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Let me acknowledge at the outset of my comments that this is a sensitive and volatile matter ... for reasons that have nothing to do with ideology. Rape isn't merely -- or shouldn't merely -- be batted around lightly as though it were a beach ball in the never-ending back-and-forth between left and right.

Let me also say this: I don't know how often rape happens on college campuses. Is it as often as is claimed in the studies that Mac Donald purports to refute? Again, I don't know.

What I do know, with some certainty, is that the problem is much bigger than she suggests in this paragraph of her LA Times essay:

Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults -- the law does not require their confirmation -- usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses, and maybe two to three times that at large public universities.

The key word there is "reported." Rape isn't reported as often as it happens, not by a long shot, because -- truth be told -- there's not a lot of incentive to do the reporting, particularly in cases of acquaintance rape. I've covered sexual assault trials; I can tell you that it's often devastating for a victim to have to go in front of a jury. Many women opt out, and never show up on a crime report.

There's more I could say here, but it would be a batch of warmed-over arguments, on both sides, going back to Katie Roiphe's writings in the early 1990s. Suffice it to say there's more support for the numbers than Mac Donald suggests. Anybody who cares can Google up the particulars.

Let me offer, though, two more thoughts that are less about numbers and methodology and more about the philosophy of this argument:

* I thought the ugliest part of Mac Donald's argument was the part Chuck quoted below. In the hypersexualized atmosphere of a modern college campus, Mac Donald suggests, men "you bet!" get drunk and act thuggish. And women get drunk and (Mac Donald implies, though she's too careful to say so)act slutty.

Mac Donald's solution? I'm paraphrasing here, but roughly speaking it is this: "Hey girls, stop acting so drunkenly slutty!"

But Mac Donald's suggestion that women "share responsibility" for the sexual outcome of an evening out works only if both sides agree to share responsibility. And Mac Donald, so intent on making sure we understand campus rape isn't that widespread can't or won't offer up even a sentence of this: "Hey boys, stop acting like drunken thugs and start acting like gentlemen!"

Given the stakes here, that's a startling omission.

And that leads me to my final point:

* It's been interesting, and disturbing, watching discussion of Mac Donald's essay spread across the Internet. Among people who welcome the article, the tone has been, at times (though not universally) gleeful.

I suppose that's because the essay, as some conservatives like to say, irritates "all the right people," in this case those annoying feminists and liberals.

As I said at the beginning: We shouldn't treat this issue like an ideological beach ball. For those half-dozen or more women that Mac Donald will agree have been raped on a campus each year, rape IS a crisis. We can discuss the numbers, and the response, as much as we need -- but we should never forget or diminish the experience of people who really have suffered.