Have neo-feminists won the battle of rape on campus? Enough so, apparently, that they’re ready to move on to the next offense to gender to be “fixed” in the college star chamber. Spokesgal for the future victims, Amanda Marcotte, gives the talking points:

Katie Baker at BuzzFeed has a new piece out about one of the less attention-getting aspects of Title IX: that it’s supposed to protect students against domestic violence as well as sexual assault. “The next wave of Title IX activism, researchers and activists say, will focus on how colleges investigate allegations of and provide resources to students in abusive relationships,” Baker writes. “And it’s going to be just as complicated and contentious.”

It seems like only yesterday when neo-feminists were railing about how one in five women will be raped in college, demanding that we believe accusers who almost never lie. Good times.

And yet, this debunked nonsense not only has become so embedded in the public narrative as to be immune from reality (with even the New York Times repeating the same debunked nonsense today), but is the foundation upon which future college crime is being built.

Some studies show that the oft-reported statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted during college also applies to domestic violence, often called “dating violence” or “intimate partner violence.”

That’s right, domestic violence is the new rape. Having put in extraordinary efforts to take the word “rape” and undefined it into whatever a woman wants it to be, subject to post hoc reconsideration years later, even when it’s the guy who was in a black out stage and the gal who took advantage of him, the same is about to be done to “domestic violence.”

There was a time when domestic violence was the generic descriptor of a battery committed by one partner to a relationship to another, but the crux of the offense was the battery, a physical act committed by one person upon another. It was a crime when done by strangers; it was still a crime when done by people who were involved in an intimate relationship. Prosecutors sought to give it a cool new name to make it seem like a different offense, requiring greater punishment.

But that was back in the days when offenses had elements, when words had definitions. As we’ve seen watching the words “rape” and “sexual assault” become untethered from any cognizable meaning, limited only by the feelings of their “survivors,” it’s already happening with the new outrage.

But few people know that Title IX also protects students from domestic violence, which includes physical and psychological harm.

Title IX protects students from “psychological harm”? Says who?

Activists have long felt frustrated that physical, emotional and psychological abuse is seen as secondary to sexual assault, unless a student is seriously injured or killed. That may be because college dating violence victims are often dismissed as being young and inexperienced, Bolger said.

“Bolger” is Dana Bolger, who just graduated from Amherst College. Congrats, Dana! Plastics! And co-founder of activist group Know Your IX, and apparently is now in charge of defining the breadth and scope of federal law. She don’t need no stinkin’ judges.

But as is already clear, the fight isn’t about physical violence, which was a crime long before anyone came up with the phrase “domestic violence,” and remains a crime in everyone’s mind today. Oh no, that’s not the issue at all. It’s the “emotional and psychological abuse” where the battle will be fought.

If you find it problematic that the number of syllables squandered on “emotional and psychological abuse” is wasteful, you can always shorten it to the “feelz,” which is comprised of anything that, whether immediately, after deliberations or upon consensus of a small group of favored activists, hurts a woman’s feelings or can be taken, through any combination of rationalizations or mental gymnastics, as offensive.

The scope of such an offense is breathtaking. More importantly, it is impossible to dispute someone else’s hurt feelings.

But if deployed correctly, Title IX could be an incredibly effective weapon to fight domestic violence. College students are of an age when the risk for being victimized is at its highest, for one thing.

There’s likely merit in that contention, given that no group is as delicate and sensitive as women in college. Not even the deeply fragile young men who suffer such micro-aggression as would make Tyler Kingkade cry. And by couching the consequences in such “non-lethal” language as allowed Taser to put a stun gun on every cops’ belt, it makes frivolous complaints seem almost harmless. Except for the young men whose lives will be ruined by their expulsion and permanent taint.

The blunt instrument of the law also makes it hard to suss out some of the complexities of an abusive relationship. The law is reductive, focused on who hit whom and when. But Title IX allows adjudicators to look at the relationship as a whole, to suss out patterns of abuse.

The law is the enemy of the feelz. The law requires elements and definitions. The law requires evidence. The only thing worse than “the complexities of an abusive relationship” lacking any evidence at all is the relationship where there is massive evidence that it never happened.

This infuriates the “survivors” (I am assuming that they, too, will call themselves “survivors,” because it sounds so much more sympathetic than accusers), as no one has the authority to question their “lived experiences.” So rather than the nasty reductivism of proof, they need only have their feelings “sussed” to heap a world of misery on the male who hurt their feelings. What could possibly go wrong?

Will this sate the deeply felt emotional and psychological needs of the neo-feminists? Will “domestic violence” be the final frontier of Title IX? Now that they’ve claimed victory over sex, and are embarking on this new quest, don’t expect it to end any time soon. My bet for the next offense? Hemorrhoids. Exactly, no one will ever want to see the proof there either, and it does make for spectacular metaphors.