Why some men rape women
I have always suspected that since the death of God, humans have tirelessly tried to take his place through a multitude of absurd behaviors like appointing themselves Nobel Prizes, incessantly admiring and mythologizing influencers who teach you how to put on make-up, or pinning colorful military insignia on the attires of murderers who are essentially more efficient at killing than their colleagues.
For a mere primate with an inferiority complex and a bad case of chronic identity crisis, nothing is more reassuring than the title of Harari’s From Animals to Gods, a book you will ironically find on most bookshelves nowadays.
Guess what, I got news for you: You’re not that important.
First of all, humans are just primates. This means that if you’re a man, you’ve got more DNA in common with a male chimpanzee than with a human female, and second of all: No, we are currently not the dominant animal species on planet Earth — termites and ants are. Get over it.
Once you’ve digested that and started dismantling your clingy attachment to a delusional and grandiose sense of self-worth, we can talk about how there may be a simple answer to problems that Sapiens believe to be as complex and mysterious as themselves.
While studying International Relations at university we learned about three different types of states. The first type, called Hawk States, are aggressive and invest an abundance of resources on defense. The second type, known as Owl States, are relatively peaceful and arm themselves in case of aggression. The third type are called Dove States, and they tend to be neutral and peaceful in their relations to other countries.
Some years ago, in order to understand how a Dove State ought to behave when being bullied by a voracious Hawk state, I decided to work as a falconer in Ireland at a Raptor Research Center. However, in addition to dealing with raptors, once there I found out that I also had to work with other creatures such as pigs, whose humble raison d’être was to become food for the Turkish Vultures. Other than for reasons such as genetic predisposition, the pigs in the pigsty varied in size because as soon as they were born they had to engage in a battle for their mother’s most nurturing teats, who were located closer to her head. This is because the milk becomes increasingly watery in the teats located closer to her hind limbs.
One day, we realized that the largest, most voluptuous and by consequence most desired sow was in heat. All the smaller pigs began their desperate attempts at having intercourse with her, by jumping on her, forcing her down, and screaming, biting or scratching. She fought back but was nonetheless bleeding and under constant peril. In the spirit of sisterhood, Belen, the Spanish biologist who worked with me, and myself, locked the sow in a pigpen all to herself and left her to rest on clean straw, while all the other pigs crowded the pen and looked at her with greedy eyes. The sow slept peacefully with a smile.
At this point our boss, an Irish zoologist, came into the pigsty and asked us why the sow had been separated from the others. We explained what happened and he replied that if we had observed more carefully, we would have noticed that only the weaker pigs, the ones whose genes she did not want were trying to mate with her; while the largest, strongest pig, the one she actually wanted to mate with hadn’t even approached her yet. He assured us that when he finally did approach her, the sow would certainly be more than happy to indulge. He also told us that she would stay in heat until she got pregnant, so it was probably best to undo our well intentioned attempt at safeguarding her by placing her back in her former accommodation with the others. We did just that and like expected, the next day she had what appeared to be quite jovial, consensual intercourse with the biggest pig in the pigsty.
This event taught me two things: The first is that if you feel a calling for an immersive experience in a foreign land to see if you could, through observation, learn a potentially life changing lesson from a notorious creature like an eagle, you might actually just learn it from a bunch of pigs you could have visited at your local farmer’s pigsty.
The second lesson is this: The desperate porcine rapes made me think of the state of North Korea, aggressive and threatening just because it is a small, unattractive pig that has to survive with everybody else in this cruel world.
The most aggressive individual is the most fearful and excluded.
Years after coming to this conclusion I read how social media managed to channel the anger of white males excluded from reproduction into furious riots and votes for Trump in the book Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the plot to break America by Christopher Wylie.
There are men who are successful, happy, and with a healthy sex life and there are males who are genetic losers. Men who have been rejected by women and society all their lives, who slowly develop an unconscious bitterness and a violent survival instinct that they vent in horrible and unjustifiable acts of savagery.
Nature is cruel, but an evolved society of conscious human beings could preemptively facilitate the inclusion of each individual, recognize their work and merits, value different aspects of their character, teach males to express their emotional needs, and provide solutions.
