
What I suspect is far more prevalent here is people wanting to believe that rape being evolutionarily selected for is a justification for the fantasies that come unbidden into their minds. Fantasies which they feel horrified by the prospect of acting on (or having enacted upon them). They want a story to tell about why it's OK for them to have the fantasies, and why they're not a horrible person for having the fantasies. And if the story is plausible enough and has enough backing, maybe they can get someone to engage in a bit of consensual roleplay.
Re 2, I think that lubrication significantly lowers the risk if injury to the female. So the point of arousal is not that the rapist would otherwise kill you intentionally, it is just a damage mitigation strategy.
> if you’d win that fight, you wouldn’t need to rape
This might be true for in-group relationships in some contexts, but it is generally false. When an armored, well-fed man kicked in a cottage door, no malnourished peasant ever thought "what a great reproductive opportunity for our daughters".
> any offspring to be killed
Why? From the mother's genes perspective, she has already invested a lot of resources in their offspring. As a bonus, a son might inherit an inclination towards rape from the rapists side, which might increase spread of the mother's genes in subsequent generations. Even if the fatherhood can be determined unambiguously, having a society coordinate to that purpose for long enough for evolution to take notice is not trivial.
For the genes of a male, the benefits of possibly having a child raised by a single mother in a resource-starved environment are much lower than raising a kid as a member of your household. But the costs are also much lower. There is a limit both in terms of norms and resources on how many partners and children you can feed. For almost all males, this limit will be much lower than the rate at which they could impregnate females. If the male is currently not in the position to sire more legitimate offspring, it makes evolutionary sense that they spend their sperm production in the effort to sire illegitimate children, should the opportunity present itself.
From an ethical point of view, this only serves to illustrate that "evolutionary advantageous" or "natural" is not any kind of moral judgement. As EY pointed out, "Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn't be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth". Evolution as Azathoth the blind idiot god favors Ichneumonidae (which made Darwin doubt a benevolent creator), starvation as a means of population control, viruses, parasites and all sorts of other horrors. I have absolutely no problem believing that this stupid fucker also looks fondly on rape at times.
There's a reason people tend to live in groups. One individual cannot (in most environments) afford to raise a child. Much better to save what resources you can, and try again when you have a better support network. It's a gamble, but it's a gamble either way.
I think there is a vast difference between the evolutionary incentives of the genes currently residing in females and males.
For a woman, giving birth is a huge investment of physical (and frequently also social) resources. For men, the investment can vary by many orders of magnitude.
Historically rape during inter-tribal conflicts occurred pretty regularly. See for example the Old Testament, e.g. Numbers 31. (Jehovah and his priests only prevented wartime rape as a reproductive strategy when they were feeling especially genocidal and explicitly ordering the soldiers to kill everyone.) From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense: the odds of siring a reproductively successful child are low, but the opportunity costs are minimal: no social costs (the victim and what survives of her family hate you for all the preceding killing anyhow), just a bit of time which could otherwise be spent looting (and enslaving people, depending on the campaign situation).
In biblical times, female consent was very much not a concern. For example, the rights protected by Deuteronomy 22 are ownership rights by males over the bodies of females. Violent rape and consensual sex are treated the same. At most a lack of consent might be a mitigating circumstance which prevents stoning the victim. If there was no contested ownership, female consent did not matter one bit.
From Adam and Eve to Mary, the bible is full of reproductive encounters where coercion-free female consent is not explicitly mentioned and IMHO should not be implicitly assumed. A significant fraction of historical sexual encounters were probably not what we would call fully consensual. In such environments, I would expect genes encouraging submissiveness and masochism (at least in women) to flourish.
(I for once am glad that we are as liberated from the commandments of Jehovah as we are from the commandments of Azathoth.)
Has anyone ever studied "rape" in the animal kingdom, specifically searching for contrasts between mating where neither partner resists at all, and mating where one partner is trying very hard to resist? In the book "A Primate's Memoir" written by a baboon researcher, the author describes an incident where an alpha male lost a fight to a lower-ranking male, losing his status. The ex-alpha then chased down a female and forcibly mated with her, with the female screaming and struggling. The author notes that he's observed this behavior in the past when a defeated male forces himself on a female. He acknowledges that rape is a loaded term in this context, but he thinks it fits. Female baboons solicit mating all the time with males they actually want to get with, but you have these incidents when males force themselves on clearly unwilling females. It makes me wonder how many animals draw a distinction between desired sexual contact, and undesired sexual contact, and if the latter causes them lasting stress.
Why "alas"? If one rejects the kind of the moralizing employed by those who engage in appeals to nature, doesn't dolphin behavior have no moral valence whatsoever?
I was just being sentimental. Dolphins are cute and smart and so I like it when their behavior matches what I'd consider ethical human behavior. I don't actually think that dolphins are intelligent enough to have ethical agency, and I try not to equate "natural" with "ethical" (in either direction).
Gay men are more submissive than straight men. Also I'm not sure there are many more submissive gay men than dominant gay men - my impression is that there are similarly many.
Is this right? In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry writes:
"Most submissives (‘subs’) are female and most dominants (‘doms’) are male. One 2013 study of participants in a BDSM online forum found that only 34 per cent of men consistently preferred the sub position, while an even smaller proportion of women – 8 per cent – identified as doms.
You are actually right. It matches the statistics from fetlife, one of the main BDSM-related social networks. I couldn't find data about gay men or lesbian women, though.
I learned from my pastor in Bible study (the progressive kind that gets her information from secular historians) that men raping men to assert their dominance over them was extremely common in Biblical times. It was an entire cultural phenomenon that most modern people aren't aware of because it's decreased so dramatically since then. That might be a good explanation for men having sub fetishes. Apparently the scholarship on this is relatively recent, so if it wasn't covered in the book you mentioned that might be why. I wouldn't be surprised if this was also related to procreation. The psychological dynamics that men evolved to enjoy rape because it increased the likelihood of passing on their genes applied similarly to raping men.
Sounds like Ig Nobel material to me!
> Bondage/domination/submission: Okay, I admit I don’t have a good just-so explanation for this one. Maybe it’s more psychological - people who have been told that sex is shameful can only fully appreciate it if they feel like a victim who’s been forced into it (and so carries no guilt). And people who have been told they’re undesirable and nobody could ever really love them can only fully appreciate it if their partner is a victim who has no choice in the matter.
I assume masochism/submissiveness at least is a rape adaptation. Rape is very stressful (citation needed) and it seems to me that the ability to find it at least complicatedly enjoyable could greatly improve your life outcomes, especially if you're going to spend a lot of time with your captor afterwards.
I feel pretty confident that people who are into BDSM don't like getting raped any more than vanilla people. (For example, go see what people on r/BDSMAdvice have to say when it happens to them).
As someone with a lot of experience in BDSM circles, I am essentially certain that bdsm folk are on average more aroused by rape than non bdsm folk, even if that amount is low and everyone is still obviously very against it in practice. But I mean - con non-con is a thing for a reason.
CNC is, certainly! Fantasies are as well. But when it *actually* happens people don't seem to report having had a good time to any degree, and indeed report considerable distress.
Perhaps in a different cultural setting it would be different; there are, after all, historical cultures that carry out ritual abductions of brides. But I don't think rape victims in our culture secretly enjoy the real thing.
A lot of these conversations, I think, have in them a background concern that any acknowledgement of "being sexually assaulted" as a kink would constitute a moral justification for rapists, which is obviously a very reasonable concern given that "she was asking for it" is a phrase that's been in the cultural lexicon since forever. Such discussion also risks accidentally minimizing the trauma of the victim, which is real and deserves respect. This is especially a concern that active BDSM practitioners are going to have, since the survival of their communities relies greatly on not being perceived as a bunch of rapist weirdos (which is a significant danger.)
I'm not sure what to do about that; "bodily autonomy" is always a right regardless of if someone is aroused by the idea or action of it being violated.
EDIT: For context, I'm fairly certain that "being sexually assaulted in some specific fashion" is, in fact, a kink some people both have and have very complicated and nuanced feelings about.
Most boys (and I guess some girls too) at some point enjoy fantasies about being a war hero, or having war adventures. However, very few of them would enjoy actual war. That is because in a fantasy you can all the perks of the situation (usually at lower intensity than the real thing, but still some) without any downsides (like heorism and excitement of the battle without actual possibility of death, mutilation, and sense of guilt from killing other people.
This is a good comparison
Note that "cultural glorification of war is an adaptation intended to make people happier with being drafted" is a pretty standard take. War is still bad (in part because of our modern circumstances, it was legitimately less harrowing and more useful in pre-modern times), and glorification of violence doesn't mean you won't get PTSD, but in some contexts that glorification does help with real war fighting.
They are not saying BDSM folk enjoy being raped, just that they are more aroused. Arousal responses are involuntary, and most people can remember a time that they were aroused, but not enjoying it. From things like blue balls and awkward boners, to sexual assault.
I say this from a bit if experience. I've been sexually assaulted in a relatively minor way before, groped, in the middle of class, by someone I was not attracted to. I felt myself get angry, embarrassed, depressed, but still aroused. I really disliked it at the time, but even now, remembering it as a fantasy is pleasant. Feelings are complicated, and sexual assault can be wrong, even if the victim becomes aroused.
+1
I think if you turn this over the right way, it's self-evident they do.
Are people who are into getting raped more likely to be into BDSM, on average? I think the answer is obviously yes. Then if everyone else, BDSM fans or not, is EQUALLY into getting raped (fair assumption?), then statistically you're going to find more people who are into getting raped at a BDSM convention* than random other convention. I think.
* OTOH I'm guessing there'd be even more at an "anti-BDSM" convention.
Agreed. For a report from the "front lines", there was a series of posts from 2012 titled "There's a war on" (https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/theres-a-war-on-part-1-troubles-been-brewing/) from someone who's very into the scene, and very not into the amount of rape and harassment they encountered there.
I think the desire to submit occurs when you like certain things but are also ashamed of those things. With your hands tied (literally) you can enjoy the things guilt-free, it’s not like you could have resisted.
Or, maybe even simpler, because of attraction to a Big Strong Man.
Humiliation fetishes though, that’s what I don’t understand.
This might or might not be relevant. I remember reading in one of the essays of Gould about struggles of Christian theologians with explaining animal suffering. While you can always say, yes we have it hard but we will be rewarded in Heaven, and also it makes us better, and so on. However, even this dubious stuff does not apply to animals which do not have immortal souls, and even (probably) lack mental faculties to elevate their suffering to something lofty. Their suffering is totally senseless. Of course one can always try to claim that they lack self-consciousness, but this is a hard sell to any pet owners. So their other solution was to claim that actually prey animals enjoy being hunted and killed. So why a deer tries to escape the wolves? Well, obviously because it enjoys being chased. I guess while this idea seems outlandish, it did not came from nowhere. I guess some people may have fantasies about being hunted and killed. And why not? When we fear something replaying it in our imagination, focusing on plesant aspects of it (perhaps even in sexual context) can relieve the tension. And this is not limited to sexual contexts. After all many people enjoy horror stories and films, and even children like being frightened (within limits of course).
> I guess some people may have fantasies about being hunted and killed.
I regret to inform you that this is, in fact, a thing - closely allied to the furry community and I believe called "primal play" or something. Though of course in practice it amounts to something closer to CNC, the supposed hunt being sublimated into sex.
Since I learned there is a paraphilia called dendrophilia (yes, it means being sexually aroused by trees... wtf?), I will not astonished by any fetish. And in this case, the issue of, ehem, splinters aside, I cannot even begin to imagine where it comes from.
Think about other stuff people find sexy, or even just emotionally intense, then figure out how trees might be conceptually associated. "Wood" as a euphemism, or correct pronunciation of the Latin word for pine tree. For a less goofy angle, the sense of awe at natural beauty of particularly impressive trees is enough to inspire numerous shinto shrines. Archetypal "out in the woods" setting, isolated from civilizing influences, has trees in a literally load-bearing role, and plenty of fairy tales set there have a sexual subtext - to say nothing of all the outright porn involving hiding behind a bush or leaning against a trunk. Anatomy of the tree itself has features which could be interpreted as limbs and even orifices, at least on a loose geometric level - which is apparently quite sufficient, given how bizarre fetish-optimized artistic depictions of actual humans can get.
Not a dendrophile myself, to be clear, and haven't validated any of this with those who are, just brainstorming ways it might work from first principles.
Big Strong Man is a big part of it.
Gor fandom always had a big female component.
Wild-eyed speculation: I wonder if these aren't commitment signals. I think part of the appeal for the dominant partner in these relationships/activities is something along the lines of "my partner will endure pain/humiliation to be with me; they're really into me" and then evolution programs your brain to find this arousing/rewarding so that you will stick with this person and have lots of procreative sex with them. That's good! But then this programming can be hacked by evolution programming someone else to actually enjoy the pain/humiliation inflicted on them; it signals commitment to the sadist, but really the masochist would be happy with anyone with similar proclivities. Thus the sadist is sort of tricked into a greater commitment to the relationship, which ultimately benefits the mashochist.
Again, this is all speculation on my part; I'm not really any sort of kinkster. I find it enjoyable to fantasize about fetish-y stuff but it doesn't really interest me in realy life.
I think there’s a simpler part where it’s about decision fatigue and feeling taken care of. There’s a reason that the fanciest restaurants do a prix fixe menu where the customer has no choice about what they’re getting - it’s to free you up to enjoy your conversation and the food rather than having to make another stressful decision after a day of being CEO or whatever, and also make you feel like you put your trust in a chef who knows your needs and will take care of you.
Submission in sex is the same thing.
This isn't quite a counter-point to what you're saying, but close enough to one that I figured I'd put it in here: While it doesn't necessarily look like it's a lot of work, it definitely can be. Mine ties into masochism, and there's a lot of managing your own body posture involved, and navigating the space between "the last micro-action was technically not pleasurable, but I can handle it" and "this is generally too much right now" with a deep respect for the person that's handling you.
Generally speaking, if you're not restrained in a given moment, there's a lot of feedback to give to the person dominating you - you'll want to touch them in reaffirming ways and be supportive, because they're ironically in a pretty psychologically vulnerable position. As an incomplete example: if your dominant partner does something silly and you burst out laughing because you didn't have self-control, that can be rather damaging to their desire to take the reins again.
If you go to a restaurant and you don't like the food, you can leave a one star rating and not tip the waiter. If you submit to someone and you don't like the things they're doing to your body, you should IMO take *some* responsibility for it, think deeply about whether you can accept their choices for recurring interaction (and err on the side of granting them their choices), and respectfully talk it through with them - tell them what you liked, what you'd prefer less off, what's in the category of "didn't technically like, but can handle, and enjoy on a meta-level that you enjoy it, so feel free to sprinkle it in sometimes", etc, as reaffirmingly and gently as possible.
I suppose this could also be phrased as advice for subs: "Look out for your domme; make sure they're comfortable at all times."
As a submissive, data point: Shame doesn't play into it at all for me. If you ask my friends who's most comfortable talking about sex, it's me. I bring it up as a casual topic like other people bring up video games they've been playing (but, yes, I do try to make sure the people I'm talking to don't mind, sex is a squick topic for a lot of people).
For me, it's the 'thrill' of being helpless and at someone's mercy.
The best way to think of this may be of being on a roller-coaster. You can't get off, you're at the whim of the ups and downs and all those curves throwing your body around, but while it's hitting some buttons in your brain that are making your body respond with stress (raising your heartrate, etc) is, on some level, really exhilerating!
Being restrained (be it just by bodily force, or by ropes, etc) is a lot like that. There's a deep sense of risk, it requires a lot of trust (and forgiveness, and communication, which new submissives sometimes don't realise), but it's very rewarding.
I've had people say that from the other side, yeah. It's like a horror movie or a scary story. Look at the popularity of 'evil' tropes--stereotypical bikers, black, Nazis (usually with the swastikas removed), goatees, skulls, I'm sure you can think of others.
There's this aspect of not having responsibility as well.
This might just be a stereotype, but it's been said that a lot of people who actually wield a lot of power and responsibility have been into submission - because it allows them to experience not being in charge at all for a while.
Wasn't there a bit of evidence recently, that human males generally become physically and mentally aroused by perceiving sexual things, but human females often only become physically aroused (i.e., things like vaginal lubrication, but without an accompanying desire to participate)?
"Shame over sex" seems contradicted by the flagrantly shameless BDSM scene with its in-person clubs and public kink.
"Sadism/domination as a response to feeling undesirable" doesn't fit the dominants I know, including my wife. If anything, being able to "get away" with being mean seems to confirm their sense of desirability.
"Rape adaption" *may* explain some M/f as a way to hack the female body's defence systems which - I've read - can switch on physical arousal to prevent damage (it's important that in the nasty real world, physical arousal isn't the same as consent or pleasure). However, it doesn't explain F/m dynamics. A better general explanation for sexual submission is that finding dominant mates hot is adaptive.
> "Shame over sex" seems contradicted by the flagrantly shameless BDSM scene with its in-person clubs and public kink.
Does it? To me at least that all seems consistent with a backlash against the shame that instilled the kink in the first place.
That's certainly another possible interpretation. Or, shameless public kink could be a reaction to having grown up ashamed of being kinky.
However, my impression - sorry, it's hard to find good studies on this sort of thing - is that most kinksters can point back to a pre-sexual stage of their development where they were already showing signs of kinkiness. There are a couple of good mémoires that go into this in detail.
There's also this thing that very dominant "alpha males" are a long-established romantic trope, and historically have been regarded as desirable husbands. So I think that, at least for M/f, BDSM is an extension, or even a conscious firewalling, of a common innate drive.
I think it's the way progressives (and before them liberals) excuse that innate drive. ;)
You mean they excuse the drive by saying it's purely cultural?
I think it's more that it's a 'kink' and therefore transgressive, and left-coded not right-coded, and therefore morally OK.
Yeah, I suspect dominance isn't an automatic turnoff for men the way submission is for women (in 90% of the population anyway). Probably in sub men whatever normally links sexual attraction to dominance detection in women gets turned on for whatever reason. I guess we'll never really know!
I think, in the vanilla world, a lot of women do like being in control, and prefer submissive men as long as that submissiveness is expressed as being a devoted champion and good boyfriend/husband; most of us don't actually look weak or wimpish, our submissiveness is defined by where our centre is.
There are reasons why this doesn't translate to lots of kinky dominant women, and most of these are the fault of male submissives.
Eh, it's always PC to blame the guy. But we can agree to disagree on that one I guess. I don't think we'll ever really know.
Yes, I agree. Currently it's fashionable to leap to blame the guy.
However, in this case it's the fault of the malesub for very specific reasons: they tend to approach partners with an off-putting list of detailed fetishes, rather than a proposal to engage in power actual exchange.
Guess you'd know. I still think there's a supply-and-demand problem, but if you made it, congratulations!
BDSM is about control. Its about relinquish control but being able to take it at any time with the concept of consent. Someone with a leadership role ordering around all day likes to relinquish control in bed ; someone who has been raped and who did not process fully the rape will want to reproduce this in private, except that the person can stop the act at any point, which is like regaining control on an event where you did not have any control (the initial rape). Its pretty basic interpretation, but Ockham's razor might be right here.
This sounds more accurate to me.
Women are probably adapted to survive rape by physically becoming lubricated in response to a variety of sexual stimuli, but in women this is generally separate from subjectively perceived mental arousal. Women who like being submissive in a BDSM context are mentally aroused by the situation, while I think women who are raped often get wet but do not perceive themselves as mentally aroused. Dominance and submission is more likely linked to attraction to high-status men and/or related to men usually being hard-coded to be the sexual initiators and women to be the responders. I am suspicious that many submissive men and dominant women have some part of their sexual brain that got flipped to be more like the sexuality of the other gender. I would expect this to be somewhat correlated with queer gender identity or sexual orientation.
> I am suspicious that many submissive men and dominant women have some part of their sexual brain that got flipped to be more like the sexuality of the other gender. I would expect this to be somewhat correlated with queer gender identity or sexual orientation.
There seem to be several styles of Femdom dynamic, some of them very much following traditional gender roles, e.g. the "Mommy Domme" dynamic.
However, you certainly see a lot of what we used to call "gender bending" amongst submissive men, though it's hard to untangle whether this is because on some level they equate "female" to "weak".
Assuming some brains are flipped, this could still be adaptive. On the male side, some of this could be a hardwired Sneaker F*cker strategy. F/m pairings could also have a reproductive advantage, e.g. when food was scarce.
I think BDSM comes from status hierarchy preferences. People have good evolutionary reasons to be attracted to high social status individuals, because status is correlated with genetic and material resources, and both of those are good for your offspring. To judge status, you need to look for reliable status markers. Those markers come in many different varieties - having lots of resources, winning competitions, having lots of attention or respect from others, knowing lots of other high-status people, etc.
But in particular, when someone is telling others what to do (and having them do it), it's very likely that they're high status. And if they're able to treat others badly and get away with it, they must be insanely high status. I think this is where BDSM comes from.
I agree with you, though I am curious to see how you would frame the attraction a dominant feels for a submissive.
Not so sure about that. Maybe feeling high status is nice?
I would have thought - at the instinctive level - assured mate guarding for M/f, and access to resources for F/m.
Is there a reason you unparsimoniously create a separate category for homosexuality when this framework of "fetishes" works just as well in that case?
Fetish is technically defined as "a form of sexual desire in which gratification is strongly linked to a particular object or activity or a part of the body other than the sexual organs." Including homosexuality would satisfy neither the technical definition nor common usage.
So per this definition, an attraction to breasts would count as a fetish?
Breasts are secondary sexual organs so strictly speaking by this definition no, but if it were strong enough and non-central enough in quality, I think some would argue yes
If it comes at the expense of PIV sex, or is necessary for PIV sex to occur, then yes, obviously? Or in mate selection, although it's hard to tell for sure, if a man prefers a woman with a particular type of breasts over a woman who'd have more PIV sex with him, that would seem to indicate that something fetish-like was going on. And then perhaps there's lesser degrees of the fetish, where it doesn't usually interfere, but does tend to affect choices at the margin.
If homosexuality behaved like a fetish, then you wouldn’t expect “homoromanticness” to go along with it; you’d expect gay men to be sexually interested in penises but still romantically interested in women.
Assuming the theory of fetishes here is correct, homosexuality might have a similar explanation, but there are differences too.
Fair point. Is that true though? Do "furries" not have romantic interests closely tied to their sexual interests? It is my understanding that zoöphiles and pedophiles do, but I welcome correction.
And there definitely is a fetish of this sort, where you want the person to present as a woman romantically but to have a penis sexually.
Indeed, and attraction to futanari is typically associated with people attracted to women (rather than with people attracted to men).
Being attracted to men isn't a fetish when women do it, so why would it be one when men do it?
Presumably the question relates to non-reproductive sex. If sex in nature is intended to propagate the species, then gay relationships clearly defeat that purpose.
Does it? Wrapping your partner in latex surely does not prevent conception, but it's clearly a fetish. Whereas oral sex is unlikely to result in conception, but is not a fetishistic act.
Scott is talking about sexual imprinting that does not lead to procreation. Oral sex would fall into that category. Latex would be a good example of a misprint as well, since it's not actually related to procreation at all. You can have latex with no conception.
Do you believe this argument sound? Bulls are attracted to cows. Rams are attracted to ewes. Stallions are attracted to mares. Men attracted to any of these would be a fetish.
Tomcats are attracted to queens when the queens are in heat.
I assume one of the reasons that this isn't purely hard-coded is because there isn't an answer to what one 'should' be attracted to, from the PoV of evolution, that is both fully general as well as consistent over time.
Depending on which time period and culture a person grows up in, it may be optimal for them to be attracted to different types of people, so a lot of this may be learned during adolescence.
One could imagine an algorithm like "When going through adolescence, I need to determine what I should become attracted to for the best outcomes. Because I cannot test all of the opportunities myself, I will defer to peers to learn as much as I can"
This algorithm probably works well in many societies, but when you hop onto the Internet and the peers which you defer to during adolescence are a niche subculture, you'll start to get pretty different outcomes. The Internet is also very good at spreading memes, so these outcomes may then propagate to more adolescents as they come online, depending on how viral the new set of likes is.
There's a lot of further implications of this if you spend some time thinking about it, and most seem to be trending in the direction that one would predict from this.
You could imagine there are traits which are desirable in a partner like e.g. wealthy & high-status, but these are displayed differently in different cultures and environments, so rather than attempting to hard-code for them, we soft-code an algorithm that attempts to learn them in the test environment
It all sounds somewhat plausible, but I'm wondering why the algorithm sometimes fails for sex but not for other things.
For instance, it never fails for food. There's not a class of people out there who want to eat rocks instead of digestible food.
Pica might be the equivalent.
Environment has rapidly changed. I think our algorithms actually do fail for food - there's a lot of extremely unhealthy yet apparently palatable food that we now eat, and if this food had been omnipresent in our ancestral environment, that likely wouldn't be the case. Also, if you literally try to only eat rocks, you will die shortly, whereas no reasonable amount of paraphilia causes this.
There are things like anorexia and bulimia, but I'm not sure if those count.
There's definitely people who like some objectively horrible food (but let's not argue over which these are), because they had it when they were a child and developed a fondness for it. Maybe it's even something that their culture celebrates, but ultimately it derives from what starving peasants had to do to survive another year.
I like marmite because I grew up eating it, but from an objective point of view I suspect it's disgusting.
As a child I took an irrational dislike against baked beans. When I eat them now I can tell they're delicious, but I will still only eat them when forced because my mind believes they're gross, in defiance of my mouth's actual experience eating them.
Some people chew gum.
Sivarajan's right - there *are* some people who eat nondigestible things, and this is categorised as the mental disorder of pica. My understanding is that dirt's more common than rocks, but there's famously a guy who ate a Cessna (obviously he had to chop it up first, and it took him two years, but he did eat all of it).
I mean, usually they eat food as well, but I imagine that's some combination of 1) most people don't want to die and it's common knowledge that not eating food will kill you, so someone who does not like eating food may still do it to avoid dying, 2) the people that still don't eat food will indeed die and therefore stop getting counted in "how many people do this at present" statistics.
> there's famously a guy who ate a Cessna
I was not aware of this until just now. Thank you for sharing. Now I need to pick my jaw up off of the floor...
There are direct biochemical signs, the kind of thing that evolution can target reasonably easily, that follow within a few hours of eating something that contains actual nutrients (macronutrients at least), as the food is digested. This gives evolution a relatively easy way to reinforce the correct behaviours. With sex, the desired outcome happens much later, not more than a dozen or so times in a lifetime rather than several times per day, and (for males at least) outside the body (and therefore subject to all the complications of basing a drive on high-level concepts).
I think food matches up quite well. The core is getting the right nutrients to stay alive, there's tastes for things like pepper on your food and coffee afterwards which aren't nutrients but are compatible with ingesting things which are, equivalent to dressing up as a furry and having piv sex, and there's people whose intake by mouth is pretty much vodka and oxycontin, which sort of look like eating but aren't and are pretty incompatible
with it - equivalent to say necrophilia
This is especially true for humans because we wear clothing and makeup. What a typical "man" or "woman" looks like in your local culture, in terms of shapes and colours, can literally physically vary quite a bit.
I doubt many if any of the orginal homo sapiens were putting on makeup or 'clothes' other than leaves
You would be wrong, I'm pretty sure
Neanderthals wore clothes, and also practiced skull-deformation. If you're messing with skull shape, you probably figured out rubbing berries on your cheeks. It's hard to tell exactly how old these things are, but modifying our appearance to signal things like group-membership seems to be a pretty ancient drive. I would argue it's probably much older than Homo Sapiens, and the evidence I can find is at least compatible with that theory.
I have read that female orangutans (in captivity) liked lipstick, once it was introduced to them.
Clothes, probably not until they lost their pelts and had to replace them. Makeup...I think they probably did. If you don't think they did, I'd like to know why. Even mud can be used as makeup.
Yes, but our ancestors were sexual before they were homo sapiens and had the challenge of recognizing appropriate mates along evolution. Even without make up, how these mates looked like changed from one generation to the next.
> There's a lot of further implications of this if you spend some time thinking about it, and most seem to be trending in the direction that one would predict from this.
Could you elaborate more on this? I'm not clear on what you're implying.
The obvious-to-me just-so story for BDSM "fetishes" is as a rape adaptation.
Explain how this would work?
Sure. I claim that rape is an evolutionary strategy wired into men, with rewards for the exercise of force on an unwilling woman, and far from the EEA, BDSM fits the bill well enough. For women, the counterstrategy is making sure said exercise of force is sexual and not fatal. (Yes, I realize this explanation doesn't work for dominatrices; evolutionary psychology doesn't have ALL the answers.)
See also: A Natural History of Rape, by Thornhill and Palmer.
Ehhhhhh… that doesn’t obviously tally with BDSM as observed:
1. The big things are generally restriction, and power/powerlessness, not force/violence.
2. There’s no evolutionary reason, on the male side, to ever make the encounter fatal (quite the contrary), so no reason to then go the extra step to avoid it; from a cold evolutionary perspective, the best response is probably to if possible, then go limp.
3. Rape is just a horribly bad reproductive strategy; you’re sacrificing parental investment, and risking death (retaliation from the pair male/peer group in general - if you’d win that fight, you wouldn’t need to rape), and in general in primates it wouldn’t be surprising for any offspring to be killed.
The more likely BDSM explanation is probably a partial/lingering adaptation to primate dominance hierarchies, and/or (for bondage) the thing pikeys/gypsies do where they physically abduct the bride; that or something like it may have been more common for hunter gatherers, or even earlier hominids.
Rape is so common by soldiers of invading armies that in that circumstance it is probably not a "bad reproductive strategy."
In this case people already hate you and want to kill you, so fear of retaliation is much reduced, and there is not much oportunity for parental investment anyway (in contemporary armies, in premodern ones it was different). But even then you are much better off with a willing partner who will not have an abortion or strangle the child in the crib, and in general treat well and invest in the child. So I think that "rape as a reproduction strategy" is not just morally repulsive, but also a factually wrong explanation. For one thing, there are many cases where soldiers kill the raped women (in fact I remember reading that during rape of Nanjing Japanese soldiers were given permission to rape Chinese women and girls as long as they kill them afterwards, to avoid mixing of races). And secondly, I do not think the raping soldiers think about their reproduction: they relieve the tension and stress of war while punishing and humiliating the local population for their resistance.
I wonder to what degree they were affected by Nazi ideology. They were allies in the war and the Japanese were trying very hard to learn about Western culture so they could be a major power.
It led in some funny directions; after hearing propaganda that the Jews were inhumanly clever manipulators who secretly controlled the business world and the world in general, the Japanese developed a plan to import a few thousand Jews to build business connections and strengthen their industry.
The Nazis nixed it, but apparently about 24000 Jews escaped the Holocaust due to the Nazis spreading conspiracy theories about Jewish power in a culture that didn't really care who killed Christ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_settlement_in_the_Japanese_Empire
I don't really agree. You are indeed better off with a willing partner, but the fact is that sperm is so cheap that rape doesn't have to be a terribly successful strategy to still have a decent ROI in evolutionary terms. Also, you have to consider that for a sexually active adult female, it likely wouldn't be easy to tell if she became pregnant as a result of the sex she had with her Celtic husband four days ago or the Viking raiders who came and raped here three days ago. As such, it's definitely not any kind of foregone conclusion that a child that's the product of rape is going to be subject to infanticide.
Regarding 2., I agree, but I also submit this is one of those "The rabbit runs faster than the fox" asymmetries: the incentive for a man not to kill his rape partner is weaker than hers not to be killed by him.
And for 3., yes, it is more of a strategy of last resort for low status males.
3. And first resort for high status males? Re: Genghis Khan?
Yes, the "retaliation" counterargument doesn't work if enough of the local men are dead.
1. Distinction without a difference, or nearly so. Violence requires differential power. Given the fundamental imprecision of evolutionary psychology, that rounds up to being the same thing.
2. Possibly most mating that happened 50k years ago was actually just forcible rape, and having a physical response that made it enjoyable for the woman could have encouraged pair-bonding, thereby enhancing offspring survival.
3. Just straight disagree. Men are r-strategists and having many lower-quality sexual encounters might be the optimal strategy in some environments. Particularly if a) it's the male's only sexual option or b) the female is likely to recruit another male to raise the child.
But whatever, evo psych is like astrology. You can always make up a story that sounds good.
> Men are r-strategists
I think a more correct version would be that males are flexible strategists who are capable of pursuing either or both strategies, as the situation demands. The classic "one wife and a succession of young mistresses" would be the perfect example.
For a lot of these conversations, I think there's an unspoken background belief that rape being evolutionarily selected for is in some way a moral justification for it. But it's not.
It's going to be a lot like theft or murdering rivals: often reproductively advantageous *if* you can get away with it.
> For a lot of these conversations, I think there's an unspoken background belief that rape being evolutionarily selected for is in some way a moral justification for it.
In some places on the Internet, sure, but I doubt that it's here.
What I suspect is far more prevalent here is people wanting to believe that rape being evolutionarily selected for is a justification for the fantasies that come unbidden into their minds. Fantasies which they feel horrified by the prospect of acting on (or having enacted upon them). They want a story to tell about why it's OK for them to have the fantasies, and why they're not a horrible person for having the fantasies. And if the story is plausible enough and has enough backing, maybe they can get someone to engage in a bit of consensual roleplay.
Re 2, I think that lubrication significantly lowers the risk if injury to the female. So the point of arousal is not that the rapist would otherwise kill you intentionally, it is just a damage mitigation strategy.
> if you’d win that fight, you wouldn’t need to rape
This might be true for in-group relationships in some contexts, but it is generally false. When an armored, well-fed man kicked in a cottage door, no malnourished peasant ever thought "what a great reproductive opportunity for our daughters".
> any offspring to be killed
Why? From the mother's genes perspective, she has already invested a lot of resources in their offspring. As a bonus, a son might inherit an inclination towards rape from the rapists side, which might increase spread of the mother's genes in subsequent generations. Even if the fatherhood can be determined unambiguously, having a society coordinate to that purpose for long enough for evolution to take notice is not trivial.
For the genes of a male, the benefits of possibly having a child raised by a single mother in a resource-starved environment are much lower than raising a kid as a member of your household. But the costs are also much lower. There is a limit both in terms of norms and resources on how many partners and children you can feed. For almost all males, this limit will be much lower than the rate at which they could impregnate females. If the male is currently not in the position to sire more legitimate offspring, it makes evolutionary sense that they spend their sperm production in the effort to sire illegitimate children, should the opportunity present itself.
From an ethical point of view, this only serves to illustrate that "evolutionary advantageous" or "natural" is not any kind of moral judgement. As EY pointed out, "Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn't be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth". Evolution as Azathoth the blind idiot god favors Ichneumonidae (which made Darwin doubt a benevolent creator), starvation as a means of population control, viruses, parasites and all sorts of other horrors. I have absolutely no problem believing that this stupid fucker also looks fondly on rape at times.
There's a reason people tend to live in groups. One individual cannot (in most environments) afford to raise a child. Much better to save what resources you can, and try again when you have a better support network. It's a gamble, but it's a gamble either way.
I think there is a vast difference between the evolutionary incentives of the genes currently residing in females and males.
For a woman, giving birth is a huge investment of physical (and frequently also social) resources. For men, the investment can vary by many orders of magnitude.
Historically rape during inter-tribal conflicts occurred pretty regularly. See for example the Old Testament, e.g. Numbers 31. (Jehovah and his priests only prevented wartime rape as a reproductive strategy when they were feeling especially genocidal and explicitly ordering the soldiers to kill everyone.) From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense: the odds of siring a reproductively successful child are low, but the opportunity costs are minimal: no social costs (the victim and what survives of her family hate you for all the preceding killing anyhow), just a bit of time which could otherwise be spent looting (and enslaving people, depending on the campaign situation).
In biblical times, female consent was very much not a concern. For example, the rights protected by Deuteronomy 22 are ownership rights by males over the bodies of females. Violent rape and consensual sex are treated the same. At most a lack of consent might be a mitigating circumstance which prevents stoning the victim. If there was no contested ownership, female consent did not matter one bit.
From Adam and Eve to Mary, the bible is full of reproductive encounters where coercion-free female consent is not explicitly mentioned and IMHO should not be implicitly assumed. A significant fraction of historical sexual encounters were probably not what we would call fully consensual. In such environments, I would expect genes encouraging submissiveness and masochism (at least in women) to flourish.
(I for once am glad that we are as liberated from the commandments of Jehovah as we are from the commandments of Azathoth.)
"Rape is just a horribly bad reproductive strategy"
It works for dolphins and ducks.
Has anyone ever studied "rape" in the animal kingdom, specifically searching for contrasts between mating where neither partner resists at all, and mating where one partner is trying very hard to resist? In the book "A Primate's Memoir" written by a baboon researcher, the author describes an incident where an alpha male lost a fight to a lower-ranking male, losing his status. The ex-alpha then chased down a female and forcibly mated with her, with the female screaming and struggling. The author notes that he's observed this behavior in the past when a defeated male forces himself on a female. He acknowledges that rape is a loaded term in this context, but he thinks it fits. Female baboons solicit mating all the time with males they actually want to get with, but you have these incidents when males force themselves on clearly unwilling females. It makes me wonder how many animals draw a distinction between desired sexual contact, and undesired sexual contact, and if the latter causes them lasting stress.
Ducks are a big one for this. Also, alas, dolphins.
Seriously, watching ducks in a pond during mating season is like watching adolescent humans in a danceclub.
Why "alas"? If one rejects the kind of the moralizing employed by those who engage in appeals to nature, doesn't dolphin behavior have no moral valence whatsoever?
I was just being sentimental. Dolphins are cute and smart and so I like it when their behavior matches what I'd consider ethical human behavior. I don't actually think that dolphins are intelligent enough to have ethical agency, and I try not to equate "natural" with "ethical" (in either direction).
I recall campus feminists once upon a time mobilizing to stop the epidemic of rape inflicted upon their duck sisters down by the riverbank.
No lie. Good times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_coercion_among_animals
In the BDSM scene there are much more submissive than dominant men. At least this holds for gay people. Your explanation would suggest the opposite.
Gay men are more submissive than straight men. Also I'm not sure there are many more submissive gay men than dominant gay men - my impression is that there are similarly many.
Is this right? In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry writes:
"Most submissives (‘subs’) are female and most dominants (‘doms’) are male. One 2013 study of participants in a BDSM online forum found that only 34 per cent of men consistently preferred the sub position, while an even smaller proportion of women – 8 per cent – identified as doms.
That would explain professional dominatrices, as well as why I am yet to see or hear of a professional sub female or dominant hetero male.
Isn't "professional submissive female" sort of the default assumption for sex work more generally?
You are actually right. It matches the statistics from fetlife, one of the main BDSM-related social networks. I couldn't find data about gay men or lesbian women, though.
https://bedbible.com/fetlife-statistic/
Aella also found that men are more likely to be dominant and women more likely to be submissive in BDSM on average. It was by a pretty large margin. https://aella.substack.com/p/how-fetishes-differ-by-region-and
I learned from my pastor in Bible study (the progressive kind that gets her information from secular historians) that men raping men to assert their dominance over them was extremely common in Biblical times. It was an entire cultural phenomenon that most modern people aren't aware of because it's decreased so dramatically since then. That might be a good explanation for men having sub fetishes. Apparently the scholarship on this is relatively recent, so if it wasn't covered in the book you mentioned that might be why. I wouldn't be surprised if this was also related to procreation. The psychological dynamics that men evolved to enjoy rape because it increased the likelihood of passing on their genes applied similarly to raping men.