BLUTO'S HARRIDANS.

At Minding The Campus, Charlotte Allen suggests that college fraternities play a useful role in the campus culture wars.

I argue that it's as plain as the nose on your face (unless you're a feminist wearing your rape-culture blinders) that the brothers of Zeta Psi and Delta Kappa Epsilon were perfectly aware not only that they were protesting, but exactly "what they were they were protesting against" and why. They chose their targets carefully, and they fired with maximum impact. The jokes they made were certainly gross, but they were not mindless. The brothers of DKE and Zeta Psi were legitimate free-speech heroes not only because the First Amendment protects boorish as well as polite speech but also because they, almost alone on their campus in New Haven (I can't think of a Yale equivalent to Harvey Mansfield), dared to mock the reigning orthodoxy—unsupported by any facts, as Heather Mac Donald pointed out—that college campuses in general, much less fraternity houses, are hotbeds of Class I  felonies involving female students routinely and brutally victimized by their male classmates. Fraternity houses are among the few places on campus where truth can be spoken, if not to power (that gets you into trouble), at least to likeminded souls, your sworn brothers, who can see very well the silliness and implausibility of the officially promoted rape myth.

The real problem—and here I think [Pope Center essayist Duke] Cheston would agree with me—is that colleges, including and perhaps especially the omnipresent Women's Centers, vigorously promote casual sexual encounters among their undergraduates, all in the name of  liberation and gender equality, and then are shocked, shocked that universal happiness does not ensue, especially among the female participants. Yale's biennial "Sex Week" featuring professional strippers, porn stars, and sex-toy consumer reps peddling their wares to 20-year-olds is just one of similar events on campuses all over the country. where the ins and outs, so to speak, of condom-fitting and leather-fetishism are just another part of  the college experience. I am not the first person to observe that the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s was largely a revolution of women, who were suddenly as free to be as promiscuous and vulgar as men. Not surprisingly, men have been all too happy to take advantage of the newly granted female sexual license—and on campuses no group has been so happy as extroverted, athletic, better-than-average-looking fraternity men at the peak of their testosterone production helped along by the fact that downing tequila shots with the best of them is now also a marker of gender equality at colleges.

In short, there's not a rape-culture problem on campuses but a hookup-and-booze culture problem that has degraded both sexes. And it's unfair to single out fraternities and their members for punishment in an unfortunate situation for which college administrators, faculty feminists, and yes, the female students who behave as grossly as their male counterparts but who refuse to take responsibility for their actions are equally to blame. And that's why I continue to give one or two cheers for college fraternities, even in their current decadent state.

Greek-letter organizations as guerrilla theater.  There has to be a better way.