you know what? I've said my piece, and I'm not here to argue. A lot of the commenters here have very uninformed ideas; if they are honestly willing to examine them, there are many opportunities, through women's centers, their local college, and so on (that is, if you are not stuck on the idea that these are all churches of some liberal agenda). Even the web can be a good resource, but you can read anything on the web.

Amerigo in particular seems very confused, he says he "practically raped" a woman; WTF is that? Did you or didn't you? You can't "practically rape" someone, it's like being a little bit pregnant. BTW just because she slept with you later, etc. does not imply consent for the one incident. You either had her consent or you didn't.

But anyway, a good place to start for Amerigo and others would be the famous study that was done by showing rapists pictures of romantic, consensual sex and pictures of rape. The rapists reported being aroused by the pictures of loving sex. The mechanism of arousal was apparently disassociated from the act of rape. This surprised the researchers, but they discovered that the aggression towards women was different from "real sex" in the rapists' own minds.

If the rapists weren't aroused, how were they getting erections and orgasms, you may ask?

Well, that part was easy, since men get erections from both fear AND--here we go, all together now!--guess what, ANGER. Who would have thought?

And as one poster pointed out, the erection and the physical act are all very mechanical and you do not need sexual arousal to get an erection and have sex. You need a stimulus, and the stimulus can vary. People watching public hangings used to make fun of the erections of the men waiting on the scaffold. Were these men sexually aroused?

Desire is a stimulus, but only one, and the stimulus that is active in rape is a different one. That's all I'm saying, and you can look it up for yourselves; like I said, there is research on the subject that is considered fairly conclusive.

This by the way is what convinces me that it is absolutely possible for women to rape men. The man can also get an erection from being terrified of a gun held to his head. But the myth of rape says that an erection=arousal, so if a woman can get it up--hey, he wanted it! No, not true at all.

This is the foundational misconception of rape, that erection=sexual desire. Yet this is quantifiably not true; it's even well known, and yet the misconception persists. There are some things we "like" to believe about rape, and God help the man or woman who bursts the bubble.

But in this case, the bubble was burst some time ago, through sociological research which has rarely been challenged, and I'm frankly surprised to see these arcane views on Salon.

he was just overcome with unendurable desire?

NOT.

Save the vicious accusations. I'm done now.

Sandra huffily saying it is wrong to suggest that rape is "not merely a by-product of the rapist's antisocial nature".

Um.....I would think that saying rape is the by-product or even the direct result of the rapist's antisocial nature would be a very safe, uncontroversial thing to say.....

Jee, I guess not.

So what is it, exactly?

The whole "beauty is defined by our biological impulses" thingee is such dog shit. It's a trope by which we normalize our prejudices, including racism.

The King of Persia in the 1800s would not have found a woman like Angelina Jolie beautiful, much less would he have found her fertile or desired to "pass on his genes" through her.

Here's a link to the Golestan Palace photos of his harem:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/arts/design/30phot.html

Surprised?

These women are not thin, fair, or even young.

They do possess some features often praised in Persian poetry, such as a very round or moon-like face. The eyebrows, which meet in the middle, are in the oft-mentioned form of a bow. The eyes, it is sung, should be in the shape of a leaf.

I didn't think a woman with those features would turn out that way; I had a different image in mind, informed by my own Western preconceptions (Walt Disney's Jasmine, I guess). I was very bowled over. Wow, vive la difference!

To us, they're not pretty, but these are the women he preferred, and if you bother to look at all the ones that are online you will see that most of these women are very similar.

The idea that there is ONE ideal of beauty--ours--that can be explained as a law of biology no less is very arrogant and I think we can lay that to rest if we look at different beauties through the ages.

Even Munich's famous Gallery of Beauties including such favorites of the Bavarian king such as Lola Montez and the baker's daughter--Montez and many of the other "great beauties" would not stand out as unusually beautiful today.

So let's give the evolutionary psychology a rest; if you follow that, it concludes that men are "hardwired" to be basically pedophiles seeking to impose sex on all the little teenage blonde girls they can get their hands on and that is just sooooooooo....ugh.