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Added Oct ’13: Warning: The topics of this post are disturbing to many.
Biologically, cuckoldry is a bigger reproductive harm than rape, so we should expect a similar intensity of inherited emotions about it. If 2+% of women were raped and we had a reliable cheap way to identify the guilty party, don’t you think we’d require that?
Many were offended at my suggesting cuckolding hurts a man remotely as much as rape hurts a woman. Reasons I heard:
what the cuckold doesn’t know can’t hurt him
lots of men don’t mind raising genetically unrelated kids
rape victims are more socially disapproved of
rape has direct physical effects, while cuckoldry does not
rape victims are more often diagnosed “post traumatic stress”
rape victims they know seem more expressively upset
Let’s consider these last two arguments. We all know that women tend to be more expressive about their complaints – you can’t beat ’em for wailing and gnashing of teeth. But the fact that men act more stoic and complain less doesn’t mean they hurt less. To economists, the relevant standard is willingness to pay, and by this standard new results suggest men hurt more from most harms:
What’s a marriage worth? To an Aussie male, about $32,000. That’s the lump sum Professor Paul Frijters says the man would need to receive out of the blue to make him as happy as his marriage will over his lifetime. An Aussie woman would need much less, about $16,000. But when it comes to divorce, the Aussie male will be so devastated it would be as if he had lost $110,000. An Aussie woman would be less traumatised, feeling as if she had lost only $9000. … The lifetime boost to happiness that flows from a birth – for the mother around $8700, for the father $32,600. … The death of a spouse or child causes a woman $130,900 worth of grief. … It costs a man $627,300.
HT to Katja Grace. I’d bet that male willingness to pay to avoid cuckoldry is not much less than female willingness to pay to avoid rape.
Added 10:30p: I’d prefer to be raped rather than cuckolded; any other men have a preference?
Added 6:30p: Here is data on men being more stoic.
Added 3Dec: Roissy did a poll of his male readers; over 3/4 prefer rape to cuckoldry.
Do Men Hurt More?
Dang, this is nuts.
Here's the thing though: YOU'RE A GUY. You've been raped, but you're a GUY and being raped is different for a man and a woman.
It makes sense that cuckoldry would be more upsetting to you than having been raped, because evolutionarily speaking, a raped man loses what...?
Being raped, for a female, could very well be an evolutionary disaster. She could have to carry a pregnancy, give birth, and take care of a child, in bad conditions, and with no support or protection. From an evolutionary level it makes sense that we females would evolve more negative feelings and reactions and fears of rape than males would.
Therefore I think males should stop telling us about how [insert thing here] is worse than rape because they don’t understand. Men rate rape as much less upsetting than women do.
From The Evolution of Desire by David Buss:
"In one study, we asked women to evaluate 147 potentially upsetting actions that a man could perform. *Women rate sexual aggression on average to be 6.5, or close to the 7.00 maximum of distress.* No other kinds of acts that men can perform, including verbal and nonsexual physical abuse, are judged by women as upsetting as sexual aggression…
*Men, in sharp contrast…judge the group of sexually aggressive acts to be only 3.02… Other sources of distress, such as a mate’s infidelity and verbal or physical abuse, are seen by men as far more upsetting - 6.04 and 5.55 respectively - than sexual aggression by a woman.*
A disturbing difference between men and women is that *men consistently underestimate how unacceptable sexual aggression is to women. When asked to judge its negative impact on women, men rate it only 5.80 on the 7-point scale, which is significantly lower than women’s own rating of 6.5 [and even lower than their level of upset at infidelity]*…
The case of the Texas politician who said that if a woman cannot escape a rape, she should just lie back and enjoy it, is something that only someone who fails to understand the magnitude of the trauma experienced by women who are victims of sexual aggression could utter."