I think there's a real distinction between violating a contract, and violating a person. Thus we have criminal penalties for assault, false imprisonment, rape, and so on, but civil penalties for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and similar.
Cuckoldry seems more similar to contracts than it does to criminal assault. You have a contract (marriage), you violate it by cheating, nobody is physically harmed.
You could ask why cuckoldry is not enforced even at a contract level. This, I think, is for two reasons: first, the damage done is emotional. This does not make it less important, but it makes it less measurable, which is problematic from a legal enforcement standpoint. Plus, there are many other harms that can occur in a relationship that are as significant -- for instance, a breakup -- that we would not want to enforce as a civil crime.
Second, adultery rates are very high. Some googling suggests the rate among married men is maybe 60%, with slightly lower rates among married women. So penalizing adultery would penalize a huge proportion of the population. We've tried that with the drug laws, and it hasn't worked out so well. Do we want to try that with marriages, too?
Lastly, if foragers permit more and varied relationships, as I think you've argued here, then as we become richer and more forager-like, shouldn't we expect less authoritarian enforcement of relationships?
If it's sex by fraud because she cheated then any legal ramification is going to be felt by more men than women so you won't ever see this becoming law.
Rape is a violation of consent, autonomy and bodily integrity; cuckoldry is a violation of loyalty. Even gentle silent rape is non-consentual, compromises autonomy and compromises bodily integrity. Further, rape is an "intimate" crime, cuckoldry less so.
As for your argument that "men would prefer rape to cuckoldry" my guess is that you're not referring to anal rape, which my intuition is that most men would prefer to be cuckolded than anally raped.
Cuckoldry is not a larger biological harm than rape. If women are the "selectors" and men are the "selected" to override the woman's biological imperative is more harmful than to go "unselected," which, biologically speaking, is what happens in cuckoldry. In biological terms, rape is a more significant harm.
The designation of women as (even rightfully) the selectors is seriously deficient. Perhaps in more primal times, men might select physically, but even today, a great deal of the selection is done effectively by men. It's subtle, bidirectional, and even concurrently bidirectional (mutual?).
I think this assignment of selector should be abandoned/dismissed.
The concept of rape is likewise subject to such equivocation.
Deuteronomy would like to have a word... and what an absurd line of reasoning.
If we take this disturbing premise, it's quite obvious that a woman who is a survivor of sexual assault will have 1) a diminished will and ability to reproduce or 2) a complete inability to reproduce due to the violence of the rape.
It takes an enormous amount of support to help a victim of rape, regardless of their sex or gender, re-enter society in the ways defined here: as friends, as partners, as nuclear family.
Until recently, we lived in small, close communities. The total realm of human social activity, travel, commerce, etc. was restricted to the hamlet, the village, the town, etc. Even up to the 1900s, basic regional mobility was rare and people couldn't marry or even survive outside of their immediate community. In many parts of the developing world, this is still the case.
If rape did not have such severe penalties historically, we would have been extinct a long time ago from the communal and population collapse leniency towards rape would precipitate.
The author also seems to forget that rape is often just one expression of a rapist's larger pathology (note that overall criminality for rapists is significantly higher than non-rapists, as in, they are far more likely to commit other opportunistic or predetermined crimes).
None of the above is true for the cuckolder.
The dyads of rapist/victim and cuckolder/cuckolded are simply not in any way comparable. The author's view is horrific and also totally bizarre.
You represented two of Hanson's points as the reverse of what he actually said. Hanson's point about "gentle silent rape" is that it is as bad as other forms of rape, and should be punished as much as other forms of rape. In your first sentences you are directly supporting his point, while seeming to think you are refuting it.
The other thing you got backwards is where you said "I challenge you to provide proof most men don't mind raising a child that is not biologically theirs." That claim was not Hanson's; Hanson listed it as a counter-argument to his own argument, i.e. a reason why cuckoldry might deserve a less severe punishment.
I wonder this quite a bit when our society values bodice-ripper romance novels. It seems like the rape (or forcible sexual act) becomes "okay" when the man gets the woman to fall in love with him and eventually marry him. All within 200 pages, it turns from a violent crime to a celebrated relationship.
As far as books go, it's a profitable formula so it's not hard to see how society can (and does) send mixed signals.
It's always a mistake to assume fiction = desire. If you've ever seen porn you'll know what I mean. And in those books it isn't rape and it isn't violent so you're exaggerating or referring to some niche bdsm novel and not Mills & Boone romance novels.
In M&B novels, often what you see is performative resistance - verbally saying no but meaning not yet. Doing so was seen as essential to give the impression of not being easy. That is the consequence of living in a world where women were guardians of their sexuality, not owners of it.
You have to understand that fantasy books such as those are echoing the mixed signals our society has already demanded. Women are expected to be chaste and demure in public and a sl*t in the bedroom.
Gentle silent robbery is still robbery and still a crime. Gentle silent murder is still murder. Your position is specious. That women seem feminist "railing against rape" is silly. Rape by nature and by definition whether "gentle" or "silent" is still the taking of someone's body without their consent. The key is consent. A woman who has an affair outside her marriage makes a cuckold of her husband. But she consents. I challenge you to provide proof most men don't mind raising a child that is not biologically theirs. Tell that to children murdered by a step parent or partner. That cuckoldry was punished more than rape in "farmer" societies" as you point out shows that men did not want to raise other men's children and speaks to their possessiveness of women and children. The fact that in many societies women are blamed for their own rape shows that same possessiveness and ego. Men are so fragile they cannot control their own behaviors around women. Educated societies understand consent and choice. Rape by definition is not something the raped choose or consent to.
The definition of a cuckold is someone who is raising someone else's children. That too is without the consent of one partner.
These things are not equal. Taking someone's time, money, and effort to raise a child that is not his is not worse than or equal to invading a person's body without their consent. In would think in court the former would be a civil offense and the latter a felony offense.
Your theorem is ridiculous because it's based on falsehoods to begin with.
I have never heard anyone (apart from potentially Hanson) use "bias" in a way that didn't imply illegitimacy or error (at least in the context of human behavior, I am aware that the term is also used in statistical modeling). Heck, even this blog is titled "Overcoming Bias" implying that Hanson sees bias in general as a flaw to be avoided. In his recent "Is Nothing Sacred?" post, he argues in favor of treating math as sacred because it's the least biased thing to hold sacred. Wikipedia says bias is "a disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is close minded, prejudicial, or unfair." The media is awash with discussions of gender bias, usually in the context of bias against women, such hiring gender bias, where the word "bias" is always used in the context of condemnation.
With all this in mind, I think it is entirely reasonable for someone to read this post and come to the conclusion that Hanson is making a normative argument in favor of cuckoldry being treated as seriously as rape. Calling this a "dog whistle" makes it sound like this is some kind of obscure meaning that people are reading into the text, but this is just basic pattern matching on how words are usually used in contexts similar to this one. That said, I can't be sure whether Hanson intended this meaning (I am genuinely unsure here), but if he didn't, I believe this represents a huge failure of communication on his part. At the very least, the fact that he was using the same language he had previously used for normative judgements should have made him realize that he should add a clarification ("Just to be clear, I am not arguing that cuckoldry should be punished as harshly as rape here") to avoid predictable misinterpretation.
Either way though, I was mainly here to respond to "That's an interesting fact, and I don't get why it makes people mad." The reason is that they are interpreting this post as arguing for cuckoldry to be punished as harshly as rape, and they strongly disagree.
I don't agree with all your points but do appreciate that yours is a very good and well reasoned comment.
A bias is simply a preference and our minds are preference based. We have over 180 cognitive biases and heuristics and we cannot escape them. However, we do have a prefrontal cortex which allows us to audit our decisions and modify the outcome if need be but make no mistake, we cannot turn them off nor make decisions without them.
Also, it's worth noting that these biases offer a reproductive advantage. We know this because we wouldn't have them if they didn't. Any evolutionary change that resulted in developing cog biases would have simply been bred out of existence if they didn't offer a reproductive advantage.
I also think you're wrong to assume Hanson is innocently making a normative argument here. He clearly states his preference early on when he states he supports the broad application of paternity testing of newborns in spite of the statistical discovery rate of cuckoldry being 2%. We know Hanson is presenting a biased view because he never talks about the fact that men cheat more often than women so are far more likely to impregnate someone other than his spouse thus causing the very same situation he's rallying against. In this way he's arguing that infidelity is akin to rape and when you look at his piece with that in mind you can understand why it's hypocrisy.
We generally assume participants in discussions about norm-adjacent topics are obliquely conveying their normative views with every statement, because in most cases, they are.
The fact as you've just stated it likely wouldn't make people mad, because there's no obvious normative interpretation of your statement. But in his post, it *really seems* like Hanson is making a normative argument for cuckoldry being punished as much as rape.
He starts by laying out reasons that cuckoldry may be expected to be punished as much or more than rape.Then he states that he is considering an argument that the current norms that punish rape more than cuckoldry are due to "gender bias", implying they are illegitimate. Then he challenges his readers to offer alternate explanations, implying that if they don't, he will adopt the view that our current greater disdain for rape than cuckoldry is a biased viewpoint that has no legitimate basis.
All of these things would strongly suggest to the average reader that Hanson is making a normative argument for punishing cuckoldry as much as rape. If Hanson was trying to avoid being interpreted as making normative statements, he did a fantastically poor job of it.
Absolutely. To try to defend, define, clarify, or spin this appalling argument makes you complicit. There is no defense or clarifying a comparison that is a false equivalency and a disgusting one based on the false premise that there can be such a thing as a gentle rape.
A. I suspect more people feel the drive to cheat on their mate than to rape (or maybe I should say, "feel the drive strongly enough to actually do it, legal consequences being equal"). This has 1. Led us to draw different conclusions about the sort of people who rape. We are lest convinced they will be able to function in and contribute to society, so we see imprisoning them as less harmful. Consequentialists are more willing to jail them.2. Increased the moral outrage people can feel towards rapists, or at least increased people's willingness to heap up social and legal costs on rapists. If you aren't tempted and aren't likely to do something, you are more likely to condemn and punish it.
B. The rapist comes into physical contact with the "victim" of a rape. The cheater is far removed from the "victim" of cuckolding. Because it is an immediate, physical act, rape is more likely to activate the part of our brains that doesn't want to push fat people in front of trains and less likely to activate the part of our brains that will divert a train to a track with one dude on it to save five. To the extent most people are either retributivists or negative rebtributivists, and most retributivist inferences are rooted in gut moral inferences, this mitigates against treating rape as lightly as cuckolding.
C. Physical consequences for the victim remain in your new hypothetical -- pregnancy, STDs.
D. People may have a moral intuition that hurting someone through coercion is worse than hurting someone through deception. Evidence for this: "Rape" accomplished by fraud in the inducement is traditionally legal. I think the best consequentialist argument for this is, again, that lying is a more common and more irresistible impulse. It costs more to deter.
Anyways, I wouldn't be too quick to draw inferences from the fact that societies in the past sometimes treated rape less harshly and pretty universally treated cuckoldry more harshly. If you think current decision making is distorted by the social value placed in holding opinions that support women, you've got to acknowledge that past decision making was heavily distorted by social and institutional bars against taking account of women's prefrences.
When we hear pro-choice people talk about abortion, we often hear the argument, "you should at least support legal abortion in case of rape". To me, that seems like the worst outcome from rape is having to raise a baby that is not 'yours'.
I think Hanson doesn't go far enough, being a cuckold is like being raped, because a man is expending physical energy and time on raising a kid he didn't agree to raise, since important decisive information was withheld. His entire 'future' life is raised on a lie.
We think of rape as bad because the rapist is taking autonomy that isn't theirs. The infidel woman is doing the same, the man autonomy to raise his own child is taken away as he is raising an imposter.
The woman is not the man's property. Me getting my feelings hurt if my wife has sex with someone else is just as valid as me getting my feelings hurt if Megan Fox has sex with someone else. My feelings are valid either way but I do not own them.
"Biologically, cuckoldry is a bigger reproductive harm than rape"
No it isn't. In fact, cuckoldry may even have reproductive advantages. When a man outsources his offspring he is quite literally spreading his eggs over many nests rather than relying on a single female to care for his offspring. This then offers advantages, both to the offspring and the father who is spreading his genetics further than if he had been committed to a single reproductive partner. And let's be real here; cuckoldry offers both men and women a reproductive advantage that is literally framed by the phrase 'not having all your eggs in one nest'. The woman gets to have her illegitimate child, who has great genes, raised by a man who's a great provider or can't have kids of his own.
It interests me greatly that in your article you never address the fact that if men weren't willing to tolerate cuckoldry that it wouldn't exist yet it does. Why? Because by holding women accountable for whose offspring they carry we also make men accountable for their infidelity. You cannot expose one parent without exposing the other.
It is because the female and her offspring are far more resource intensive and valuable than the experimental XY sperm giver. He can make 20-40,000 potential babies every second where she can only make hundreds in her life. Biologically it does not matter what happens to him, only what happens to her. She is sexually more valuable dimorphically so her sexual nature is protected at all costs, and reflected in our legal system.
I think there's a real distinction between violating a contract, and violating a person. Thus we have criminal penalties for assault, false imprisonment, rape, and so on, but civil penalties for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and similar.
Cuckoldry seems more similar to contracts than it does to criminal assault. You have a contract (marriage), you violate it by cheating, nobody is physically harmed.
You could ask why cuckoldry is not enforced even at a contract level. This, I think, is for two reasons: first, the damage done is emotional. This does not make it less important, but it makes it less measurable, which is problematic from a legal enforcement standpoint. Plus, there are many other harms that can occur in a relationship that are as significant -- for instance, a breakup -- that we would not want to enforce as a civil crime.
Second, adultery rates are very high. Some googling suggests the rate among married men is maybe 60%, with slightly lower rates among married women. So penalizing adultery would penalize a huge proportion of the population. We've tried that with the drug laws, and it hasn't worked out so well. Do we want to try that with marriages, too?
Lastly, if foragers permit more and varied relationships, as I think you've argued here, then as we become richer and more forager-like, shouldn't we expect less authoritarian enforcement of relationships?
If it's sex by fraud because she cheated then any legal ramification is going to be felt by more men than women so you won't ever see this becoming law.
Rape is a violation of consent, autonomy and bodily integrity; cuckoldry is a violation of loyalty. Even gentle silent rape is non-consentual, compromises autonomy and compromises bodily integrity. Further, rape is an "intimate" crime, cuckoldry less so.
As for your argument that "men would prefer rape to cuckoldry" my guess is that you're not referring to anal rape, which my intuition is that most men would prefer to be cuckolded than anally raped.
Cuckoldry is not a larger biological harm than rape. If women are the "selectors" and men are the "selected" to override the woman's biological imperative is more harmful than to go "unselected," which, biologically speaking, is what happens in cuckoldry. In biological terms, rape is a more significant harm.
The designation of women as (even rightfully) the selectors is seriously deficient. Perhaps in more primal times, men might select physically, but even today, a great deal of the selection is done effectively by men. It's subtle, bidirectional, and even concurrently bidirectional (mutual?).
I think this assignment of selector should be abandoned/dismissed.
The concept of rape is likewise subject to such equivocation.
Rape is not subject to any such equivocation unless the reason to obfuscate its meaning is to create 'room to move'.
Deuteronomy would like to have a word... and what an absurd line of reasoning.
If we take this disturbing premise, it's quite obvious that a woman who is a survivor of sexual assault will have 1) a diminished will and ability to reproduce or 2) a complete inability to reproduce due to the violence of the rape.
It takes an enormous amount of support to help a victim of rape, regardless of their sex or gender, re-enter society in the ways defined here: as friends, as partners, as nuclear family.
Until recently, we lived in small, close communities. The total realm of human social activity, travel, commerce, etc. was restricted to the hamlet, the village, the town, etc. Even up to the 1900s, basic regional mobility was rare and people couldn't marry or even survive outside of their immediate community. In many parts of the developing world, this is still the case.
If rape did not have such severe penalties historically, we would have been extinct a long time ago from the communal and population collapse leniency towards rape would precipitate.
The author also seems to forget that rape is often just one expression of a rapist's larger pathology (note that overall criminality for rapists is significantly higher than non-rapists, as in, they are far more likely to commit other opportunistic or predetermined crimes).
None of the above is true for the cuckolder.
The dyads of rapist/victim and cuckolder/cuckolded are simply not in any way comparable. The author's view is horrific and also totally bizarre.
You represented two of Hanson's points as the reverse of what he actually said. Hanson's point about "gentle silent rape" is that it is as bad as other forms of rape, and should be punished as much as other forms of rape. In your first sentences you are directly supporting his point, while seeming to think you are refuting it.
The other thing you got backwards is where you said "I challenge you to provide proof most men don't mind raising a child that is not biologically theirs." That claim was not Hanson's; Hanson listed it as a counter-argument to his own argument, i.e. a reason why cuckoldry might deserve a less severe punishment.
I wonder this quite a bit when our society values bodice-ripper romance novels. It seems like the rape (or forcible sexual act) becomes "okay" when the man gets the woman to fall in love with him and eventually marry him. All within 200 pages, it turns from a violent crime to a celebrated relationship.
As far as books go, it's a profitable formula so it's not hard to see how society can (and does) send mixed signals.
It's always a mistake to assume fiction = desire. If you've ever seen porn you'll know what I mean. And in those books it isn't rape and it isn't violent so you're exaggerating or referring to some niche bdsm novel and not Mills & Boone romance novels.
In M&B novels, often what you see is performative resistance - verbally saying no but meaning not yet. Doing so was seen as essential to give the impression of not being easy. That is the consequence of living in a world where women were guardians of their sexuality, not owners of it.
You have to understand that fantasy books such as those are echoing the mixed signals our society has already demanded. Women are expected to be chaste and demure in public and a sl*t in the bedroom.
Gentle silent robbery is still robbery and still a crime. Gentle silent murder is still murder. Your position is specious. That women seem feminist "railing against rape" is silly. Rape by nature and by definition whether "gentle" or "silent" is still the taking of someone's body without their consent. The key is consent. A woman who has an affair outside her marriage makes a cuckold of her husband. But she consents. I challenge you to provide proof most men don't mind raising a child that is not biologically theirs. Tell that to children murdered by a step parent or partner. That cuckoldry was punished more than rape in "farmer" societies" as you point out shows that men did not want to raise other men's children and speaks to their possessiveness of women and children. The fact that in many societies women are blamed for their own rape shows that same possessiveness and ego. Men are so fragile they cannot control their own behaviors around women. Educated societies understand consent and choice. Rape by definition is not something the raped choose or consent to.
The definition of a cuckold is someone who is raising someone else's children. That too is without the consent of one partner.
These things are not equal. Taking someone's time, money, and effort to raise a child that is not his is not worse than or equal to invading a person's body without their consent. In would think in court the former would be a civil offense and the latter a felony offense.
Your theorem is ridiculous because it's based on falsehoods to begin with.
I have never heard anyone (apart from potentially Hanson) use "bias" in a way that didn't imply illegitimacy or error (at least in the context of human behavior, I am aware that the term is also used in statistical modeling). Heck, even this blog is titled "Overcoming Bias" implying that Hanson sees bias in general as a flaw to be avoided. In his recent "Is Nothing Sacred?" post, he argues in favor of treating math as sacred because it's the least biased thing to hold sacred. Wikipedia says bias is "a disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is close minded, prejudicial, or unfair." The media is awash with discussions of gender bias, usually in the context of bias against women, such hiring gender bias, where the word "bias" is always used in the context of condemnation.
With all this in mind, I think it is entirely reasonable for someone to read this post and come to the conclusion that Hanson is making a normative argument in favor of cuckoldry being treated as seriously as rape. Calling this a "dog whistle" makes it sound like this is some kind of obscure meaning that people are reading into the text, but this is just basic pattern matching on how words are usually used in contexts similar to this one. That said, I can't be sure whether Hanson intended this meaning (I am genuinely unsure here), but if he didn't, I believe this represents a huge failure of communication on his part. At the very least, the fact that he was using the same language he had previously used for normative judgements should have made him realize that he should add a clarification ("Just to be clear, I am not arguing that cuckoldry should be punished as harshly as rape here") to avoid predictable misinterpretation.
Either way though, I was mainly here to respond to "That's an interesting fact, and I don't get why it makes people mad." The reason is that they are interpreting this post as arguing for cuckoldry to be punished as harshly as rape, and they strongly disagree.
I don't agree with all your points but do appreciate that yours is a very good and well reasoned comment.
A bias is simply a preference and our minds are preference based. We have over 180 cognitive biases and heuristics and we cannot escape them. However, we do have a prefrontal cortex which allows us to audit our decisions and modify the outcome if need be but make no mistake, we cannot turn them off nor make decisions without them.
Also, it's worth noting that these biases offer a reproductive advantage. We know this because we wouldn't have them if they didn't. Any evolutionary change that resulted in developing cog biases would have simply been bred out of existence if they didn't offer a reproductive advantage.
I also think you're wrong to assume Hanson is innocently making a normative argument here. He clearly states his preference early on when he states he supports the broad application of paternity testing of newborns in spite of the statistical discovery rate of cuckoldry being 2%. We know Hanson is presenting a biased view because he never talks about the fact that men cheat more often than women so are far more likely to impregnate someone other than his spouse thus causing the very same situation he's rallying against. In this way he's arguing that infidelity is akin to rape and when you look at his piece with that in mind you can understand why it's hypocrisy.
We generally assume participants in discussions about norm-adjacent topics are obliquely conveying their normative views with every statement, because in most cases, they are.
The fact as you've just stated it likely wouldn't make people mad, because there's no obvious normative interpretation of your statement. But in his post, it *really seems* like Hanson is making a normative argument for cuckoldry being punished as much as rape.
He starts by laying out reasons that cuckoldry may be expected to be punished as much or more than rape.Then he states that he is considering an argument that the current norms that punish rape more than cuckoldry are due to "gender bias", implying they are illegitimate. Then he challenges his readers to offer alternate explanations, implying that if they don't, he will adopt the view that our current greater disdain for rape than cuckoldry is a biased viewpoint that has no legitimate basis.
All of these things would strongly suggest to the average reader that Hanson is making a normative argument for punishing cuckoldry as much as rape. If Hanson was trying to avoid being interpreted as making normative statements, he did a fantastically poor job of it.
Absolutely. To try to defend, define, clarify, or spin this appalling argument makes you complicit. There is no defense or clarifying a comparison that is a false equivalency and a disgusting one based on the false premise that there can be such a thing as a gentle rape.
Did this woman hurt your feelers? Too bad.
A. I suspect more people feel the drive to cheat on their mate than to rape (or maybe I should say, "feel the drive strongly enough to actually do it, legal consequences being equal"). This has 1. Led us to draw different conclusions about the sort of people who rape. We are lest convinced they will be able to function in and contribute to society, so we see imprisoning them as less harmful. Consequentialists are more willing to jail them.2. Increased the moral outrage people can feel towards rapists, or at least increased people's willingness to heap up social and legal costs on rapists. If you aren't tempted and aren't likely to do something, you are more likely to condemn and punish it.
B. The rapist comes into physical contact with the "victim" of a rape. The cheater is far removed from the "victim" of cuckolding. Because it is an immediate, physical act, rape is more likely to activate the part of our brains that doesn't want to push fat people in front of trains and less likely to activate the part of our brains that will divert a train to a track with one dude on it to save five. To the extent most people are either retributivists or negative rebtributivists, and most retributivist inferences are rooted in gut moral inferences, this mitigates against treating rape as lightly as cuckolding.
C. Physical consequences for the victim remain in your new hypothetical -- pregnancy, STDs.
D. People may have a moral intuition that hurting someone through coercion is worse than hurting someone through deception. Evidence for this: "Rape" accomplished by fraud in the inducement is traditionally legal. I think the best consequentialist argument for this is, again, that lying is a more common and more irresistible impulse. It costs more to deter.
Anyways, I wouldn't be too quick to draw inferences from the fact that societies in the past sometimes treated rape less harshly and pretty universally treated cuckoldry more harshly. If you think current decision making is distorted by the social value placed in holding opinions that support women, you've got to acknowledge that past decision making was heavily distorted by social and institutional bars against taking account of women's prefrences.
When we hear pro-choice people talk about abortion, we often hear the argument, "you should at least support legal abortion in case of rape". To me, that seems like the worst outcome from rape is having to raise a baby that is not 'yours'.
I think Hanson doesn't go far enough, being a cuckold is like being raped, because a man is expending physical energy and time on raising a kid he didn't agree to raise, since important decisive information was withheld. His entire 'future' life is raised on a lie.
We think of rape as bad because the rapist is taking autonomy that isn't theirs. The infidel woman is doing the same, the man autonomy to raise his own child is taken away as he is raising an imposter.
The woman is not the man's property. Me getting my feelings hurt if my wife has sex with someone else is just as valid as me getting my feelings hurt if Megan Fox has sex with someone else. My feelings are valid either way but I do not own them.
"Biologically, cuckoldry is a bigger reproductive harm than rape"
No it isn't. In fact, cuckoldry may even have reproductive advantages. When a man outsources his offspring he is quite literally spreading his eggs over many nests rather than relying on a single female to care for his offspring. This then offers advantages, both to the offspring and the father who is spreading his genetics further than if he had been committed to a single reproductive partner. And let's be real here; cuckoldry offers both men and women a reproductive advantage that is literally framed by the phrase 'not having all your eggs in one nest'. The woman gets to have her illegitimate child, who has great genes, raised by a man who's a great provider or can't have kids of his own.
It interests me greatly that in your article you never address the fact that if men weren't willing to tolerate cuckoldry that it wouldn't exist yet it does. Why? Because by holding women accountable for whose offspring they carry we also make men accountable for their infidelity. You cannot expose one parent without exposing the other.
bro what the fuck is this shit
It is because the female and her offspring are far more resource intensive and valuable than the experimental XY sperm giver. He can make 20-40,000 potential babies every second where she can only make hundreds in her life. Biologically it does not matter what happens to him, only what happens to her. She is sexually more valuable dimorphically so her sexual nature is protected at all costs, and reflected in our legal system.
Do you have a blog or anything? You articulated yourself so well!