PRINCE Harry comes to town and is accosted by a woman forcibly trying to kiss him at the Sydney Opera House. Where’s the outrage? Where is the “jazz hands” crowd when it is a man whose consent is not granted for a bit of slap and tickle? Of course, 21-year-old Victoria McRae was just having fun, as her “Marry Me, Prince Harry!” sign and the plastic crown on her head showed. The cameras loved it when the exuberant blonde grabbed the Prince around the neck and pulled him in for a cheeky full-lips pash. “He let me kiss him on the cheek but then I went in for it,” McRae told ­reporters. “There’s a lot of chemistry there, I’d say.” Harry took it in his stride, backing away from the uninvited kiss with fast reflexes and a hearty chuckle. McRae told FoxFM the next day that Harry had “very nice lips … They are very soft and they felt like they hadn’t been kissed much!” Yes, it was all in good fun, making headlines around the world, much as, a generation ago, a bikini-clad model ­ambushed Prince Charles with a kiss on Perth’s Cottesloe Beach. But, still, if a man did to a woman what McRae did to Harry, all hell would have broken out. The double standards on sexual relations between the sexes have gone from confusing to downright dangerous. We have a situation where a 17-year-old in Albury this month placed the entire town on alert after claiming to have been the victim of a violent sexual assault by three men as she walked home from work. Two days later, after a media frenzy and the Albury Mayor had been castigated by feminist hit squads for warning women not to “walk alone”, the case was dropped. The Border Mail reported the assault had never happened and it was unlikely the girl would be charged. The only person to suffer any consequences from the false alarm was Mayor Kevin Mack, who had to issue a ­humiliating apology. It is “victim-blaming” to ­accuse a woman of lying about sexual assault, so it’s rare for police to lay charges over false accusations, even if an innocent man has to spend a couple of days in jail. “Innocent until proven guilty” has a new caveat: “unless you are a man”. It’s fair game to accuse men of the most heinous behaviour, impugn an entire sex and not only go unpunished, but ­become a media darling. In the US, which is a few years ahead of us on this poisonous trajectory, even the President will take your side. Take the celebrated Rolling Stone story last year, accusing seven male students of gang rape at a fraternity party at the University of Virginia. The “victim” has since been revealed as a serial liar and Rolling Stone has issued a full retraction: “We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account.” Just a teensy journalistic error. Such are the extremes of “rape culture” hysteria, which has been fuelled by the Obama administration’s claim of a “rape epidemic”, and its directive to college campuses to crack down on sexual assault or lose funding. Young men are having their reputations ­ruined and career prospects jeopardised because the burden of proof is weighted heavily against them. More than 60 men are suing American colleges over false accusations, according to activist group “A voice for male students”. One is Australian Lewis McLeod, 24, a former Sydney Grammar vice-captain who was expelled from Duke University over unproven rape allegations, costing him his $250,000 degree and a job on Wall Street. Then there is the surreal story of Mattress Girl. Columbia University student Emma Sulkhowitz made the cover of Time Magazine because she carries a mattress with her everywhere as a protest against university authorities who have not expelled a student she claims raped her. She named and shamed Paul Nungesser, a German student on a scholarship, as a “serial rapist” despite him having been cleared by the university and police of any wrongdoing. He is suing the university for allowing Sulkhowitz to harass him. Sexual assault is a serious problem. But it won’t be stopped by a mutant feminism which holds that rape is whatever you want it to be. According to an article in an American college newspaper last month, women who ­engage in consensual sex can still be “raped by rape culture”. This sort of nonsense devalues the trauma of genuine rape victims. How can a women who feels regret about a sexual encounter equate her hurt feelings with the horrors of, say, Jill Meagher’s last horrific moments on earth? If all men are rapists, then every woman who is not a virgin is a victim, and everybody is a child of rape. Where does that leave us?