From Patricia Finney
Two points need to be made concerning the falsifiability of Randy Thornhill’s
theory of rape as a purely sexual behaviour
(19 February, p 44).
Firstly, if rape were only about sex and not about power, then women who are
forced by religious laws to cover themselves from head to foot, including their
faces, would never be raped.
And second, if rape were only about sex and not about power, then there would
never be anal rapes of anybody, let alone of men—who are famously hard to
get pregnant. If rape is about power and only secondarily about sex, then you
would expect more anal rape to occur in places where there are a lot of men kept
in close quarters, in power hierarchies mostly governed by violence—such
as prison, for instance.
Rape is a desperately complicated subject full of ambiguities. I have no real
objections to Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s core theory—it seems
unexceptionable that rape will sometimes allow men to breed who normally
wouldn’t get the chance. Rape by invading armies seems an obvious case.
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However, Thornhill and Palmer have fallen into the usual traps. They seem to
think that because rape is sometimes genetically beneficial, then that’s what
it’s always about.
The law has been struggling for years to cope with the complexities of rape.
Have Thornhill and Palmer handed another useful defence to rapists: “I
desperately wanted to breed, your honour, and could find no other way”? I
suppose the good thing is they have made the case for abortion after rape
unanswerable.
Truro, Cornwall
