Whether rape is solely about power is not exactly the issue, I think. It's putting sexual assault on a continuum with a casual glance or inopportune erection. Insofar as sexual assault could be called an impulse, it's one that society abhors. So we have all sorts of inhibitors against sexually aggressive behavior. I think there's got to be some other factor than testosterone that drives a person to endanger his entire social order—preservation of which, after all, is also a strongly determined instinct, isn't it?

Also: that comment represents all the work that I will do today. So very, very dizzy.

Well sure -- I'm not trying to say that if you inject somebody with more testosterone, they'll suddenly turn into a rapist.

But I don't see the problem with putting these things on the same continuum. We are (I assume) willing to say that murder is an extreme result of a perfectly normal impulse that we all occasionally have: anger. It's on the same continuum (another one to which testosterone is relevant, incidentally). What's the difference here?

Let me answer my own question. I think it's that people are terrified of accidentally excusing a crime in the process of explaining it. If rape is determined in part by a biological drive that is in some sense out of the rapist's control, then we might partially excuse his crime. Even worse, we might arrive at some really horrible misogynist ideas about guys needing/deserving sexual attention from women.

Those are both repellant ideas, and certainly not ones I endorse. But I think it's a mistake to insist on keeping sex criminals' motivations mysterious in order to ensure that we can hate them adequately. We can still hate them just as much as we need to -- we'll just have to do it on utilitarian grounds.

I realize I'm assigning motivations to your argument, and that's a shitty thing to do. So if I'm totally off-base in the above assumptions, I guess I'd just ask what you do think motivates people to commit this particular crime.

I don't think we run the risk of desensitizing sex crimes by discussing them, if that's what you're saying. Not at all—I just think we're talking about differences in kind.

Take your example: I really don't think anger and murder should be situated on the same spectrum. You understand why I'd say that, right? Murder requires the suppression of an extremely powerful human motivation—fear of recrimination, exile, punishment, etc. Raskolnikov wasn't angry, he was tortured, psychotic, socially diseased—all things that speak to that fundamental stricture and are associated with socialization.

It's not really in our self interest to sin, given the strong negatives we learn to associate with these behaviors from day one.

But do you really think Raskolnikov represents the typical criminal case? That most or all crimes are committed due to a mental illness (or philosophical experiment)?

I have a hard time buying that line. I think most crimes probably have a lot more to do with simply having a base desire and thinking you can get away with indulging it.

"[T]hinking you can get away with indulging it" being the phenomenon that's most interesting. That's what distinguishes murder from anger and rape from lust, isn't it? Not all murders are like Raskolnikov's, maybe not even most, but the way we talk about murder and crime more closely resembles his situation than the way we talk about being angry or hott.

There's some other delimiting factor that enables a person to cross hard rules set by society and enforced by socialization. If there is a heritable bloodlust, well, most of us seem to control it pretty well almost all the time—what is wrong with violent criminals that they don't have the same safety valves?

Aside: You ask whether I think all murders are caused by a mental illness. (I don't.) But why would you take offense to this, anyway? Aren't you positing an overabundance of testosterone as the proximate cause?

Also: Seven days a week I am fairly trembling with testosterone. Burly, macho, and yet kind, and gentle. Can't be good for your theory.