Discussion List for campus-based and allied personnel working to end gender-based violence on campus.

["Chad Sniffen" <>]

See:
 
http://feministing.com/archives/008670.html
 
which was a blog entry about this LA Times Op-Ed:
 
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-mac_donald24
feb24,0,7810608,full.story
 
which was reprinted from this publication:
 
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html
 
If you have ever considered writing a letter to the editor, but not
known where to start, this would be a good place to do it. Here is the
article from the LA times:
 
 
Heather Mac Donald
The Campus Rape Myth
The reality: bogus statistics, feminist victimology, and
university-approved sex toys

It's a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center.
Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged
campus rape epidemic-but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis
is overblown? No: it means, according to the campus sexual-assault
industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever
imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to
persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical
feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more
vulnerable female victimhood. But the movement is an even more important
barometer of academia itself. In a delicious historical irony, the baby
boomers who dismantled the university's intellectual architecture in
favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both. While
women's studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape
rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out
tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys. The academic
bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism
of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of
student life. The only thing that doesn't fit into the university's new
commitments is serious scholarly purpose.

The campus rape industry's central tenet is that one-quarter of all
college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the
end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes
by a ratio of about three to two). The girls' assailants are not
terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting
next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

This claim, first published in Ms. magazine in 1987, took the
universities by storm. By the early 1990s, campus rape centers and
24-hour hotlines were opening across the country, aided by tens of
millions of dollars of federal funding. Victimhood rituals sprang up:
first the Take Back the Night rallies, in which alleged rape victims
reveal their stories to gathered crowds of candle-holding supporters;
then the Clothesline Project, in which T-shirts made by self-proclaimed
rape survivors are strung on campus, while recorded sounds of gongs and
drums mark minute-by-minute casualties of the "rape culture." A special
rhetoric emerged: victims' family and friends were "co-survivors";
"survivors" existed in a larger "community of survivors."

An army of salesmen took to the road, selling advice to administrators
on how to structure sexual-assault procedures, and lecturing freshmen on
the "undetected rapists" in their midst. Rape bureaucrats exchanged
notes at such gatherings as the Inter Ivy Sexual Assault Conferences and
the New England College Sexual Assault Network. Organizations like One
in Four and Men Can Stop Rape tried to persuade college boys to redefine
their masculinity away from the "rape culture." The college rape
infrastructure shows no signs of a slowdown. In 2006, for example, Yale
created a new Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education
Center, despite numerous resources for rape victims already on campus.

If the one-in-four statistic is correct-it is sometimes modified to
"one-in-five to one-in-four"-campus rape represents a crime wave of
unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape,
has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even
over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most
violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and
aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants-a rate of 2.4 percent. The
one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young
women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of
murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require
nothing less than a state of emergency-Take Back the Night rallies and
24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of
sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of
vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning
boys entirely. The nation's nearly 10 million female undergrads would
need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they
would have to alter their sexual behavior radically to avoid falling
prey to the rape epidemic.

None of this crisis response occurs, of course-because the crisis
doesn't exist. During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the
rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they
had been raped yielded disappointing results-very few women said that
they had been. So Ms. commissioned University of Arizona public health
professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the
prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per
se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then
classified as rape. Koss's method produced the 25 percent rate, which
Ms. then published.

Koss's study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly
ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare
professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation
of Koss's research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women
whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn't been raped.
Further-though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily
have sex again with the fiend who attacked her-42 percent of Koss's
supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

All subsequent feminist rape studies have resulted in this discrepancy
between the researchers' conclusions and the subjects' own views. A
survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only
23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims
felt that they had been raped-a result that the university's director of
Sexual and Domestic Violence Services calls "discouraging." Equally
damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the
Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of what the feminist
researchers called "completed rape" victims and three-quarters of
"attempted rape" victims said that they did not think that their
experiences were "serious enough to report." The "victims" in the study,
moreover, "generally did not state that their victimization resulted in
physical or emotional injuries," report the researchers.

Just as a reality check, consider an actual student-related rape: in
2006, Labrente Robinson and Jacoby Robinson broke into the Philadelphia
home of a Temple University student and a Temple graduate, and anally,
vaginally, and orally penetrated the women, including with a gun. The
chance that the victims would not consider this event "serious enough to
report," or physically and emotionally injurious, is exactly nil. In
short, believing in the campus rape epidemic depends on ignoring women's
own interpretations of their experiences-supposedly the most grievous
sin in the feminist political code.

None of the obvious weaknesses in the research has had the slightest
drag on the campus rape movement, because the movement is political, not
empirical. In a rape culture, which "condones physical and emotional
terrorism against women as a norm," sexual assault will wind up
underreported, argued the director of Yale's Sexual Harassment and
Assault Resources and Education Center in a March 2007 newsletter. You
don't need evidence for the rape culture; you simply know that it
exists. But if you do need evidence, the underreporting of rape is the
best proof there is.

Campus rape researchers may feel that they know better than female
students themselves about the students' sexual experiences, but the
students are voting with their feet and staying away in droves from the
massive rape apparatus built up since the Ms. article. Referring to rape
hotlines, rape consultant Brett Sokolow laments: "The problem is, on so
many of our campuses, very few people ever call. And mostly, we've
resigned ourselves to the under-utilization of these resources."

Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their
students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults-the law does not
require their confirmation-usually run under half a dozen a year on
private campuses and maybe two to three times that at large public
universities. You might think that having so few reports of sexual
assault a year would be a point of pride; in fact, it's a source of gall
for students and administrators alike. Yale's associate general counsel
and vice president were clearly on the defensive when asked by the Yale
alumni magazine in 2004 about Harvard's higher numbers of reported
assaults; the reporter might as well have been needling them about a
Harvard-Yale football rout. "Harvard must have double-counted or
included incidents not required by federal law," groused the officials.
The University of Virginia does not publish the number of its
sexual-assault hearings because it is so low. "We're reticent to
publicize it when we have such a small 'n' number," says Nicole Eramu,
Virginia's associate dean of students.

Campuses do everything they can to get their numbers of reported and
adjudicated sexual assaults up-adding new categories of lesser offenses,
lowering the burden of proof, and devising hearing procedures that will
elicit more assault charges. At Yale, it is the accuser who decides
whether the accused may confront her-a sacrifice of one of the great
Anglo-Saxon truth-finding procedures. "You don't want them to not come
to the board and report, do you?" asks physics professor Peter Parker,
convener of the university's Sexual Harassment Grievance Board.

The scarcity of reported sexual assaults means that the women who do
report them must be treated like rare treasures. New York University's
Wellness Exchange counsels people to "believe unconditionally" in
sexual-assault charges because "only 2 percent of reported rapes are
false reports" (a ubiquitous claim that dates from radical feminist
Susan Brownmiller's 1975 tract Against Our Will). As Stuart Taylor and
K. C. Johnson point out in their book Until Proven Innocent, however,
the rate of false reports is at least 9 percent and probably closer to
50 percent. Just how powerful is the "believe unconditionally" credo?
David Lisak, a University of Massachusetts psychology professor who
lectures constantly on the antirape college circuit, acknowledged to a
hall of Rutgers students this November that the "Duke case," in which a
black stripper falsely accused three white Duke lacrosse players of rape
in 2006, "has raised the issue of false allegations." But Lisak didn't
want to talk about the Duke case, he said. "I don't know what happened
at Duke. No one knows." Actually, we do know what happened at Duke: the
prosecutor ignored clearly exculpatory evidence and alibis that cleared
the defendants, and was later disbarred for his misconduct. But to the
campus rape industry, a lying plaintiff remains a victim of the
patriarchy, and the accused remain forever under suspicion.

So what reality does lie behind the campus rape industry? A booze-fueled
hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands.
Students in the sixties demanded that college administrators stop
setting rules for fraternization. "We're adults," the students shouted.
"We can manage our own lives. If we want to have members of the opposite
sex in our rooms at any hour of the day or night, that's our right." The
colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora's box of boorish, sluttish
behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the
testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? You bet! Do the
girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.

College girls drink themselves into near or actual oblivion before and
during parties. That drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests
University of Virginia graduate Karin Agness: it frees the drinker from
responsibility and "provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she
ordinarily wouldn't." A Columbia University security official marvels at
the scene at homecomings: "The women are shit-faced, saying, 'Let's get
as drunk as we can,' while the men are hovering over them." As
anticipated, the night can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a
guy whom the girl may not even know. This less-than-romantic denouement
produces the "roll and scream: you roll over the next morning so
horrified at what you find next to you that you scream," a Duke coed
reports in Laura Sessions Stepp's recent book Unhooked. To the extent
that they're remembered at all, these are the couplings that are
occasionally transformed into "rape"-though far less often than the
campus rape industry wishes.

The magazine Saturday Night: Untold Stories of Sexual Assault at
Harvard, produced by Harvard's Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and
Response, provides a first-person account of such a coupling:

        What can I tell you about being raped? Very little. I remember
drinking with some girlfriends and then heading to a party in the house
that some seniors were throwing. I'm told that I walked in and within 5
minutes was making out with one of the guys who lived there, who I'd
talked to some in the dining hall but never really hung out with. I may
have initiated it. I don't remember arriving at the party; I dimly
remember waking up at some point in the early morning in this guy's
room. I remember him walking me back to my room. I couldn't have made it
alone; I still had too much alcohol in my system to even stand up
straight. I made myself vulnerable and even now it's hard to think that
someone here who I have talked and laughed with could be cold-hearted
enough to take advantage of that vulnerability. I'd rather, sometimes,
take half the blame than believe that a profound evil can exist in
mankind. But it's easy for me to say, that, of the two of us, I'm the
only one who still has nightmares, found myself panicking and detaching
during sex for many months afterwards, and spent more time looking into
the abyss than any one person should.

        The inequalities of the consequences of the night, the actions
taken unintentionally or not, have changed the course of only one of our
lives, irrevocably and profoundly.

Now perhaps the male willfully exploited the narrator's self-inflicted
incapacitation; if so, he deserves censure for taking advantage of a
female in distress. But to hold the narrator completely without
responsibility requires stripping women of volition and moral agency.
Though the Harvard victim does not remember her actions, it's highly
unlikely that she passed out upon arriving at the party and was dragged
away like roadkill while other students looked on. Rather, she probably
participated voluntarily in the usual prelude to intercourse, and
probably even in intercourse itself, however woozily.

Even if the Harvard victim's drunkenness cancels any responsibility that
she might share for the interaction's finale, is she equally without
responsibility for all of her behavior up to that point, including
getting so drunk that she can't remember anything? Campus rape ideology
holds that inebriation strips women of responsibility for their actions
but preserves male responsibility not only for their own actions but for
their partners' as well. Thus do men again become the guardians of
female well-being.

As for the story's maudlin melodrama, perhaps the narrator's life really
has been "irrevocably" changed, for which one sympathizes. One can't
help observing, however, that the effect of this "profound evil" on at
least her sex life appears to have been minimal-she "detached" during
sex for "many months afterwards," but sex she most certainly had. Real
rape victims, however, can fear physical intimacy for years, along with
suffering a host of other terrors. We don't know if the narrator's "look
into the abyss" led her to reconsider getting plastered before parties
and initiating sexual contact with casual acquaintances. But if a
Harvard student doesn't understand that getting very drunk and becoming
physically involved with a boy at a hookup party carries a serious
probability of intercourse, she's at the wrong university, if she should
be at college at all.

A large number of complicating factors make the Saturday Night story a
far more problematic case than the term "rape" usually implies. Unlike
the campus rape industry, most students are well aware of those
complicating factors, which is why there are so few rape charges brought
for college sex. But if the rape industrialists are so sure that
foreseeable and seemingly cooperative drunken sex amounts to rape, there
are some obvious steps that they could take to prevent it. Above all,
they could persuade girls not to put themselves into situations whose
likely outcome is intercourse. Specifically: don't get drunk, don't get
into bed with a guy, and don't take off your clothes or allow them to be
removed. Once you're in that situation, the rape activists could say,
it's going to be hard to halt the proceedings, for lots of complex
emotional reasons. Were this advice heeded, the campus "rape" epidemic
would be wiped out overnight.

But suggest to a rape bureaucrat that female students should behave with
greater sexual restraint as a preventive measure, and you might as well
be saying that the girls should enter a convent or don the burka. "I am
uncomfortable with the idea," e-mailed Hillary Wing-Richards, the
associate director of the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and
Women's Resource Center at James Madison University in Virginia. "This
indicates that if [female students] are raped it could be their fault-it
is never their fault-and how one dresses does not invite rape or
violence. . . . I would never allow my staff or myself to send the
message it is the victim's fault due to their dress or lack of restraint
in any way." Putting on a tight tank top doesn't, of course, lead to
what the bureaucrats call "rape." But taking off that tank top does
increase the risk of sexual intercourse that will be later regretted,
especially when the tank-topper has been intently mainlining rum and
Cokes all evening.

The baby boomers who demanded the dismantling of all campus rules
governing the relations between the sexes now sit in dean's offices and
student-counseling services. They cannot turn around and argue for
reregulating sex, even on pragmatic grounds. Instead, they have
responded to the fallout of the college sexual revolution with bizarre
and anachronistic legalism. Campuses have created a judicial
infrastructure for responding to postcoital second thoughts more complex
than that required to adjudicate maritime commerce claims in Renaissance
Venice.

University of Virginia students, for example, have at least three
different procedural channels open to them following carnal knowledge:
they may demand a formal adjudication before the Sexual Assault Board;
they can request a "Structured Meeting" with the Office of the Dean of
Students by filing a formal complaint; or they can seek voluntary
mediation. The Structured Meetings are presided over by the chair of the
Sexual Assault Board, with assistance from another board member or
senior staff of the Office of the Dean of Students. The Structured
Meeting, according to the university, is an "opportunity for the
complainant to confront the accused and communicate their feelings and
perceptions regarding the incident, the impact of the incident and their
wishes and expectations regarding protection in the future." Mediation,
on the other hand, "allows both you and the accused to discuss your
respective understandings of the assault with the guidance of a trained
professional," says the school's sexual-assault center.

Rarely have primal lust and carousing been more weirdly paired with
their opposites. Out in the real world, people who regret a sexual
coupling must work it out on their own; no counterpart exists outside
academia for this superstructure of hearings, mediations, and negotiated
settlements. If you've actually been raped, you go to criminal court-but
the overwhelming majority of campus "rape" cases that take up
administration time and resources would get thrown out of court in a
twinkling, which is why they're almost never prosecuted. Indeed, if the
campus rape industry really believes that these hookup encounters are
rape, it is unconscionable to leave them to flimsy academic procedures.
"Universities are equipped to handle plagiarism, not rape," observes
University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors.
"Sexual-assault charges, if true, are so serious as to belong only in
the criminal system."

Risk-management consultants travel the country to help colleges craft
legal rules for student sexual congress. These rules presume that an
activity originating in inchoate desire, whose nuances have taxed the
expressive powers of poets, artists, and philosophers for centuries, can
be reduced to a species of commercial code. The process of crafting
these rules combines a voyeuristic prurience and a seeming cluelessness
about sex. "It is fun," writes Alan D. Berkowitz, a popular campus rape
lecturer and consultant, "to ask students how they know if someone is
sexually interested in them." (Fun for whom? one must ask.) Continues
Berkowitz: "Many of the responses rely on guesswork and inference to
determine sexual intent." Such signaling mechanisms, dating from the
dawn of the human race, are no longer acceptable on the rape-sensitized
campus. "In fact," explains our consultant, "sexual intent can only be
determined by clear and unambiguous communication about what is
desired." So much for seduction and romance; bring in the MBAs and
lawyers.

The campus sex-management industry locks in its livelihood by
introducing a specious clarity to what is inherently mysterious and an
equally specious complexity to what is straightforward. Both the
pseudo-clarity and pseudo-complexity work in a woman's favor, of course.
"If one partner puts a condom on the other, does that signify that they
are consenting to intercourse?" asks Berkowitz. Short of guiding the
thus-sheathed instrumentality to port, it's hard to imagine a clearer
signal of consent. But perhaps a girl who has just so outfitted her
partner will decide after the fact that she has been "raped"-so better
to declare the action, as Berkowitz does, "inherently ambiguous." He
recommends instead that colleges require "clear verbal consent" for sex,
a policy that the recently disbanded Antioch College introduced in the
early 1990s to universal derision.

The university is sneaking back in its in loco parentis oversight of
student sexual relations, but it has replaced the moral content of that
regulation with supposedly neutral legal procedure. The generation that
got rid of parietal rules has re-created a form of bedroom oversight as
pervasive as Bentham's Panopticon.

But the post-1960s university is nothing if not capacious. It has
institutionalized every strand of adolescent-inspired rebellion familiar
since student sit-in days. The campus rape industry may decry ubiquitous
male predation, but a campus sex industry puts bureaucratic clout behind
the message that students should have recreational sex at every
opportunity.

In late October, for example, New York University's professional
"sexpert" set up her wares in the light-filled atrium of the Kimmel
Student Center. Along with the usual baskets of lubricated condoms,
female condoms, and dental dams (a lesbian-inspired latex innovation for
"safe" oral sex), Alyssa La Fosse, looking thoroughly professional in a
neatly coiffed bun, also provided brightly colored instructional sheets
on such important topics as "How to Female Ejaculate" ("First take some
time to get aroused. Lube up your fingers and let them do the walking")
and "Masturbation Tips for Girls" ("Draw a circle around your clitoris
with your index finger"). In a heroic effort at inclusiveness, she also
provided a pamphlet called "Exploring Your Options: Abstinence," but a
reader could be forgiven for thinking that he had mistakenly grabbed the
menu of activities at a West Village bathhouse. NYU's officially
approved "abstinence options" include "outercourse, mutual masturbation,
pornography, and sex toys such as vibrators, dildos, and a paddle." Ever
the responsible parent-surrogate, NYU recommends that "abstinence"
practitioners cover their sex toys "with a condom if they are to be
inserted in the mouth, anus, or vagina."

The students passing La Fosse's table showed a greater interest in the
free Hershey's Kisses than in the latex accessories and informational
sheets; very occasionally, someone would grab a condom. No one brought
"questions about sexuality or sexual health" to La Fosse, despite the
university's official invitation to do so. NYU is not about to be
daunted in its mission of promoting better sex, however. So it also
offers workshops on orgasms-"how to achieve that (sometimes elusive)
state"-and "Sex Toys for Safer Sex" ("an evening with rubber, silicone,
and vibrating toys") in residence halls and various student clubs.

Similarly, Brown University's Student Services helps students answer the
compelling question: "How can I bring sex toys into my relationship?"
Brown categorizes sex toys by function ("Some sex toys are meant to be
used more gently, while others are used for sexual acts involving
dominance and submission . . . such as restraints, blindfolds, and
whips") and offers the usual safe-sex caveats ("If sharing sex toys,
such as dildos, butt plugs, or vibrators, use condoms and dental dams").
UCLA's Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center advises on how a
man might "increase the amount of time before he ejaculates"; Tufts
University's 2006 Sex Fair featured a "Dildo Ring Toss" and dental-dam
slingshots; and Barnard College suggests that participants in
sadomasochistic sex, "where 'no, please don't' . . . can be a part of
the fun," agree on a "safeword" that "will stop all play immediately." A
Princeton student who thinks that a "docking sleeve" may be some kind of
maritime hardware, or a "suction device" something used for plumbing,
had better bone up, so to speak, before playing the school's official
"Safer Sex Jeopardy" game, because these objects are in the "grab bag"
categories of penile toys and nipple toys, respectively. Encyclopedic
knowledge is advisable: game developers list six types of vibrators,
including the "rabbit vibrator," and eight kinds of penile toys,
including the "pocket pussy."

By now, universities have traveled so far from their original task of
immersing students in the greatest intellectual and artistic creations
of humanity that criticizing any particular detour seems arbitrary.
Still, the question presents itself: Why, exactly, are the schools
offering workshops on orgasms and sex toys instead of on Michelangelo's
Campidoglio or Pushkin's Eugene Onegin? Are students already so
saturated with knowledge of Renaissance humanism or the evolution of
constitutional democracy, say, that colleges can happily reroute
resources to matters readily available on porn websites?

Strange Bedfellows at William and Mary

Anyone who still thinks of sorority girls as cashmere-clad innocents,
giggling as they wait by the phone for that special someone to call,
won't understand much of the campus "date rape" scene. A few incidents
at the College of William and Mary, a pioneer in sexual-assault
awareness, may correct lingering misconceptions.

In October 2005, at a Delta Delta Delta formal, drunken sorority girls
careened through the host's house, vomiting, falling, and breaking
furnishings. One girl ran naked through a hallway; another was found
half-naked with a male on the bed in the master suite. A third had
intercourse with her escort in a different bedroom. On the bus back from
the formal, she was seen kissing her escort; once she arrived home, she
had sex with a different male. Later, she accused her escort of rape.
The district attorney declined to prosecute the girl's rape charges.
William and Mary, however, had already forced the defendant to leave
school and, even after the D.A.'s decision, wouldn't let him return
until his accuser graduated. The defendant sued his accuser for $5.5
million for defamation; the parties settled out of court.

The incident wasn't as unusual as it sounds. A year earlier, a William
and Mary student had charged rape after having provided a condom to her
partner for intercourse. The boy had cofounded the national antirape
organization One in Four; the school suspended him for a year, anyway.
In an earlier incident, a drunken sorority girl was filmed giving oral
sex to seven men. She cried rape when her boyfriend found out. William
and Mary found one of the recipients, who had taped the event, guilty of
assault and suspended him.

But in the fall semester of 2005, rape charges spread through William
and Mary like witchcraft accusations in a medieval village. In short
succession after the Delta Delta Delta bacchanal, three more students
accused acquaintances of rape. Only one of these three additional
victims pressed charges in court, however, and she quickly dropped the
case.

A fifth rape incident around the same time followed a different pattern.
In November 2005, a William and Mary student woke up in the middle of
the night with a knife at her throat. A 23-year-old stranger with a
prior conviction for peeping at her apartment complex had broken into
her apartment; he raped her, threatened her roommate at knifepoint, and
left with two stolen cell phones and cash. The rapist was caught,
convicted, and sentenced to 57 years in prison.

Guess which incident got the most attention at William and Mary? The
Delta Delta Delta formal "rape." Like many stranger rapists on campus,
the knifepoint assailant was black, and thus an unattractive target for
politically correct protest. (The 2006 Duke stripper case, by contrast,
seemingly provided the ideal and, for the industry, sadly rare
configuration: white rapists and a black victim.)

Stranger rapes also provide less opportunity for bureaucratic expansion.
After the spate of "date rapes," William and Mary's vice president for
student affairs announced that the school would hire a full-time
sexual-assault educator, in addition to its existing sexual-assault
services and counseling staff and numerous sexual-assault awareness
organizations. Freshmen would now have to attend a gender-specific
sexual-assault awareness program. None of this new apparatus-for
instance, the "Equality Wheel," which explains the "dynamics of a
healthy relationship"-has the slightest relevance to stranger rapes.

However, the cross-currents of campus political correctness are so
intense that they produce some surprising twists. William and Mary's
sexual-assault resources webpage invites visitors to "listen to what
people affected by sexual assault are sharing." It then offers ten audio
accounts of sexual assaults, exactly half of which are male. "My
experience came very close to killing me," one man reports. One would
need the skills of a Kremlinologist to interpret this gender lineup, and
the site doesn't explain who exactly these voices are-but it's hard to
escape the impression that William and Mary has admitted either a huge
gay community or some very beefy women. Diversity politics, gay
politics, and the sexual-assault movement produce strange bedfellows.

Columbia University's Go Ask Alice website illustrates the dilemma posed
by a college's simultaneous advocacy of "healthy sexuality" and of the
"rape is everywhere" ideology. Go Ask Alice is run by Columbia's Health
Services; it answers both nonsexual health queries and such burning
questions as: "Sex with four friends-Mutual?" and "Will it ever be good
for me?" (from a virgin). In one post, titled "I'm sure I was drunk, but
I'm not sure if I had sex," Alice takes up the classic hookup scenario:
a girl who has no recollection of whether she had intercourse during a
drunken encounter and now wonders if she's pregnant. Alice's initial
reaction is pure hip-to-free-love toleration: "Depending upon your
relationship with your partner, you may want to ask what happened.
Understandably, this might feel awkward and embarrassing, but the
conversation might . . . help you to understand what happened and what
steps you might decide to take." Absent that pesky worry about
insemination, there would presumably be no compelling reason to engage
in something as "awkward and embarrassing" as a post-roll-in-the-hay
conversation.

But then a shadow passes over the horizon: the date-rape threat. "On a
darker note," continues Alice, "it's possible your experience may have
been non-consensual, considering that you were drunk and don't remember
exactly what happened." Alice recommends a call to Columbia's Rape
Crisis/Anti-Violence Support Center (officially dedicated to "speaking
our truths about sexual violence"). Alice's advice shows the incoherence
of the contemporary university's multiple stances toward college sex.
It's hard to speak your truths about sexual violence when your
involvement with your potential date-rapist is so tenuous that it's
awkward to speak to him. And the support center can't know whether the
encounter was consensual. But Alice declines to condemn the behavior
that both got the girl into her predicament and erased her memory of it.

The only lesson that Alice offers is that the girl might-purely as an
optional matter-want to think about how alcohol affected her. As for
rethinking whether she should be getting into bed with someone whom,
Alice presumes, she would be reluctant to contact the next day, well,
that never comes up. Members of the multifaceted campus sex bureaucracy
never seem to consider the possibility that the libertinism that one
administrative branch champions, and the sex that another branch
portrays as rape, may be inextricably linked.

Modern feminists defined the right to be promiscuous as a cornerstone of
female equality. Understandably, they now hesitate to acknowledge that
sex is a more complicated force than was foreseen. Rather than
recognizing that no-consequences sex may be a contradiction in terms,
however, the campus rape industry claims that what it calls campus rape
is about not sex but rather politics-the male desire to subordinate
women. The University of Virginia Women's Center intones that "rape or
sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust-it's about aggression,
power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is
domination." 

This characterization may or may not describe the psychopathic violence
of stranger rape. But it is an absurd description of the barnyard
rutting that undergraduate men, happily released from older constraints,
seek. The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one
thing only, and it's not a reinstatement of the patriarchy. Each would
be perfectly content if his partner for the evening becomes president of
the United States one day, so long as she lets him take off her panties
tonight.

One group on campus isn't buying the politics of the campus "rape"
movement, however: students. To the despair of rape industrialists
everywhere, students have held on to the view that women usually have
considerable power to determine whether a campus social event ends with
intercourse.

Rutgers University Sexual Assault Services surveyed student athletes
about violence against women in the 2001-02 academic year. The female
teams were more "direct," the survey reported, in "expressing the idea
that women who are raped sometimes put themselves in those situations."
A female athlete told interviewers: "When we go out to parties, and I
see girls and the way they dress and the way they act . . . and just the
way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of
like, oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me or whatever, I honestly
always think it's their fault." Another brainwashed victim of the rape
culture.

Equally maddening must be the reaction that sometimes greets performers
in Sex Signals, an improvisational show on date rape whose venues
include Harvard, Yale, and schools throughout the Midwest. "Sometimes we
get women who are advocates for men," the show's founders told a Chicago
public radio station this October, barely concealing their disbelief.
"They blame the victim and try to find out what the victim did so they
won't do it." Such worrisome self-help efforts could shut down the
campus rape industry.

"Promiscuity" is a word that you will never see in the pages of a campus
rape center publication; it is equally repugnant to the sexual
liberationist strand of feminism and to the Catherine Mac-Kinnonite
"all-sex-is-rape" strand. But it's an idea that won't go away among the
student Lumpenproletariat. Students refer to "sororistutes"-those wild
and crazy Greek women so often featured in Girls Gone Wild videos. And
they persist in seeing a connection between promiscuity and the alleged
campus rape epidemic. A Rutgers University freshman says that he knows
women who claim to have been sexually assaulted, but adds: "They don't
have the best reputation. Sometimes it's hard to believe that kind of
stuff."

Rape consultant David Lisak faced a similar problem this November: an
auditorium of Rutgers students who kept treating women as moral agents.
He might have sensed the trouble ahead when in response to a photo array
of what Lisak calls "undetected rapists," a girl asked: "Why are there
only white men? Am I blind?" It went downhill from there. Lisak did his
best to send a tremor of fear through the audience with the news that
"rape happens with terrifying frequency. I'm not talking of someone who
comes onto campus but students, Rutgers students, who prowl for victims
in bars, parties, wherever alcohol is being consumed." He then played a
dramatized interview with a student "rapist" at a fraternity that had
deliberately set aside a room for raping girls during parties, according
to Lisak. The students weren't buying it. "I don't understand why these
parties don't become infamous among girls," wondered one. Another asked:
"Are you saying that the frat brothers decided that this room would be
used for committing sexual assault, or was it just: 'Maybe I'll get
lucky, and if I do, I'll go there'?" And then someone asked the most
dangerous question of all: "Shouldn't the victim have had a little bit
of education beforehand? We all know the dangers of parties. The victim
had miscalculations on her part; alcohol can lead to things."

In a column this November in the University of Virginia's student
newspaper, third-year student Katelyn Kiley gave the real scoop on frat
parties: They're filled with boys hoping to have sex. She did not call
these boys "rapists." She did not demonize their sex drive. She merely
offered some practical wisdom to the "scantily clad" freshman girls
trooping off to Virginia's fraternity row: "That frat boy really is just
trying to get into your pants." Most disturbingly, she advised the girls
to exercise sexual control: "So dance with that good-looking guy. If he
offers, you can even go up to his room to get a mixed drink. . . .
Flirt. But it's probably a good idea to keep your clothes on, and at the
end of the night, to go home to your own bed. Interestingly enough,
that's how you get them to keep asking you back."

You can read thousands of pages of rape crisis center hysteria without
coming across such bracing common sense. Amazingly, Kiley hasn't
received any of the millions of dollars that feminists in the federal
government have showered on campuses to prevent what they call rape. 

Some student rebels are going one step further: organizing in favor of
sexual restraint. Such newly created campus groups as the Love and
Fidelity Network and the True Love Revolution advocate an alternative to
the rampant regret sex of the hookup scene: wait until marriage. Their
message would do more to return a modicum of manners to campus male-and
female-behavior than endless harangues about the rape culture ever
could.

Maybe these young iconoclasts can take up another discredited idea:
college is for learning. The adults in charge have gone deaf to the
siren call of beauty that for centuries lured people to the classics.
But fighting male dominance or catering to the libidinal impulses
released in the 1960s are sorry substitutes for the pursuit of
knowledge. The campus rape and sex industries are signs of how hollow
the university has become.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John
M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her most recent book,
coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, is The
Immigration Solution.