Matthew Yglesias has a serious, legitimate beef with an NPR piece on campus rape researcher David Lisak. Yglesias says the piece (which I haven’t heard) first covers men who admit having sex with women against their will and then… maybe out of some perverse j-school “to be sure” reflex… brought up another professor, Stetson University law professor Peter Lake, who says naah, a lot of college students just drink too much, engage in risky behavior, and then regret it later.

The two concepts are not a good combination in a single piece. Says Matt, emphasis his:

It’s seems incredibly pernicious to me to be running these things together. Lisak’s question specifically posits that the victim “did not want to” have sex, but was “too intoxicated … to resist.” What Lake is talking about conjured up an imagine of a young woman with impaired judgment doing something while drunk that she later regrets. Obviously, that does happen. But it’s quite a different situation from an encounter where even the perpetrator acknowledges that the victim was unwilling.

He said it here.

That sounds right.

You wanna know something else about the mentality that brings us the bogus Two Rules of Desire? If you’re convinced it’s simultaneously intolerable and inconceivable for women to have sexual desire then of course you’re going to believe they’re going to claim rape ever time they have a drunken hookup.

In fact most people who have drunken hookups just say “oh well, that was dumb.” You know who tends to claim rape instead? People who were actually raped.

Just a thought.