by exploited » Tue Oct 15, 2013 8:20 pm
The 2003 book Evolution, Gender, and Rape, written in response to A Natural History of Rape, compiles the views of twenty-eight scholars in opposition to sociobiological theories of rape. One contributor, Michael Kimmel, criticizes Thornhill and Palmer's argument that female rape victims tend to be sexually attractive young women, rather than children or older women, contrary to what would be expected if rapists selected victims based on inability to resist. Kimmel argues that younger women are the least likely to be married and the most likely to be out on dates with men, and therefore are the most likely to be raped because of opportunity arising from social exposure and marital status.[9] Palmer and Thornhill responded to these critics in an article in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.[1]
Smith et al. (2001) have criticized the scientific accuracy of Thornhill and Palmer's rape adaptation claim. In a study on the Aché in Paraguay, they found that the disadvantages of rape outweighed the reproductive advantages by a 10 to one margin. The study suggests that this would make it very unlikely that rape would be an adaptive behavior for increased reproduction.[11][12]
While defending the evolutionary psychology theory of rape against its more vehement critics, Vandermassen (2010) provides a critique of some aspects of the view. She characterises the view of Thornhill and Palmer as "extreme" (p. 736), as they fail to allow for the influence of any non-sexual motivations in the crime of rape. Vandermassen also notes two problems with the data cited by Thornhill and Palmer regarding the psychological trauma caused by the violence associated with rape: firstly, this data is inaccurately and confusingly presented in the book, often obscuring the fact that it does not support Thornhill and Palmer's "counterintuitive hypothesis" (p. 744) that more physical violence during rape is associated with less psychological pain. Secondly, more recent research has failed to support this hypothesis. A more moderate position, integrating the evolutionary psychology and feminist theories on rape, is presented by Vandermassen, based in part on the work of feminist evolutionary researcher Barbara Smuts.[13]
Hamilton (2008) has criticized Thornhill and Palmer's definition of rape as the coerced vaginal penetration of women of reproductive age. He has suggested that the exclusion of male rape, rape on women outside the reproductive age range, murderous rape, and non-vaginal forms of rape virtually guaranteed the confirmation of their hypothesis that rape is an evolved reproductive strategy and not a crime of violence. Hamilton has argued that evolutionary psychology fails to explain rape because, by evolutionary psychology's own criteria, an adaptation to rape children or men, or non-vaginal rape, would have been eliminated in the course of evolution because it did not confer reproductive advantage on our ancestors.