ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the topic of women’s rape avoidance from a modern evolutionary psychological perspective (for an overview see, for example, Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Buss 2004; Confer et al., 2010). An evolutionary psychological perspective is a powerful heuristic tool that can be used to generate novel and testable hypotheses across all domains of psychology. Evolutionary psychology rests on a number of key premises (Buss, 2004). The first premise states that natural selection is the only known process capable of producing complex functional systems such as the human brain. The complexity of human behavior can only be understood completely by taking into account human evolutionary history and natural selection.
