Perhaps you might want to read this review of Thornhill's work, since I don't have time to spell it out for you:

http://www.feminista.com/archives/v3n9/brownmiller.html

"Anyone with a logical mind who understands a tautology will have no trouble seeing the holes, discrepancies, fanciful leaps and wild suppositions masquerading as fact in the Thornhill thesis. "

His data do not stand up.

And animals are not moral agents, so while they may have forced copulation, they are not "raping" in the human sense of the word.

Back to the paper under discussion:
They had a total of 17 subjects, but reported over 5000 individual datapoints. Pseudoreplication, anyone?

Oh, and Kinsey vs. Thornhill?

Kinsey was a taxonomist, and approached human sexuality in a similar way. He cataloged what existed. He did not try to rationalize its existence based on what insects do.

Thornhill did great work on flies, and fly sexual behavior. Then he went off to explain how that dynamic of control and manipulation could be found in other species like humans, and cherry-picked data to prove his theory. And wrote some really offensive books about rape.

There is no similarity between the two.

it's not ad hominem if the person you are criticizing is actually full of s@#t.

I've looked at this study now, and I really don't see anything convincing here. I can think of a lot of reasons for a woman entering her menstrual cycle to transmit this information other than chemically.

"All women made less money during their menstrual periods, whether they were on the pill or not."

DUH.

But--seriously--what would make a person try to investigate this question using strippers and tips?? And involve an undergraduate in the research?

The idea that economic interactions are the best measure of sexual interest, or way to evaluate women's cycles, is pretty repugnant.

Randy Thornhill has absolutely ZERO credibility. He's the one who thinks rape is "adaptive" in humans, and a natural reproductive strategy.

He's also an entomologist, which I guess eminently qualifies him to explain human sexual behavior.
Somehow.