“The Hyped Campus Rape That Wasn’t”

An interesting and troubling column by Cathy Young (Minding the Campus). The opening paragraphs:

If a satirist had set out to write a scathing parody of the campus crusade against rape, he could not have come up with anything more bizarre, or more ridiculous, than the real-life comedy-drama that unfolded last month at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

The scandal started, like many scandals do these days, in the social media. On Saturday, October 12, amidst the school’s Homecoming Weekend festivities, photos and a video of two young people engaged in a public sex act near the campus–the man on his knees performing oral sex on the woman while she leaned against a plate-glass window, half-sitting on its ledge–showed up online and promptly spread on Twitter….

Read the whole piece, plus, if you’d like, the linked-to news story on the grand jury’s refusal to indict. (For the sake of completeness, I should note that the story also mentions that the video footage showed digital penetration as well as oral sex, though I don’t think that affects the analysis.)

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