Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 281

Only A Fraction Of College Men Are Rapists, Ctd

A reader writes:

Your reader’s shock about the study that found 6 percent of college men had attempted or successfully raped might be lessened if he looked at the study’s methodology. The study defines a man as a rapist if he answers yes to one of four questions:

1) Have you ever been in a situation where you tried but for various reasons did not succeed in having sexual intercourse with an adult by using or threatening to use physical force (twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.) if they did not cooperate?

2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?

3) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.) if they did not cooperate?

4) Have you ever had oral sex with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.) if they did not cooperate?

The first, third, and fourth options would be probably be considered rape or attempted rape by most people, but the second is much less clear. Obviously, having sex with someone who is drunk to the point of unconsciousness is rape, but the phrasing of the second option casts a much broader net.

It seems that a drunken hookup where one participant expressed regret after the fact would qualify even if he or she appeared to be consent at the time. I’m not trying to blame the victims of rape; I am simply pointing out that determining consent in the presence of intoxication is difficult, and broadly defining sex while intoxicated as rape would likely over count substantially given how linked sex and alcohol tend to be in a college environment.

The paper shows that question two is where the vast majority of the tallied rapes come from: 80.8 percent of the 120 who answered “yes” to any of the four questions answered “yes” to question two, compared with only 17.5 percent for question one, 9.2 percent for question three, and 10 percent for question four. If you exclude question two, you end up with somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent of respondents being rapists. This is still a high number, to be sure, but nowhere near the 6 percent your reader was so concerned about.

Lots of readers were concerned that the study “broadly defined sex while intoxicated as rape,” which might be the case if question two didn’t specify that the intoxicated person did not want to have sex. Still, it’s worth noting violent rape, at least, is relatively rare. Another writes that “Marcotte’s piece was actually more brave than you give it credit for”:

In the past few years, there’s been a consistent, concerted effort to reorient the discussion about sexual assault towards blaming the perpetrators (which, in many cases, are “men” as a class) and not the victims (“women”).

A good portion of this is because, per feminist theory, “men” are the oppressor class and “women” are the oppressed class. Therefore, because most rapists are men and too many women get raped, we can safely use “men” as a shorthand for “the rapey class of people.” From my angle, I’ve long believed that making “men” and “rapists” semi-coterminous is seriously bad for young men’s mental health, especially as they’re coming to discover what “man” and “masculinity” are in high school and college. It reinforces all the worst, most negative, most damaging stereotypes about how they should see themselves: they’re violent, scary, and unambiguously threatening.

Marcotte may seem to be stating the obvious when she says that “men” don’t rape, but look at what happened when RAINN, among other mild statements, suggested that the over-focus on men as perpetrators “has led to an inclination to focus on particular segments of the student population (e.g., athletes), particular aspects of campus culture (e.g., the Greek system), or traits that are common in many millions of law-abiding Americans (e.g., “masculinity”), rather than on the subpopulation at fault: those who choose to commit rape.” They got massacred by the gendersphere.

So unfortunately, even though (as RAINN’s report states) only 3 percent of college men are responsible for more than 90 percent of rapes, any discussion about rape is almost universally framed as “men vs women” instead of “normal people vs the minority of sociopathic people who commit rape.”

Amanda Marcotte – as popular a feminist blogger as any – is quite familiar with all this background, and she chose to poke holes in the conversation anyway. That takes guts.

Recent Dish on campus rape here, here, and here.

Deep Dish: Sully And Hitch After Dark

My entire 2006 conversation with Hitch is now available for subscribers. Because the quality of the audio is not-so-great, we’ve provided a full transcript as well – it can be downloaded and read as an e-book by clicking here. The gist:

A while back I thought it would be a cool idea to do some post-prandial chats with some of my favorite people. It occurred to me that the best conversations I ever heard in Washington never happened on television or radio. They were always way off the record. But they might occur, I suspected, if we just attached microphones to ourselves, had a bottle of wine or two and just riffed. And who else to start with but Hitch?

You’ll have to forgive the quality of the recording, as it was made with a cheap microphone on Hitch’s dining room table, but we’ve tried to improve it and now think it’s good enough to share.

It’s on God and no-God, Iraq and war, love and death (somewhat poignant in retrospect). Listen or read here. And thanks for subscribing.

Of course, if you’d like to listen to or read this – and haven’t yet subscribed – now’s your chance. Subscribe here! Just $1.99 a month – $19.99 a year.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

I spent almost the entire weekend in bed or hooked up to a nebulizer, and inhalers. The pollen in DC right now is Code Dark Red, and it seems to seep into my very muscles. Each year this happens and yet I forget about it until it happens again: the city is at its new greenest, the parks beckon, the temperature is in the low 70s, the breeze is gentle again … and I’m in lockdown. So I didn’t go to the Nerd Prom. Not that you were asking.

This weekend was Hellish on the Dish as well. Damon Linker asked us to re-imagine Hell as simply the absence of love; Islam’s Hell (and Heaven) turns out to be relatively open to all; medieval mystic Julian of Norwich found the doctrine utterly alien to the God she worshiped. Plus: Valley Of The Dead Dolls!

Four other posts: the impact of “white supremacy” on the ICU’s infant ward; bad-ass chick drinks; one of the most gorgeous visual eulogies I’ve ever seen; and the amazing digital literary results when the scanner misreads “arms” as “anus”. A reader sent in his fave:

While he yet spoke, a youth broke from the group before them, and rushing towards the Regent, threw himself with a cry of joy at his feet. ‘My Edwin, my brother!’ exclaimed Wallace; and immediately raising him, clasped him in his anus. The throng of Scots, who had accompanied their young leader from Stirling, now crowded about the chief; some kneeling, and kissing his garments ; others, ejaculating, with uplifted hands, their thanks at seeing their protector in safety, and with redoubled glory.

The most popular post of the weekend was A Grim Climate Milestone; followed by Oh Peggy.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Senior citizens perform various laughing exercises during an event on the occasion of World Laughter Day held at Girgaon on May 4, 2014 in Mumbai, India. By Kalpak Pathak/Hindustan Times via Getty Images.)

A Poem For Sunday

“1 Corinthians 13″ by Spencer Reece:

How long do we wait for love?

Long ago, we rowed on a pond.

Our oars left the moon broken—

our gestures ruining the surface.

Our parents wanted us to marry.

Beyond the roses where we lay,

men who loved men grew wounds.

When do we start to forget our age?

Your husband and I look the same.

All day, your mother confuses us

as her dementia grows stronger.

Your boys yell: Red Rover!

We whisper your sister’s name

like librarians; at last on the list,

her heart clapping in her rib cage,

having stopped now six times,

the pumps opened by balloons,

we await her new heart cut

out from the chest of a stranger.

Your old house settles in its bones,

pleased by how we are arranged.

Our shadow grows like an obituary.

One of us says: “It is getting so dark.”

Your children end their game.

Trees stiffen into scrapbooks.

The sky’s shelves fill with stars.

(From The Road to Emmaus © 2014 by Spencer Reece. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Photo by Jenny Downing)

Book Club: Why Does Jesus Need To Be Divine?

A reader writes:

Question: If there is no God, what becomes of Christianity?  I think for many religious people, if there is no God, they would feel that there is no point.  No point to life.  No point to religion.  Christianity would lose its meaning and significance.  It would become a sham.  People have a strong desire for some ultimate meaning, for “truth,” for a final reward or punishment, for an afterlife, and in their view, these things require a deity (how else could they exist?). And if there is no God, then the core attraction of religion is gone.

But just the same, as a thought experiment, let’s imagine there is no God.  Nothing supernatural in the universe.  Let’s imagine that Jesus was not the Son of God, but merely a charismatic and radical teacher of a new form of love and compassion who so inspired his followers that they were willing to die for him. Let’s assume that the scriptures were not divinely inspired writings, but merely the product of the greatest authors over a millennium of human history.  Let’s say that all of the awe inspiring cathedrals, the soulful hymns and music, two thousand years of Christian paintings and sculpture, let’s say all of that was the product solely of the human heart and mind.  No help from the outside.  And finally, let’s imagine that all human acts of amazing sacrifice, generosity, bravery and compassion (even if the person was inspired by religious belief) were entirely and exclusively humans acts.

Where would this leave Christianity?  Would it be any less?  Would its teachings be false?  Would the strength and inspiration it provides be any less real?  Somewhat to my surprise, when I engage in this thought experiment, I find it uplifting.

Christianity becomes not some gift from God, but instead a wondrous example of human potential.  What thoughts we can have!  What beauty we can create!  God doesn’t get the credit – we do.  Rather than exalting Jesus, if you take God out of Christianity, you end up exalting all of humanity.

And the nice thing is, this understanding easily accommodates all of the bad aspects of religion too.  All the manipulation and abuse, all the false pretense and religious justification for horrible behavior.  Pretty much everyone agrees that those are human distortions of “true religion.”  Nobody blames God for that.  Humans take the blame (rightly so), so why don’t we get the credit when things go right?  No guessing about when it’s God will, or human distortion – it’s always us.  We get the credit, we get the blame.

Seems like a pretty conservative notion to me.  In the end, we, humanity, are the responsible party.

Yes, and we have a lot to be proud of. But doesn’t this accretion of cultural genius and human love point back, at the end, to something more perfect? As we ascend from the lowest forms of our nature, do we not chart a trajectory beyond it? Does this experience not help us understand the meaning of the word “divine” – to be human and yet not to fear death, to be human and yet to choose love over hate, to be human and yet be at peace with everything? “And all will be well. And all will be well. And all manner of thing will be well.”

Jesus, Christianity teaches, was very much human. But wasn’t his transcendence of so much of that humanness something that, in retrospect, his friends and disciples also believed to be divine? It’s the sacramental mixture of the two that captures the essence of Christianity, and its eternal mystery. There is something about humanity that intimates the divine.

A Gay Evangelical Preaches To The Unconverted, Ctd

Reviewing Matthew Vines’s new book, God And The Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships, Randy Potts explains why it could shift the conversation among conservative evangelicals:

Thus far, most attempts to ask conservative Christians to reconsider their beliefs regarding same-sex couples have appealed either to the heart, on the progressive end, or the mind, on the academic end, but both approaches fail to understand how change in the conservative Christian church occurs. Appeals to the heart, however deeply expressed, often fall on deaf ears because bearing the cross is seen as a difficult task: any tale of hardship regarding an attempt to follow Scripture will often only buttresses the importance of the struggle itself. Appeals to the mind can also fail because conservative Christians do not come to their faith primarily through intellect nor do they approach the Bible as a book that can be put under a microscope and dissected with reason and logic. At the end of the day, the Bible and the experience of Christianity for conservatives is a walk of faith borne out in testimony, prayer, fellowship, and service: tribalism, at its most basic.

This is where all previous attempts have failed to sway conservative Christians: gay apologetics have been written from the outside of this tribe looking in and the writers have been open to attack for their “lifestyle,” the focus of character assassination rather than argument. Vines is open to no such attacks and fundamentalists are already getting the memo – aside from the usual reviews, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has already published a 100-page ebook rebuttal. The difficulty here is that if they are too strident or crude in their attacks they will alienate younger evangelicals already sympathetic to Vines’ project. If character assassination won’t work and the theological debate comes across as splitting hairs, Vines wins by default, resetting the debate as a member of the tribe – as a voice from within, not from without.

The book is a depth charge against religious homophobia. Greg Garrett unpacks how Vines ask evangelicals to read Scripture:

What Matthew Vines does so well in his new book is to help fellow evangelicals move from “transparency” (the commonly-held belief that the Bible “says what it means and means what it says”) to a rubric in which tradition, logic, Spirit, and our communities help us discern what scripture ought to mean for us today.

This approach is not—and Vines is clear about this—de-centering scripture. It is an approach that says we should read, revere, and follow the Bible. But we need to read the Bible better. We need to understand that the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality, but a failure to love and welcome the stranger, that the proscription in Leviticus against a male having sex with another male must be interpreted as bound up in the Hebrews’ patriarchal revulsion of men behaving like women, and so on.

Vines reads—and writes—about the Bible as a good evangelical does. Every position is supported from the scriptures, and his close readings of these problematic texts demonstrate proper reference to contemporary scholarship and proper deference to the belief that the Bible is our greatest source of information about who God is and what God wants.

In an interview about his book, Vines elaborates on how the Bible figures in the arguments he makes:

In denominational debates about this issue over the past several decades, the key fault line between Christians hasn’t actually been whether they support or oppose same-sex relationships. From the viewpoint of theologically conservative Christians, disagreements over this issue are merely symptomatic of a deeper disagreement: Is the Bible authoritative for Christians, or not?

If you argue that we are free to agree or disagree with parts of the Bible we may not like, then supporting same-sex relationships is easy: just say that the biblical authors were wrong and move on. But that isn’t how I see the Bible, and it isn’t how most evangelicals see it either. When I say I have a high view of Scripture, what I mean is that I don’t feel free to set aside parts of the Bible that may make me uncomfortable. Instead, I have to seriously grapple with Scripture, daily striving to submit my will to the Bible rather than submitting the Bible to my will. For Christians who share that understanding of Scripture, biblical interpretation on same-sex relationships is far more consequential in determining our beliefs.

Recent Dish on Vines’ book here. Our coverage of his viral video on the Bible and homosexuality is here and here.

Eulogy Of The Day

In the form of a beautiful video:

My grandmother Elizabeth (or Gan-Gan as I called her) was a force of nature; she was wonderful. As a child she seemed to me like a visitor from another time or place. Her tiny terraced house in Bideford was full of treasures; hundreds of books, a medusa’s head, Peter the Great’s ivory letter opener, the caul of her mother tied up in blue ribbon, a tile stolen from the Alhambra, a silk blouse embroidered by nuns, deadly poison, beautiful Pre-Raphaelite artworks, a knife carved from the wood of HMS Victory, Granny Green’s pince-nez, and diaries full of stories from a hard life well-lived.

After her death in 2010, I helped my father and uncle sort through some of her possessions. I inherited some of her clothes to wear, books to read, a bicycle to ride. But how do you make sense of all the other things that someone leaves behind, the things nobody sees, boxes full of photographs, and bits of string? I used these objects alongside images and memories of my own to make this short animation, which I dedicate to her memory.

Can Creationism Be Debated?

When it comes to discussing evolution with creationists, philosopher Helen De Cruz is doubtful that debate can be effective. She ponders communication strategies for empiricists:

[J]ust presenting people with arguments and evidence will not make them change their minds. This has been demonstrated for several issues where opinions are highly polarized, such as climate change, gun control and vaccines. What happens instead is that people think that the person in the debate who defended their viewpoint has won the debate. So if anything, debates entrench and further polarize beliefs.

But, picking up on De Cruz’s points, Tania Lombrozo worries about abandoning debate altogether:

One approach is to tackle issues about the bases for belief head on. Besides discussing the evidence for evolution, for example, you might talk about the nature of evidence and how science works. In fact, in a 2008 study, my collaborators and I found that understanding something about how science works, and in particular the status of scientific theories, was correlated with accepting evolution. This suggests — but only suggests — that conversations at this higher level might be a more effective way to bridge the divide between creationists and evolutionists.

She also acknowledges the limits of this strategy. Another reason she doesn’t want to give up on debate is because “alternatives to rational debate seem deeply problematic”:

The project of changing minds, or even trying to converge on substantive common ground, becomes one of indirect persuasion or manipulation. If evidence and argument won’t do it, how about appeals to authority? Indoctrination? Secret ? Subliminal priming? Not in my democracy, please.

Previous Dish on debating creationism here, here, and here.

Dolls Of The Dead

The above short documentary Valley of Dolls tells the story of Ayano Tsukimi, a 64-year-old woman pursuing her “decade-long dedication to making dolls of the dead and disappeared in her nearly abandoned town of Nagoro, Japan.” Allison Meier finds the film at once moving and disquieting:

The video is definitely unsettling; Tsukimi’s project seems like a sort of Japanese version of the now defunct Possum Trot, an outsider art roadside attraction that tossed you into an uncanny valley of creakily singing dolls. However, those haunting button eyes and sewn, twisted lips capture something about a very real crisis in Japan. Most of the dolls are elderly, their faces pulled in wrinkles (the artist notes, “I’m very good at making grandmothers”). As Tsukimi explains, there was once a dam in Nagoro where hundreds of people worked; now the population is only 37. The school was closed (she’s since filled it with dolls of children, teachers, and a principal), and those still living in town are dying off. … Tsukimi started creating the dolls as scarecrows to protect her planted seeds, but after making the first one look like her father, she continued fashioning them after all of the vanishing people around her, a memento mori both for the people and the place.

A Better Way To Talk About Hell

Damon Linker laments that “the way many American Christians think and talk about hell” keeps those who might otherwise embrace the faith, especially young people, from doing so:

[T]he most theologically cogent view of hell found in classical Christianity maintains that it is the state of mind (or soul) of someone who is alienated from God. Living a life that is out of harmony with God is painful, and to die and be confronted so decisively with the error of your ways — to be made to see that you made a wreck of your life by separating yourself from God, and to have to learn to shatter your pride by reforming yourself in his divine presence — is, one imagines, excruciating. But it is intrinsically painful, not externally imposed by torturers in some fire-and-brimstone-filled dungeon.

Or in the words of theologian David Bentley Hart, “What we call hell is nothing but the rage and remorse of the soul that will not yield itself to love.” In refusing to “open itself to the mercy and glory of God, the wrathful soul experiences the transfiguring and deifying fire of love not as bliss but as chastisement and despair.”

This is what hell must be if God is truly good.

I, for one, find this far more plausible than the popular vision of hell as a torture chamber run by sadistic demons. And I suspect that at least some young religious skeptics might, too, if only committed Christians would rise to the challenge of making the case.

Jonathan Merritt finds that some shifts already are underway, claiming that “many Christians have begun to refine their message to attract new followers and not repel skeptics,” and so downplaying the idea of a literal hell. One reason why:

[One reason] people are hesitant to discuss hell, [pastor Brian] Jones says, is because the only people who talk about it are hateful Christians like those associated with Westboro Baptist Church and “creepy Christians that no one wants to hang out with.” By contrast, he says, most modern believers want to be perceived as kind, loving, and gracious.

“There aren’t very many models out there for how to talk about hell winsomely, so Christians are frozen in their tracks. It’s hard to do something when you haven’t seen it modeled well,” says Jones.

Jason Boyett, author of “Pocket Guide to the Afterlife.” Echoes Jones’s sentiment: “I think some people hesitate to talk about hell because they don’t want to continue to deliver only bad news instead of something that is encouraging and inspiring. The existence of hell is difficult and a challenging part of Christian theology. If you think too much about it, it is really kind of frightening.”

(Image: Andrea di Bonaiuto’s “Descent of Christ to Limbo” via Wikimedia Commons)