A Natural History of Rape
Cover of the first edition
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| Authors | Randy Thornhill, Craig T. Palmer |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Rape |
| Published | 2000 (The MIT Press) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 251 |
| ISBN | |
A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion is a 2000 book about rape by biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig T. Palmer, with a foreword by psychologist Margo Wilson. Thornhill and Palmer propose that rape should be understood through evolutionary psychology, and criticize the idea, popularized by Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will (1975), that rape is an expression of male domination that is not sexually motivated. They argue that the capacity for rape is either an adaptation or a byproduct of adaptive traits such as sexual desire and aggressiveness. A Natural History of Rape provoked controversy and received extensive criticism.
Thornhill and Palmer wrote that they wanted to see rape eradicated, and argued that improved understanding of what motivates rape would help achieve this goal, while false assumptions about the motivation of rapists are likely to hinder efforts to prevent rape. They wrote that rape could be defined as, "copulation resisted to the best of the victim's ability unless such resistance would probably result in death or serious injury to the victim or in death or injury to individuals the victim commonly protects". However, they noted that other sexual assaults, including oral or anal penetration of a man or a woman under the same conditions, can also sometimes be called rape. They suggested that theory and research in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology can help to elucidate the ultimate (evolutionary) causes (as opposed to primarily proximate causes) of rape by males in different species, including humans. They argued that the capacity for rape is either an adaptation, or, a byproduct of adaptative traits such as sexual desire and aggressiveness that have evolved for reasons that have no direct connection with the benefits or costs of rape.
Thornhill and Palmer identified anthropologist Donald Symons as the first author to propose, in The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979), that rape is "a by-product of adaptations designed for attaining sexual access to consenting partners." They noted that Symons has falsely been accused of basing his arguments on the assumption that "behavior is genetically determined", even though he explicitly rejects that assumption and criticizes it at length. Thornhill and Palmer criticized explanations of rape put forward by social scientists, and Susan Brownmiller's book Against Our Will, which popularized the feminist view that rape is an expression of male domination that is not sexually motivated. They criticized arguments that rape is not sexually motivated on several grounds. In their view, concluding that rape must be motivated by the desire to commit acts of violence because it involves force or the threat of force is as illogical as concluding that men who pay prostitutes for sex are motivated by charity. They criticized the argument that rape cannot be sexually motivated because rapists do not prefer sexually attractive victims by citing evidence that a disproportionate number of rape victims are women in their teens and early twenties.
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