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Comment by tablewatcher | Hacker News Reader

This is loosely comparative to mating styles seen in humans, but not with the same implimentation-

Female humans have a dualistic reproductive strategy, an Alpha (orange) male is good for securing the best genes but he typically wont stay around to provide resources for their children (because he is busy mating others). A Beta (blue) provider will typically stay around but may not have the best genes. A rapist (yellow) is completely shunned by society. A female's best approach is to find an Alpha who wants to settle down, or to get pregnant by an Alpha but have a Beta raise the children, failing that have children to a Beta. Rape fantasies are very prevalent among women, perhaps there is a link between this and the opportunistic orange lizard.

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    Rape fantasies are very prevalent among women

This in particular could do with a citation; it's a contentious topic and would do better with some formal verification.

They're pretty common. Most (62%) women supposedly have had them.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19085605

As someone in this 62%, I can tell you that the numbers may be correct but the terms are anything but. Men hear "rape fantasies" and think real rape, while women think "intense sex with a hot stranger which requires no effort on my part and furthermore absolves me of any decision making so no one can brand me a hoe".

As always, it helps to remember that women are people and therefore the overwhelming majority do not fantasize about actually being tortured and possibly killed or maimed for life. (Not saying that the parent actually said anything to that effect, just trying to drive home the point that these stats use bad terminology).

Edit: for some reason I cannot reply so I will post an answer here.

Is the survey methodology flawed in what they ask the respondents?

I think so. The linked study said it counted self-reported incidents of fantasies of sexual encounters that fall within "the legal definition of rape", and that's where I have a problem. The central point of the legal definition of rape is the lack of consent. So how could sexual fantasies, which are by their nature something you want in that moment, be counted as non-consensual? You are asking people about a consensual sexual scenario that's only staged as non-consensual but then you are counting it as non-consensual. It's like asking people if they fantasize about the doctor/nurse scenario (or whatever) and when 20% report that they've had that fantasy, you conclude that 20% of the population wish they had a serious illness.

That's not rape though. I guess I wonder why this 62% figure comes up if it's actually "hot sex with an attractive stranger" rather than "forced intercourse." Is the survey methodology flawed in what they ask the respondents? Are the respondents confused about what they're agreeing with? Are the results being incorrectly reported?

"absolves me of any decision making" certainly implies it (and meets the "legal definition of rape" the study was looking at).

It's also easy to miss that figure is "have had" a rape fantasy, meaning at least once would qualify. This survey study[1], for instance, found estimates of 31% - 57% "have fantasies in which they are forced into sex against their will". However, for only "9% to 17% of women these are a frequent or favorite fantasy experience".

In any case, I'm not sure why this is surprising. Power dynamics are a powerful part of any sexual experience, whether they be a central part of it or just fleeting. The point that rada made above is important, though, that when speaking of fantasies we are talking about people deriving pleasure from circumstances that are imagined by the very person who wouldn't be able to give consent were the situation reality.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18321031

Apart from all the things you point out, I also can't help but wonder - for eg. the US "1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (14.8% completed rape; 2.8% attempted rape)."[1, numbers from 1998]

So, how those that jive with "rape fantasies"? Are we to assume that many women that have been the victim of rape, still have rape fantasies? Without going into the deep topic of coping strategies for trauma, and what is considered "normal" sexual behaviour etc -- at the very least it would seem that the "rape" in one survey isn't quite the same term as the one in the other?

To reply to the sibling comment about "legal definition of rape" -- that kind of disregards the fact that these are fantasies. Isn't there something from Freud about us being everyone in our dreams? I don't think it's wrong to claim that when you fantasise about having control of someone else, you're also fantasising about being the one in control.

As for the low numbers for men (3%), I came across an article[2] on the prison system -- that doesn't really seem to change the overall picture that much: Men are less likely to be sexually assaulted in general, while inmates (of both sexes) are more likely to assaulted.

One depressing thing that can be gleaned from the second article, is that female correction officers apparently have a higher rate of abuse of juvenile inmates. Overall, I'm not sure the article adds much to the discussion of rape fantasies -- but I add it here as it might be of interest to those that are curious about rape statistics in general.

[1] https://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assa...

[2] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/24/shame-o...

Well....

I've been raped but also have (what I would consider) rape fantasies. My sexual assault isn't at all like my rape fantasies. I can't say I understand it either but they are totally different in my mind. My fantasies are different in that I have fantasies about resisting my husband (someone I trust completely) who then holds me down "against" my will and "forces" it on me while I struggle to physically "resist" but ultimately lose. It's roleplaying and when you are roleplaying it isn't like reality by definition. When I was actually raped it was different but I'm not going to describe that here because I don't want to have to defend myself.

Of course that also has absolutely nothing to do with whatever that creepy dude was talking about comparing yellow lizards with breeding rapists. We can just also say the best rapists aren't the kind that are strangers who jump out of bushes (the kind that society hates). My rapist was a charismatic "lady's man." My rape was never reported but many years later my rapist is currently sitting in jail for raping someone else. Part of me feels like I'm responsible for the other women who he raped after me because I never said anything. I'm also sure the other woman who reported him probably got a lot of backlash too.

It probably helps that my assaults was a very long time ago and I didn't start having these fantasies until probably a decade later.

> One depressing thing that can be gleaned from the second article, is that female correction officers apparently have a higher rate of abuse of juvenile inmates.

Would it be less depressing if male correction officers had a higher rate of abuse instead?

I meant depressing in the sense that I learned something new from the article, and what I learned was depressing.

I'm having trouble tracking this here. What is the difference between "real rape" and your description?

> As always, it helps to remember that women are people

Uh, I'll try to keep that in mind.

I might sometime fantasize about fighting in a battle. That doesn't necessarily mean that I for real want to do it.

Yep. Anecdotes simply won't do here.

You should probably supply some references (other than, say, The Game) if you'd like to not be voteslammed by the hivemind.

Is it fair to call the people downvoting him a "hivemind"? Given the unsubstantiated and creepy nature of his comment, I think lots of different people from lots of different walks of life would agree he should be downvoted.

I absolutely think it's fair to use the term hivemind. The base class of hivemind, community, is generally a bit more open-minded.

A community might say "Well, you really ought to back up these assertions, because they may be a bit unsettling for some folks". It may not even react predictably to such things, being more liberal than expected.

By contrast, a hivemind will downvote and write them off as "unsubstantiated and creepy", fail to provide guidance, and perhaps even lash out at the folks identifying it as the less-friendly version of its parent implementation.

"Well, you really ought to back up these assertions, because they may be a bit unsettling for some folks" doesn't do it here because of the nature of the comment. It was complete BS, 100% stupid, and completely off topic. You don't usually see comments that bad here.

Ok, lets break it down - humans are a large group of people with a lot of different life goals and motives and their selection of mates can't be generalized as such. Not all humans fit into little boxes such as "alpha male." Or even "male" and "female." What are "good genes" anyways that these "alpha males" supposedly possess? Why are they good or desirable? Do women care about genes when selecting a partner or are partners selected some other way such as the mere-exposure effect or for cultural reasons? Who are these "alpha males" who desire to never setting down ever and do nothing but have sex with multiple women for the rest of their lives? There certainly isn't a dichotomy of men - those with "good" genes that women swoon over but refuse to raise a child and those with "bad" genes that women don't want but will raise children. Then the rapist hiding in the shadows who are somehow not part of society and don't have consensual sex ever? That is obvious if you spend some time with, well, anyone. Making extremely broad and silly assumptions about groups of people is just not productive.

Every single person I know who is male and has lots of sexual partners are the ones who really do want to raise children and "settle down," probably moreso than their peers with less sexual partners. But they wanted to have years of sex with lots of women first then when they get older raise children. The women they have sex with don't want "genes."

What about people who want to adopt, gays who may or may not want children, asexuals who may or may not want children? Etc. Most people who don't desire children also desire a mate so what do they look for?

Anyways, it was completely off topic. It doesn't relate to lizards in any way whatsoever.

So, first, your assertion that it was "complete BS" (despite you, in another post, providing anecdotal data for the rape fantasy claim--with which there is nothing wrong, let me be clear) and "100% stupid" is exactly what I mean by closemindedness.

As for your questions, those are all excellent points, even if only a handful of easy references into popular culture or literature would be enough to answer them. I particularly like your observation about "well, they want a lot of banging first, then later want to raise kids": that suggests perhaps a temporal or maturity aspect to the whole thing.

The "want to adopt", "gays", "asexuals", etc. are all, bluntly, not representative of the popular as a whole nor worth considering from the timescale of thousands of years if we are going after an evolutionary explanation for this, which is the ultimate direction of the proposed sort of theories of human courtship.

It's not as off-topic as you assert because the paper suggests a three-strategy approach that loosely maps onto the theory put forth above. It's not a clean mapping, and there are a lot of valid criticisms with it, but it's not totally unrelated either.

Your questons are very basic, if you actually want an answer start reading some books on evolutionary biology.

You need to supply some links to papers or articles supporting your claims, or mention the books you handwavingly reference. If you want people to take your (somewhat incendiary) assertions seriously, you need to provide some evidence or at least sources.

Otherwise, they're right to dismiss you as a crank.

> But they wanted to have years of sex with lots of women first then when they get older raise children.

Right. The "get it out of my system"-type. Thinking that they want to spend 'the rest of their life' with a person, if they just bang a lot of chicks first.

AFAICS, the 'hivemind' here is really a crowd sourced checker for broadly worded unsourced comments. And that's not a bad thing.

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