One Old Dominion student told Jezebel, “I feel very strongly about how the attitude towards sexual assault on campuses is met with a slap on the wrist … As a woman, it’s frustrating to see the media bring awareness to the issue and then witness something related in your own community/school and see that nothing is changing.”

To other observers, those reactions make little sense.

As they see it, a college’s sexual-assault problem is best gauged by the number of sexual assaults. They regard the banners as an obvious joke. And they insist that the humor is rooted in confronting parents, who like to guard the virginity of their daughters, with the trope that they go off to college and have sex with frat guys. In this telling, nothing about the trope implies a non-consensual encounter. And regardless of the joke’s meaning, they believe it irrational to operate as if a sophomoric prank that seems like something a couple 19-year-olds cooked up in a few hours reveals their attitudes toward rape; the likelihood that they would rape someone; campus attitudes toward rape; or the success of campus anti-rape efforts.

“I’m usually in the position of defending extremely offensive speech on the grounds that it is protected by the First Amendment,” Robby Soave wrote at Reason. “In this case, I struggle to grasp what was even so monstrous about the banners. Hope your baby is ready for a good time, oh, mom too! is certainly crude and in bad taste. But no specific person is being maligned, threatened, or disparaged. And some frat brothers are eager to have sex with girls—is this surprising?”

He added that, “associating the banners with sexual assault, as Broderick did, is a considerable exaggeration. Sigma Nu members certainly didn’t threaten anyone with sexual assault; putting up some mildly suggestive signs does not constitute an act of violence. The banners don’t even clear the sexual-harassment bar. They aren’t severe, pervasive, objectively offensive, or directed at anyone in particular.”

Where do I come down? It’s lamentable that some women arrived on their college campus only to be greeted by signs treating them as sexual objects. These immature 19-year-olds displayed bad judgment, but so do the adults who are reacting as if they were stockpiling GHB. Pop culture is filled with material far more vulgar and offensive, including content that actually does transgress against the value placed on consent.

Debates like this are polarizing because a false choice is often presented: defend the transgression that is generating outrage or join in condemning the perpetrators. But there is a third way. It requires circumspection and a sense of proportion.

The banners do deserve criticism.

Sigma Nu, the national fraternity, is within its rights to complain about the way this chapter is representing it; on Monday, it suspended the chapter pending the outcome of an investigation.