By Heather Wilhelm - June 12, 2014

Back when I was an undergrad at Northwestern University, a crime spree struck the school. A mysterious assailant, appearing only at night, would approach female students on the way back from the gym or the library. After hovering for a few moments, he would dash forward, quickly grope them, and flee. His nickname soon spread like wildfire throughout campus: “The Crotch Grabber.”

The Crotch Grabber’s reign of terror—and I’m not being glib, as it was pretty darn spooky—lasted a month or two. Then, thanks to an act of student bravery, it ended as quickly as it had begun. A sorority sister of mine clobbered the Crotch Grabber as he dashed her way, pinned him down with a friend, and called the cops. According to rumor, the Crotch Grabber turned out to be some pervy, obviously disturbed local high school kid. She Who Vanquished the Crotch Grabber, on the other hand, had also recently been crowned Northwestern’s Homecoming Queen. Talk about a feminist heroine.

I shudder to imagine what would happen if a crotch grabber, or even a crotch flasher, appeared on campus today. We live, after all, in the age of the collegiate “trigger warning,” where schools shield fragile students from “offensive,” “disturbing,” or “traumatizing” material. At Wellesley College, students recently petitioned to remove from campus a statue of a man sleepwalking in his underwear, calling it “a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for many member of our campus community.” (The statue, by the way, is also hideously ugly, but few seem to have a problem with that more middlebrow, normal-person concern.)

The Crotch Grabber popped into my mind with the recent crowning of this year’s Miss USA, Nia Sanchez, who happens to have a fourth-degree black belt in taekwondo. During the pageant, when asked about college sexual assault, Sanchez replied, “More awareness is very important so that women can learn to protect themselves. … You need to be confident and be able to defend yourself. That’s something we need to start to implement for a lot of women.”

If you think the above statement is pretty noncontroversial, and maybe even a decent idea, you haven’t spent much time around modern feminists.

“College women shouldn't have to ‘learn to protect themselves,’” writer Rebecca Rose huffed on the feminist website Jezebel. “College men should ‘learn not to rape.’” (The “teach men not to rape” line, in case you’ve been lucky enough to miss these discussions, is, right along with the phrase “rape culture,” so hot right now.) Meanwhile, added Slate’s always-entertaining Amanda Marcotte, “the implication” of stressing self-defense, “though Sanchez didn’t likely intend it this way, is that women who do suffer rape are not confident and are insufficiently interested in their own safety.” (Does that seem like a wild, slightly crazy, illogical leap to you? Or is it just me?)

Time for some standard-issue disclaimers: Yes, in an ideal world, women would not have to think about self-defense in their daily lives. Yes, in an ideal world, all potential rapists—note that I say “all rapists,” not “all men,” because unlike modern feminists, I don’t see the two as synonyms—would be successfully “taught not to rape.” Crotch grabbers, meanwhile, would be “taught not to crotch-grab.” Burglars, while we’re at it, would be “taught not to rob,” and murderers would be “taught not to kill.” Fashion designers would be “taught not to make crop tops for grown women and men’s suits that have shorts instead of pants.” Sadly, we do not live in an ideal world. The wise among us plan accordingly.

More important, however, and more troubling, is that “learning not to rape,” as the feminist community repeatedly instructs young men to do, involves a far more complicated playbook than one might imagine, at least in today’s context.

Mary Anne Franks, a University of Miami law professor, recently told the Huffington Post that self-defense should not be prioritized in combating sexual assault, because “people in most sexual assault contexts are dealing with familiar people.” Slate’s Marcotte put it more directly: “The focus on self-defense allows some to argue that a rape doesn’t count as rape unless the woman attempted to use violence in self-defense.”

This brings us to George Will, who stirred up an unholy hornet’s nest of feminist angst with his syndicated column last Friday. His crime? Raising skepticism regarding the “supposed campus epidemic of rape” plaguing our nation. In particular, Will reported on a highly questionable example of “rape” from Swarthmore, involving two hookup partners who decided to be just friends.

After deciding to be just friends, they immediately also decided to sleep in the same bed. A few minutes after one “friend” told her other “friend” she didn’t want to have sex with him, he tried again. “I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything,” the alleged victim said. “I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.’” Six weeks later, one former “friend” was accusing the other of rape.

I’m sorry, but under any sane person’s definition, this is not “assault.” It’s laziness, both physical and moral. According to this account, no one was incapacitated, and no one was under the threat of violence. No one was “forced” to do anything. If you genuinely care about justice—and about women—this is an important distinction. The Swarthmore Regrettable Sex Incident may be a sad story. But to call it rape is not only silly, it’s highly offensive to the true victims of sexual assault. It also trivializes the real and serious crimes that actually exist on campus and elsewhere.

But never mind the details. Will’s use of basic logic has earned him the ire of women everywhere, from the New Yorker (“women are, really, just fodder for Will—crushable things”) to the Guardian (people like Will, Jessica Valenti writes, are “misogynists who believe rape is about ‘ambiguities’ rather than violence”) to Heidi Stevens at the Chicago Tribune, who wrote, disgustedly, “I don’t see how George Will can keep his job.”

The ultimate irony is that for all of their talk of empowerment, this generation’s leading feminists seem to have a serious case of Daddy issues. Whether it’s a university board of regents, a set of byzantine campus “sexual consent” rules, or the Obama administration—which recently jumped on the university “rape culture” bandwagon—feminists just seem to want someone else to take care of them. Strangely, they don’t seem to mind celebrating passive, confused women, and, as seen in the case of Miss USA, they certainly don’t want to prioritize proactive self-responsibility. What a mess.