“the vast, overwhelming majority of men (and women) DO NOT RAPE.”

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), that means that 8% of men are rapists, and about 92% are not. Does that mean a “vast, overwhelming majority” of men aren’t rapists? I don’t know; that depends on what you’re considering “vast” and “overwhelming” for a particular purpose. I mean, look, 92:8 is a big ratio, but it 8% of men is still a lot of men. In a country of about 115,000,000 men over the age of 16, that means about 10,000,000 rapists. It means that if you put 12 average men in a room together, the probability that at least one of them is a rapist is about 92%. (I am given to understand that most women will encounter at least 12 men on an average day.)

Most men are not rapists. But 1 in 12 is not a marginal population of freaks; it’s a hell of a lot of men, a hell of a lot of dangerous men who are not easy to pick out, who look more or less like “ordinary” men by any measure. And the notion that that’s a small enough minority that it doesn’t or shouldn’t make a difference to most women’s lives, or how most women react to men on a day to day basis, or to their political commitments and priorities, is frankly nuts.

Pick any of: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Todd Browning’s Dracula (1931—the one with Bela Lugosi), or Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979), in comparison to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

(I think good film adaptations of plays are a bit of a cheat, incidentally. It’s not like “the book” was meant to be primarily read as a book in the first place.)

This one’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Fun fish in a barrel.

The Lord of the Rings, Part I. No, not that one. The one by the dude who did Fritz the Cat. If you haven’t seen it, it’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s unimaginably worse. There are lengthy stretches during which it ceases to be anything that could be described as a “film,” let alone a successful adaptation.

The Name of the Rose. I actually don’t hate the movie. There are a lot of things that it does right. But considered as a version of the book, it’s just terrible.

And, of course:

The Ten Commandments. “Where’s your Messiah now Moses?” Enough said.

MOM goes on to suggest that “instinct” may be responsible for this disgusting act: “Instinct in a young, roving band of teenage boys dictates imposing sexually upon a vulnerable girl…” In MOM’s view, young boys have an instinct towards gang-rape, which they need to be guided away from. …

I don’t think boys have a natural instinct for gang-rape.

Jiminy Cricket. And anti-feminists complain that feminists are “anti-male?”

That something like “I don’t think boys have a natural instinct for gang-rape” still needs to be said in our culture is embarassing. Look, we are talking about rational human beings here, not beasts. If they have come up to their late teens with a more-or-less unreflective desire to sexually assault young women then that’s deeply disturbing, but it’s not something that they are compelled by an inborn drive to do. It’s something that they have chosen and have been taught by other men in the culture at large to think is O.K. An appeal to mythical “instincts” to explain why they don’t think or care enough about a young woman’s humanity not to assault her amounts to nothing more than a cheap way to let young men off the hook when it comes to their own humanity.

“Case in point: For years now, we’ve walked a very specific line on the issue of abortion. The government shouldn’t be allowed to tell us what we can or can’t do with our bodies has been the mantra of pro-choice advocates for 40 years. And while I certainly agree with that point, it doesn’t play well. The past two elections, and especially in this last one, our candidates have just looked silly with lines like, I have a tenet of faith, but I can’t force that tenet of faith on anyone else, when compared with a consistency from the Republicans on the issue.”

Pardon? Every time people are asked about invasive government restrictions on abortion in polls, lines like “The government shouldn’t be allowed to tell us what we can or can’t do with our bodies” does play very well. The problem is that it seems to be impossible to get Democrats—oh, hell, let’s say it, Democratic men—to just come out and say that without and endless stream of Concerned Looks and hand-wringing and apologies for being pro-choice like the majority of people in America and far more useless blather about how much you want to reduce abortion than about how it’s unconscionable for some well-armed prick in Washington to ordering women around on how and when to use their uterus.

The Clinton line is a case in point—and it just gets worse with repetition. “Safe, legal, and rare” is a slogan that uses rhetorical emphasis to highlight the fact that the speaker is conceding that there’s something wrong with getting an abortion, instead of the fact that jailing women and/or doctors is dead wrong. Of course that doesn’t motivate people; it doesn’t motivate people because the slogan apologizes for itself immediately.

Most Democratic men seem to feel profoundly uncomfortable with saying this (Howard Dean being the noble exception). Most Democratic women don’t seem to waste everyone’s time with it (Hillary Rodham Clinton—alas!—being the ignoble exception). But Democratic men have been the candidates for the past, well, 200 years, and thus we have weaselly ignoramuses like George Bush, who looks visibly uncomfortable and resorts to dog-whistle soundbites whenever the matter comes up in a public forum, looks like the Voice of Integrity by comparison.

Yeah, this is stuff I’ve worked over before, but it’s still true. If the Democratic candidates would stop trying to devise creative new apologetic soundbites and actually get on board with the fact that the party is pro-choice, they’d have a lot more success than they actually do.

Well, I treat posting on my website more like pleasure reading than like Mass: if I can’t get together the energy to do it on a given day that’s too bad but it’s not a mortal sin. But if I’m feeling lazy and want to post something, I usually resort to:

1. Link farms — sometimes a lot of stuff builds up that I want to mention but don’t have more than a couple sentences to say about. Sometimes this falls naturally into themes; other times not.

2. Quotes. Lots of quotes. I pick up a book (preferably one with material that’s not already online) and pull out a quote and put it online. There’s 1,000s of years of literature out there and a lot of it is by people who are more interesting than me, so I enjoy turning the space over to them every now and again.

And, if I do have energy, but just don’t have anything very topical to talk about, there is always:

1. Digging up old comments — those that could use a longer, philosophical response, and reply to them at length.

Is it that Andrea Dworkin (who was openly lesbian, for what that’s worth) was writing from a heteronormative viewpoint, or just that she can’t touch on every kind of pornography that there is every time she gives a talk?

I mean, whether one agrees or disagrees with her take on it, she does talk about lesbian pornography and pornography aimed at women and gay pornography elsewhere in her books and articles. She mostly focuses on heterosexual pornography aimed at heterosexual men, yes, but why shouldn’t she? Isn’t that what the overwhelming majority of pornography, as an industry and a cultural institution, consists of? As a political critic of pornography it seems to make sense to direct the majority of your analytical and polemical energy at what is overwhelmingly most common, and most definitive of the institution…

I have my disagreements with some of Susie’s statements in her obituary, but I have to say I found the Googlism touchingly inspired, and I appreciate those who can disagree sharply with Andrea Dworkin without feeling the need to engage in wildly hyberbolic attacks. I can’t say the same for this:

Anthony: “her ultimate deeds and words make her out to be a brutal, decisive, and damaging reactionary who did more damage to progressive thought with her antisex and antimale distortions of feminism than any other intellectual this side of Stalin.”

Stalin, famously, mercilessly slaughtered somewhere around 20,000,000 innocent people, through terror famines, through the hell of the gulag, and through plain old bullets to the back of the head.

You might think that besides Stalin, you might point to blood-soaked tyrants like Chairman Mao (who slaughtered another 20,000,000 himself while entrancing a generation of the American radical Left), Zhou En-Lai, Kim Jong Il, Pol Pot, Trotsky, Beria, etc., or even at least someone like “revolutionary” serial rapist Eldridge Cleaver or violent terrorists like Mark Rudd or Bill Ayers or Bernadine Dorn. But no, apparently, it is none other than Andrea Dworkin right up there at #2.

Whether you agree with her or not, a little perspective, please.

On another note,

Christian: “After discussing the idea that Ms. D. seemingly espoused, namely that all male-female intercourse is rape (did she really say that?)”

No, she did not say that. There’s a reason why this soundbite is being bandied around freely without a citation to any of her work; it’s because you can’t find it there. (It’s commonly presumed to be the thesis of her book Intercourse, but it’s nowhere to be found in there and she’s explicitly rejected that interpretation when asked about it — cf. http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/MoorcockInterview.html . She says a lot of radical and profoundly challenging things that throw the gauntlet down at the feet of “normal” heterosexual sexuality as it is commonly practiced, but this is not among them.)

I don’t mean to be rude, but if you admittedly haven’t read much (or any) of Andrea Dworkin’s work, how do you have any idea whether Andrew Sullivan is right or wrong about her? Do you normally take confident stances on the merits or demerits of political theorists based solely on second-hand information, mostly provided by their critics?

Richard Fagin: “Of course Andrea Dworkin was cracked. She stated that ALL sex between a man and a woman constitutes rape.”

Where did Andrea Dworkin say this?