In all these drunken couplings, there may be some deplorable instances of forced and truly non-consensual sex. But most campus "rape" cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally.
"Ninety-nine percent of all college rape cases would be thrown out of court in a twinkling," observes University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Kors.
Many students hold on to the view that women usually have the power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse. A female Rutgers student expressed a common sentiment in a university sexual-assault survey: "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."
But suggest to a rape bureaucrat that female students share responsibility for the outcome of an evening and that greater sexual restraint would prevent campus "rape," and you might as well be saying that women should don the burka.
College officials have responded to the fallout of the college sexual revolution not with sound advice but with bizarre and anachronistic legalisms for responding to postcoital second thoughts.
University of Virginia students, for example, 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.
Risk-management consultants travel the country to help colleges craft legal rules for student sexual congress.
"If one partner puts a condom on the other, does that signify that they are consenting to intercourse?" asks Alan D. Berkowitz, a campus rape consultant. Short of guiding the thus-sheathed instrumentality to port, it's hard to imagine a clearer signal of consent, although Berkowitz apparently finds it "inherently ambiguous."
And even as the campus rape industry decries alleged male predation, a parallel campus sex bureaucracy sends the message that students should have recreational sex at every opportunity.
