I think the debate isn't really constitutional and about free speech. It is that this guy is a walking time-bomb with a well-understood, largely untreatable mental illness. We don't do a very good job handling mentally ill people of all stripes; we have swung from highly arbitrary cruel confinement and forced treatment, to callous indifference and virtually no treatment at all.

A cop I was talking to a while back, said: "Prisons make pretty poor mental hospitals." They do. Unfortunately, that seems to be the only response we have: ignore them until they do something bad enough that we can lock them up. Which is, I expect, what will happen with Mr. McClellan, that is if some vigilante doesn't get him first.

This is one thing that women rarely have to put up with: being solicited in public washrooms by other women (or so I would imagine). Or having to hear guys getting it on while you try and pee. So while my first instinct is to ask whether the cops don't have anything better to do, on reflection in fact this is a good use of their time. Take it to a gay bar, or a bathhouse, or whatever, but let me pee in peace. I don't think it's much to ask.

You know, I don't even mind social conservative hypocrites getting it on with their pages or flirting with their neighbors (Craig actually has a bit of a history). We know they are lying dirtbags anyway. But creeps peering at you through the cracks of bathroom stall doors, and then settling in next stall over for a game of footsie and reach under the wall, well ick and yuck. Regardless of your position on same-sex marriage, that is just disgusting and amounts to harassment and thanks cops for busting your skeezy ass.

Poor cop though, aside from having to do such a crappy job at all, can you imagine having to learn all the hand and foot signals? I have to go look at some kitten pictures now to wash that knowledge out of my mind.

The thing is, there IS a gray area, just not in the scenarios in the article. No means no, and being unconscious means no, and that is rape and no question. But what about situations where there is not an explicit "no," because of psychological pressure, fear, manipulation, etc. These situations range from what is probably just bad sex to the moral (and in some situations, the legal) equivalent of rape.

I don't think these have much to do with hook-up culture, which as a poster pointed out has functionally been around for maybe 40 years so. In fact, the bad old days then and before (in the mythical ideal 40s or 50s that Stepp seems to be yearning for) may have been worse, in that the psychological pressures were more effective, men's attitudes were worse, and women's own understanding of their rights much weaker. "Boys will be boys" probably accounted for a good deal of gray and not so gray rape. So if anything, Stepp might well have the whole things backwards: things are rather less "gray" now, on the whole.

Rape is rape, but there is, I think, a distinction to be made between types of rapists. The fairly rare stereotypical violent stranger rapist very often seems to be mostly on a misogynist angry power trip (I've heard they often don't even ejaculate, can't remember where). Filthy Uncle John with the wandering hands seems quite differently motivated and inclined to use other techniques. The stupid misogynist frat boy "banging" a drunk girl that he can brag about later to his frat boy buddies is a rather different kettle of fish entirely.

But both genders occasionally put on some pressure for sex, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, and it can range from being appreciated to uninteresting to dreadful to terrible to out and out rape. And here there actually is a gray area, and a continuum between bad sex and rape. And it is not made gray by female irresponsibility (though no doubt there is some of that too, always has been), but by female fear, insecurity, intimidation, and (and I really hate to use this word) disempowerment. My original point was that Stepp is wrong, in that I think it is pretty clear that women are on the whole rather less disempowered than in her golden age.

But my other point is that there are very real gray areas. And this kind of haunts me a little, as a little over 20 years ago as a young male idiot I was in one of those grayish situations, and I've never really figured out how to think about it. Partly because I don't remember it so well myself, college binge drinking is not a good thing. Well, at a minimum I did behave like a bit of a cad (though I did what little I could to atone afterwards). By any legal standard I did nothing wrong, for what that is worth (not much, in my estimation). I certainly wasn't in any of the above categories. But it isn't comfortable to think about, nevertheless. Because it was in a gray area.

The thing it taught me, I guess, is that it isn't binary, yes yes yes or no no no, one or both parties can be ambivalent and/or of two minds, and youth and alcohol don't help in that situation at all.

Well we absolutely do charge them with the currently legalese equivalent, and they absolutely do go to jail. Feel better now?

Millions of teenage boys don't.

Me, I can think of three or four high-school teachers, if they had wanted to take an interest in my clammy pimply teen body, I would like have been totally down with that. Just not the marrying from prison part.