EDIT: OK, on reflection I’m less confident in all this. Feel free to read my original comment below.
I have a theory that a high male-to-female ratio actually triggers creepy behavior in men. Why?
Creepy behavior has an evolutionary purpose, just like all human behavior. The optimal mating strategy changes depending on my tribe’s gender ratio. As nasty as it sounds, from the perspective of my genes it may make sense to try to have sex by force, if it’s not going to happen any other way.
I suspect evolution has programmed men to be more bitter, resentful, and belligerent if they seem to be in an area where there aren’t many women. Hence you get sexual assault problems in the military, countries with surplus young males causing various forms of societal unrest, etc.
In other words, maybe it’s not that individuals are creepy so much as men “naturally” act more rapey if there are only a few women around. Of course, we’re all adults and we can supress unwanted internal drives, but it may also be a good idea to attack the root problem.
So in light of this, some possible solutions for male creepiness:
When men feel desperate, they act creepy. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should treat these men like bad people. Yes, these are antisocial behaviors. But they’re a manifestation of internal suffering. So, try to feel compassion and respect for people that are suffering, in addition to letting them know that their behavior is antisocial.
If you’re a man and you notice yourself acting creepy, one idea is to try to get interested in something that’s got a decent number of women involved with it. (Possible examples: acting, dancing, book clubs. Maybe other commenters have more ideas?) Hopefully, this will program your subconscious to believe you’re no longer in a desperate situation. In the best case, maybe you’ll find a girlfriend.
Creepy behavior has an evolutionary purpose, just like all human behavior.
Humans are adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers. Evolution may have crafted me into a person who wants to sit at home alone all day and play video games, but sitting at home alone all day and playing video games doesn’t offer me a fitness advantage.
(I don’t actually want to sit at home alone all day and play video games. At least, not every day.)
Yep. I’m arguing that creepy/misogynistic behavior may be an adaptation that fires when a man is feeling desperate.
It’s weird because since thinking of this yesterday, I’ve noticed that it has a ton of explanatory power regarding my own feelings and behavior. And it actually offers a concrete solution to the problem of feeling creepy: hang out with more women. But I’m getting voted down both here and on reddit. I guess maybe I’m generalizing from myself improperly, and lack of social awarenesss is actually a much larger problem?
Hanging out with more women could also be a solution to lack of social awareness, by the way. In my experience, I naturally tend to start making friends with some of them, and in conversations I learn a lot more about how they think and feel.
You seem to be confusing high-status creep and low-status creep. The latter, which you describe, happens among desperate low-status men (rarely other genders), is characterized by misogyny and a sense of thwarted entitlement, is obvious to outsiders, and makes then even less desirable partners. Hanging around women is usually promoted as a cure, and looks like it works. I see little evidence for or against this being evolutionary or cultural.
The former happens among predators, who often (not always) are high-status because they’re driven to be, is characterized by a sense of entitlement that is denied but acted on (by flouting norms and personally-imposed boundaries on interaction, especially sexual), and works in the sense that it gets the creeper lots of dubiously consensual sex while avoiding social blame. This seems to be a straightforward outgrowth of “Screw the rules, I have status”.
That seems like an accurate description to me. I’m inclined to think that if LW has any kind of creep problem, it’s more likely to be low-status creep problem, i.e. men who feel like social outcasts (possibly because they’re really smart and have always had a hard time finding people like them to make friends with) and have been programmed to alieve that as social outcasts, the only way they’re going to have sex is through creepy means.
And maybe part of the solution to this problem is to help men feel less like social outcasts. Group hug, everyone! I’m also in favor if discouraging creepy behavior verbally; I’m just suggesting this as an additional solution.
And maybe part of the solution to this problem is to help men feel less like social outcasts. Group hug, everyone!
And this gets into a related issue—male/male affection in general is often strongly proscribed, at least in Western society, to the point where a risk of censure for the mere possibility of a sexual component is a real risk. My guess is that most men, regardless of status or other factors, will not fail to pick up on this, given the sheer amount of signalling to that effect. Some groups that recognize this problem try to drive an even harder wedge of distinction between the two possible readings of any given affectionate act, which doesn’t help in the long run; it simply exacerbates the matter.
Clearly a whole lotta lower-status creepy men who feel like social outcasts need to start doing something to shake this homophobia and this obsession with their own sexual dissatisfaction, and the rigidly-framed societal narratives they’re willing to accept that being fulfilled within...
And this gets into a related issue—male/male affection in general is often strongly proscribed, at least in Western society, to the point where a risk of censure for the mere possibility of a sexual component is a real risk.
Clearly a whole lotta lower-status creepy men who feel like social outcasts need to start doing something to shake this homophobia and this obsession with their own sexual dissatisfaction, and the rigidly-framed societal narratives they’re willing to accept that being fulfilled within...
The vast majority of modern societies where male/male non-sexual affection is considered normal are incredibly intolerant of homosexuality, like say Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and to a lesser extent other Mediterranean cultures like say the Sicilian one, so I’m not sure it is useful to frame it in those terms.
The unfortunate norms basically arise out of the following: “It is socially acceptable to have sex with men, the standard social identity for that assumes you have sex with only men, how do I signal I don’t have sex with men?”
So the solution is increased tolerance and visibility of bisexuality? That explains the most male-male-affectionate subculture I know of, the sigh furry community, where bisexuality is rarely erased.
So the solution is increased tolerance and visibility of bisexuality?
A possible solution, yes. It works as long as people don’t mind dating bisexuals. If people prefer to date those who only date one gender, it doesn’t work that well since it still pays to signal.
Yah, it definitely varies in time, place and cultural context.
The vast majority of modern societies where male/male non-sexual affection is considered normal are incredibly intolerant of homosexuality
The vast majority of modern societies (full stop) are incredibly intolerant of homosexuality. The variance on human cultural diversity has been winnowed a lot; you don’t see much like the Spartan or old Celtic norms today. Both colonialism and the spread of big, monotheistic conversion-focused religions probably have at least a bit to do with that (though the religion angle shouldn’t be overemphasized either—indigenous cultures that aren’t violently subjected to conversion often come up with interesting syncretic adaptations—the Minangkabau are polyandric, matrifocal, animist, intellectual-focused Muslim culture who were able to bring in Islam at their pace, on their terms).
Basically what I’m saying here is I don’t think acceptance of male/male affection in general is a causal determinant of homophobia in culture, and that pragmatically, both problems need attention in this culture.
The vast majority of modern societies (full stop) are incredibly intolerant of homosexuality.
There are worlds of difference between Sweden and Turkey, let alone Sweden and Saudi Arabia.
Remember that while in some parts of the ancient world homosexual relations with young men or fellow fighters where tolerated or even idealized as a higher form of love than with women, men where generally still pressured to find wives and produce heirs with them. There where exceptions to this, but they where just that, exceptions. Homosexuals outside of the closet in the West are not under such pressure by society at large.
Naturally the social construct of homosexual identity has besides such benefits also limitations and expectations peculiar to our society that came up with it, that may not be something everyone wants.
I assume you are referring to family pressure? Outside of “pray the gay away” American silliness from some Churches I don’t think I see much pressure to marry with the opposite sex. But you are probably more knowledgeable on this than I am.
What I was going for is that the social reality of homosexuality in some parts of the ancient world as it likely was has both ups and downs when compared to the social reality of homosexuality in the West today and that comparison to them is hard to use that as an argument that all modern societies are extremely intolerant of homosexuality. One can much more plausibly make this argument on the same grounds we criticize other things that where never better but should be better in the future.
I’m just wondering if this is something we now agree on or if you found it unconvincing.
Edit: I would appreciate it if down voters would comment to explain why they down vote.
Outside of “pray the gay away” American silliness from some Churches I don’t think I see much pressure to marry with the opposite sex
I hear it a lot—I live in the US, I grew up in mostly liberal areas of it (and live in one now) and it’s still very common for me to hear, both in person and in media, the idea that queer people are confused, deviant or mentally-ill. I don’t tend to hear the suggestion that they’re demon-possessed outside of more “churchy” circles than I habitually frequent, but I do run into the attitude from time to time since I have a fair bit of contact with multiple culture groups in my everyday life (and pretty much all of them have their own flavor of homophobia).
What I was going for is that the social reality of homosexuality in some parts of the ancient world as it likely was has both ups and downs when compared to the social reality of homosexuality in the West today
Sure, I agree with you.
and that comparison to them is hard to use that as an argument that all modern societies are extremely intolerant of homosexuality.
Well, I didn’t mean to make that point by means of the comparison, but I do think it’s a true statement—I genuinely if you were to round up all the distinct societal groups in the world today (however you want to slice the distinctions—I’d say it’s true at both the level of communities and nation-states), you’d find that a big majority of them display homophobic/heterosexist norms. That’s not to say it’s the same kind or intensity everywhere, but my life as a queer person has left me rather disillusioned with the idea that even places with a reputation for “tolerance” or “acceptance” (say, a liberal city in Canada, which I’ve spent plenty of time in, and where same-sex marriage is just a thing, or the Netherlands, which I haven’t visited but have some friends from) are really, at a basic statistical level, not homophobic. I agree that in some places those norms have shifted so greatly that it’s not a major thing there, but I don’t think those places are really representative of the majority of human social groups or cultures, however finely-grained your definition of those things.
The vast majority of modern societies where male/male non-sexual affection is considered normal are incredibly intolerant of homosexuality
Yes, but within each society ISTM that the individuals who display less affection towards members of the same sex tend to be the more homophobic ones (possibly because homophobes don’t want to be seen as showing more same-sex affection than the typical person in their own society).
And it actually offers a concrete solution to the problem of feeling creepy: hang out with more women.
If that works, it might just be that by doing so you learn more about those women’s preferences. In other words, that specific sort of creepitude may just be low skill, and the remedy is practice. That is, it’s not an adaptation firing any more than the fact that an untrained trumpet player produces painfully unpleasant noise (and doesn’t get invited to perform at parties) is an adaptation firing!
What worries me is some folks’ readiness to rationalize exhibiting the low-skill behavior — especially when it comes at others’ expense. “Asking me not to play my trumpet at meetup is just calling me low-status!”
This is different in its causes from deliberate, exploitative creepitude — the person who gets off on blatting their crappy trumpet at others to demonstrate their dominance, or some such …
If that works, it might just be that by doing so you learn more about those women’s preferences. In other words, that specific sort of creepitude may just be low skill, and the remedy is practice.
Yep, I raised that hypothesis in the latter half of my comment.
What worries me is some folks’ readiness to rationalize exhibiting the low-skill behavior — especially when it comes at others’ expense. “Asking me not to play my trumpet at meetup is just calling me low-status!”
I don’t wish to rationalize exhibiting low-skill behavior at all. I think discouraging low-skill behavior is a good idea. In fact, I think it can potentially be valuable negative feedback if done right (see http://lesswrong.com/lw/e5h/how_to_deal_with_someone_in_a_lesswrong_meeting/7daq). I’m hoping my proposed solutions can be done in tandem with discouraging low-skill behavior.
Yep, I raised that hypothesis in the latter half of my comment.
Sure, I wanted to point out that it may well explain away the whole effect, leaving the “adaptation that fires when a man is feeling desperate” explanation looking unnecessary — and excluded by Occam. Flirty skills are skills and follow the usual patterns for skills; that they’re involved in reproduction doesn’t give them any more evopsych fairy dust than (say) language or music. (Which get a lot, but they don’t get “being bad at singing is an adaptation”.)
I don’t wish to rationalize exhibiting low-skill behavior at all.
I didn’t think you did — “some folks” was meant to imply “not you, at least not here”. But some people do that. See, for instance, Elevatorgate and any number of other cases where folks readily engage in motivated search to find reasons to stick up for the creeper at the expense of the creeped.
And it actually offers a concrete solution to the problem of feeling creepy: hang out with more women.
Even if hanging out with women makes you grow less creepy over time, you’re still inflicting your creepy self on them at the beginning. Being willing to do this for your own benefit is… creepy.
I’m still not convinced there’s an ethical way out of the creepy trap. Is there any sound (not self-serving) argument against the idea that the best thing for creepy males to do is just go away?
Ceteris paribus, the world where a creepy guy turns into a non-creepy guy is better than the one where the creepy guy ceases to exist. (Marginally, at least, the world needs a whole lot more well-adjusted nerds.)
So a better question is, how does a social group help and encourage creeps to become non-creeps wherever possible (without enabling creepy behavior)?
This one too (which, on a totally unrelated note, exhibits the groping-her-way-towards-Bayesianism phenomenon I have noticed—to the point of (appearing to) incorrectly think that Schrödinger’s cat is about epistemic probability).
Is there any sound (not self-serving) argument against the idea that the best thing for creepy males to do is just go away?
Maybe. Telling people to go away makes them stop listening to you—and probably not “go away”, but “find people who agree with them and hang out there instead”. You can move the problem, but making it stop being a problem isn’t going to happen through mere eviction unless you can effect very systematic culturewide change.
Telling people to go away makes them stop listening to you—and probably not “go away”, but “find people who agree with them and hang out there instead”.
Yeah, I see this in the wild pretty often and it seems… suboptimal. Not to name names, but when you get lots of creepy-labeled people hanging out together, one natural consequence is the formation of identity groups based partly around the behaviors that got them labeled as creepy in the first place. Which in turn creates positive reinforcement that makes those behaviors a lot harder to get rid of and the process of removing them a lot more painful.
That seems like a straightforward loss for everyone, except in the hypothetical case where allegedly creepy behavior is consequentially positive but maintains negative associations thanks to some random social hangover—and I think those cases are pretty rare.
I suspect you and Matt are talking past each other a bit.
Let’s say we’ve got a guy who went to engineering school, works as an engineer, and plays Magic the Gathering in his spare time. As a result most of the people he has interacted with over the past decade are men, and evolution has programmed him to feel desperate and act creepy. Is there any ethical way for him to overcome his creepiness problem? Matt’s arguing that maybe there isn’t, because even if he finds women to hang out with, he’ll end up creeping them out some at first by accident. So the ethical thing to do is to avoid women at all costs.
What’s your take on this argument? My take is that someone needs to give Matt a big hug.
As a result most of the people he has interacted with over the past decade are men, and evolution has programmed him to feel desperate and act creepy.
For all that it’s relevant to your point and means in context, you might as well replace “evolution has programmed him” with “he is being moved by the gods.”
Yeah, I’m not sure why telling myself “I have a strong inclination to do x” and “evolution programmed me to do y in order to acheive z” feel so different.
Generally, I find that if the behavior is fitness-maximizing (seeking social interaction, sex, food, etc), I think of it as “evolution programmed me”, whereas in the case of things that are not obviously fitness-maximizing (finding interesting puzzles/challenges, building things, playing guitar, etc), I think of it as “I have an inclination to X”. It might actually also have to do with whether most people have similar urges as well, now that I think about it.
It might be optimal for this guy to befriend men, or women he knows to be married or gay, who know how to socialize with people and are willing to help him out with that. There’s a bootstrapping issue, but it’s the best outcome if it can be attained.
[Edit] Misread, unfairly singled out one responder, editing to make generic.
My take is that any such person can read all the links provided by the OP, some of which are written specifically for people in that scenario.
Some of the other links have many comments now, but it’s worth reading all of them. Anyone who can read every comment on all of those links is pretty much guaranteed to level-up in all sorts of ways that will be to their benefit in many respects, including improving their interactions with other people, which includes women.
not “go away”, but “find people who agree with them and hang out there instead”
I’m not sure what the difference supposed to be. If they hang out with someone else, and are happy there, and don’t bother you anymore, how is that “not going away”, and why is that not a good solution?
The problem seems to be not your scenario, but the one where they fail to find people who agree with them and hang out there.
ETA: reading Nornagest’s comment below, maybe you mean that they find others who agree with them, but instead of hanging out together somewhere else, they come back with those others and bother you as a group (or bother someone else). That’s a problem, but if these other similar-minded people are around to be found, I’m not sure if not telling them to go away will prevent them from finding one another and banding together.
Tl;dr of my point: telling people to go away should on balance make them go away more.
What I meant (but didn’t express well) was more like “they go find another group, which is composed of people who agree with them and can protect each other, and there are also some people around for some reason who don’t like all this creeping but don’t have the wherewithal to leave for some reason”.
Telling them to go away may well increase such congregations (I’m interested in hearing non-anecdotal evidence). But even assuming that happens, do you think the net amount of being-creeped-out increases as a result? Some people do get them to go away, after all.
Yes, but I’m not so much interested (right now) in what are the optimal rules to impose on people; I’m asking what is the right thing to do, which is a subtly different question. Your argument that eviction leads to problems in other places is clearly true. Analogously, it would be a very bad idea to impose a 80% marginal tax rate on top earners to fund the Against Malaria Foundation, because most of them would work less and there would be huge deadweight loss. However, Peter Singer and people like that argue persuasively that very wealthy people should as a matter of principle voluntarily give a high percentage of their income to efficient charity. And this causes no deadweight loss if they make sure to work as much as before.
Similarly, if there are creeps in your group, don’t you wish they would just leave, and not try to infiltrate another innocent group? Then that is what they should do.
Analogously, it would be a very bad idea to impose a 80% marginal tax rate on top earners to fund the Against Malaria Foundation, because most of them would work less and there would be huge deadweight loss.
The tax rate was 90 percent on them for a long time, in the US—what’s your basis for that claim? It sounds like a cached belief.
One popular tax dodge that made the effective tax rate much lower. Also, until the 80′s (Reagan?) you could get lots of stuff paid for by the company without paying tax on it; company car, housing allowance, other stuff. I’m not an expert but the “real” tax rates were that high only for some.
Huh, interesting claim in the link. I Googled, though, and I couldn’t find any source for this besides the comments on Y Combinator. Can you find another source (preferably one that explains how big an effect this had in aggregate)?
The yield of a tax at 0% is 0. The yield of tax at 100% is also close to zero, as nobody will do anything to earn money that will be taxed at 100% (i.e. ensure all earnings dodge that tax). Therefore the set of policies that give maximum tax yield do not have a tax rate of 100%, and increasing tax rates beyond that reduce tax yield.
(Not to mention that some taxes are easier to evade than others, and it’s easier for some people (e.g. self-employed workers) to evade taxes than for others (e.g. public servants).)
Taxes will be dodged regardless of the rate as long as paying lawyers and accountants is cheaper than paying those taxes. Simplifying the tax code would do a lot to prevent this deadweight loss
Similarly, if there are creeps in your group, don’t you wish they would just leave, and not try to infiltrate another innocent group?
I wish them to do their part to not run into the people they creep on, and allow other people in the group (if any exist) to continue to extract any available value from their participation. And fix them, if that’s doable. (This is if all they are doing is creeping. If they are committing assaults or something I wish them to go away, to a corrections facility.)
So you think the world would be better off if creepy men all “go away”? A bold point to make. Maybe they should just kill themselves while they’re at it?
It’s hard enough to learn to update one’s abstract formal beliefs. Updating one’s unconsciously regulated social behavior is impossible in the general case, and in most of the desirable concrete cases too. And here the people who should “update” are the ones who are least adept at social behavior to begin with.
Updating one’s unconsciously regulated social behavior is impossible in the general case, and in most of the desirable >concrete cases too.
I don’t see why that should necessarily be the case. It would simply require specifying the desired behavior and bringing it into the realm of the conscious until the new behavior is learned.
For example, if I were able to realize that a major barrier to my social communication is my lack of eye contact, I could make a deliberate effort to always make eye contact when having conversations. Ideally this behavior would eventually become internalized, but even if it didn’t there’s no actual reason why I couldn’t keep it up for the rest of my life.
Updating one’s unconsciously regulated social behavior is impossible in the general case, and in most of the desirable concrete cases too.
“Impossible” is a big claim. We don’t put much stock in zero or one probabilities around here …
System 1 can be programmed by System 2. There are cases of individuals updating to become (e.g.) less socially anxious; less triggered by various things; or less bigoted in various ways. About fifteen years ago I took a massive update about taking responsibility for actions that had harmed others; the details are more private than I care to post about, though. For that matter, there are religious and philosophical conversion experiences that produce dramatic social behavior change; and psychedelic experiences that do so, too.
People can change. Many people spend a lot of effort constructing rationalizations as to why they shouldn’t have to, though.
I’m not sure, I’m still thinking it through. The point is that it is not immediately obvious to me that we should reject a result just because it seems unattractive. Maybe our intuitions are just wrong. See the Repugnant Conclusion and Torture vs. Specks.
Presumably some women are less averse to creepiness than other women. Perhaps a socially awkward guy could start by interacting with women who are tolerant of social awkwardness, but who will point out his mistakes so he can improve. Then, he could work his way up to interacting with people who are less and less tolerant of creepiness.
Even if such women are numerous enough, a socially awkward man who is bad at reading others will not be able to reliably identify them, and so will occasionally creep out more-averse women, and that may be enough for him to be banished from the whole social group. This is a matter for empirical measurement.
If noncreepiness can be learned fairly quickly under the right circumstances, and the decreepified individual can contribute to people around him significantly, then the benefit to the world at large of decreepification is larger than the cost.
It’s the worst thing for them, but it’s probably the best thing for everyone else.
And what do you mean, non self-serving argument? Who else could it serve except for the people making it? If creeps go away, everyone else benefits, so everyone else is served by the argument that they should go away. That’s tautological.
I guess I meant self-serving from the creep’s point of view.
It’s the worst thing for them, but it’s probably the best thing for everyone else.
I agree. It seems to me that the best, most straightforward solution to creepiness is to have very low tolerance for it, and eject anyone who violates with extreme prejudice. A lot of the discussion in this thread is about how to compromise with creepers, which seems a little shameful, like negotiating with terrorists.
It seems to me that the best, most straightforward solution to creepiness is to have very low tolerance for it, and eject anyone who violates with extreme prejudice. A lot of the discussion in this thread is about how to compromise with creepers, which seems a little shameful, like negotiating with terrorists.
I probably should’ve just said “I agree” in the grandparent and left it at that. But I would like to plead that I don’t want to use power against anyone. I realize I have been treating this whole discussion more like a thought experiment (in which we are free to create and kill 3^^^3 people, tile the universe with paperclips, and negotiate with babyeating aliens) than a real-world issue. Maybe that was insensitive and I’m sorry.
If you can see your way clear to it, please try to take my comments as being the equivalent to saying “Well, it appears that egalitarian utilitarianism obligates us to give most of our money to the AMF and live lives of impoverishment, isn’t that interesting,” without having any real desire to take anyone’s money.
But again, the error is mine; this is a near problem and shouldn’t be treated like a far idea. Apologies.
I am creeped out by Matt’s comment too, and not just by way of making an ironic point. The declared wish to use power based against others based on his own naivety. Creepy and dangerous (to the extent that it is not impotent).
I probably was not clear enough. What I mean is: let’s assume creeps want to stay and everyone else wants them to leave. Then any argument made by the creeps that tries to dissuade others from evicting them is self-serving. (You say, well of course). The problem is that most arguers in favor of creep-tolerance don’t acknowledge those competing interests, instead they try to assert that higher intolerance for creeps would be bad for the group as a whole somehow. I am tentatively of the opinion that these arguments are bullshit, in the Frankfurt sense. People who argue this way are like those who claim they are buying an expensive TV to stimulate the economy, or those who claim they don’t give to charity because handouts only hurt poor people in the long run. Of course, those are not the real reasons; the real reasons are much more simple and selfish.
This is all true but doesn’t seem relevant. You asked if there was any argument against making creeps go away that wasn’t self serving (if made by a creep). The answer is that there isn’t and cannot be one, because any such argument made by a creep serves the creep.
Creepy behavior has an evolutionary purpose, just like all human behavior.
The primary ‘evolutionary purpose’ here is in the selection of instincts for things feeling ‘creepy’, not evolving to be ‘creepy’. It is at the core a mechanism for reducing the chance that the host will mate with a low value male—either consensually or otherwise. ‘Creepy behavior’ then is largely a matter of losing at an evolutionary arms race. (With confounding factors around there being trade-offs to acting confident.)
The central claim I made is that creepiness, like sexiness is about perceptions of the observer. Looking at the “evolutionary purpose of creepy behavior” is the wrong place to look and is likely to involve some confusion about the map and the territory.
I also mentioned offhand that the instinct to be ‘creeped out’ serves the purpose of reducing the chance of impregnation by inferior mates, either consentually or otherwise. It honestly didn’t occur to me that this is something people would expect significant justification for. It doesn’t strike me as a deep or particularly controversial insight.
I didn’t think it was quite fair that your comment was downvoted to −2, but then I read the sentence “When women feel desperate, they cry about it.”
While I think your comment was overall constructive to the discussion, that kind of thing is a turnoff. I assume you meant it in the best possible way, but I would encourage you to avoid that particular construction in the future.
I’m genuinely curious why hg00′s amended comment is now even more downvoted? And why my advice is also? Generally I take downvotes to mean “Would not like to read more of such comments at Less Wrong,” but I’m a little puzzled at these.
In other words, maybe it’s not that individuals are creepy so much as men “naturally” act more rapey if there are only a few women around.
This is unlikely. The idea that male-on-female rape, in humans, is reflective of forced mating as a reproductive strategy makes some big mistakes because it doesn’t factor in how human reproduction actually works.
It’s true in a general way that if the cost of your gametes is low, and you can get out of the parental investment, then increasing the number of coital acts is an effective way to buy genetic fitness at reduced cost (part of why mammals tend to be much more promiscuous, in a very broad sense, than birds: birds get their embryo out of Mom and into the world early and let it develop there, which means Daddy has a higher incentive to invest parentally—though this is only a very broad pattern).
Trigger warning for those who’d rather not hear it described in frank, mechanical terms!
But with humans in specific, rape is not a great reproductive strategy. The odds of insemination are lower, because things like self-lubrication and uterine peristalsis (which make a big difference) aren’t typically going to occur. Even post-coital cuddling increases the odds of fertilization. Getting into comparative primatology, humans have conspicuously large penises compared to our relatives who do tend to use force as a basic approach to getting sex (gorillas, who have a harem-style arrangement as their basic stable social model).
Rape has been prevalent throughout human history, but forced copulation doesn’t seem to be a leading or even closely-tailing human reproductive strategy. It’s probably not an adaptation (though if you insist that pretty much every salient feature of behavior is, or is the proximal outcome of some evolutionary adaptation, you can spin a theoretical picture to justify it easily).
Rape has been prevalent throughout human history, but forced copulation doesn’t seem to be a leading or even closely-tailing human reproductive strategy.
“Forced copulation” could describe a fair percentage of co-habitations in a fair percentage of cultures throughout history.
Trigger warning: more mechanical discussion of nonconsensual sex.
The odds of insemination are lower
On a per-act basis, rapes are about twice as likely to result in pregnancy than consensual sex. I suspect that you’re right that various fertility-boosting measures don’t happen during rape and this effect is due primarily to selection effects (who rapes, who is raped, and when the rape happens), but the net result is still that rapes are a decent reproductive strategy (if the rapist can get away with it).
Rape has been prevalent throughout human history, but forced copulation doesn’t seem to be a leading or even closely-tailing human reproductive strategy.
This seems really unlikely in the context of marriages before the Enlightenment, or in the context of wars and raids (where women were a resource like any other).
On a per-act basis, rapes are about twice as likely to result in pregnancy than consensual sex.
Yes, in America. We also frequently do our best, when having consensual sex, to minimize our odds of having kids. (I was unable to find rates of birth control use during rapes, unfortunately.) In the ancestral environment, this would probably not be a factor.
Yes, in America. We also frequently do our best, when having consensual sex, to minimize our odds of having kids. (I was unable to find rates of birth control use during rapes, unfortunately.) In the ancestral environment, this would probably not be a factor.
I’m pretty sure the 3% number comes mostly from women trying to get pregnant, and it’s estimated that the per-act incidence of rape pregnancy would be about 8% instead of about 6% if none of the victims were using birth control.
It looks to me like your link is a 1995 study, and my link described a 2000 or 2001 study, which I’m having trouble finding. I think it might be this one but I’m not seeing the 3.1% value anywhere. The study I linked has slightly lowered my credence in the 3.1% number, but I can’t tell if the numbers it’s reporting are per-act numbers or not. (I’m not an expert in this field and have been trusting summaries from science journalists; I’m not sure if I’m interpreting the actual papers correctly or not.) It looks like this study might have said “at their least fertile, there’s less than a 5% per-act chance of copulation, which is lower than we thought it was” and that got interpreted as “in general, there’s less than a 5% per-act chance of copulation.”
I hope Gottschall and company know what they’re doing, and expect the 3.1% number comes from another study. It might be profitable to email one of the professors in question and ask for where that number came from, because it’s being slippery.
Edit: I would like to criticize Todd Akin for making my truth-seeking less convenient by really messing up the signal-to-noise ratio regarding this matter.
but the net result is still that rapes are a decent reproductive strategy (if the rapist can get away with it).
They touch on the statistics further down—it’s believed to be due to the fact that, in the case of consensual sex, the woman is more likely to have control over when in their fertility cycle the act occurs.
This seems really unlikely in the context of marriages before the Enlightenment, or in the context of wars and raids (where women were a resource like any other).
Different cultures have had very different approaches to marriage throughout history; they still often do. Anyway, I’m talking about the claim that rape is an evolutionary adaptation from the ancestral environment, couched as a reproductive strategy—Neolithic Eurasia is a bit too recent to be germane to my argument.
The odds of insemination are lower, because things like self-lubrication and uterine peristalsis (which make a big difference) aren’t typically going to occur.
A SINGLE act of rape may be more than twice as likely to make a woman pregnant as a single act of consensual sex.
[...]
The Gottschalls focused on 405 women who had suffered a single incidence of penile-vaginal rape at some point between the ages of 12 and 45. Of these, 6.4 per cent became pregnant. But that figure jumped to nearly 8 per cent when the researchers allowed for the women who’d been using birth control-US government statistics show that 1 in 5 of the women in the sample were likely to have been using the pill or an IUD.
To complete the comparison, the Gottschalls needed to know how many women in that age group get pregnant from one-night stands and other one-off acts of consensual sex. The answer-reported this year in a separate study by Allen Wilcox, head of the epidemiology branch of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences-was a mere 3.1 per cent. “It was surprising to see this margin of difference,” says Jon Gottschall.
Historically, getting pregnant or not wasn’t the only important factor; maternal investment in the child (vs abandonment or neglect) was tremendously important too. And, naturally, mothers would be less likely to invest in a child with an absent or non-providing father (this is especially true early in their lives, when they would have more chances to have children with mates of their choice).
Well, even if rape is not an adaptation, men still do it. So it seems plausible that whatever baggage evolved along with rape (from however long ago) would also still be present.
Are you suggesting rape doesn’t happen among hunter-gatherers?
No, but I am suggesting it’s probably not been selected for as a genetic predisposition due to the fitness it supposedly brings. The cost/benefit ratio seems pretty damn bad. Let’s assume a man of 25 (great fertility, past the peak risk-of-mortality age on a pure-forager’s lifespan curve, presumably able to provide for himself to greater or lesser degree.) Assume he only targets women of peak reproductive age, 25 to 30 years (this is very generous for the rape-as-adaptation argument; in reality rapists are known to target women of any age, from single-digits to senescence), thereby maximizing expected payoff per act.
He loses fitness if:
-He is killed by the victim or her relatives. How likely this is depends entirely on his culture—some forager band societies are quite pacifistic; others resort quickly to violence and have no real way to regulate its spread. It’s a pretty strong risk, though.
-The mother refuses to raise the child. This is unlikely to happen, but in a society with high infant mortality rates and established protocols for socially-legitimate infanticide by abandonment or handing off to a relative for culling (standard practice in societies like these if the baby is more than 48 hours old; otherwise the mother usually does it), it’s not socially-costly behavior either.
-Having a reputation as a rapist makes it harder for him to survive. This is a virtual certainty—cooperative food acquisition, compulsory sharing and an ethic of reciprocity are standard features of societies like these. Cutting someone off from this network of assistance is as good as a death sentence in most cases; it also means he’s unlikely to ever get consensual sex, or medical assistance when he’s hurt. I can’t overstate how bad an outcome this is, and how likely it is to happen—tribal societies don’t keep many secrets!
Meanwhile, he gains fitness if and only if all of the following happen:
-The victim is potentially able to concieve on that given day AND
-She does (the cumulative on these first two items equals 3 − 5 percent odds of conception for consensual sex), AND
-She doesn’t then miscarry (true 90 percent of the time), AND
-She won’t voluntarily let the unwanted baby die (not sure, but estimates for the probability of routine infanticide in paleolithic cultures ranges from 15 percent on the lower end, up to 20 or even 50 percent in some cases). No idea offhand, but it seems a heck of a lot more likely than it would be today in the Western European culture area.
You’d have to get incredibly lucky to have a payoff even once; it’s certainly not a viable reproductive strategy, not even a distant also-ran that some minority of the population favors. Human population densities in the EEA simply don’t support it.
So the fact that rape is common suggests that it’s happening for some other reason than it being an evolutionarily-fixed, advantageous trait.
I find it hard to believe that a tendency to rape (or more specifically, the psychological traits that make one more likely to be a rapist today) wouldn’t have been a fitness advantage in at least some of our forager ancestors. There are too many examples in societies close to our own where various forms of rape or were forgivable/forgiven (by society, not necessarily by the victim): rape of foreigners in war, marital rape, rape as punishment, protection of the rapist by an influent member of his family, marrying the rapist … sure, some of those situations may not happen in a forager society, but there may be different ones that do happen.
Having a reputation as a rapist makes it harder for him to survive
This supposes that the society in question has a concept of “rapist” analogous to our own; I suspect many societies would have different concepts, and only harshly punish some of the behaviors (rape of enemies and marital rape seem to usually get off the hook, except in very recent history).
As an illustration of the way different societies approach the problem, I’ve already been in a conversation with African men who were saying how under certain conditions rape was an acceptable way of getting sex from a girl.
That being said, I don’t know much about how foragers approach the question of rape, I’m merely skeptical of the idea that they have very few children of rape.
There are too many examples in societies close to our own where various forms of rape or were forgivable/forgiven (by society, not necessarily by the victim): rape of foreigners in war, marital rape, rape as punishment, protection of the rapist by an influent member of his family, marrying the rapist …
Having a reputation as a rapist makes it harder for him to survive. [...] tribal societies don’t keep many secrets!
On the other hand, in most contemporary and historical agricultural societies, rape is often kept secret, and women have incentives not to make public accusations. This has been true for long enough to allow for some quite drastic changes in behavior to spread through natural selection (on, say, mostly existing variation).
No way—kin selection. He can still net genetic fitness by helping out his social unit, which will almost invariably contain his relatives, who share some of his genetic payload. Conversely, raping someone is likely going to be terminal in some fashion, which eliminates any chance of getting lucky later. Even if they only cast him out instead of killing him, his chances of successfully mating later drop precipitously.
I don’t think we can know much about how social norms and rape played out in the early environment.
We can make some inferences from mobile foragers who’ve maintained some cultural distance from the outside world, though—they’re not a perfect substitute, but they tell us something about patterns of human behavior and existence in the absence of other economic or ecological resource bases.
It’s certainly a whole lot more likely to be, at minimum not entirely off-target, than you’ll be semi-consciously conflating “hunter-gatherer” as a synonym for “primitive”, assuming that all societies without industrialization or intensive agriculture of the type one recognizes are in that category, failing to account for the spread of of particular value-systems and norms that have widely impacted societies around the world, and hyper-focusing on chimps to the exclusion of other primates as analogues for our own evolutionary history (which is what I’m seeing and responding to here).
As someone with almost no vested interest in the conversation I’m not going to do the (rather extensive) work it would take to provide a good summary of the science of rape, however I find it odd that this conversation seems to be completely ignoring that fact that it is a heavily researched area, particularly by evolutionary psychologists. As a representative example this experiment suggests a link between status manipulations and additudes towards rape, and the evo-psyc journal it’s in has 50+ other articles that mention rape, even though its less than ten years old.
I’m aware of the evo psych research into the subject of rape. I disagree with it, but I’m aware of it, I’ve read some fair portion of it, and I think that the idea that rape is a behavioral adaptation driving a reproductive strategy is flawed.
If nothing else, a reputations as a “rapist” is not at all the same thing in a society where women aren’t considered to be people, but property. Hunter gatherers as well as civilization at least up to the biblical level have also engaged in Bride kidnapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping) Which we would definitely think of as rape but clearly wasn’t viewed in the same way at those times. Genghis Khan didn’t get to be the ancestor of 8 percent of people in east asia by being nice. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan)
You seem to be doing a lot of theorizing about ancient behavior on very little data, because you don’t want rape to have been adaptative.
The Yanomamo are horticulturalists. They grow bananas, manioc and other crops available in the wild by means of slash-and-burn and managed planting. They are not an example of a forager (aka hunter-gatherer) society.
They are were (using past tense because of the changes they have undergone) a hybrid culture. They did agriculture but the crops were low-quality and they also relied heavily on hunting and also on gathering. For a man to prove himself a worthy husband for a woman, he had to do “bride service” which basically amounted to providing meat from hunting to the bride’s family for a year or two.
I agree that the first part is rude, but how is information irrelevant? It’s an undisputed example of violent tactics working for reproduction, and a description of how the culture of many societies either endorsed or did not frown on what we would see as rape.
The article on bride kidnapping contained no hunter-gatherers, as far I could see.
It’s an undisputed example of violent tactics working for reproduction, and a description of how the culture of many societies either endorsed or did not frown on what we would see as rape.
I do not think it wise to attempt to extrapolate information about the EEA from contemporary (or even merely ancient) societies whose material conditions do not resemble the conditions of bands in the EEA. (Hell, I don’t even know if we can extrapolate information from modern bands. All of this is an incredible epistemic mess.)
I do not dispute the truth of this fact. However, the ruler of the largest contiguous land empire in history is not the sort of fellow we wish to be looking at in order to determine whether or not rape was adaptive in the EEA. If you were interested in answering such a question, I guess you would want to look at some folks like the Hadza and observe how reproductively successful fellows like Scumbag Sengani, a hypothetical rapist, end up being.
It’s irrelevant because Neolithic-era societies are not representative of plausible assumptions about the evolutionary ancestral environment or early human and protohuman lifestyles. It’s not an example of the thing being talked about; it has no direct bearing on it; ergo, it’s irrelevant.
We have evidence that chimps rape, and we have evidence that Neolithic societies rape. You need to provide strong information that somewhere between those two states of existence(taking the way chimpanzees live now as an very broad approximation of how our great great great ancestors lived), it became evolutionarily unfavorable to rape, but not enough to keep civilized people from doing it
taking the way chimpanzees live now as an very broad approximation of how our great great great ancestors lived
Bad assumption. We’re genetically equidistant from chimps and bonobos, who are pretty nearly opposite in their social and sexual behavior.
Did that common ancestor favor one strategy, or the other? Or neither one, or a mix of the two? Is the chimp model an adaptation subsequent to that divergence? Is the bonobo model one? Are both?
taking the way chimpanzees live now as an very broad approximation of how our great great great ancestors lived
We do share a common ancestor with chimps, yes. From this common ancestor is descended both chimps and bonobos.
Given the existence of bonobos, I do not see why chimp-rape is particularly relevant to the question of whether or not rape is adaptive in humans. That is, given the existence of bonobos, it seems uncertain whether or not the common ancestor of chimps and humans (who is also the common ancestor of humans and bonobos) was, how to put this, a rape ape.
But with humans in specific, rape is not a great reproductive strategy. The odds of insemination are lower, because things like self-lubrication and uterine peristalsis (which make a big difference) aren’t typically going to occur. Even post-coital cuddling increases the odds of fertilization. Getting into comparative primatology, humans have conspicuously large penises compared to our relatives who do tend to use force as a basic approach to getting sex (gorillas, who have a harem-style arrangement as their basic stable social model).
He may have been misunderstanding some of the same information Jandila supplies. But it’s not an absolute effect, it’s a probabilistic one. I’m more likely to break an egg yolk if I open the egg two feet above my bowl; that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen pretty frequently when I open it closer to the bowl (or that it couldn’t land intact from two feet up).
Uh, no. This isn’t a matter of suppressing pregnancies that aren’t wanted—it’s a matter of not boosting the likelihood of pregnancy by means of various reinforcing mechanisms that in all add a minor, though non-negligible, probability of conception.
So you admit that the decrease in the probability of conception is minor. This means that it’s not enough to invalidate hg00′s argument that what you think of as ‘creepy’ strategies, even rape, are adaptive under some circumstances.
EDIT: OK, on reflection I’m less confident in all this. Feel free to read my original comment below.
I have a theory that a high male-to-female ratio actually triggers creepy behavior in men. Why?
Creepy behavior has an evolutionary purpose, just like all human behavior. The optimal mating strategy changes depending on my tribe’s gender ratio. As nasty as it sounds, from the perspective of my genes it may make sense to try to have sex by force, if it’s not going to happen any other way.
I suspect evolution has programmed men to be more bitter, resentful, and belligerent if they seem to be in an area where there aren’t many women. Hence you get sexual assault problems in the military, countries with surplus young males causing various forms of societal unrest, etc.
In other words, maybe it’s not that individuals are creepy so much as men “naturally” act more rapey if there are only a few women around. Of course, we’re all adults and we can supress unwanted internal drives, but it may also be a good idea to attack the root problem.
So in light of this, some possible solutions for male creepiness:
When men feel desperate, they act creepy. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should treat these men like bad people. Yes, these are antisocial behaviors. But they’re a manifestation of internal suffering. So, try to feel compassion and respect for people that are suffering, in addition to letting them know that their behavior is antisocial.
If you’re a man and you notice yourself acting creepy, one idea is to try to get interested in something that’s got a decent number of women involved with it. (Possible examples: acting, dancing, book clubs. Maybe other commenters have more ideas?) Hopefully, this will program your subconscious to believe you’re no longer in a desperate situation. In the best case, maybe you’ll find a girlfriend.
Humans are adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers. Evolution may have crafted me into a person who wants to sit at home alone all day and play video games, but sitting at home alone all day and playing video games doesn’t offer me a fitness advantage.
(I don’t actually want to sit at home alone all day and play video games. At least, not every day.)
Yep. I’m arguing that creepy/misogynistic behavior may be an adaptation that fires when a man is feeling desperate.
It’s weird because since thinking of this yesterday, I’ve noticed that it has a ton of explanatory power regarding my own feelings and behavior. And it actually offers a concrete solution to the problem of feeling creepy: hang out with more women. But I’m getting voted down both here and on reddit. I guess maybe I’m generalizing from myself improperly, and lack of social awarenesss is actually a much larger problem?
Hanging out with more women could also be a solution to lack of social awareness, by the way. In my experience, I naturally tend to start making friends with some of them, and in conversations I learn a lot more about how they think and feel.
You seem to be confusing high-status creep and low-status creep. The latter, which you describe, happens among desperate low-status men (rarely other genders), is characterized by misogyny and a sense of thwarted entitlement, is obvious to outsiders, and makes then even less desirable partners. Hanging around women is usually promoted as a cure, and looks like it works. I see little evidence for or against this being evolutionary or cultural.
The former happens among predators, who often (not always) are high-status because they’re driven to be, is characterized by a sense of entitlement that is denied but acted on (by flouting norms and personally-imposed boundaries on interaction, especially sexual), and works in the sense that it gets the creeper lots of dubiously consensual sex while avoiding social blame. This seems to be a straightforward outgrowth of “Screw the rules, I have status”.
That seems like an accurate description to me. I’m inclined to think that if LW has any kind of creep problem, it’s more likely to be low-status creep problem, i.e. men who feel like social outcasts (possibly because they’re really smart and have always had a hard time finding people like them to make friends with) and have been programmed to alieve that as social outcasts, the only way they’re going to have sex is through creepy means.
And maybe part of the solution to this problem is to help men feel less like social outcasts. Group hug, everyone! I’m also in favor if discouraging creepy behavior verbally; I’m just suggesting this as an additional solution.
And this gets into a related issue—male/male affection in general is often strongly proscribed, at least in Western society, to the point where a risk of censure for the mere possibility of a sexual component is a real risk. My guess is that most men, regardless of status or other factors, will not fail to pick up on this, given the sheer amount of signalling to that effect. Some groups that recognize this problem try to drive an even harder wedge of distinction between the two possible readings of any given affectionate act, which doesn’t help in the long run; it simply exacerbates the matter.
Clearly a whole lotta lower-status creepy men who feel like social outcasts need to start doing something to shake this homophobia and this obsession with their own sexual dissatisfaction, and the rigidly-framed societal narratives they’re willing to accept that being fulfilled within...
It should be noted this is a recent phenomena. This wasn’t at all the case in the 19th and early 20th century.
The vast majority of modern societies where male/male non-sexual affection is considered normal are incredibly intolerant of homosexuality, like say Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and to a lesser extent other Mediterranean cultures like say the Sicilian one, so I’m not sure it is useful to frame it in those terms.
The unfortunate norms basically arise out of the following: “It is socially acceptable to have sex with men, the standard social identity for that assumes you have sex with only men, how do I signal I don’t have sex with men?”
So the solution is increased tolerance and visibility of bisexuality? That explains the most male-male-affectionate subculture I know of, the sigh furry community, where bisexuality is rarely erased.
A possible solution, yes. It works as long as people don’t mind dating bisexuals. If people prefer to date those who only date one gender, it doesn’t work that well since it still pays to signal.
Yah, it definitely varies in time, place and cultural context.
The vast majority of modern societies (full stop) are incredibly intolerant of homosexuality. The variance on human cultural diversity has been winnowed a lot; you don’t see much like the Spartan or old Celtic norms today. Both colonialism and the spread of big, monotheistic conversion-focused religions probably have at least a bit to do with that (though the religion angle shouldn’t be overemphasized either—indigenous cultures that aren’t violently subjected to conversion often come up with interesting syncretic adaptations—the Minangkabau are polyandric, matrifocal, animist, intellectual-focused Muslim culture who were able to bring in Islam at their pace, on their terms).
Basically what I’m saying here is I don’t think acceptance of male/male affection in general is a causal determinant of homophobia in culture, and that pragmatically, both problems need attention in this culture.
There are worlds of difference between Sweden and Turkey, let alone Sweden and Saudi Arabia.
Remember that while in some parts of the ancient world homosexual relations with young men or fellow fighters where tolerated or even idealized as a higher form of love than with women, men where generally still pressured to find wives and produce heirs with them. There where exceptions to this, but they where just that, exceptions. Homosexuals outside of the closet in the West are not under such pressure by society at large.
Naturally the social construct of homosexual identity has besides such benefits also limitations and expectations peculiar to our society that came up with it, that may not be something everyone wants.
Me and a whole lotta other queer people know might beg to differ on that point. ;p
I assume you are referring to family pressure? Outside of “pray the gay away” American silliness from some Churches I don’t think I see much pressure to marry with the opposite sex. But you are probably more knowledgeable on this than I am.
What I was going for is that the social reality of homosexuality in some parts of the ancient world as it likely was has both ups and downs when compared to the social reality of homosexuality in the West today and that comparison to them is hard to use that as an argument that all modern societies are extremely intolerant of homosexuality. One can much more plausibly make this argument on the same grounds we criticize other things that where never better but should be better in the future.
I’m just wondering if this is something we now agree on or if you found it unconvincing.
Edit: I would appreciate it if down voters would comment to explain why they down vote.
Some but not only.
I hear it a lot—I live in the US, I grew up in mostly liberal areas of it (and live in one now) and it’s still very common for me to hear, both in person and in media, the idea that queer people are confused, deviant or mentally-ill. I don’t tend to hear the suggestion that they’re demon-possessed outside of more “churchy” circles than I habitually frequent, but I do run into the attitude from time to time since I have a fair bit of contact with multiple culture groups in my everyday life (and pretty much all of them have their own flavor of homophobia).
Sure, I agree with you.
Well, I didn’t mean to make that point by means of the comparison, but I do think it’s a true statement—I genuinely if you were to round up all the distinct societal groups in the world today (however you want to slice the distinctions—I’d say it’s true at both the level of communities and nation-states), you’d find that a big majority of them display homophobic/heterosexist norms. That’s not to say it’s the same kind or intensity everywhere, but my life as a queer person has left me rather disillusioned with the idea that even places with a reputation for “tolerance” or “acceptance” (say, a liberal city in Canada, which I’ve spent plenty of time in, and where same-sex marriage is just a thing, or the Netherlands, which I haven’t visited but have some friends from) are really, at a basic statistical level, not homophobic. I agree that in some places those norms have shifted so greatly that it’s not a major thing there, but I don’t think those places are really representative of the majority of human social groups or cultures, however finely-grained your definition of those things.
Yes, but within each society ISTM that the individuals who display less affection towards members of the same sex tend to be the more homophobic ones (possibly because homophobes don’t want to be seen as showing more same-sex affection than the typical person in their own society).
Also, placing a male into a high status position probably increases the chance he will exhibit this behavior.
If that works, it might just be that by doing so you learn more about those women’s preferences. In other words, that specific sort of creepitude may just be low skill, and the remedy is practice. That is, it’s not an adaptation firing any more than the fact that an untrained trumpet player produces painfully unpleasant noise (and doesn’t get invited to perform at parties) is an adaptation firing!
What worries me is some folks’ readiness to rationalize exhibiting the low-skill behavior — especially when it comes at others’ expense. “Asking me not to play my trumpet at meetup is just calling me low-status!”
This is different in its causes from deliberate, exploitative creepitude — the person who gets off on blatting their crappy trumpet at others to demonstrate their dominance, or some such …
Yep, I raised that hypothesis in the latter half of my comment.
I don’t wish to rationalize exhibiting low-skill behavior at all. I think discouraging low-skill behavior is a good idea. In fact, I think it can potentially be valuable negative feedback if done right (see http://lesswrong.com/lw/e5h/how_to_deal_with_someone_in_a_lesswrong_meeting/7daq). I’m hoping my proposed solutions can be done in tandem with discouraging low-skill behavior.
Sure, I wanted to point out that it may well explain away the whole effect, leaving the “adaptation that fires when a man is feeling desperate” explanation looking unnecessary — and excluded by Occam. Flirty skills are skills and follow the usual patterns for skills; that they’re involved in reproduction doesn’t give them any more evopsych fairy dust than (say) language or music. (Which get a lot, but they don’t get “being bad at singing is an adaptation”.)
I didn’t think you did — “some folks” was meant to imply “not you, at least not here”. But some people do that. See, for instance, Elevatorgate and any number of other cases where folks readily engage in motivated search to find reasons to stick up for the creeper at the expense of the creeped.
Your theory fails to account for cases of creepiness among men surrounded by their targets (women, children, men, whatever). See my explanation.
I agree. I’m not sure what fraction of creepy behavior is explained by my theory. BTW, you might like this comment.
Even if hanging out with women makes you grow less creepy over time, you’re still inflicting your creepy self on them at the beginning. Being willing to do this for your own benefit is… creepy.
I’m still not convinced there’s an ethical way out of the creepy trap. Is there any sound (not self-serving) argument against the idea that the best thing for creepy males to do is just go away?
Ceteris paribus, the world where a creepy guy turns into a non-creepy guy is better than the one where the creepy guy ceases to exist. (Marginally, at least, the world needs a whole lot more well-adjusted nerds.)
So a better question is, how does a social group help and encourage creeps to become non-creeps wherever possible (without enabling creepy behavior)?
Point them at the links in the OP.
This one too (which, on a totally unrelated note, exhibits the groping-her-way-towards-Bayesianism phenomenon I have noticed—to the point of (appearing to) incorrectly think that Schrödinger’s cat is about epistemic probability).
What do you mean by that? Who needs them for what purpose and as opposed to what alternative?
Maybe. Telling people to go away makes them stop listening to you—and probably not “go away”, but “find people who agree with them and hang out there instead”. You can move the problem, but making it stop being a problem isn’t going to happen through mere eviction unless you can effect very systematic culturewide change.
Yeah, I see this in the wild pretty often and it seems… suboptimal. Not to name names, but when you get lots of creepy-labeled people hanging out together, one natural consequence is the formation of identity groups based partly around the behaviors that got them labeled as creepy in the first place. Which in turn creates positive reinforcement that makes those behaviors a lot harder to get rid of and the process of removing them a lot more painful.
That seems like a straightforward loss for everyone, except in the hypothetical case where allegedly creepy behavior is consequentially positive but maintains negative associations thanks to some random social hangover—and I think those cases are pretty rare.
I suspect you and Matt are talking past each other a bit.
Let’s say we’ve got a guy who went to engineering school, works as an engineer, and plays Magic the Gathering in his spare time. As a result most of the people he has interacted with over the past decade are men, and evolution has programmed him to feel desperate and act creepy. Is there any ethical way for him to overcome his creepiness problem? Matt’s arguing that maybe there isn’t, because even if he finds women to hang out with, he’ll end up creeping them out some at first by accident. So the ethical thing to do is to avoid women at all costs.
What’s your take on this argument? My take is that someone needs to give Matt a big hug.
For all that it’s relevant to your point and means in context, you might as well replace “evolution has programmed him” with “he is being moved by the gods.”
Yeah, I’m not sure why telling myself “I have a strong inclination to do x” and “evolution programmed me to do y in order to acheive z” feel so different.
Generally, I find that if the behavior is fitness-maximizing (seeking social interaction, sex, food, etc), I think of it as “evolution programmed me”, whereas in the case of things that are not obviously fitness-maximizing (finding interesting puzzles/challenges, building things, playing guitar, etc), I think of it as “I have an inclination to X”. It might actually also have to do with whether most people have similar urges as well, now that I think about it.
The blind idiot god Evolution knows little of this human invention called “morality” …
Correction, Matt needs someone to give him a big hug.
It might be optimal for this guy to befriend men, or women he knows to be married or gay, who know how to socialize with people and are willing to help him out with that. There’s a bootstrapping issue, but it’s the best outcome if it can be attained.
[ETA: I failed a pronoun.]
Married women frequently (warning, availability) report men making unwanted sexual advances. That they’re married makes them even more creepy.
[Edit] Misread, unfairly singled out one responder, editing to make generic.
My take is that any such person can read all the links provided by the OP, some of which are written specifically for people in that scenario.
Some of the other links have many comments now, but it’s worth reading all of them. Anyone who can read every comment on all of those links is pretty much guaranteed to level-up in all sorts of ways that will be to their benefit in many respects, including improving their interactions with other people, which includes women.
I’m not sure what the difference supposed to be. If they hang out with someone else, and are happy there, and don’t bother you anymore, how is that “not going away”, and why is that not a good solution?
The problem seems to be not your scenario, but the one where they fail to find people who agree with them and hang out there.
ETA: reading Nornagest’s comment below, maybe you mean that they find others who agree with them, but instead of hanging out together somewhere else, they come back with those others and bother you as a group (or bother someone else). That’s a problem, but if these other similar-minded people are around to be found, I’m not sure if not telling them to go away will prevent them from finding one another and banding together.
Tl;dr of my point: telling people to go away should on balance make them go away more.
What I meant (but didn’t express well) was more like “they go find another group, which is composed of people who agree with them and can protect each other, and there are also some people around for some reason who don’t like all this creeping but don’t have the wherewithal to leave for some reason”.
Telling them to go away may well increase such congregations (I’m interested in hearing non-anecdotal evidence). But even assuming that happens, do you think the net amount of being-creeped-out increases as a result? Some people do get them to go away, after all.
Yes, but I’m not so much interested (right now) in what are the optimal rules to impose on people; I’m asking what is the right thing to do, which is a subtly different question. Your argument that eviction leads to problems in other places is clearly true. Analogously, it would be a very bad idea to impose a 80% marginal tax rate on top earners to fund the Against Malaria Foundation, because most of them would work less and there would be huge deadweight loss. However, Peter Singer and people like that argue persuasively that very wealthy people should as a matter of principle voluntarily give a high percentage of their income to efficient charity. And this causes no deadweight loss if they make sure to work as much as before.
Similarly, if there are creeps in your group, don’t you wish they would just leave, and not try to infiltrate another innocent group? Then that is what they should do.
The tax rate was 90 percent on them for a long time, in the US—what’s your basis for that claim? It sounds like a cached belief.
One popular tax dodge that made the effective tax rate much lower. Also, until the 80′s (Reagan?) you could get lots of stuff paid for by the company without paying tax on it; company car, housing allowance, other stuff. I’m not an expert but the “real” tax rates were that high only for some.
Huh, interesting claim in the link. I Googled, though, and I couldn’t find any source for this besides the comments on Y Combinator. Can you find another source (preferably one that explains how big an effect this had in aggregate)?
And they still dodge taxes now, even when the rates have been slashed into oblivion. If anything they only seem more determined to do it.
Mindkiller Alert!
The yield of a tax at 0% is 0. The yield of tax at 100% is also close to zero, as nobody will do anything to earn money that will be taxed at 100% (i.e. ensure all earnings dodge that tax). Therefore the set of policies that give maximum tax yield do not have a tax rate of 100%, and increasing tax rates beyond that reduce tax yield.
This analysis is subject to some caveats, and where the optimal rate is is a very complicated and politically charged question, of course, and this is already completely off topic.
(Not to mention that some taxes are easier to evade than others, and it’s easier for some people (e.g. self-employed workers) to evade taxes than for others (e.g. public servants).)
Taxes will be dodged regardless of the rate as long as paying lawyers and accountants is cheaper than paying those taxes. Simplifying the tax code would do a lot to prevent this deadweight loss
I wish them to do their part to not run into the people they creep on, and allow other people in the group (if any exist) to continue to extract any available value from their participation. And fix them, if that’s doable. (This is if all they are doing is creeping. If they are committing assaults or something I wish them to go away, to a corrections facility.)
Best thing for who?
The world. Find highest possible total utility, act accordingly.
Of course that result may not work out great for some particular person, and that’s interesting, but that’s not the question I’m asking right now.
So you think the world would be better off if creepy men all “go away”? A bold point to make. Maybe they should just kill themselves while they’re at it?
Creepy behavior should go away. Individuals can update.
There is little value in staying creepy, after all.
It’s hard enough to learn to update one’s abstract formal beliefs. Updating one’s unconsciously regulated social behavior is impossible in the general case, and in most of the desirable concrete cases too. And here the people who should “update” are the ones who are least adept at social behavior to begin with.
I don’t see why that should necessarily be the case. It would simply require specifying the desired behavior and bringing it into the realm of the conscious until the new behavior is learned.
For example, if I were able to realize that a major barrier to my social communication is my lack of eye contact, I could make a deliberate effort to always make eye contact when having conversations. Ideally this behavior would eventually become internalized, but even if it didn’t there’s no actual reason why I couldn’t keep it up for the rest of my life.
“Impossible” is a big claim. We don’t put much stock in zero or one probabilities around here …
System 1 can be programmed by System 2. There are cases of individuals updating to become (e.g.) less socially anxious; less triggered by various things; or less bigoted in various ways. About fifteen years ago I took a massive update about taking responsibility for actions that had harmed others; the details are more private than I care to post about, though. For that matter, there are religious and philosophical conversion experiences that produce dramatic social behavior change; and psychedelic experiences that do so, too.
People can change. Many people spend a lot of effort constructing rationalizations as to why they shouldn’t have to, though.
I’m not sure, I’m still thinking it through. The point is that it is not immediately obvious to me that we should reject a result just because it seems unattractive. Maybe our intuitions are just wrong. See the Repugnant Conclusion and Torture vs. Specks.
Presumably some women are less averse to creepiness than other women. Perhaps a socially awkward guy could start by interacting with women who are tolerant of social awkwardness, but who will point out his mistakes so he can improve. Then, he could work his way up to interacting with people who are less and less tolerant of creepiness.
Even if such women are numerous enough, a socially awkward man who is bad at reading others will not be able to reliably identify them, and so will occasionally creep out more-averse women, and that may be enough for him to be banished from the whole social group. This is a matter for empirical measurement.
If noncreepiness can be learned fairly quickly under the right circumstances, and the decreepified individual can contribute to people around him significantly, then the benefit to the world at large of decreepification is larger than the cost.
It’s the worst thing for them, but it’s probably the best thing for everyone else.
And what do you mean, non self-serving argument? Who else could it serve except for the people making it? If creeps go away, everyone else benefits, so everyone else is served by the argument that they should go away. That’s tautological.
I guess I meant self-serving from the creep’s point of view.
I agree. It seems to me that the best, most straightforward solution to creepiness is to have very low tolerance for it, and eject anyone who violates with extreme prejudice. A lot of the discussion in this thread is about how to compromise with creepers, which seems a little shameful, like negotiating with terrorists.
Ugh. Now you’re kinda creeping me out.
I probably should’ve just said “I agree” in the grandparent and left it at that. But I would like to plead that I don’t want to use power against anyone. I realize I have been treating this whole discussion more like a thought experiment (in which we are free to create and kill 3^^^3 people, tile the universe with paperclips, and negotiate with babyeating aliens) than a real-world issue. Maybe that was insensitive and I’m sorry.
If you can see your way clear to it, please try to take my comments as being the equivalent to saying “Well, it appears that egalitarian utilitarianism obligates us to give most of our money to the AMF and live lives of impoverishment, isn’t that interesting,” without having any real desire to take anyone’s money.
But again, the error is mine; this is a near problem and shouldn’t be treated like a far idea. Apologies.
I am creeped out by Matt’s comment too, and not just by way of making an ironic point. The declared wish to use power based against others based on his own naivety. Creepy and dangerous (to the extent that it is not impotent).
If it’s better for creeps to not go away, then any argument that they should not go away serves them. This is regardless of the actual argument.
I probably was not clear enough. What I mean is: let’s assume creeps want to stay and everyone else wants them to leave. Then any argument made by the creeps that tries to dissuade others from evicting them is self-serving. (You say, well of course). The problem is that most arguers in favor of creep-tolerance don’t acknowledge those competing interests, instead they try to assert that higher intolerance for creeps would be bad for the group as a whole somehow. I am tentatively of the opinion that these arguments are bullshit, in the Frankfurt sense. People who argue this way are like those who claim they are buying an expensive TV to stimulate the economy, or those who claim they don’t give to charity because handouts only hurt poor people in the long run. Of course, those are not the real reasons; the real reasons are much more simple and selfish.
This is all true but doesn’t seem relevant. You asked if there was any argument against making creeps go away that wasn’t self serving (if made by a creep). The answer is that there isn’t and cannot be one, because any such argument made by a creep serves the creep.
Well, most arguers against creep-tolerance aren’t acknowledge their competing interests either.
The primary ‘evolutionary purpose’ here is in the selection of instincts for things feeling ‘creepy’, not evolving to be ‘creepy’. It is at the core a mechanism for reducing the chance that the host will mate with a low value male—either consensually or otherwise. ‘Creepy behavior’ then is largely a matter of losing at an evolutionary arms race. (With confounding factors around there being trade-offs to acting confident.)
How do you know any of this?
The central claim I made is that creepiness, like sexiness is about perceptions of the observer. Looking at the “evolutionary purpose of creepy behavior” is the wrong place to look and is likely to involve some confusion about the map and the territory.
I also mentioned offhand that the instinct to be ‘creeped out’ serves the purpose of reducing the chance of impregnation by inferior mates, either consentually or otherwise. It honestly didn’t occur to me that this is something people would expect significant justification for. It doesn’t strike me as a deep or particularly controversial insight.
Was jumping from creepy to rapey like that intentional?
I didn’t think it was quite fair that your comment was downvoted to −2, but then I read the sentence “When women feel desperate, they cry about it.”
While I think your comment was overall constructive to the discussion, that kind of thing is a turnoff. I assume you meant it in the best possible way, but I would encourage you to avoid that particular construction in the future.
I’m genuinely curious why hg00′s amended comment is now even more downvoted? And why my advice is also? Generally I take downvotes to mean “Would not like to read more of such comments at Less Wrong,” but I’m a little puzzled at these.
This is unlikely. The idea that male-on-female rape, in humans, is reflective of forced mating as a reproductive strategy makes some big mistakes because it doesn’t factor in how human reproduction actually works.
It’s true in a general way that if the cost of your gametes is low, and you can get out of the parental investment, then increasing the number of coital acts is an effective way to buy genetic fitness at reduced cost (part of why mammals tend to be much more promiscuous, in a very broad sense, than birds: birds get their embryo out of Mom and into the world early and let it develop there, which means Daddy has a higher incentive to invest parentally—though this is only a very broad pattern).
Trigger warning for those who’d rather not hear it described in frank, mechanical terms!
But with humans in specific, rape is not a great reproductive strategy. The odds of insemination are lower, because things like self-lubrication and uterine peristalsis (which make a big difference) aren’t typically going to occur. Even post-coital cuddling increases the odds of fertilization. Getting into comparative primatology, humans have conspicuously large penises compared to our relatives who do tend to use force as a basic approach to getting sex (gorillas, who have a harem-style arrangement as their basic stable social model).
Rape has been prevalent throughout human history, but forced copulation doesn’t seem to be a leading or even closely-tailing human reproductive strategy. It’s probably not an adaptation (though if you insist that pretty much every salient feature of behavior is, or is the proximal outcome of some evolutionary adaptation, you can spin a theoretical picture to justify it easily).
“Forced copulation” could describe a fair percentage of co-habitations in a fair percentage of cultures throughout history.
Trigger warning: more mechanical discussion of nonconsensual sex.
On a per-act basis, rapes are about twice as likely to result in pregnancy than consensual sex. I suspect that you’re right that various fertility-boosting measures don’t happen during rape and this effect is due primarily to selection effects (who rapes, who is raped, and when the rape happens), but the net result is still that rapes are a decent reproductive strategy (if the rapist can get away with it).
This seems really unlikely in the context of marriages before the Enlightenment, or in the context of wars and raids (where women were a resource like any other).
Yes, in America. We also frequently do our best, when having consensual sex, to minimize our odds of having kids. (I was unable to find rates of birth control use during rapes, unfortunately.) In the ancestral environment, this would probably not be a factor.
I’m pretty sure the 3% number comes mostly from women trying to get pregnant, and it’s estimated that the per-act incidence of rape pregnancy would be about 8% instead of about 6% if none of the victims were using birth control.
Tentatively updated. Will investigate further later. 3.1 number comes from an odd data-set.
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/atniehs/labs/epi/studies/eps/question/index.cfm
I have updated my credence based on Gottschall. (Also, updated credence in the sexy son hypotheses, but let’s ignore that for now.)
However, the 3.1% value is supposed to come from here:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199512073332301
I cannot find any such thing.
It looks to me like your link is a 1995 study, and my link described a 2000 or 2001 study, which I’m having trouble finding. I think it might be this one but I’m not seeing the 3.1% value anywhere. The study I linked has slightly lowered my credence in the 3.1% number, but I can’t tell if the numbers it’s reporting are per-act numbers or not. (I’m not an expert in this field and have been trusting summaries from science journalists; I’m not sure if I’m interpreting the actual papers correctly or not.) It looks like this study might have said “at their least fertile, there’s less than a 5% per-act chance of copulation, which is lower than we thought it was” and that got interpreted as “in general, there’s less than a 5% per-act chance of copulation.”
I hope Gottschall and company know what they’re doing, and expect the 3.1% number comes from another study. It might be profitable to email one of the professors in question and ask for where that number came from, because it’s being slippery.
Sorry, for deleting my post. I linked to the wrong study (as you pointed out) and wanted no replies until I revised my post.
Also, this is the 2001 study:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11376648
Edit: I would like to criticize Todd Akin for making my truth-seeking less convenient by really messing up the signal-to-noise ratio regarding this matter.
They touch on the statistics further down—it’s believed to be due to the fact that, in the case of consensual sex, the woman is more likely to have control over when in their fertility cycle the act occurs.
Different cultures have had very different approaches to marriage throughout history; they still often do. Anyway, I’m talking about the claim that rape is an evolutionary adaptation from the ancestral environment, couched as a reproductive strategy—Neolithic Eurasia is a bit too recent to be germane to my argument.
A quick Bing search found this:
Did they account for people having consensual one-night stands possibly using condoms more often than rapists ?
Historically, getting pregnant or not wasn’t the only important factor; maternal investment in the child (vs abandonment or neglect) was tremendously important too. And, naturally, mothers would be less likely to invest in a child with an absent or non-providing father (this is especially true early in their lives, when they would have more chances to have children with mates of their choice).
Well, even if rape is not an adaptation, men still do it. So it seems plausible that whatever baggage evolved along with rape (from however long ago) would also still be present.
Making sandwiches is not a genetic adaptation. Men still do it.
Are you suggesting rape doesn’t happen among hunter-gatherers? What does “adaptation” mean, exactly?
No, but I am suggesting it’s probably not been selected for as a genetic predisposition due to the fitness it supposedly brings. The cost/benefit ratio seems pretty damn bad. Let’s assume a man of 25 (great fertility, past the peak risk-of-mortality age on a pure-forager’s lifespan curve, presumably able to provide for himself to greater or lesser degree.) Assume he only targets women of peak reproductive age, 25 to 30 years (this is very generous for the rape-as-adaptation argument; in reality rapists are known to target women of any age, from single-digits to senescence), thereby maximizing expected payoff per act.
He loses fitness if:
-He is killed by the victim or her relatives. How likely this is depends entirely on his culture—some forager band societies are quite pacifistic; others resort quickly to violence and have no real way to regulate its spread. It’s a pretty strong risk, though.
-The mother refuses to raise the child. This is unlikely to happen, but in a society with high infant mortality rates and established protocols for socially-legitimate infanticide by abandonment or handing off to a relative for culling (standard practice in societies like these if the baby is more than 48 hours old; otherwise the mother usually does it), it’s not socially-costly behavior either.
-Having a reputation as a rapist makes it harder for him to survive. This is a virtual certainty—cooperative food acquisition, compulsory sharing and an ethic of reciprocity are standard features of societies like these. Cutting someone off from this network of assistance is as good as a death sentence in most cases; it also means he’s unlikely to ever get consensual sex, or medical assistance when he’s hurt. I can’t overstate how bad an outcome this is, and how likely it is to happen—tribal societies don’t keep many secrets!
Meanwhile, he gains fitness if and only if all of the following happen: -The victim is potentially able to concieve on that given day AND -She does (the cumulative on these first two items equals 3 − 5 percent odds of conception for consensual sex), AND -She doesn’t then miscarry (true 90 percent of the time), AND -She won’t voluntarily let the unwanted baby die (not sure, but estimates for the probability of routine infanticide in paleolithic cultures ranges from 15 percent on the lower end, up to 20 or even 50 percent in some cases). No idea offhand, but it seems a heck of a lot more likely than it would be today in the Western European culture area.
You’d have to get incredibly lucky to have a payoff even once; it’s certainly not a viable reproductive strategy, not even a distant also-ran that some minority of the population favors. Human population densities in the EEA simply don’t support it.
So the fact that rape is common suggests that it’s happening for some other reason than it being an evolutionarily-fixed, advantageous trait.
I find it hard to believe that a tendency to rape (or more specifically, the psychological traits that make one more likely to be a rapist today) wouldn’t have been a fitness advantage in at least some of our forager ancestors. There are too many examples in societies close to our own where various forms of rape or were forgivable/forgiven (by society, not necessarily by the victim): rape of foreigners in war, marital rape, rape as punishment, protection of the rapist by an influent member of his family, marrying the rapist … sure, some of those situations may not happen in a forager society, but there may be different ones that do happen.
This supposes that the society in question has a concept of “rapist” analogous to our own; I suspect many societies would have different concepts, and only harshly punish some of the behaviors (rape of enemies and marital rape seem to usually get off the hook, except in very recent history).
As an illustration of the way different societies approach the problem, I’ve already been in a conversation with African men who were saying how under certain conditions rape was an acceptable way of getting sex from a girl.
That being said, I don’t know much about how foragers approach the question of rape, I’m merely skeptical of the idea that they have very few children of rape.
Also, date rape of course, duh.
Upvoted for careful thinking even though I probably disagree with the conclusion.
On the other hand, in most contemporary and historical agricultural societies, rape is often kept secret, and women have incentives not to make public accusations. This has been true for long enough to allow for some quite drastic changes in behavior to spread through natural selection (on, say, mostly existing variation).
Observe that if he’s unlikely to be able to have sex otherwise, it’s worth the risk.
No way—kin selection. He can still net genetic fitness by helping out his social unit, which will almost invariably contain his relatives, who share some of his genetic payload. Conversely, raping someone is likely going to be terminal in some fashion, which eliminates any chance of getting lucky later. Even if they only cast him out instead of killing him, his chances of successfully mating later drop precipitously.
I don’t think we can know much about how social norms and rape played out in the early environment.
There are competing pressures. Unless someone is very low status, throwing them out is likely to be disruptive to the group.
We can make some inferences from mobile foragers who’ve maintained some cultural distance from the outside world, though—they’re not a perfect substitute, but they tell us something about patterns of human behavior and existence in the absence of other economic or ecological resource bases.
It’s certainly a whole lot more likely to be, at minimum not entirely off-target, than you’ll be semi-consciously conflating “hunter-gatherer” as a synonym for “primitive”, assuming that all societies without industrialization or intensive agriculture of the type one recognizes are in that category, failing to account for the spread of of particular value-systems and norms that have widely impacted societies around the world, and hyper-focusing on chimps to the exclusion of other primates as analogues for our own evolutionary history (which is what I’m seeing and responding to here).
As someone with almost no vested interest in the conversation I’m not going to do the (rather extensive) work it would take to provide a good summary of the science of rape, however I find it odd that this conversation seems to be completely ignoring that fact that it is a heavily researched area, particularly by evolutionary psychologists. As a representative example this experiment suggests a link between status manipulations and additudes towards rape, and the evo-psyc journal it’s in has 50+ other articles that mention rape, even though its less than ten years old.
Is there any way to check on whether those sorts of simulations are a good model for attitudes which haven’t been affected by experimenters?
I’m aware of the evo psych research into the subject of rape. I disagree with it, but I’m aware of it, I’ve read some fair portion of it, and I think that the idea that rape is a behavioral adaptation driving a reproductive strategy is flawed.
[citation needed]
If nothing else, a reputations as a “rapist” is not at all the same thing in a society where women aren’t considered to be people, but property. Hunter gatherers as well as civilization at least up to the biblical level have also engaged in Bride kidnapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping) Which we would definitely think of as rape but clearly wasn’t viewed in the same way at those times. Genghis Khan didn’t get to be the ancestor of 8 percent of people in east asia by being nice. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan)
You seem to be doing a lot of theorizing about ancient behavior on very little data, because you don’t want rape to have been adaptative.
That does not describe forager societies at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Common_characteristics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanomami_women#Violence
Not strict “foragers”
The Yanomamo are horticulturalists. They grow bananas, manioc and other crops available in the wild by means of slash-and-burn and managed planting. They are not an example of a forager (aka hunter-gatherer) society.
They are were (using past tense because of the changes they have undergone) a hybrid culture. They did agriculture but the crops were low-quality and they also relied heavily on hunting and also on gathering. For a man to prove himself a worthy husband for a woman, he had to do “bride service” which basically amounted to providing meat from hunting to the bride’s family for a year or two.
It should be considered rude to post:
and then offer irrelevant information to back up your point.
I agree that the first part is rude, but how is information irrelevant? It’s an undisputed example of violent tactics working for reproduction, and a description of how the culture of many societies either endorsed or did not frown on what we would see as rape.
The article on bride kidnapping contained no hunter-gatherers, as far I could see.
I do not think it wise to attempt to extrapolate information about the EEA from contemporary (or even merely ancient) societies whose material conditions do not resemble the conditions of bands in the EEA. (Hell, I don’t even know if we can extrapolate information from modern bands. All of this is an incredible epistemic mess.)
I do not dispute the truth of this fact. However, the ruler of the largest contiguous land empire in history is not the sort of fellow we wish to be looking at in order to determine whether or not rape was adaptive in the EEA. If you were interested in answering such a question, I guess you would want to look at some folks like the Hadza and observe how reproductively successful fellows like Scumbag Sengani, a hypothetical rapist, end up being.
It’s irrelevant because Neolithic-era societies are not representative of plausible assumptions about the evolutionary ancestral environment or early human and protohuman lifestyles. It’s not an example of the thing being talked about; it has no direct bearing on it; ergo, it’s irrelevant.
We have evidence that chimps rape, and we have evidence that Neolithic societies rape. You need to provide strong information that somewhere between those two states of existence(taking the way chimpanzees live now as an very broad approximation of how our great great great ancestors lived), it became evolutionarily unfavorable to rape, but not enough to keep civilized people from doing it
Bad assumption. We’re genetically equidistant from chimps and bonobos, who are pretty nearly opposite in their social and sexual behavior.
Did that common ancestor favor one strategy, or the other? Or neither one, or a mix of the two? Is the chimp model an adaptation subsequent to that divergence? Is the bonobo model one? Are both?
We do share a common ancestor with chimps, yes. From this common ancestor is descended both chimps and bonobos.
Given the existence of bonobos, I do not see why chimp-rape is particularly relevant to the question of whether or not rape is adaptive in humans. That is, given the existence of bonobos, it seems uncertain whether or not the common ancestor of chimps and humans (who is also the common ancestor of humans and bonobos) was, how to put this, a rape ape.
So basically you’re saying that Todd Akin’s recent comments about rape were correct?
He may have been misunderstanding some of the same information Jandila supplies. But it’s not an absolute effect, it’s a probabilistic one. I’m more likely to break an egg yolk if I open the egg two feet above my bowl; that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen pretty frequently when I open it closer to the bowl (or that it couldn’t land intact from two feet up).
Agreed. However, Jandila requires it to be an absolute (or almost absolute) effect for the argument against hg00′s point to work.
Uh, no. This isn’t a matter of suppressing pregnancies that aren’t wanted—it’s a matter of not boosting the likelihood of pregnancy by means of various reinforcing mechanisms that in all add a minor, though non-negligible, probability of conception.
So you admit that the decrease in the probability of conception is minor. This means that it’s not enough to invalidate hg00′s argument that what you think of as ‘creepy’ strategies, even rape, are adaptive under some circumstances.
hg00 didn’t make the argument that it was adaptive, e just assumes it is. I respond to that too, if you’ll look at my dialogue with em a bit further.