Do I Have Permission To Kiss You? Tick the Box …

In the United States, universities introduce good practice codes for students who want to initiate a romantic or sexual relationship, in order to halt the increase of rapes and sexual attacks.

Have these elegant American universities, which produce world leaders that are featured at the top of Chinese (Shanghai) and Swedish (Nobel) rankings, become dangerous places for girls? At these universities they practice science, they want to change the world, like at Stanford, preparing students to invent bio foods, unprecedented modes of transport and unheard of telecom services. However, in this politically correct country — currently experiencing a prohibitionist age in which a majority gets their fix from soda — isolated youth living on campus have turned to festive and inappropriate use of alcohol. There are parties of a fairly brutal nature that promote binge drinking, a crude practice of violently consuming alcohol in order to become drunk very quickly. Those girls who succumb to this often wake up having been violated.

Feminists are astonished that these sexual assaults are trivialized in what we call “frats,” more or less secret types of organizations made up of students and alumni who generally welcome new members. In “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” Tom Wolfe recounts the rape of a young girl who has come to study and finds herself involved in the Dantesque hell of the “parties” on the beaches of Palm Beach, Florida. One in five girls are raped there, a figure which should be viewed with care, but one which is sufficiently worrying to alert the police, the Department of Education and Obama himself. Doesn’t Woodstock seem long ago?

Feminists and the left have seized the subject, condemning “male psychology” and the “rape culture” from which women have to be protected, particularly those who visit the frats, and who are suspected of hiding the truth. This is an outlook which these girls condemn just like some students from Cornell and Harvard, who condemn this Puritanism and the various approaches taken by different establishments. It is true that the geography of binge drinking shows that they are unequally affected by the scourge. Today it is the students who contest the legal proceedings to which they are subject. In retaliation, they take the university to court seeking millions of dollars in damages.

This sort of behavior has deteriorated throughout the year to the point that Philip Hanlon, president of Dartmouth College, sounded the alarm against the “sexual assaults on campus and dangerous drinking that have become more the rule than the exception.” On the universities’ side, psychologists accuse parents of having overprotected their children and having promised them total freedom. To “have a great time,” young people leave the family nest at 18 and throw themselves into unrestrained drunkenness. They are exploited. Date rape introduces a situation where the line is blurred between what appears to be consent and what isn’t.

On the right, moralists condemn the loosening of male traditions, distinguishing between Rousseau’s vision of the good individual, guided by the weight of religion, and fundamentally weak beings who do not manage to control themselves if they lack faith (St. Augustine). How can we restrain this violence? Without a doubt, preventing this situation is not simple. Laure Mandeville, who led an inquiry at the University of Virginia, states that seminars teaching consensual sex are taking place at the university, which has introduced a strict rule to standardize the stages of a relationship. The rule requires one to ask such things as, “Do I have your permission? Can I kiss you, put my hand here …” Apple even thought up an app “Good2Go” for seeking “digital” consent. But in the end, it was perceived to be too crude!

Americans believe that they are sexually liberated. Perhaps. But relationships between men and women are comparable to a minefield. Well noted.