Today's must read is Mona Charen's Federalist column on "What the Left and Right Don't Get about Campus Rape." 

Mona starts off with the "geniuses" at an Old Dominion University frat house who, to make this year's freshman orientation particularly memorable,  draped bed sheet banners reading "Freshman Daughter Drop Off" and "Rowdy Fun, Hope Your Baby Girl Is Ready for a Good Time" out the windows.  Needless to say, this made almost everybody angry. Predictably, feminists condemned "the patriarchy."

Of the response,  Mona writes:

The proper response to the fraternity’s vulgarity is not to condemn men, or “rape culture,” but the sexual revolution itself. The agonies college campuses are now routinely experiencing are the result of a hyper-sexualized culture that has robbed the young of romance, courtesy, privacy, and, yes, love. The feminists call it “rape culture” and blame “traditional masculinity,” but they forget, if they ever knew, that “traditional” men were never encouraged to behave like this.

According to the Left (and that very much includes the federal government under President Obama’s leadership), we are in the midst of an epidemic of rape and sexual assault. According to the Right, we are in the throes of a “moral panic,” or rape hoax, that has led universities to railroad innocent young men in kangaroo courts while failing to hold women accountable for their behavior.

Hair on fire anti-rape activists insist sexual assault is epidemic. A recent Oscar-nominated documentary, “The Hunting Ground,” tells their side in chilling terms. Critics reply that the numbers are absurdly exaggerated. . . .

The left calls for ever more stringent guidelines for dealing with rape, including ones that undermine the right to due process of the accused.

The right tends to respond (correctly) that the statistics regarding campus rape are biased or rely on definitions that blur the difference between assault and rape but then goes on to dismiss the notion of a campus "rape culture." 

Mona says that the truth does not lie somewhere between these two views but requires looking at the matter in an entirely different way from both. Mona, by the way, has conducted numerous interviews with students and recent graduates and found that most know one or more women who were victims of sexual assault on campus. So she doesn't dismiss the idea that sexual activity on campus is harmful to women, though she does challenge the sloppy work that has led to the statistic that one-in-five college women is the victim of rape.

Maybe the reality is that women are getting hurt on campus, but that the culprit isn't masculinity. To see the cure of the current situation, it is necessary to recognize the roots:

The sexual revolution and the feminist revolution teamed up to create the culture of ultra-casual sex that now characterizes campus life and social life in general. If we were attempting to design a social code that would be more conducive to date rape and less likely to lead to romance and love, we could scarcely improve on hook-up culture.

The hook-up is the fullest realization of the ethic of casual sex. The term is vague, but nearly always conveys some kind of sexual activity. . . .

Try as they may (and many seem to be making a heroic effort) women are not comfortable with hook-up culture. That, I submit, is why drinking to the point of incapacitation has become such a widespread phenomenon among the young. Hooking up isn’t particularly congenial to men, either, although they almost never perceive it to be traumatic. 

This is a terrific piece and I urge you to read it.