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So presumably 'rape fantasies' have some evolutionary basis, yadda yadda high status male, our primate ancestors didn't wait for enthusiastic consent, etc. What I don't understand, then, is why women have way more fantasies of being raped than men have of raping?

Aella

@Aella_Girl

May 24, 2018

I doubt that it's that men are socially shamed out of it - in my amateur study of tabooness vs. arousal, you can see the gender rape divide, but a lot more taboo things are disproportionately more male - one key example is pedophilia.

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Aella

@Aella_Girl

I wonder if it has anything to do with the 'gay uncle' theory, or that fewer men than women in history have reproduced. Maybe a lower amount of men are programmed with raping fantasies because it reduces the pot of sexually competitive males?

4:12 PM · May 24, 2018

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Agree. I think that a male caught raping in the past genes won't spread too much.

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That's a group selectionist theory. A gene for not raping would not have survived in the ancestral environment.

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Nothing wrong with generating adaptationist hypotheses. But I'm skeptical that they'll bear fruit for most of the topics listed in this figure, including the one discussed here.

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Why would that be evolutionarily successful?