xssve
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Edwynn
On the issue of the Huns (and other invaders) allegedly 'using rape as a successful reproduction' strategy, a few points.
Firstly, the Huns did not invade and conquer territory with much of any strategy in mind other than conquest for its own sake. Rape was just the other side of the coin of slaughtering most of the males; that is, for purpose of making the strongest statement possible of the absoluteness of their conquest. In any case most conquests involve more rape in the first rush of invasion. Historically, no conquest I am aware of, not even the Huns, continues the practice of raping en masse generation after generation after the initial invasion. If they or any other invaders had considered it to be a successful reproduction strategy they would not have desisted from it after one or two generations. In these cases rape is not a strategy unto itself, it is a 'natural' byproduct of the conquest, just one of several sorts of violence endemic in the process.
The Roman soldiers who raped Boudica's daughters certainly had no reproductive intent in mind whatsoever, much less any reproductive strategy. It was intended as the strongest possible "because we can" statement of disrespect to the Queen herself and to the whole Iceni people to rape the daughters, an even stronger statement than that of raping the Queen herself would have been.
Even if we were (for whatever reason) to refer to one or several births and subsequent survival to adulthood as product of rape as being 'successful' in that crudest of meaning, I still can't see from anything either in nature or from human history where rape has ever displayed itself as what could properly called an actual strategy of any sort, which then renders the question of whether it could be considered successful or not to be moot.
It is endemic to war in general, modern warfare is no exception, Japanese American children were discriminate against after WWII, they cannot have all been the result of consensual sex, and that pattern is repeated in every other conquest going back to, as I say, the Bible: kill the adult males, impregnate the women, in that case explicitly - it is also a territorial strategy. Ever read Candide? It's practically a cliché, rape and pillage, like beer and potato chips.
And, you are probably using strategy in the military sense, rather than the biological one, it's a subspecies of r strategy, and it need not be noetic in order to be a called strategy, it merely has to work some of the time.
Is it also a display of dominance? An act of terror? Why not? Being the one doesn't mean it isn't the other, it's the selfish gene doing what it does.
You are all quite welcome to characterize it as deplorable, I won't argue with that, I am merely establishing it's existence.
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