HEATHER MAC DONALD writes at The Weekly Standard about the campus rape controversy and the spate of new regulations:

If campus rape were the epidemic that the activists allege, there would have been a stampede to create alternative schools for girls. Instead, every year the competition among girls (and boys) to get into selective colleges grows fiercer. Sophisticated baby boomer mothers start their daughters’ preparation for college earlier and earlier. The Obama White House asserts that campus rape “survivors” suffer a lifetime of psychological and physical trauma, yet females are graduating from college in ever more disproportionate numbers, after which they go on to have lucrative careers, with no evidence of crippling mental injury. The bogus statistics thrown around by the feminist-industrial complex—a one-in-four to one-in-five incidence of sexual assault among undergraduate girls—dwarf any known crime rate, even in the most brutal African ethnic wars. In 2012, Newark, New Jersey’s rate for all violent crimes—murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault—was 1.1 percent; its rape rate was under .02 percent. Activist researchers attain their 20-25 percent rape incidence statistic by the strategic phrasing of questions and the exquisite parsing of definitions. In a 1986 Ms. survey that sparked the campus-rape industry, 73 percent of respondents whom the study characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped when asked the question directly. Forty-two percent of these supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants—an inconceivable behavior in the case of actual rape. Sixty-five percent of females whom a 2000 Department of Justice study deemed “completed rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report,” nor did their alleged “victimization” result in physical or emotional injuries.

MacDonald’s main point is that there is a good side to the new campus regulations, as draconian as they are. They may restore some restraint on campus. It’s a point that has been made here before. She writes:

Unlike the overregulation of natural gas production, say, which results in less of a valuable commodity, there is no cost to an overregulation-induced decrease in campus sex. Society has no interest in preserving the collegiate bacchanal. Should college fornication become a rare event preceded by contract signing and notarization, maybe students would actually do some studying instead.

But there is a cost to the regulations, mostly in their reinforcement of the ideological premises of feminism. They are entirely negative incentives, with no affirmation of the complementarity of the sexes.

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