The Democratic response to the allegation that three and a half decades ago, Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh assaulted a girl at a teenage beer party bears many hallmarks of campus culture, from the admonition that “survivors” should always be believed to the claim that the veracity of the accusation matters less than the history of white-male privilege.

But the most significant import from academic feminism is the idea that a long-ago incident of adolescent sexual misbehavior (assuming that the assault happened as described, which Kavanaugh has categorically denied) should trump a lifetime record of serious legal thought and government service.

Now The New Yorker is charging that Kavanaugh exposed himself to a Yale classmate at a party, ramping up outrage to the point that feminists are demanding that the hearings they wanted be canceled — though The New York Times regarded the latest allegation as too flimsy to publish.

The feminist nostrum that the personal is political is being weaponized to subordinate the public realm of ideas to the private realm of sexual relations — all, ironically, in the service of a highly political end: preventing a judicial conservative from being seated on the high court.

The demand to derail the Kavanaugh nomination is particularly absurd when the alleged incidents (lacking any corroborating specificity of time and place in one case, or any witnesses able to confirm the story in the second) are balanced against Kavanaugh’s subsequent relations with women.

Kavanaugh has had an unblemished record of treating women with respect. He was the first judge on the DC Circuit to have an all-female class of clerks, and over the course of his 12 years on the federal bench, most of his clerks have been women.

Working for a judge is an intense experience that includes late nights editing draft opinions, an environment that invites erotic complications. Yet Kavanaugh’s female clerks have been unanimous in testifying to his character.

The most salient fact about this alleged episode will never register on elite consciousness: the sexual free-for-all environment, which may or may not have given rise to an assault by Kavanaugh. The sexual revolution declared that the traditional restraints on the male libido — norms of male chivalry and gentlemanliness and of female modesty and prudence — were patriarchal and oppressive. Men should stop protecting women and putting them on a pedestal. Males and females were assumed to desire easy sex with equal fervor, and to be able to walk away from a one-night stand with equal complacency.

With regard to students, adults should remain nonjudgmental and as far out of the picture as possible. Chaperones were relegated to the relic pile, as fusty as a mothballed corset. Starting in the 1970s, affluent parents often absented themselves from their teenagers’ parties, leaving the house liquor cabinet unattended. Popular culture became hyper-sexualized.

The results were not pretty: the male libido, free to act as boorishly as it wanted; females getting drunk to reduce their innate sexual inhibitions, unprotected by any default assumptions against casual premarital sex. Whether a 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh took advantage of this putative sexual liberation, many other teenagers have, and in so doing, merely followed the new script for sexual relations.

Those derided Victorian values of chivalric paternalism are now being reimported covertly on college campuses, however, where male students are deemed responsible for female well-being during drunken hook-ups, even if the male and female student are both equally inebriated. The #MeToo movement is going further, turning a drunken pat on the butt in a suburban kitchen into a criminal offense and a squeeze on the knee under a dinner table grounds for banishment.

A panelist on “The View” complained that the “white men” on the Senate Judiciary Committee were “not protecting women.” One might have thought that the committee’s role was to protect the constitutional balance of power.

Ironically, Hillary Clinton had it right when she called her husband’s affair with a White House intern a “lapse,” notwithstanding that it represented an abuse of workplace hierarchies. She was right to complain that the anti-Clinton “feeding frenzy” was using the criminal justice system to “achieve political ends.”

Hillary and her feminist peers had a better grip then on the relative importance of the private and the public than Bill Clinton’s right-wing persecutors.

Today, of course, Clinton and her supporters are singing a different tune. But Kavanaugh’s feminist opponents have yet to articulate the limits of the principle being advanced here. If his Supreme Court nomination is scuttled, is he fit to return to the DC bench? If not, what about serving in a law firm? How far does this go? Will they take their own claims seriously enough to pursue criminal charges and put him behind bars?

It is feminist narcissism to put flimsy accusations of teenage impropriety ahead of a lifetime of achievement in the law. The priorities look like a revenge attack on a civilization deemed too male.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, from which this was adapted. Her latest book, “The Diversity Delusion,” is out now.