Mona Charen weighs in on Feminist Lies about Sexual Assault:

You don’t have to believe the one-in-four figure floated by activists to agree that women are experiencing a marked degree of sexual assault and battery in the liberated hook-up world liberalism has created. But this is progressivism chasing its tail.

For centuries, men have lied to women to lure them into bed. Parents warned their daughters about such men. In recent decades, it’s women who’ve been lying to other women. Feminists peddled the notion that women wanted exactly the same things from sex that men did. They rejected modesty and its cousin chivalry with contempt and welcomed the sexual free for all.

They were wrong about human nature — in this case immutable sex differences — but cannot admit it. . . .

Women who lie to other women conceal the facts. For example: The National Institute of Justice reports that among the risk factors for sexual assault on campus is “having numerous sexual partners,” getting “drunk or high” on a regular basis, and attending fraternity parties.

Pointing out these realities is rejected as “slut shaming” or “victim blaming” by feminists.

For all their bold talk about empowerment, feminists seem always to demand that they not be forced to deal with reality. They preach to young women that they’re just like men sexually, and when they find, to their horror, that lots of women are getting raped, they respond that women shouldn’t be cautious about who they get drunk with, men should “be taught not to rape.”

The current uproar in academic and legal circles about the rape epidemic and how to deal with it would be laughable if the consequences were not so tragic. Having repudiated the age-old system of chivalry, modesty, and chastity that—however imperfectly—protected women and their offspring, our culture is now caught in a moral morass of its own making. With the old rules now gone, young people no longer have any idea how to manage the powerful—and different—hormonal urges that are part of our male and female natures. The result is chaos.

Putting all the blame on men while absolving women of any responsibility in this crisis is not a recipe for gender equality but for even more conflict. This will not end well for anyone, including women.