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Yes, women realistically do experience a lot more sexual violence than men, so it is not an unfounded worry; but as ordinary and normal and safe reproductive co
by sheepleherd 10y ago
Yes, women realistically do experience a lot more sexual violence than men, so it is not an unfounded worry; but as ordinary and normal and safe reproductive courtship entails a lot more approaches to women, the physically smaller nurturing gender, by men, the larger more aggressive hunting gender, such examples of deviant and opportunistic sexual violence can be seen to "come with the territory" of our evolutionary history. It's nice to imagine that we as a social species could have evolved past this, but in studying our history on the scale of hundreds of years rather than evolutionary scales of thousands of years, and in studying works of scholarship such as the Selfish Gene by Dawkins, one may not be at all surprised that we are where we are, but perhaps by continuing to educate one another we can takes steps to make all people feel, and more importantly be, safer.
The reason I felt it necessary to add the "context" to your statement is that our world consists of many many interacting postitive and negative stochastic processes, and when we look at a simple "violence" statistic it might seem "oh, this is terrible, we must stop this" when in fact things are much more complex than that.
- matt4077 10y agoOh, but despite all the biologistic determinism, it really is that easy: there is violence – and it needs to stop. It doesn't matter why is exists, and even if we believe the stuck-at-13-years simpleton you're quoting, an explanation is not an excuse.
- sheepleherd 10y agonobody is excusing it at all. But you are dreaming if you think you are going to stop it cold turkey along with you stopping shoplifting, child abuse, elder abuse, car accidents, bank fraud, armed robbery, etc. Those things are also biologically determined, they simply don't involve the reproductive function directly which seems to make you ... more optimistic? more outraged? Actually, BTW, I have read (but not looked up myself) that if we count prison rape, men actually experience more sexual violence than women, so that part of the above formulation should perhaps be changed. And in terms of child abuse including to the point of murder, women perpetrate more of it than men do, so there is some value in looking at these issues from the point of view of "strong vs. weak + opportunity" biology rather than "gender". But you are correct, violence between humans is for the most part a very bad thing, and I too would like to see it reduced as quickly as possible regardless of the cause.
- exolymph 10y agoThe prison rape thing is a little more complicated than that, but thanks for bringing it up, since I wasn't aware. More context here for anyone who's interested: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/21/us-more-men-raped-than-women http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb... I do think evo-psych tells us a lot more about human nature than we sometimes want to admit.