Thanks to Darleen Click for that phrase, describing the feminists who have ginned up a campus sex panic with hysterical claims about a (non-existent) “rape epidemic” at colleges and universities.

Rape has real victims — including murdered victims like Hannah Graham — but this phony hysteria has real victims, too, including male students accused of sexual assault and denied their due process rights in university disciplinary proceedings.

This has been the problem behind the “rape epidemic” rhetoric all along. What has happened is this: In response to feminist pressure, universities and colleges have begun treating accusations of sexual assault not as crimes, but as infractions of campus policy. Why? Because most of the cases involve “he-said/she-said” disputes about consent: Boy and girl get drunk; drunk boy and drunk girl have sex; girl sobers up and regrets having sex; girl claims she was raped.

In nearly all of the specific cases like this that have come to my attention, the accusation of rape was made several days or weeks or even months after the incident. No witnesses, no evidence, and no way to make a criminal prosecution. Whatever happened, however traumatic or shameful it was for the female involved, no prosecutor is going to take a case like that to trial. So . . .

To satisfy feminist demands, university administrators started using disciplinary hearings to punish males accused of rape — punishing them as if they had been found guilty of a crime, which they have not. This extra-judicial campus “rape court” system clearly violates the rights of the accused students. This is what I wrote last year about the case of Vassar College student Peter Yu:

If this guy is, in fact, a predatory sex offender, he should be charged and tried for the alleged crime. Merely to kick him out of school — to ruin his name on the basis of a disciplinary hearing — is both unjust to him, and inadequate as a public safety measure.

And let me be perfectly blunt here: Belated remorse over an unsatisfactory drunken hook-up doesn’t make you a victim.

Any drunken hook-up is a bad idea, but feeling embarrassed or regretful about it afterwards does not make your partner a rapist.

Alas, common sense is even more unfashionable on college campuses than the Anglo-American common-law tradition.

The minimum age for alcohol possession is 21, and there are laws against underage drinking which, if enforced rigorously, would substantially reduce the number of these types of incidents, but guess what? Getting drunk and having sex are popular pastimes for college kids, and if university administrators cracked down on underage drinking, they would be forced to expel so many students, they wouldn’t have enough tuition revenue to pay the bills. Instead of cracking down on illegal underage drinking, therefore, they’re cracking down on sex — specifically, they’re cracking down on male heterosexuality.

Have any gay males or lesbian students been treated to this administrative disciplinary star-chamber process? Of course not.

In today’s campus climate, it would be a hate crime for a student to claim that he or she had been raped by a homosexual, yet I do not doubt that drunken gay hook-ups happen on campus which are regretted the day after in the same way heterosexual hook-ups are regretted by girls who claim the guy they hooked up with raped them.

Only heterosexual males are targeted by the “rape epidemic” hysteria, and if nobody else will bother to point out this fact, I must.

“Shut Up, Because Rape” — that’s the real feminist message here. Wielding the sword of victimhood, feminists are attempting to silence all discussion of sexuality (especially on campus) that contradicts feminism’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology. What students are permitted to “know” about sex must be exactly what feminists want to teach them, and if anyone challenges this authority that feminism arrogates to itself, that person must be demonized and shouted down:

[M]ore than 100 people turned out Wednesday for the protest outside his Miami University lecture. There were also online petitions against Will’s talk.

The protests against the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist were over a June column he wrote about federal pressure on colleges in reporting of sexual assaults. Will questioned statistics cited by President Barack Obama’s administration and suggested that federal authorities were making “victimhood a coveted status.”

Will explained Wednesday he was criticizing loss of due process for those accused of the serious crime.

“Our society has decided rightly that rape ranks close to and not far behind murder as the most serious crime,” Will said in response to a question after his lecture. Because it carries severe penalties, “it is particularly important that people accused of this heinous crime have all the protections.”

However, the Vagina Warrior Lynch Mobs (excellent phrase, Darleen) have decided that due process is a synonym for rape, and that the Constitution should not protect male heterosexuals from extra-judicial punishment. New York lawyer Andrew Miltenberg is defending several male heterosexual students who say they have been falsely accused and wrongfully punished:

He’s already filed four lawsuits — against Vassar College, Columbia University, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Drew University — will file several more before month’s end, and is consulting on 20 or so appeals at the college disciplinary level. In each, he is suing the schools for violations of the Title IX gender-parity law of 1972, contractual claims, unfair trade practices, as well as a number of tort claims.

If you feel like you’ve been reading more about campus rape of late, that’s because you have—most recently in a New York magazine cover story in September. The trend has been gathering steam since the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights sent a letter to colleges nationwide on April 4, 2011, mandating policy changes in the way schools handle sexual assault complaints, including a lowering of the burden of proof from “clear and convincing” evidence to a “preponderance” of evidence. . . .

Mr. Miltenberg and [another attorney in his firm, Kimberly] Lau get about 10 calls a week from parents whose sons have been accused, suspended, or expelled. Too many of those calls, says Mr. Miltenberg, describe the same basic story: “The majority of them have botched the investigations, either on purpose because they’re simply pandering to the current political climate or because they’re not equipped to conduct them in the first place.” . . .

“Look, I’m not a senior partner at Blank, Blank, and Blankety Blank. I’m just Andrew Miltenberg with an office across the street from Penn Station. But if you dare question the motives of an Ivy League School, you’re suddenly trapped in a room with a bunch of white-shoed guys with Roman numerals after their names. And they’re all harrumphing about the audacity of questioning anything they do. Well, we’re questioning them. And we won’t stop until the schools admit that they need to severely revamp their approach to handling sexual assault accusations.”

Or abandon it entirely: he thinks it should be up to the criminal justice system to handle campus complaints that rise to the level of felonies. “A school’s disciplinary board wouldn’t be dealing with a campus shooting, would they? So why are they dealing with sexual assault?”

Exactly. Sexual assault is a crime. If you are a victim of crime, call the police. A hearing in the dean’s office is not justice, unless what you’re seeking is “social justice,” which in certain circumstances looks a lot like personal revenge: “You took advantage of me when I was drunk, so now I’m going to ruin your life.” Hell hath no fury, etc.

Common sense: Stay sober and keep your britches on, honey.

Alas, common sense is now prohibited on American university campuses.









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