Friday, February 12, 2016

[emfpplyg] Sex wrestling

Klingons, and probably some real species, precede their sexual intercourse with fighting their prospective mate.  This makes some evolutionary sense: a strong mate will yield stronger children; fighting allows a way to measure, or demonstrate, strength.

Do humans do this?  There are anecdotes of becoming aroused after a fight.  Is it a mechanism that causes rape?

The sex fighting needs not to be fighting to "win", but fighting to demonstrate strength.  Unclear what this means, because holding back might fail to demonstrate full strength, so might fail to exceed the partner's threshold for acceptability.  However, not holding back could result in disastrous, even fatal, injuries.

Each side gets aroused according to the demonstration of strength, and sex happens only if there is mutual arousal from this demonstration; that is, both sides feel other has fought well enough according to their internal measures.  In order for the evolutionary mechanism to work, sex needs not to happen if the demonstration of strength was not good enough.  All of these seem rather different from rape.

Fighting of an unrelated kind is males (because they have plenty of sperm) fighting each other -- but in this case, definitely to win -- and some mechanism for the winners to gain advantage in mating: perhaps the females find winning attractive.

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