Re: Some prison statistics

Timothy Bates (tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au)
Wed, 16 Jun 1999 16:58:15 +1000

> This is interesting. It does not explain why people who are married
> or who have girlfriends/boyfriends still commit rape though.

the hypothesis is that this depends on an additional postulate - that males will have sex with more than 1 partner if given the opportunity. There seems to be some evidence for this from coolidge to clinton ;-)

> Nor does
> it explain why little old ladies sometimes get raped.
that is not a problem for the rape hypothesis, but rather for any reproductive hypothesis - people who have been married for 50 years have been known to have sex to, I am told ;-)

> Wouldn't the
> tendancy be for primarily sexually attractive people to get raped if
> it is about sex?
ceterus paribus, yes. That is a critical case: given the choice of raping an "attractive" and an "unattractive" person, the attractive person should be chosen.

> How would this explain prostitutes getting raped? Clearly they
> provide easy access to sex, yet there are many cases of prostitutes
> being raped.
This is a problem for psychopathic behavior. One explanation is that $0.00 is less than $100 and so ...

> If you could point me in the direction of the article (or other
> source) where you found the information about incidence of rape
> decreasing when available sex partners increases I'd be very
> interested to read it.

high level but approachable intro at Pinker's book "how the mind works" and Wright's book The Moral Animal
http://www.booksamillion.com/cat/books?book_search=the+moral+animal