Charen: Hookup culture and the campus rape hysteria

Article here. Excerpt:

'The case should remind us of something important: Don’t think in categories. The left slips into this all the time: Men are guilty; women are victims. The right has its own categories: Campus rape is ginned-up hysteria based on missed signals and regretted sex. Both sides need to remove their blinders.

Many on the right have noted — correctly — that the left has gone berserk on the subject of what it calls “rape culture.” According to the left’s overwrought account, 1 in 5 female college students is the victim of “sexual assault.” The solution, imposed by the Obama Justice Department and endorsed by the bien pensant, is a massive sexual adjudication bureaucracy that dispenses with centuries-old protections for the accused, like the presumption of innocence and the right to confront witnesses, while denying that women ever make false accusations. Many innocent young men have faced star chamber disciplinary proceedings; one young man was banned from certain parts of campus because he resembled a man who had raped a student.

But any insight can be ridden into the ground, and the Stanford case is a reminder that the right’s perception of what’s happening has limits, too. In my research, I have met too many students who recount rapes and sexual assaults for all of it to fit within the category of morning-after regrets. Women have been assaulted by men they’d just met, by men they thought were friends, by men who slipped drugs into their drinks and by multiple men at once. It’s not all the Duke lacrosse case and “Jackie” from the University of Virginia.'