I'm not sure if you've read even the first link. Because it seems to say that Don Symons doesn't seem to really apply, when you look at it, and mostly reflects a bias in how easy it is to get a conviction.
Moreover, even for Symons, the problem is that it has only one of those "common sense" -- i.e., just handwaved -- connections between being poor and the motive being sex. Again, the majority of rapes are commited by intimate partners, and most rapists aren't particularly sex deprived anyway, so the whole idea that they rape because otherwise they'd get no sex partners is pretty hard to support. We know that for a majority of rapists it doesn't apply.
Furthermore, someone poorer raping someone more successful doesn't have needing sex as the only explanation in any case. E.g., power rape is also just as good an explanation, especially when it's committed by a husband or boyfriend who was otherwise getting sex anyway. And it doesn't even take much guessing that it happens, because all else being equal, the woman being more educated or successful
is known to increase the risk of being raped. E.g., see that CDC page for a reference.
So we're dealing with something that really, can and is often known to be basically just a case of some idiot wanting to show the woman who's boss.
As for the Bryden & Grier .pdf, well, doesn't seem to help much for the topic of the thread actually. And yes, I actually spent almost two hours carefully reading it, and now I want my time back
For a start I see no actual evidence there at all, to warrant putting any claims about "the weight of the evidence" in the conclusion. They mention a lot of contradicting opinions, and actually some which aren't as contradicting as they seem, but there doesn't seem to be much more given there than personal veracity considerations for why someone mentioning that
some sexual motive may be included too is obviously hitting the nail on the head, and why someone who studied 3000 cases is wrong when they don't see that as playing much role.
It's good and fine to poke possible holes in claimed correlations, but I really don't see them doing that great a job of it either. At best the claims are addressed as a superficial aggregate thing, where it may sound superficially reasonable to question the conclusion, but it's not clear at all how that applies to the individual cases or actual data distribution, or cherry-picking some individual paragraph and saying, basically, "yeah, but he could have some sexual motive too."
At best, it's a good list of which books to read on the topic, but hardly seems to nail any answer either way.
Moreover, most of the objections aren't as relevant as they sound. Most of the time it boils down to just saying that, yeah, but someone could
also want sex. E.g., at one point they don't deny that a husband raping his wife may be motivated by teaching her a lesson,
but they think that the lesson may also be teaching her to provide sex whenver the husband wants it.
Well, that's not a bad observation, but it hardly says much, if you think about it. Obviously people do also want sex, but it's hardly answering the question why they choose to get it in an illegal manner when even they admit that:
A) most American rapists not only aren't sex starved, but actually have very active sex lives. (Which by itself is already contradicting Symons's ideas quoted in the other link.) Yet,
B) there doesn't seem to be a hormonal cause like elevated testosterone levels or anything. They have the same levels as you'd expect of a random sample of the general population.
I.e., there doesn't actually seem to be more of a physiological drive than among the people who can jolly well control their dick,
and the rapists vent their hormones more often than other people anyway. In effect the rapes are committed by those who would have the least reason to resort to that as a way to satisfy their sex drive.
So, you know... why, then?
The claim that it's not about sex doesn't say that rapists have no sex drive, or anything. It's pretty much assumed that, yes, they'd like to get sex too, just as much as the rest of the population. The question is what motivates them to take that route when actually they're the least in need of it.
If you want an analogy, consider another need that's actually at a lower level in the pyramid: hunger. You can believe that someone shoplifting a box of chocolates was motivated by hunger if they're in fact starving and couldn't afford food. But if someone has plenty of options, ranging between going home to get a meal, to going to a restaurant, to just buying those chocolates, it's hard to present hunger as their motivation for shoplifting. Sure, nobody says that they don't get hungry like anyone else too, nor that they weren't going to eat those chocolates, but we don't ascribe the act to hunger because really they didn't need to break the law to satisfy that need. There must be some other motivation to take the forbidden route when a legit route to satisfy the same need is just as available.
Similarly, nobody says that rapists don't have a sex drive, nor that they necessarily weren't going to get sexual satisfaction out of it. When talking about motivation, it's like in the shoplifting analogy: most of them are the least denied other routes to satisfy the same drive. If the motive were sex, why not take the easier and less risky of available ways to satisfy it?
In effect, what I'm saying is that Bryden and Grier mis-understand and/or mis-represent the argument they're arguing against. Nobody argued for a version where the sex need isn't present at all, so their arguing that basically one could also be wanting sex is really not adding much.
But most of their argument doesn't really help the kind of thing we're talking about in this thread. E.g., they too acknowledge that rapists seek vulnerable victims (as opposed, I guess, to the whole "she attracted attention" argument, which they don't make) or are often motivated by hostility to women. Even if we grant that some sexual component is actually present too, it still doesn't help the case of idiots like Dan Rottenberg much.
It also doesn't change much the fact that including Lara Logan in that BS piece is not falling even into that. There is no indication that the attack was motivated by sex to any degree worth mentioning, nor that sticking fingers in her or dragging her by the hair was actually doing anything to satisfy those guys' libido. Whatever exceptions or nuances of sexual motivation may be argued for other cases, that was as clear cut a case as it gets of a simple anger rape without any sex desire component. Some idiot Arabs were pretty clearly trying to dish some painful and humiliating punishment on someone they thought was an Israeli Jew, not getting turned on by the prospect of sex with a Jew.
But to return to Bryden & Grier, even then, some of their objections seem to be fairly weird in their irrelevance. They just seem to argue for example on page 189, after conceding hate or power as at least factors, is that there is no organized system of enforcing the patriarchy by rape. E.g., that perps don't travel to another city to rape a feminist, nor seek to punish women who spurned
other men. Well, that's a strange argument, because I don't think anyone actually preached that kind of a rapist-conspiracy theory.
Acts of violence against a group can still be motivated by keeping that group in line or showing them who's boss, even if there is no organized and "fair" system of dishing that violence to whoever is acting the most above his/her station. I mean, skinheads also typically don't travel to beat the most unruly blacks or jews in other cities either, but still nobody would take that as a sign that they're not motivated by showing their victims who's boss. Lashing randomly against whoever is an easy target just happens.
Again, to link it to this thread, the fact that those guys lashed at Lara Logan for thinking she's an easily accessible Israeli Jew instead of travelling to another town to find an actual Israeli Jew, doesn't change the fact that that's what their real motivation was.
About the only really useful objection comes on page 239, where they even manage to introduce a fourth motive mentioned in another study, namely peer pressure. I.e., basically rape as a status symbol. Some people think that they're expected to get more sex or more partners, and rape basically because of that. And that power games are basically a way to get that coveted achievement for number of sexual conquests, rather than just for power sake.
While this does sorta contradict Groth's making power a purpose in itself, I'm not sure it makes all that much of a difference in the end. It still makes a power rape a power rape, it just says there may be some status motive behind it, rather than power being the ultimate goal. But ultimately it's still about achieving something else than just sex.
And even then, be it as it may, for the purpose of this thread, even there there seems to be no such motive as the victim showing too much skin or attracting too much attention. There may be a motivation to use more pretty women than ugly ones as basically points in some social status game, but really, there is nothing to indicate that a woman in a "slutty" dress is worth more points than one in a long evening dress.
Finally, in both cases I have trouble taking anyone seriously who bases anything on "evolutionary psychology" BS. Evidence and data are that-a-way, and evo-psych is just sitting and postulating stuff about caveman motives without having any. And in fact often against even evidence of present-day behaviours in primitive tribes or other cultures, that could readily be provided by anthropologists and sociologists.
Quoting some unsupported and unsupportable evo-psych postulates as an equally valid point to contrapose to actual study, strikes me as the kind of giving everyone an equal voice that rubs me the wrong way when the press does it. No, all opinions are not created equal. For example, between a doctor who studied actual nutrition and bases his/her stuff on real studies, and a quack just postulating that we evolved for natural stuff, there is no room for delusions of it being all equal and valuable. Similarly between a psychologist who actually studied 3000 rapists and their cases, and someone just postulating how it would make sense to them that rape fits into human evolution, they're not equal in any form or shape. Quoting the latter as a counter-point to the former is just frakking stupid.
