Geez…there’s no subject like the boys-girls-and-sex subject. I mean…Eric Raymond posts a concise essay speculating about the human biological imperatives underlying the current campus rape panic, including the following:
The crazy inflation of rape statistics suggests that the campus “anti-rape” movement has little or nothing to do with preventing rape….College campuses are far from a threatening environment for feminists. Nowadays women outnumber men in every department outside STEM fields. At many colleges mandatory ‘sensitivity training’ heavily privileges female and feminist perspectives. By federal encouragement, female students can now accuse men of rape and expect the claim to be evaluated under circumstances that deny the man any right to due process and the presumption of innocence.
So then Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit notes it, and in short order we’ve got hundreds (ultimately maybe thousands) of comments by people from all over the world (including economist David Friedman, son of Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman). They run the gamut. Here are some of my favorites:
- “At bottom, the problem is that female hypergamic instinct and the ideology of sexual equality are inevitably in collision.”
- “One question is to what degree male pair bonding emotions link to sex. Will the man who has been engaged in casual sex prior to marriage feel less strongly bonded to his partner after?” (part of what David Friedman had to say)
- “One minor kibitz: It doesn’t really make sense to talk about r- and K- selection differences between men and women. That’s a theory that has to do with entire species. The ‘r’ and ‘K’ refer to the exponent of population growth and the carrying capacity of the environment, respectively. (dN/dt = r N (1 – N/K)) ‘r-selected’ means n << K.” (that from a female commenter)
- “Animal behaviorists have the concept of the ‘action chain,’ a sort of extended reflex. It is triggered by a stimulus, and proceeds through a set of steps to an end result. The key point is that ALL steps must be carried out, in the specified ORDER, or the end result does not occur. Nest building behavior and mating behavior are both examples of action chains.”
Tell me to shut up if you want to, but I’ve got to say it again: The comments following articles and essays are almost always as interesting as the writings themselves…and often moreso!
(You can read the whole thing HERE.)