Naomi Schaefer Riley of the New York Post points out that rape culture obscures the very real horror of the crime of rape.

The frenzy over ‘campus rape culture’ is hurting real victims

If you want to know the difference between someone who is a victim of rape and someone who is a victim of the “rape culture,” you could do worse than compare the recent cases at Stanford and at Columbia.

In the case of the former, two graduate students came upon a young woman, unconscious, on the ground behind a trash bin as a man was assaulting her. She awoke in the hospital to find, by her own account, “fingers had been jabbed inside me along with pine needles and debris.”

In the case of the latter, a young woman (now widely known as “Mattress Girl” because she carried a mattress around campus to symbolize her plight) claimed that a man with whom she’d previously had consensual sex, assaulted her in her bed and then left.

Two days after, he invited her to come to a party, and she said yes, adding that the two should have a “chill sesh.” A couple weeks later on Facebook, she wrote to him, “I want to see yoyououoyou” — part of six pages worth of flirty conversations on Facebook the two had after the alleged attack.

One of these women was raped. The other one had an encounter that she might not have liked — but whatever happened, it wasn’t something she held against the guy for very long.

Unfortunately, the waters of campus politics have been muddied to the extent that these two incidents will be thrown into the same broad category of campus assault for years to come.