Alvaro,

Thanks for the interesting discussion. I tried to soften the words by
saying "apparent 'rape'" rather than just plain "rape" for exactly that
reason, but will be happy to use the correct buzzwords henceforth --
especially because I am not without sympathy to the position held by the
Women's Groups. Even if one _does_ theorize that ducks, scorpionflies and
male humans might all indulge in aggressive copulation because it's a
low-overhead way of fathering offspring (good for those who don't wish to
spend time nurturing and figure a resourceful female will either manage
alone -- or find another mate pronto when she thinks she is pregnant), it
still doesn't mean that it's a "natural and therefore good" thing for human
males to do (and by my way of thinking, not too nice of the mallards or
scorpionflies!)

I would dare say though that there is a lot more complexity to the
psychology of human courtship behaviors and mallard courtship behaviors
(whether agrgessive or not) than there is for scorpionflies. (O.K.,
virtually all humans; we can all think of someone for whom there is a teeny
bit of reasonable doubt on this issue :-)

But how can you say that gulls are so squeaky clean? Wasn't there a finding
of some non-trivial incidences of homosexuality in gulls? I seem to
remember hearing about this in some sort of reputable magazine once. (I
believe the magazine thought there were more females than males in the
population and figured this was why some of the females indulged in
courtship behavior with each other, cohabitation, etc.) Doesn't bother me,
but there are sure some political organizations in Oregon that might elect
to get their gull populations to nest elsewhere if it's true.

Leslie Schweitzer