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Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

Humans do this too, on occasion. Apart from the obvious but difficult-to-verify night club anecdotes, here's a well-known historical example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather#World_War_I

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It's really just staggering how little anybody understood about what they were really getting themselves into with WW1. All of the horrors of modern, industrial warfare unleashing themselves on a culture still steeped in Victorian attitudes, and general staffs that had absorbed the lessons of Sedan, rather than Petersburg or Mukden.

And yet 20 years later, the same but with much better technology.

This is anecdotal: girl I know had a guy push her after a bad joke in a group while everyone was drinking. I don't think the guy meant any harm by it, he didn't cause her any harm. He should keep his hands to himself but it was clearly not done with ill intent nor was it hard enough to hurt her.

She later said that was 'violent,' then it turned into, that was 'rape.' Really.

She tried badmouthing about that guy to some other drunk guys at a bar to do her bidding to get revenge. Nothing came of it, except some mean comments towards that guy.

The next day I asked her about it and she was quite belligerent in discussing it. So I didn't continue. When getting up to leave she was joking about how in the past at a night club she had gotten two guys to beat up another guy because she didn't like that guy.

Anyways, I feel like this might happen a lot more than is reported. The guy who this happened to said he 'just didn't want any more trouble' so he wasn't going to follow up on it and report her or do anything else.

That girl even made some comment about how 'guys are rapists.' WTF

One example:

> (...) once again stated that she was related to the two boys simultaneously and that at one point she told the murderer that his sexual performance was inferior to that of the victim.

If you can read portuguese, or is willing to try some online translation, you can go to:

http://g1.globo.com/sp/santos-regiao/noticia/2016/10/pivo-da...

On the other side of the coin, there's the fictionalized story of Lysistrata.

No need for fiction Colin, I'm sure you've heard of the Sabine women:

"[They], from the outrage on whom the war originated, with hair dishevelled and garments rent, the timidity of their sex being overcome by such dreadful scenes, had the courage to throw themselves amid the flying weapons, and making a rush across, to part the incensed armies, and assuage their fury; imploring their fathers on the one side, their husbands on the other, 'that as fathers-in-law and sons-in-law they would not contaminate each other with impious blood, nor stain their offspring with parricide, the one their grandchildren, the other their children. If you are dissatisfied with the affinity between you, if with our marriages, turn your resentment against us; we are the cause of war, we of wounds and of bloodshed to our husbands and parents. It were better that we perish than live widowed or fatherless without one or other of you.' "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women

That's a story of women as peacemakers, to be sure (although I'm not entirely sure how much of it is history and how much is legend). Unlike the Greek story (which is not necessarily entirely fictional) the Sabine women weren't specifically using sex as a weapon of peace, though.

Wow, in essence this means:

"Dear husband, please take that chance to die. Love you, honey"

Not dear husband.

Many of those "men" were teens.

Harassing 15 year olds was not uncommon.

Harassing WWI veterans not in uniform was very common.

They're both examples of social pressure, but the vervet monkeys presumably weren't subject to propaganda from military leaders, and the human woman certainly didn't have any kind of feather-presenting instinct.

I think the gender angle is not as interesting as the cultural one.

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