I usually don't believe in issuing trigger warnings.
I'm gonna issue one here because I'm gonna be dealing with the one crime that's worse than murder.
I think that we all know what that is.
Christina Hoff Sommers has been falsely accused as a rape denier for years now. The reason is that, over the last ten years or so, the claim has been between one in five and one and three women have experienced a sexual assault on college campuses. As Sommers put it, that would mean that a college campus is more dangerous for a woman than a war zone in Congo.
The thing is, I have too many women in my life who have opened up to me about having been sexually assaulted for me to be as skeptical of that number a Sommers is.
Since we're specifically talking about college, and colleges aren't known for being packed with evangelical Christian right-wingers.
The research has been done that psychopaths make up a tiny minority of the prison population.
So, most violent offenders commit their crimes because they have poor moral values.
The thing is, it's demonstrably true that the left has a massive philosophical problem with the concept of consent.
The same college campus that was requiring students to fill out consent documents if they wanted to hook up employs a professor who wrote the book Screw Consent. This is the professor, Joseph J. Fischel who has made arguments that you should stick your finger in somebody's ass without his or her consent because the person might like it. This is the same person who has passionately supported dicks being waved in public in front of children.
I don't see anybody on the Right swapping out the word "pedophile" with the term "minor attracted person." I don't see anybody on the Right insisting that kids can consent to puberty blockers and hormones and to sterilize themselves before they even hit puberty. I don't see anyone on the Right arguing that kids can consent to selective surgeries.
Just about the entire public support for the North American Man Boy Love Association comes from the Left. That's an open pro-pedophile group.
The thing is, it's baked in the cake that the radical Left would be confused about consent. Most of the philosophy comes from Marx, and Marx didn't give two shits about consent. It would be funny if it weren't so horrifying that colleges, which are supposed to be stacked with our most enlightened people, would tell us that a simple, "Do you want to?" followed by a smile and nod isn't sufficient consent for to adults to have sex, while the faculty is telling you that consent is an after thought in moral evaluation.
Look, I come from a libertarian perspective. I spent four years in a mostly libertarian community. Within that community were libertines who conservatives who consider to be sexual deviants -- and definitely had different tastes than me. Still, the entire libertarian philosophy is built around consent. You can fuck whoever your want, as many people as you want, as many people as the same time as you want, as roughly as you want, in as gross of a way as I may find it -- my only concern is that everybody involved is an adult of sound mind.
The Left doesn't have this component in their moral philosophy. To the extent that they do, it's on the backburner.
So, if the numbers that Sommers refutes are actually real, this horrifying epidemic of sex crimes is being committed by the very people who claim that we live in a rape culture.
If colleges are really this dangerous for women, our lens has been out of focus while we've been looking for the cause of the problem.
I'm not sure that leftists have been looking for the cause of the problem.
If colleges are this dangerous for women, it's because of leftist ideology. It's because the Left complicates the obvious in regard to consent. It's because the Left has to complicate the obvious in regard to consent.