“Date Rape” on Campus

This file is a single short polemical essay by Murray N. Rothbard, dated February 1991. Its scope is narrow but combative: Rothbard responds to contemporary campus debates over “date rape,” especially a New York Times report and the influence of feminist anti-rape theory. The essay’s thesis is that rape should be understood only as coercive sex against a person’s will, and that campus feminist discourse has blurred this definition by treating ambiguous, intoxicated, or regretted sexual encounters as rape.

To a libertarian, or indeed to any sensible person, there is no problem: if the sex was coercive, and took place against the will of one of the parties, then it was rape and if not, not.

The central conceptual move is reduction: Rothbard collapses the problem of consent into a binary of coercion versus non-coercion. From that premise, he treats students’ uncertainty about “What is Rape?” not as evidence of complex social conditions but as ideological confusion produced by feminism. His method is not empirical adjudication but rhetorical inversion: claims of hidden coercion become evidence, for him, of a new puritanism and victimology.

The essay’s structure proceeds through escalating stages. It begins with Rothbard’s libertarian definition of rape, then turns to campus complaints that women did not say “no” or physically resist but later described the encounter as rape. Rothbard makes this absence of refusal decisive.

For whether or not “encouragement” took place, it strikes me as crystal-clear that if the girl did not say no and did not physically resist, then sex did indeed take place by “clear mutual consent.”

This is the essay’s hinge and its most revealing premise: consent is equated with non-resistance and implicit mutuality, while later reinterpretation is treated as bad faith. Rothbard then broadens the issue from law to culture, arguing that feminist insistence on “clear mutual consent” threatens the tacit, nonverbal nature of sexual courtship.

The point is that, as in so many other aspects of human “relationships,” the feminists are setting out to destroy romance (if that word is not yet obsolete), which thrives on spontaneity, and on implicit, non-verbal mutual understanding.

The next section attacks the Mary Koss study and the idea that intoxication may transform sex into assault. Rothbard distinguishes only one morally relevant case—surreptitious spiking of a drink—and otherwise insists on individual responsibility for drinking and conduct.

Everyone is responsible for whatever he or she imbibes, unless the guy spiked the girl’s drink without her knowledge (not mentioned in any of these cases) and everyone is responsible for their own actions, liquor or not.

From there the essay shifts into a psychological and moral explanation: Rothbard claims that women have historically used alcohol and romantic spontaneity to reduce guilt after consensual sex, and that feminism now redirects that guilt onto men. This move turns feminist anti-rape activism into a mechanism of moral transfer rather than a response to violence.

Now, along comes our baneful feminist theoreticians who have been able to use their besotted theories to (a) free girls, once and for all, from guilt for their actions, and (b) to load that guilt onto the poor, hapless male population.

The final movement is satirical. A Lehigh University dormitory lecture is presented as “brainwashing” and likened to Orwellian self-criticism; possible “solutions” are then exaggerated into prohibition, chaperonage, abolition of coeducation, and finally the criminalization of heterosexual sex itself.

And finally, why not go the whole hog toward Left Puritanism and define all sex as per se coercive?

The essay’s relevance lies in its sharp expression of an early-1990s libertarian-conservative backlash against campus feminism, “political correctness,” affirmative consent, and expanded accounts of sexual coercion. It is less a balanced analysis of sexual assault than a compressed ideological artifact: Rothbard defines violence narrowly, treats ambiguity as feminist fabrication, defends tacit sexual norms, and frames anti-rape education as puritanical social control.