I'm gonna regret having an opinion on this, and I'm going to regret it deeply. But I'm going to do it anyway.

There are more than two sides to any issue, "college rape" in particular. Todd Akin swallowed a sneaker over dividing "rape" into "legitimate rape" and... everything else, I guess. It's a lot like saying "actual pregnancy." But it's also a ham-fisted acknowledgement that the public's appetite and understanding of sexual assault is a moving target and that we are now prosecuting and calling inexcusable things that used to just be "boys being boys."

Blade Runner was the most expensive movie made in 1982. Harrison Ford was hot off of Indiana Jones and Empire Strikes Back. Sean Young was a rising star. Watch this clip and see if shit at 3:00 doesn't start making you distinctly uncomfortable:

It made Sean Young uncomfortable. She's said publicly she felt like she was being raped. The result? She stopped working. This is a fully unsubstantiated guess on my part but I reckon we're hearing about Bill Cosby's past now rather than then because then the most common reaction would have been "Bill Cosby slipped these girls his Jello Pudding pop?" (instantrimshot) (laugh track).

Women should feel safe. Women should be protected from retaliatory harassment when they charge that their safety has been violated. That's rape activism. But women should not feel safe to groundlessly annihilate the future of any man they encounter. And that's the pendulum swinging the other way - it's more of a likelihood now than it was 20 years ago.

Here's the thing: a man can destroy a woman's life with rape. He will face consequences. A woman can destroy a man's life with accusations of rape. By and large, she won't. Li'l story:

I made a deal with myself back in the golden era of Match.com: I wouldn't give them money but I'd go out on at least one date with anyone who approached me. As men outnumbered women about 20 to 1 on Match.com it was a deal that didn't involve much work on my part. Think I went on three dates. One of them was with a girl who was very coy about her identity, refusing to give me a last name. Problem was she called from her dad's house. Star 69, firstname lastname, "Montana State University" and I knew, within 20 minutes, that she was on academic probation for one year for making a false rape accusation.

Doesn't sound like much, but this is a girl who cut at her own jugular with an X-acto knife, tore her own sweater and told the cops she'd been dragged behind the bushes by a boy who, as it turns out, hadn't wanted to give her his number. She cracked under questioning by the district attorney as she was working up the rape and assault case against the boy... six months after this poor kid had been thrown to the ground in his dorm room by Bozeman police, guns drawn, and thrown into jail over the weekend. Six months after he'd been kicked off campus and expelled.

One year. Academic probation. The charge?

Perjury.

In 2002.

I guess it's progress that both genders now have life-ruining power but it's also fucking sad that right about the time we finally get kids free of their overbearing, overprotective helicopter parents we're also telling them that any consensual sexual encounter they may have is grounds for a life-ending disciplinary hearing at any point in the future. You think that isn't gonna fuck up both genders and thereby society?

Here's the thing. Rape is a crime. Falsely accusing someone of rape is also a crime. We didn't used to prosecute the former nearly enough. Now we've swung the other way where we aren't willing to do anything about the latter.

I want women to feel safe. I want women to be safe. But I can't endorse a society where men can have their futures deep-sixed when your freshman fling's mother finds her diary.