Using well-known intelligence assessments to select the best students is a Harvard tradition. Harvard wants the best students. Harvard accepts only those students whose SAT scores are nearly perfect. But Harvard also recruits strong athletes, and it even invites professional sports teams to scout its athletes. So why the uproar over Harvard men’s soccer?

Harvard men’s soccer players evidently produced the “scouting report,” which has been deemed unacceptable at the school because it sized up Harvard female soccer players based on their physical and sexual characteristics. Although I find this development adolescent and amusing, evidently Harvard has not. So what did Harvard administrators do? They suspended men’s soccer for the year. News of the suspension has spread across the Internet as if to confirm that men are in fact sexual monsters. Indeed, the tone and tenor online treats the “scandal” with a condescending feminist Victorianism.

As the female soccer players asserted, men sometimes engage in “locker room talk.” And even I (once a college soccer player) engaged in locker room talk. But that was thirty-five years ago – since then the world has changed dramatically. Thirty-five years ago, men had safe spaces, and men could talk openly in locker rooms. We did not talk online. However, the Harvard soccer players have no safe space online. What’s online stays online – for everyone to see. And in the digital age in which college men and women hook up, what was private has become very public. Despite the contradictions, men will continue to be blamed. Unchallenged, women and gender activists will continue with their twisted Puritanical moralism which denies men expression of their own sexual performances. This double standard will only worsen, of course. And it will expand.

So in the meantime, I believe it is time for men to resist cowering in embarrassment or guilt, and to stand up instead, challenging such double standards whereby women may talk freely about their sexuality while openly demeaning men for his sexual impulses. Furthermore, men are not allowed the same privileges. At stake in this debate, therefore, is whether we let feminist moralism overcome freedom of speech.