The video is replete with issues, from the accused being a child, a black child, to the “survivor” bizarrely remembering her trauma backwards, where she claimed someone else claimed to be a cop when it came from her mouth. Reactions to the video are as varied as there are IQ scores. But there is one tiny slice of what happened that can’t be distinguished by age or race, the lie of traumatic memory or #BelieveTheWoman.

What happened to her was “sexual assault.” We know because she said so. While #BelieveTheWoman would preclude anyone from doubt that it happened, it also prevents all but the slave to facts from questioning her conclusory claim, that whatever actual conduct occurred, it was “sexual assault.” Not a grope. Not even “copped a feel,” but “sexual assault.”

As video showed, it was nothing of the sort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7goQ7r_xRQ

A young boy’s backpack inadvertently brushed the woman’s, Teresa Klein’s, buttocks. Had there been no video, people would be arguing with absolute certainty that she was sexually assaulted, plus the myriad other issues and problems raised by this encounter. But that the contact, if it happened at all, was a sexual assault would be an unassailable fact. Because she said so.

The slide down the slippery slope of meaninglessness has been happening for years.

For those of us not indoctrinated into the new conceptions of rape and sexual assault, we envision forcible rape, a man with a gun to the head of a woman, pushing her into a dark alley where he forces himself onto her.  At best, we imagine a woman passed out, unaware that the man she was drinking with earlier removed her clothing and forced himself on her.

But to others, force is only the extreme.  Rape is now the word used to describe sex when a woman has had a few drinks, falls somewhere along the buzzed spectrum and decides the next day that she didn’t really want to do it, even though she was an enthusiastic participant the night before.

Even if we assume, as we must, that Klein mistakenly leaped to the assumption that someone touched (not groped, not rubbed, not fondled, but at worst touched) her buttocks, this formed the basis for her cry that she was sexually assaulted. This doesn’t mean there aren’t sexual assaults, but that anything, no matter how slight, that could conceivably be claimed by the most sensitive of accusers to be a sexual assault is one. And it’s not about the brush against her buttocks, but about sexual assault. If she feels it is, then it is, and only a rape apologist would question her.

Back when, as words became untethered from definitions and, step by step, their meanings became so vague, so broad, so meaningless, that the closest one could come to a definition is that rape and sexual assault were whatever the woman felt they were, the problem for law became obvious.

We have some basic notions of what is required of a rule, the violation of which carries a penalty.  The most fundamental of these notions is that it provide notice of the conduct prohibited, so that a person will know that by engaging in that conduct, he violates the prohibition.  The reasoning is straightforward:  we cannot expect a person to recognize that certain conduct is wrong if that conduct is not defined.

The insipid responded to such legal niceties by screaming, “well, just don’t rape, duh,” which entirely missed the point as the insipid are wont to do. What is rape? What is sexual assault? How is anyone supposed to not do it when they don’t know what it is?

It’s not like I didn’t tell you so. I’ve been harping on definitions, much to the chagrin of those who get headaches from all that legal mumbo jumbo, for the nouvelle crimes that have become ubiquitous.  Many have wondered why so much real estate here has been dedicated to questions about how sex on college campuses has become untethered from any meaningful definition.  This is why.

With an effort also underway by the American Law Institute to reconsider when an assault becomes rape, some legal experts predict that changes to criminal laws in many states may not be far off.

Indeed, with academics throwing around words like “rape” and “sexual assault” as if they were humpty dumpty, they are bringing up baby in a world where these words have come to mean whatever individuals choose them to mean.  Who cares if they are all fuzzy around the edges, defined post hoc, limited only by the feelings of their victims?  What about the victims?!?

This was written in 2014, and we’ve since crept, slowly at first but now at warp speed, miles beyond this basic definition problem. The #MeToo movement’s purpose wasn’t to reveal how many woman have stories of rape and sexual assault, but to do so without scrutiny, without any critical question of whether their stories hold up in fact. It’s proven wildly successful in allowing any accusation to stick, to taint and ultimately to justify punishment, by creating both a fiction that it’s pervasive and almost never false, and a threat: anyone so horrible as to question is at best a misogynist and at worst a rapist, since who would ever question a “survivor”?

This young child touched no one. His backpack inadvertently brushed against Klein. But her “truth” was that she was sexually assaulted. Had there been no video, so that we could see that she was wrong and thereupon launch into rationalizations that allow us to try to salvage the #BelieveTheWoman narrative despite it being flagrantly nonsensical, her cries would have been blindly believed, indisputable by anyone except a misogynist.

Remove the hooks that the insipid* hang on to ignore the glaring problems with their ideology and it should be clear as day why this is untenable. If the “perp” had been older, if there were no witnesses, if there was no video, if the person had the same skin color as Klein, the exact same physical conduct could have put him in prison, had him expelled from college, ruined his life and there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do about it. Because Teresa Klein said she was sexually assaulted, so she was.

*The most mind-numbingly stupid reaction in my line of sight was a lawyer who bizarrely connected in his twisted mind this situation with Kavanaugh. Had this been some random nutjob, it wouldn’t be surprising, but when the nutjob is a lawyer, his irrationality is of far deeper concern.