Jim's Blog

Todd is deep trouble for using the phrase “legitimate rape”, for implying that a lot of rapes are not legitimate – implying that a lot of rape allegations are false rape allegations, or the post hoc reinterpretation of profoundly ambiguous events as rape.

Evolutionary psychology predicts that women will be far more upset about consenting to sex with someone that they subsequently deem a creep or a loser, than actually being forcibly and unambiguously raped, thus false or delusive rape accusations are likely to be common.

Surveys show that it is very rare for a woman married to the head of her household to be raped, and very common that the rapist is an acquaintance of the woman.

This suggests that most rapes occur under courtship circumstances, where it is apt to be inherently ambiguous whether the women consented or not.

In practice, the only common cases where a woman unambiguously consents to sex is marriage, where she consents verbally in front of witnesses, and prostitution, where she accepts a fee for service.  In other cases, consent is seldom verbal, and not merely merely non verbal, but, as in cats, pre verbal, making it genuinely hard to apply our contract based concepts of consent.  Illicit sex is usually inherently ambiguous sex.   You cannot really say she consented except she comes back or sticks around, she herself cannot really say whether she consented unless she observes herself coming back or sticking around. These days, much, perhaps most, sex outside marriage does not involve people sticking around or coming back. Read the rest of this entry »