California has passed a new "affirmative consent" law that apparently only affects colleges and college students. I don't believe that there's a rape epidemic on college campuses, but I do believe that our cultural morals have completely collapsed. I think most people understand that college students shouldn't be getting drunk and screwing each other randomly, but our culture is so degraded that we can't say so anymore.

At California colleges, students must now ensure they have the affirmative consent of their partners at the beginning of a sexual encounter and maintain that consent throughout the activity. The law states that consent "can be revoked at any time." The absence of "no," the law says, is insufficient to indicate consent.

The law is written to be gender neutral (as Constitutionally required) but I'm sure the assumption is that the complainants will women and the accused will be men. However, the new law isn't just about what most people think of as "rape", it covers any situation in which the participants aren't vocalizing their "yes"es. And in that ambiguous grey area, according to the CDC, men are frequently victims of women, too.

Unsurprisingly, when the definition of rape -- or, as it's often now called in order to provide less clarity, "sexual assault" -- expands to include a lot more than behavior distinguished by superior physical strength, the incidence of rape goes up, and behavior engaged in by women is more likely to be included in the definition. (At juvenile detention centers nine out of 10 reporters of sexual assault are males victimized by female staffers.)

Thus, as Young points out, the CDC finds that men make up over a third of the victims of "sexual coercion," which can include such things as "lies or false promises, threats to end a relationship or spread negative gossip, or 'making repeated requests' for sex and expressing unhappiness at being turned down."

So it will be interesting to see what happens when men start filing complaints.

Camille Paglia identifies one part of the absurdity by exhorting young women to overcome the naivety of modern feminism.

Misled by the naive optimism and "You go, girl!" boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

I'll go farther. The civilization we enjoy-- the civilization that enables this naivety -- was founded on a simple sexual morality: don't have sex outside of marriage. Throughout history lots of people paid lip-service to this morality while ignoring it privately. We're now getting into the second generation that actively denigrates traditional sexual morality in both deed and word, and we're starting to reap the consequences.

(HT: Althouse.)

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