© MICHAEL HICKEY / GETTY
This is the question - rife with legal, anatomical, and emotional improbabilities - to which the University of Cincinnati now addresses itself, and with some urgency, as
the institution and three of its employees are currently being sued over an encounter that was sexual for a brief moment, but that just as quickly entered the realm of eternal return. The one important thing you need to know about the case is that according to the lawsuit,
a woman has been indefinitely suspended from college because she let a man touch her vagina. What kind of sexually repressive madness could have allowed for this to happen? Answer
that question and you will go a long way toward answering the question, "What the hell is happening on American college campuses?"
The substantive facts of the case come to us only through a lawsuit, one that has thus far implicated everything from Title IX, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Constitution to "slut shaming" and good old-fashioned horniness. But not
super horniness, because - as with many high profile cases involving the infinitely expandable concept of "college sexual assault" - the actual encounter exists as merest prologue to the massive novel of ideas that followed it.
The event in précis, as
summarized by Robby Soave of
Reason magazine:
"Male and female student have a drunken hookup. He wakes up, terrified she's going to file a sexual misconduct complaint, so he goes to the Title IX office and beats her to the punch. She is found guilty and suspended."
The image that this conjured - of a couple waking up in the fetid bed of blackout sex, coming to the hideous realization of what happened and then lacing up their running shoes for a mad race across campus to the Torquemada of Title IX - is not just amusing, but offers a potentially useful precedent to the nation's college men. The race is not always to the swift, but
the functionaries of the college sex panic have an obdurate habit of determining that the victim of a blearily remembered amorous encounter is the person who decides to report it, with all ties broken by the one who reports it first.
Comment: See also: Has a new American Civil War begun?