Only now the cry across campuses is "date rape."
Those involved frame it as a liberal concern, cut and dry, beyond debate.
But they don't stop to consider the fundamentally sexist images lurking beneath their rhetoric.
The term "date rape" itself hints at its conservative bent. More than just a polemic against rape, it reveals a desire for dates.
Although not an explicit part of their movement, these feminists are responding, in this time of sexual suspicion, to the need for a more rigid courtship structure.
The message represents, in part, a nostalgia for 1950s-style dating. For Johnny picking Susie up for a movie and a Coke.
And the assumption embedded in this movement is our grandmother's assumption: Men want sex, women don't.
In emphasizing this struggle - him pushing, her resisting - the movement against date rape recycles and promotes an old model of sexuality.
The definition of "date rape" stretches beyond acts of physical force.
According to pamphlets widely distributed on college campuses, even ''verbal coercion" constitutes "date rape."
This so-called feminist movement peddles an image of gender relations that denies female desire and infantalizes women.
Once again our bodies seem to be sacred vessels. We've come a long way and now it seems we are going back.
Let's not chase the same stereotypes our mothers spent so much energy running away from.
Let's not reinforce the images that oppress us, that label us victims, and
deny our own agency and intelligence, as strong and sensual, as autonomous, pleasure-seeking, sexual beings.
