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They found that of 405 women raped between the ages of 12 and 45, some eight percent became pregnant when contraception was factored out of the calculation. They compared this with a separate study which found the proportion of women in a similar age group who got pregnant whilst unprotected from a one-night stand or other one-off act of consensual sex was just over three per cent. The Gottschalls believed one explanation may be that women feel more attractive and sexy when ovulating, and unconsciously give off signals that rapists pick up.
    Critics of the Gottschall study mentioned have pointed outthat rape cannot be a very efficient evolutionary strategy when only 38 percent of the conceptions studied led to a live birth, with abortion or miscarriage accounting for nearly two-thirds. The odds, in other words, that a rapist will successfully father a child from a single attack are still less than 1 in 100.
    The idea that rape is an attempt at reproductive rather than belligerent behaviour was first mooted in a 1999 book,
A Natural History of Rape
, by a biologist, Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, and Craig T. Palmer of the Anthropology Department at the University of Colorado, and built on the Gottschall findings to construct a theory – or polemic, more properly – that rape is best understood as a behavioural adaptation moulded by sexual selection, a viable alternative to regular courtship. Thornhill and Palmer suggested that all young men be educated frankly about their supposedly genetic desire to rape.
    The greatest problem (among many) with the Thornhill and Palmer idea is guessing how it might explain rape of children and elderly women – not to mention rape of men. It is not easy to see how violent paedophilia, for instance, can be construed as even the distant cousin of an evolutionary strategy. Nevertheless, their theory has been praised by the eminent likes of Steven Pinker, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor of Psychology.
    As regards the aggression/sex relationship, it must also be remembered that anger can be a two-sided coin. For some people, both women and men, aggression can cause such strong emotional feelings against a partner as to inhibit orgasm; in others, meanwhile, it can provide positive stimulation. This is why for some couples, fighting is a form of foreplay, and leads often to satisfying, mutually orgasmic sex. There have even been reported instances or couples seeking therapy to end their fighting, and, duly cured, as a result, in the absence of any other erotic stimulus, promptly ending their relationship; as soon as the well of emotional energy dried up, the fighting stopped – but so did the sexual attraction.
    The sex/aggression connection greatly intrigues anthropologist Lionel Tiger, because in male masturbation, he sees an easy, natural way in which excess-to-requirements belligerence in young males can be calmed – in a cheaper and safer way, one might add, than drugs like Ritalin and tranquillisers, which are routinely prescribed for such antisocial behaviour. The fact that successive societies have so strenuously outlawed such masturbation fascinates and perplexes Tiger. In the introduction to
The Pursuit of Pleasure
, he writes: ‘… while male sexual intercourse usually causes an increase in bodily testosterone, which is associated with assertion and aggression, masturbation leaves the level of this influential substance unchanged. It may actually reduce the tension and sense of frustration adolescent males often experience.’ Tiger might have added that women who are accomplished masturbators are also familiar on a daily basis – hourly in times of stress -with a similar tension and aggression-dousing effect from, you might say, a quick twiddle.
    There is a special orgasmic consideration too in the sex/aggression nexus, which is sadomasochism. Why do sadomasochists need to give and experience pain to