The sexual revolution TURNS FULL CIRCLE


A new law designed to end campus rape may change the nature of relationships
To counter the rising numbers of campus rape incidents, the California legislature introduced a new law (commonly referred to as `Yes Means Yes'), defining `affirmative consent'.
“Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent,“ the law says, “nor does silence mean consent. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time.“

The law has caused a firestorm of discussion online and off. “Colleges have settled into an equilibrium where too little counts as sexual assault, where the ambiguity of consent gives rapists loopholes in which to hide, and forces women to spend their lives afraid,“ writes Ezra Klein at Vox.com. “To work, `Yes Means Yes' needs to create a world where men are afraid,“ he writes. Kevin Drum, at Mother Jones, notes that we require affirmative consent for most things. “Why not sex?“ he asks.

But while most feminists and progressives are strongly behind the law, there are those who have a different take. “Campus feminists are reimporting selective portions of a traditional sexual code that they have long scorned, in the name of ending what they preposterously call an epidemic of campus rape. They are once again making males the guardians of female safety and are portraying females as fainting, helpless victims of the male libido. They are demanding that college administrators write highly technical rules for sex and aggressively enforce them, 50 years after the proponents of sexual liberation insisted that college adults stop policing student sexual behavior,“ writes Heather MacDonald at The Weekly Standard. MacDonald believes that the campus law is symptomatic of a neo-Victorian ethos which makes the male the sole guardian of female safety . What is happening, she says, is not the result of rape culture, but the emotional fallout of sexual liberation