“This view is shared by noted religious theologian Mel Gibson.”

That’s Gibson’s view but it’s not the modern Church’s view. Church teaching since Vatican II flatly contradicts it. Gibson is speaking here as a member of an apostate sect that rejects Vatican II entirely.

“Even in the most strict interpretation, the statement by Jesus does not preclude Protestants from reaching salvation.”

Neither does Cardinal Ratzinger’s statement. Church teaching since Vatican II (Unitatis Redintegratio) has been that trinitarian churches other than the Roman Catholic Church are doctrinally and liturgically “deficient” (which is why the Pope’s Catholic rather than Baptist) but that they participate in the small-c catholic church of Christ and that members of them can be saved.

The brethren divided from us also use many liturgical actions of the Christian religion. These most certainly can truly engender a life of grace in ways that vary according to the condition of each Church or Community. These liturgical actions must be regarded as capable of giving access to the community of salvation.

It follows that the separated Churches and Communities as such, though we believe them to be deficient in some respects, have been by no means deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation. For the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Church.

Ratzinger’s line in Dominus Iesus doesn’t contradict this; it repeats it. The emphasis is shifted to the deficiency rather than the grace, to be sure, but emphasis can shift depending on your purpose, and it’s important to note that in Christian theology saying a person can receive divine grace commits you to saying that they can receive salvation.

Not that I don’t think he’s wrong. I do. But I think he’s wrong because I think God doesn’t exist, not because I think there’s some antagonism here between Ratzinger and Jesus as we find him in the Gospels.

I think you are reading too much into it.

The ruling doesn’t indicate that Dworkin’s brief singled out the description of her as a lesbian as libelous (indeed the ruling says she doesn’t challenge that description in her brief). I’d have to see the appellate briefs (which may be out there, but which I can’t find on the Internet) to know for sure, but it looks pretty likely that Dworkin identified the whole passage as libelous, and that the four claims considered by the court were what the judge parsed out as the statements of fact contained in the passage, not anything that Dworkin singled out. It’s a short passage, and the claim that she’s a lesbian is contained in a single adjective rather than so much as a whole sentence, so it would have been hard to complain about a libel in it without including the sentence in which she is described as a lesbian—even if the description of her as a lesbian is not what she was calling libelous.

Andrea was, incidentally, openly a lesbian, as she attests not only in her address but also e.g. in her memoir, Heartbreak and in numerous interviews. (John Stoltenberg’s essay about living with Andrea recounts how the editor of the New York Times Style page refused to allow the writer to identify them as gay and lesbian, as they had asked to be identified, in 1985.) You might think that the fact that they thought of each other as “life partners” and “in love” with each other tends to disqualify her as a lesbian and him as gay. Without prying unnecessarily into their sex lives, this at least seems like good reason to think that they were intensely romantically connected. But that’s only true if you think that “lesbian” means “a woman only romantically involved with other women” and gay means “a man only romantically involved with other men.” Some people use the words that way and other people don’t; it’s important, if nothing else, to know that a lot of women in the lesbian and radical feminist communities in the 1970s didn’t use the word that way. So it’s not weird or unusual that Andrea Dworkin would describe herself that way.

An argument stands or falls on its own merits, not on the appearance of (or any other facts about) the person who is giving it.

You might say that biographical facts about Dworkin (or Flynt or Goldstein) can be useful to understanding why they argue the way the do, or why they focus on what they focus on, or what have you. That’s fine, but that’s not the same thing as evaluating the arguments that they give (which is a matter for logic, not psychoanalysis).

If you try to argue (as obliterati does above) that Dworkin is unattractive and therefore does not need to be taken seriously when she gives moral and political arguments against pornography. This is just an argumentum ad hominem (abusive form). A rather sleazy one, in this case, since it involves nasty personal abuse and participates in well-worn misogynist gambits. Part of the point here is that nobody would think it’s appropriate to treat male scholars this way: if you went around saying things like “Harold Bloom is a fat old pervert. Who cares what he argues about love and sex in early modern literature?” or “Norman Mailer is a ghastly little garden gnome; what does he know about pornography or sex in contemporary literature?” you would (rightly) be regarded as a twit.

Argue with the text, or don’t bother.

See, that’s quite a lot of work when the books are mostly crap. But lets go through a summary of stereotypical “Dworkin thoughts”, which really is all you’re going to get out of an amateur of course . . .

Have you ever read one of her books? I mean, actually read it, from beginning to end? If so, why not talk about that book and the specific lines of argument that you find especially weak rather than pulling out a few unsourced quotes that you don’t have the context for? If not, then how do you have any idea whether or not “the books are mostly crap” in the first place?

This is important, because many of Dworkin’s critics accuse her, without any particular reference to her work, of things that she never said or advocated. Here’s an example:

You start randomly outlawing erotica like she wanted and you give rise to just about every bad thing there is about censorship and morality police and invasion of provacy.

But Andrea Dworkin never proposed “outlawing erotica” (let alone doing so “randomly,” whatever that means). She was a very harsh critic of pornography—and you can give arguments for or against her critical analysis of pornography—and she proposed laws which would allow women to sue pornographers for violations of their civil rights if specific abuses were committed against them because of the production or distribution of pornography—and you can give arguments for or against her model civil rights ordinance. But she was opposed in principle to both “obscenity” law and the use of criminal law to ban pornography. You might know this if you had read some of the things she’s written about it.

To suggest that *my* use of porn for instance, might somehow be involved in the plague of rape, which her writing states clearly, or that casual enjoyment of porn somehow condones rape, causes rape, necessarily profits from rape, …etc., is a despicable twisting of the facts of porn.

That’s an interesting assertion you’ve got there. Care to give the argument for it?

… the market for visual stimulation, which is a place where she has no business being.

This is, frankly, a useless cheap-shot. A sleazy cheap-shot that you ought to be embarassed you engaged in.

But even besides her legal and porn studies and everything else, much of her work is bland emotional outpouring about why no one loves her. Here’s another quote for you:

Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.

Nota bene: this passage is neither bland, nor particularly emotional, nor is it about who does or doesn’t love Andrea Dworkin (she does not mention herself at all). These are all things that you have read into the passage without any clear grounds for doing so.

Which is bullshit, as a theory on love, and I’m sure you agree.

You presume too much. First, because it’s not Andrea Dworkin’s “theory on love”; it’s her description of “love” as portrayed in pornography and as experienced under the conditions of a male-centric society, something which she takes to be a man-made social reality but something that can and should be changed. (You’d know this if you’d read The Root Cause, the essay from which the quote is taken from.) Second, because you presume that it is obviously false to anyone who reads it. But it’s not. In fact, it seems to me that it’s a rather obviously correct reading of how love has been portrayed, over and over again, in our culture—in literature, in pornography, in psychology, in religion, and everywhere else. Now, you may not find that convincing yourself; that’s fine, but you ought to give some arguments for why you think it’s unconvincing, rather than just pointing to the quote, declaring that it is bullshit, and relying on the fact that this is obvious to you (and therefore to everyone else?) to carry the day.

You know who is really ugly? Larry Flynt. Slimey, incoherent, drooling, pug-ugly Larry Flynt. If there is someone I would never, ever want to think of having any kind of sexual contact whatsoever, it is Larry Flynt.

You know who else is really ugly? Al Goldstein. If there’s someone else I’d never, ever want to think about having any kind of sexual contact whatsoever, it’s definitely Al Goldstein.

Strangely, the people who are so firmly convinced that their sleazy little snickers at Andrea Dworkin’s appearance are absolutely vital to understanding and replying to her arguments on pornography don’t seem interested in my pain-staking research into the absolutely vital issue of how ugly Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein are.

I wonder why that is.

1. 65% is not a “guesstimation.” It is the outcome of calculating the conjoint probability of 12 independent events each of which has a 1/12 probability of occurring (= (1/12)¹²), then subtracting the result from 1. If you choose any one man at random then 1 time out of 12 that man will be someone who committed rape. But if you choose a group of 12 men at random, then about 65% of the time, at least one man in that group of 12 men will be a man who committed rape. I showed you how this percentage is calculated already. If you don’t understand what that means, fine, but quit trying to bust my chops about something you clearly don’t understand. As for why it matters: most women know at least 12 men. That means the chances are they know some men who have already committed rape and some who will in the future. This is a simple and horrible fact that women have to deal with every day and it is a basic touchstone of a lot of feminist politics. For good reason. Because it’s a response to a simple and horrible reality.

2. Koss’s work is not a quote-study-unquote. It’s a study. One which is highly regarded in the literature by professional psychologists and sociologists who study sexual assault and which has had its findings confirmed by several later studies, such as the CDCP/NIJ’s National Violence Against Women study and the NIJ’s Sexual Victimization of College Women study. Again, there’s nothing wrong with not knowing the literature on this topic but there is something wrong with lecturing feminists about getting their facts straight and accusing people of uttering “bullshit” or being dishonest when you haven’t spent the time finding out whether what you’re saying is true or not.

So why did you and everyone else fail to bring up that the 1 out of 4 and 1 out of 12 statistics involve a study of college students? Because you’re intentionally being misleading.

This is simply a defamatory lie. You owe me an apology and you ought to be embarassed that you have stooped to it. Here is what I said in the very first post that you responded to (boldface added):

The Koss survey on sexual victimization on college campuses found that about 1 in 12 male respondents admitted to committing acts that met the legal definition of rape.

Now, if we just grant the measure as representative of the general population (it’s probably not, but the factors that would change it—e.g., the number of men who commit rape after leaving college—would mostly tend to make it an underestimation rather than an overestimation),

I stated at the beginning of this conversation that I was working from data gathered from college students and that readers should take them with the necessary grain of salt when applying them to the population at large. However, what I also noted is that most of the factors that might make the numbers unrepresentative would tend to make them too low rather than too high. Here’s one example: if the number of college women who have been sexually assaulted in their lifetime hasn’t significantly increased in the past 20 years (and we know, from studies such as SVCW) then factoring in college graduates cannot possibly lower the prevalence of rape, because we are talking about lifetime prevalence, and incidents that happened while you were in college or high school still count when you are 30 or 40.

You could claim that all the people who never went to college will make a difference. True, but in order to parlay that into a claim that Koss’s figures are significantly inflated you’d first have to give some reason to think that women who never went to college are significantly less likely than those who do to be assaulted (or that men who never went to college are significantly less likely than those who do to commit assault). As it turns out, there’s been plenty of research since Koss’s study came out that specifically dealt with the general population instead of college students (the largest being the CDCP/NIJ National Violence Against Women Study) and the research confirmed that her findings about the prevalence of rape on college campuses were in fact reflective of the population as a whole.

Again, these are things you could know by simply taking the time out to read the relevant research.

Professional antifeminists have spent a lot of time and money and print in the effort to misrepresent Koss’s study, knock over straw dogs that only vaguely resemble it at best, dissemble about its acceptance by social scientists (it is widely accepted and the charges against it are sheer fabrication), and thus dismiss what it has to say wholesale and deride feminists who have made use of it as dishonest partisans. I say these things not because I intend to accuse you of any bad motives, but rather to point out that unless you have actually spent some time reading the research itself then it’s likely that most of what you know about it in fact comes from unqualified hacks who do have bad motives and who often have not even read the primary sources that they claim to be criticizing.

If you want to have a serious talk about the prevalence of sexual assault in our society and how it is measured, that’s fine, but you had better realize that there is serious literature on the topic of putting numbers to the problem and how those numbers are arrived at. If you expect to know what you are talking about when it comes to these questions then you had better put in the effort to learn something about that literature. If you don’t care enough about the issue to spend the time that it takes to learn about it, that’s also fine, but then you had better not go around throwing accusations of dishonesty at the people who have.

Trigger warning: Folks should know ahead of time that this comment might be triggering for sexual assault experiences.

Unfortunately the numbers are accurate.

Koss counted men as having committed rape if they answered yes to a group of questions in her ten question Sexual Experience Survey (section C). If you want a list of the questions themselves I can probably dig one up for you later in the day when I have access to JSTOR. In the meantime, here is Koss’s description of the metric (in an Afterword to Robin Warshaw’s I Never Called it Rape [1994]):

Five classes of sexual aggression and sexual victimization, sexual contact, sexual coercion, attempted rape, and rape. The groups labeled “rape” and “attempted rape” included women who had experienced and men who had perpetrated acts that met legal definitions of these crimes. the typical definition of rape is the following: “… vaginal intercourse between male and female, and anal intercourse, fellatio, and cunnilingus … Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete vaginal or anal intercourse…. No person shall engage in sexual contact with another person … when any of the following apply: (1) the offender purposely compels the other person to submit by force or threat of force, (2) for the purpose of preventing resistence the offender substantially impairs the other person’s judgment or control by administering any drug or intoxicant to the other person….” (Ohio Revised Code, 1980). I have used this strict, narrow definition of rape and have tried to stay in line with legal requirements. The people labeled “rape” victims or perpetrators all experienced acts that involved oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse or penetration by objects against consent through the use of force or threat of bodily harm, or intentional incapacitation of the victim. (p.207)

Some critics of Koss’s study have claimed that the numbers may be inflated because of ambiguous wording in the question concerning the use of intoxicants. I’ve read the question and I don’t think the wording is actually particularly ambiguous, but whether it is or not, Koss also ran the same analyses over again without the question on incapacitation by intoxicants (i.e., so that she was only counting cases in which rape was accomplished against consent by the use of force or the threat of force). She found that it did not significantly affect her results — if you exclude the intoxicant question then the number of women who are counted as having suffered a rape or attempted in their lifetime goes from 1 in 4 to … 1 in 5.

There’s a long argument here about the details of the survey methodology, the finding of later studies (the short version is: they confirm Koss’s findings), and back-and-forth over the characteristics of Koss’s work. But that leads us pretty far astray. The bottom line is that Koss’s research is well-supported and widely accepted among professional social scientists (the attacks on it originated from hit pieces commissioned by Playboy and repeated by professional antifeminists with no particular academic qualifications, such as Katie Roiphe and Warren Farrell).

But that would take us pretty far afield from the point. What all these numbers tell us, in the end, is something that my own experience — listening to my friends tell me about what happened to them — showed me before I ever looked into the literature. Rape is horrifyingly common. You almost certainly know women who have been raped (on average, 1/4 women) and you know men who have committed rape (on average, 1/12 men) — even if you don’t know that you know them. That’s a big part of the reason why I’m a feminist: because this daily, horrifying violence is no accident and it’s no law of nature, and it’s something that we can and must work to end.

Trigger warning: folks should know ahead of time that this may be triggering for sexual assault experiences.