Feelings of Importance

At http://bobstruth.blogspot.com/2006/04/has-any-female-ever-been-hurt-by-rape.html Bob states that he has never met or known any woman who was hurt by rape other than a few hurt feelings which would go away quickly, and asks whether any woman has ever really been hurt by a rape.

Even tongue in cheek, this question should not be easily dismissed. Particularly if, as is likely, the feelings Bob refers to are telling us something important about our future.

Those men who follow the reasoning of Aristotle, Ockham (aka Occam), Darwin and Dawkins but, like Bob above, have real trouble understanding women's abhorrence to rape, might find it helpful to look at the issue this way:

We, all of us, exist because of the success of our genes. These genes themselves exist only because they replicate through people who procreate successfully. To mature successfully human children need substantial maternal nurture such that mother and child need support from an external source. To be reliable over long periods of time this source needs to have a genetic interest in providing the support. Over hundreds of thousands of generations in the ancestral environment men whose genes encourage within them emotions to support their own offspring have out-reproduced other men. This fatherly support is known to scientists as 'paternal investment'. The extent to which it is directed to a man's own offspring is referred to as his 'paternal certainty'. Both of these factors manifest themselves in men through strong motivating emotions. To put it another way, the genes of men who don't feel the need to support their children don't replicate well, and the genes of men who are not instinctively careful about whether the children they support are their own genetic offspring don't replicate well either. An essential part of being an evolutionarily successful man (i.e. a man who maximises the chance of his genes replicating) is to feel these emotions strongly and to act upon them.

These straightforward facts explain the strength of many men's feelings about both their partner's sexual fidelity and their child's well-being. Fecking important issues, most men would say. They'd have no trouble agreeing with that. Not because threats to either are physically damaging to the man himself, but because such threats are so devastating to his ultimate evolutionary purpose, the replication of his genes. Should Bob have contended that, e.g., paternity deception only results in a 'few hurt feelings' and so should be ignored he would be summarily dismissed by most men, and quite rightly. After all the men who don't dismiss such ideas are unlikely to be contributing much to future generations. They exist, for sure, but they are an evolutionary dead end. They are not the future.

Now what has all this to do with how women feel about rape? Well, in all probability, the feelings that women experience about rape have similar evolutionary causes to those that men feel about being cuckolded. The ultimate purpose of both types of feelings are similar and it is likely, therefore, that the strength of the associated emotions are similar, too. To have the best chance of replicating her genes successfully a woman needs to be able to choose her mate well. She needs to be sure about his fitness; i.e. his attractiveness, his capability and his willingness to invest in her and her child. While a woman does not share a man's concerns about parental certainty - if the baby comes out of her it is hers - her equivalent concern is about its father's fitness. Rape undermines her ability to determine this as best she can, to choose her mate. It is likely that most women have as strong an emotional aversion to rape as most men do to being cuckolded.

The fitness of humans in the natural world depends on these emotions. They are much more important to our species and to our society’s longevity than 'a few hurt feelings'.