Connections Between Sexuality and Aggression

Dolf Zillmann

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317717072
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

This is the only available comprehensive monograph on interrelations and interdependencies between agonistic and sexual behaviors. Integrating theory and research from biology, anthropology, neurophysiology, endocrinology, psychophysiology, and psychology, this book focuses on the mechanisms that govern the mutual influences between sexuality and aggression in behavior sequences and especially in admixtures of aggressive-sexual behaviors. This book places human agonistic and sexual behaviors into an evolutionary context. It offers a Weltbild of human aggressive-sexual behaviors by tracing their biological and developmental origins and examines the plasticity and manipulability of connections between agonistic and sexual behaviors. Strategies for the maximization of sexual pleasures are elaborated, and intervention treatments--aiming at the control of violent behaviors--are considered. Coercive sexuality is given special attention. Prevalent motive ascriptions to rape are called into question and the motivation that dominates rape is reinterpreted in the context of pleasure maximization. This second edition brings the coverage of pertinent research up to date. It advances the exploration of aggressive-sexual behaviors by further integrating the research contributions from various disciplines, and by refining and unifying theory capable of explaining the behavioral phenomena under consideration. COPY FOR ZILLMANN MAILER
Zillmann examines issues such as sexual access through aggression, the involvement of agonistic behavior within sexuality, sex-aggression fusion, the consequences of anticipatory imagination concerning sexuality, and aspects of libido loss due to excitatory habituation. This book also:
* traces connection between sexuality and aggression in nonhuman species, especially in nonhuman primates,
* subjects human behavior to comparative and evolutionary analysis,
* examines connectedness in neurological and endocrinological terms,
* details both central and autonomic commonalities between sexual and aggressive behaviors,
* outlines sexual dimorphism and chromosomal-endocrine aberrations,
* pays special attention to adrenal commonalities in sexual and aggressive behaviors and the fusion of these behaviors, and
* examines aggressive-sexual connectedness in the analysis of motivation and emotion. Zillmann finally proposes new explanations for the numerous documented associations between sexuality and aggression. These proposals combine biological, neuroendocrine, autonomic, and cognitive aspects of aggressive and sexual behaviors. A trichotomy of excitatory interdependencies is developed for fight, flight, and coition. In the nomenclature of emotion, this trichotomy concerns the interdependencies between aggressiveness, fear, and sexual impulsion. A considerable amount of research evidence is aggregated in support of these interdependencies. The author ultimately examines the exploitation of the existing connections between sexual and aggressive behaviors, especially the exploitation that serves the enhancement of sexual pleasure. In this context he arrives at novel, and perhaps distressing, characterizations of sexual coercion. However, he also explores sexual boredom and discusses remedies in the framework of his theorizing. Last but not least, sexual aggression, and sexual and aggressive behaviors independently, are placed into an evolutionary context. Recognition and acknowledgment of the archaic nature of many aspects of sexual and aggressive behaviors, in contrast to the comparatively vernal development of behavior-guiding contemplation, leads him to a unique and provocative proposal of the function of aggression in the realm of sexuality.

1 Connections Everywhere

Relationships between sexuality and aggression seem both obtrusive and abundant. Not surprisingly, then, they have been the subject of much contemplation and debate. This opening chapter attempts to provide an overview of various principal connections and discusses the ways in which they have been construed in grandiose speculations and in popular theories.

SEXUAL ACCESS AND AGGRESSION

In the midst of the applause ... the king gave to the people the expected sign of rape. Straightway they leap forth ... and lay lustful hand upon the maidens. As doves ... flee from the eagles, and the weanling lamb when it spies the wolf, so feared they the men rushing wildly on them; in none remained her former colour. For their fear was one, but not one was the appearance of their fear: some tear their hair, some sit crazed; one is silent in dismay, one calls in vain upon her mother; this one bewails, that one is struck dumb;... and to many their very fear had power to lend grace Ah, Romulus, thou only didst know how to bestow bounty on thy warriors; so thou but bestow such bounty upon me, I will be a warrior. (Ovid, Artis amatoriae, i, 110-135)

With this comment on early Roman history, the author of the first Western manual on the joy of sex made reference to the well-known fact that in the ascent of civilizations, aggression and sex tended to join forces on a grand scale. Today’s teachers of history are likely to characterize events such as those eluded to as barbaric and inhumane. Ovid, however, reveled in the imagination of coercive sexual action and could see nothing wrong with using coercion in a sexual context. In fact, if there is a recurrent, dominant theme in Ovid’s tutoring, it is that women just wait to be violated. The use of force in achieving their compliance with the eager males’ demands is not merely viewed as being above reproach, but is considered part and parcel of lovemaking: a welcome enhancement of the passions, ultimately for women as well as for men. Ovid insisted that the ravisher will find favor with the ravished, and that forceful seduction accomplishes admiration in the end.

Perhaps she will struggle at first ... yet she will wish to be beaten in the struggle.... You may use force; women like you to use it; they often wish to give unwillingly what they like to give. She whom a sudden assault has taken by storm is pleased, and counts the audacity as a compliment. (Ovid, Artis amatoriae, i, 665-675)

No doubt, most women might be inclined to accuse Ovid of callousness toward females. But such accusations, it seems, could be levied as readily against the majority of men in contemporary society, not to mention men of civilizations gone by. Beliefs about what women tolerate and enjoy within the sexual sphere, and about what men need and must do within this sphere, appear to have changed little over the ages. In more or less all known cultures there were and are institutions (such as today’s young men’s bull sessions: i.e., bigtalk of sexual adventure in gatherings on street corners, in locker rooms, around pool tables, in camps, clubs, and bars) promoting beliefs about male and, in particular, female sexuality that are essentially those implicit in Ovid’s recommendations. All such institutions, it seems, have encouraged, if not created, callous, exploitative, and aggressive attitudes and dispositions toward women—dispositions that serve one goal only: sexual access.

Ovid’s caution that he who is noble and gentle shall be a lover last apparently has not lost its threatening quality for men. Forceful attempts at intercourse, short of full-fledged rape, remain common. In contemporary society, many young men, indeed a surprisingly large proportion, trust their physical powers in subduing reluctant partners more than their communicative talents in gaining cooperation (e.g., Kanin, 1957, 1967; Koss & Dinero, 1988; Koss, Leonard, Beezley, & Oros, 1985; Lloyd & Emery, 1994; Malamuth, 1986; Mosher, 1971; Muehlenhard & Linton, 1987). This preference for aggression in achieving compliance is by no means limited to young men, however. It cuts across age levels. It is in evidence even among intimates who have known each other for some time and who should have had ample opportunity to develop and refine nonviolent bargaining techniques to achieve their partners’ collaboration in sexual endeavors. Recent research on forced sexual intercourse in married couples, for example, suggests that women are far more frequently forced into compliance, through violent action, than previously had been thought (Finkelhor & Yllo, 1982; Pagelow, 1984; G. Russell, 1988). It appears that women take a beating whenever persuasion fails (deTurck, 1987), and persuasion tends to fail most often when men demand and insist on the women’s participation in some of the more uncommon sexual practices.

There can be no question that through the ages a great many men have sought and achieved sexual access through violent action or the threat thereof. No civilization, regardless of the degree of punitive sanctions against forceful access and the extent of access-accommodating promiscuity among women, has been without rape. The coercive sexual assault of strangers, acquaintances, friends, and relatives alike has been a most ubiquitous phenomenon through the history of humankind, and it has remained so in contemporary societies (e.g., Allison & Wrightsman, 1993; Brownmiller, 1975; Gager & Schurr, 1976; Groth, 1979). However, although there is little, if any, argument about the ubiquity of rape, the appraisal and evaluation of sexual coercion has varied greatly among and within societies. Legal records of sanctions against rape in ancient societies (e.g., Bullough, 1976) would seem to suggest that rape has been consensually condemned in most civilizations. Rape is likewise consensually censured in contemporary societies, although many inadequacies in the application of punitive sanctions may exist (e.g., D. Russell, 1975, 1990). Notwithstanding such consensus, some individuals, invariably men, have embraced the coercive solution to sexual access and celebrated rape as the ultimate expression of sexual freedom. Sexual violence has been hailed by de Sade (1799/1955), who viewed it as a basic and common human desire. Modern political radicals, such as Marcuse (1957), have similarly endorsed it and urged that the pleasurable yielding to violent sexual impulses be recognized as a civil liberty, if not as an inalienable human right. In stark contrast, others have deemed rape to be an undesirable, intolerable expression of human sexuality and have tended to view it as a grave illness: a form of antisocial sexual psychopathy (e.g., Groth & Burgess, 1977; Sanday, 1981). Still others have seen it as a comparatively minor aberration; that is, as a deplorable inability on the part of some men to check urges that presumably all men experience at one time or another (e.g., L. M. Clark & Lewis, 1977). Regardless of the particular evaluation of rape and quasi-rape in terms of social unacceptability and pathology, however, sexual access through the use of physical force undoubtedly constitutes a domain of behavior in which aggression and sexuality appear to be intimately linked.

In his influential essays on sexuality, Freud (1905/1942) sought to put this intimate linkage into perspective theoretically. He suggested that the intertwining of sexual and aggressive impulses constitutes a remnant of times when communication skills were not sufficiently developed to assure sexual access and, hence, reproduction. The linkage, then, is seen as a reflection of an archaic but nevertheless functional and natural inclination to take women by force. Freud (1905/1942) thus viewed the tendency to behave forcefully toward the sexual object as characteristic, not as abnormal: “An admixture of aggression characterizes the sexuality of most men. There is an urge to overpower the sexual object. The biological significance of this urge lies in the necessity to overcome the resistance of the object by means other than persuasion" (p. 57; author’s translation).

Freud’s contentions regarding access in humanity’s darker hours might be cast aside as idle speculations. Records of such presumed, ancient behaviors do not exist, and any demonstration of the contention’s validity is thus impossible. The situation seems to be different, however, for related contentions that have emerged from ethology. A wealth of behavioral observations on a vast number of species (e.g., Hinde, 1970; Marler & Hamilton, 1968) has led investigators such as Lorenz (1963, 1964) and Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1970, 1973) to propose views that in many ways resemble those espoused by Freud.

Lorenz (1963) promoted the idea that specific forms of aggression have evolved in the service of sexual access. Obviously, in order to gain access, males not only must achieve compliance in females, but also must ward off competing males. Lorenz apparently assumed that aggression initially served both of these ends; he further assumed that the amount of aggression thus necessitated must have been excessive and maladaptive for any species. Lorenz then proposed that reproductive success favored those animals whose fighting was less destructive. As ferocious fighters mutilated and devastated each other, those who fought less ferociously reproduced and shaped their species. Similarly, female victims of destructive assaults participated less efficiently in the reproductive process than those treated somewhat more gently. Following Darwin’s (1859/1887) proposals concerning natural selection, this selective bias certainly should produce a less aggressive species. Lorenz’s suggestion is more specific, however. Applying evolutionary considerations somewhat selectively, he proposed that in the evolutionary adjustment only the destructive goal reaction dropped out, not the action patterns of aggression. As a result, animals still fight, but they do so in a ritualized fashion. Analogous to the tournaments of medieval knights, in which destructiveness was curtailed by honor codes, animals are thought to fight in a controlled manner, with built-in constraints against maiming and killing their own kind. The strongest, swiftest, most enduring fighters thus emerge as unharmed victors from ritual combat, their victories giving them sexual access.

Lorenz’s proposal accommodates the fact that intraspecific intermale fighting rarely produces severe injury. The competition for sexual access is indeed often settled in skirmishes that leave the participants exhausted but unharmed. Also, females are often without a choice in the matter, taking their lot with the outcome of the combat over access. Ruminants, such as deer, are usually called on to illustrate the outlined solution to the sexual access problem. Males engage in combat spectaculars, locking horns to the point of total collapse, but maimings are rare despite the apparent capacity for it. The victor is granted sexual access, presiding over a harem of accommodating females. Many species of birds, although the male—female pair constitutes the reproductive unit, exhibit essentially the same approach to sexual access. The males fight over territories in skirmishes that hardly ever produce bodily harm. The females are then attracted to these territories. Once co-occupants, they seem to offer little resistance to the landlord’s sexual advances.

Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1970, 1973, 1974) and others (e.g., D. Morris, 1968; Storr, 1968) popularized the view that ritualized aggression is not limited to subhuman species, but permeates more or less all facets of human life and culture. Regarding sexual access, anything that men can do to impress favorably on the opposite gender has, it seems, been interpreted as an element of ritualized aggression that somehow evolved from initially destructive fighting for reproductive privileges. Anything that smacks of competition is construed as a derivative of such fighting. Playing a game of tennis becomes a ritualized exercise in violence. So does any other game that entails elements of ancient combat: strength, quickness, agility, accuracy, or endurance. Although devoid of similarities with physical fighting, assertive behavior in any kind of business endeavor also has been interpreted as ritualized aggression, as have behaviors such as “pumping iron” to build a supernormal chest or wearing a jacket with padded shoulders to achieve similar impressions. The skillful can, no doubt, spot an element of access-achieving aggression even in tender love songs, especially in those that celebrate the longevity of relationships (i.e., the securement of sexual access over extended periods of time can be construed as manipulation and control).

It may appear that Lorenz’s ritualization concept has taken the element of destructive violence out of the fight for sexual access. Aggression is trivialized, so to speak, and rendered innocuous through miraculous selective adjustments. More recent research has made it abundantly clear, however, that fighting for access is by no means innocuous. Intraspecific maiming and killing may not be common, but they seem to be less rare than presumed by Lorenz (e.g., Estes, 1969; Schaller, 1969). If, among species as diverse as cichlid fish, hamsters, langurs, baboons, and gorillas, the inferior fighter fails to submit and escape in time, the victorious animal is likely to fight to the point of the opponent’s incapacitation or death (e.g., Dart, 1961; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1970; Hall, 1968a; Lawick-Goodall, 1968; Sugiyama, 1967; Yoshiba, 1968). The fact that fighting for access often proves harmless is apparently more the result of nimble feet (i.e., a capacity for quick withdrawal), sturdy skulls, and thick skin (cf. Johnson, 1972) than of “knowing” when to stop. The so-called tournamental fighting, then, can readily turn into gladiatorial combat. Even the subduing of the female, notwithstanding spectacular courtship rituals precipitating it, can become a bloody affair (cf. Ford & Beach, 1951).

Lorenz’s concept of ritualized aggression for sexual access might be considered a magnificent abstraction. But it should be recognized as one that does not correspond too well with the facts at hand. It understates the infliction of pain and injury associated with access fighting. Freud, on the other hand, may well have overstated the role of physical force and coercion in the presumed conquest of the female. After all, in many of the closest relatives of humans (both monkeys and apes), combat over access is conspicuously absent; and the females, at least early during estrus, actively solicit sexual engagements from the males in their troop (e.g., Carpenter, 1965; Hall & DeVore, 1965; Jay, 1965; Nadler, 1988).

Regardless of the extent to which the one position underestimates and the other overestimates the actual involvement of aggression in the striving for sexual access, especially among humans, both positions entail a projection of archaic sexuality that may be as erroneous and misleading as it has been influential. Clearly, both positions are based on the assumption that, once upon a time, sexuality was a behavioral problem to be resolved between initiative, hyperaggressive men and passive, submissive women. Without such an assumption, the concept of ritualization, as it has been applied to this sex-aggression connection, becomes meaningless. For ritualization to occur, the aggressive behavior that becomes pseudoaggressive via ritualization obviously must have existed initially (e.g., Lorenz, 1950, 1961, 1965). Additionally, the fact that ritualized aggression has been detected mostly, if not exclusively, in the behavior of males suggests that females have never been considered to have much aggressiveness to ritualize.

Freud, in his proposals, also focused on the male as the active, aggressive agent, Libidinal urges (i.e., the forces of the life instinct, Eros, focusing on reproduction) were viewed as impelling the male to action, more so than the female (e.g., 1905/1942, 1915/1946, 1917/1940). Aggression was clearly secondary, a force in the service of Eros. This situation did not critically change with the later (e.g., 1920/1940, 1933/1950) addition of a death instinct, Thanatos. The forces of the death instinct, unlike those of other aggression instincts, are said to operate toward the destruction of the self. For life to be maintained, these instinctual forces have to be continually converted into outwardly directed destructive actions. Males are thought to manage the indicated conversion better than do females. More specifically, males are thought to be so proficient at this conversion that they can place the freed energies into the service of Eros. According to this Freudian thinking, then, females not only become the victims of the greater conversion efficiency on the part of the males, but are additionally victimized by letting themselves too often be the target of self-destructive impulses. The latter aspect, in particular, has opened the door to much speculation concerning a greater propensity for mental illness in women (e.g., Bardwick, 1971; H. Deutsch, 1944).

The Urzustand (i.e., the “primal state”) regarding sexual access may, of course, have been quite different from that projected by Freud and Lorenz, and all derivations can legitimately be questioned. Freud’s projection can indeed be branded idle speculation, and Lorenz’s can be considered based on faulty reasoning. The fact that gazelles, for example, fight for access in seemingly vicious snout-pushing rituals (Walther, 1958) does not mean that in earlier days they engaged in injurious biting. Similarly, from the fact that oryx antelopes, who use their spearlike horns to stab predators, do not use these weapons in their conspecific head-to-head pushing contest, it does not follow that they ever used them in sexual access fighting. The unwarranted, interdependent inferences of both ritualization and primal state, it appears, were invited mainly by redundancies in the expression of social conflict that are due to a limited capacity for locomotion and signal production. Destructive interspecific fighting and comparatively nondestructive conspecific fighting are bound to share many manifestations in any particular species. Rather than “inferring” ritualization from the necessary behavioral similarities, the affinity might actually be interpreted as reflecting an evolutionary adjustment in the opposite direction: The nondestructive forms of aggression that are characteristic of conspecific fighting may have been abandoned in defensive, interspecific fighting, making this type of fighting increasingly destructive. Such an interpretation circumvents the assumption of mayhem in the Urzustand, an assumption that meets with great conceptual problems. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how any species could have survived the presumed initial chaos and its devastation. But it is even more difficult to imagine why, in the mutational advancement of species, a reversion to seemingly indiscriminate destructive aggression would occur and recur. Why, after the nonhuman primates found ways of dealing with sexual access in essentially nonviolent ways, should the humanoids have fallen back on the instinctual use of violence to solve their sexual problems?

Projections of a violent beginning undoubtedly have great dramatic appeal. Presumably because of this, and despite their indefensibility from a scientific point of view, such projections tend to leave deep impressions. Uncritically accepted, they provide an orientation as to what is and is not “natural.” With human sexual violence looming so large in these projections, the somewhat forceful pursuit of sexual access may appear innocuous, if not civilized. Truly forceful, violent attainment of access, moreover, might be construed as the expression of culturally unmitigated “human nature.” Sexual violence thus might be deemed more tolerable and acceptable than it would if beliefs about a primal state of such violence had not been adopted.

In recent years, assumptions about an Urzustand regarding sexual aggression have been entertained as integral parts of evolutionary or sociobiological theorizing (e.g., M. Daly & M. Wilson, 1983; Hagen, 1979; W. Shields & L. Shields, 1983; Symons, 1979; Thiessen, 1986; R. Thornhill & N. Thornhill, 1987). Such theorizing is based on the premise that males and females of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 CONNECTIONS EVERYWHERE
• 2 CONNECTIONS IN COMPARATIVE BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
• 3 CONNECTIONS IN NEUROPHYSIOLOGY
• 4 CONNECTIONS IN ENDOCRINOLOGY
• 5 CONNECTIONS IN MOTIVATION AND EMOTION
• 6 THE EXCITATION-TRANSFER CONNECTION
• 7 IMPLICATIONS OF EXCITATION TRANSFER
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index