Why Men Rape: A Complicated Portrait of Rapists’ Minds

There is no easy answer to this question. While it may be tempting to lump all rapists into one monstrous category, rapists vary just as much as ordinary men do. In fact, many of them are ordinary men.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing was one of the first people to explore the reasons behind rape. In his book Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), he assumed that rapists might be suffering from ‘a mental weakness’ to lust that causes them to lose control with women. Later Havelock Ellis believed that rape was a natural manifestation of male sexual desire, which was, by default, violent and predatory. These are the kind of notions that support rape culture at large: the onus was on women to defend themselves from dangerous men.

Finding and Categorizing Rapists

Following the surge of feminism, researchers began to delve into the reasons behind rape in the late seventies. These early studies used prisoners as samples, which meant that their results were skewed: the vast majority of rapists were never jailed. Subsequently, in the 1980s, researchers now targeted ‘undetected’ rapists: men who hadn’t been arrested or reported for rape. This revealed a new dimension: 10 different studies between 1985 and 1998 revealed that around 6–14.9% of male college students in the US admitted to rape or attempted…