The Washington Post has taken the plunge into the murky depths of college campus life this week and produced a short video of various students trying to define what “consent” means in terms of engaging in sexual activity. I’ll confess, it’s an informative piece, though perhaps not in the way intended. They managed to find a fairly wide range of students who all had their own ideas about what consitutes consent and how that definition is “changing” over time. (That’s fairly frightening right there.)

It’s pretty clear that the students they spoke to for this video fell into two distinct camps. One group is the kids who have clearly spent plenty of time at social justice meetings, hanging out in safe spaces and scanning the campus square for trigger warning signs. The others gave far more hesitant answers and seemed confused by some of the questions being asked. Their attitudes suggest someone who just may have grown up somewhere out there in the real world where people still interact in natural ways without each and every aspect of their lives being subjected to navel gazing and political dissection.

The members of the former group are well practiced in the Yes means Yes, Campus Culture of Rape talking points. The ones falling into the latter category dare to say things along the lines of verbal consent not always being required if “I’m obviously into it” and participating and responding in a positive fashion. (Imagine the horror. She’ll probably be kicked off campus after this comes out.)

Before we continue, check out the video if you have time. It’s a little over four minutes long and consists solely of comments from the students.

Watching some of these responses it’s no wonder that we’ve got such a mess brewing in our nation’s colleges. One thing seems clear, though: the much ballyhooed national discussion about sexual assault has managed to leave a lot of these kids confused beyond any reasonable limit. And what do you expect when they’ve apparently been trained to give answers like this:

“Consent is about boundaries. And we are constantly defining those boundaries.”

Actually, I’d replace “defining” with “redefining” but why quibble over semantics? Here’s another beauty from one young man who has probably spent too much time in the women’s studies classes:

“No means no. And yes can mean yes. But when did they say yes? Why did they say yes? What conditions were they under when they said yes?”

We shouldn’t be shocked if these colleges are turning out a confused collection of young adults when it comes to matters of sex and social interaction. I’m trying to put myself in the place of a young, college age man being invited up to the apartment or dorm room of a girl I managed to get a date with and navigating these types of traps. Can you just imagine the couple in a heavy make-out session and the guy tentatively sliding a hand off the shoulder and down the front of the girl’s sweater? Even if we assume that she is fully into the idea and is planning to have him spend the night, she stops and says, “Wait. Aren’t you going to ask me before you put your hand on my breast?”

If I’m that guy, I’m going to immediately assume that I’m getting the wave off signal and it’s just not going to happen. At that point, I’d remove my hands and probably either ask if she wants to put on a movie from Netflix or just call a cab. But under these new rules, now things take a twist. She turns around and says, “No! I didn’t mean you should stop. But you need to ask first!”

I don’t know about you, but at that point I’m pretty sure I’ll be slowly sliding toward the door if not diving out the window because it’s quickly becoming clear that I’ve managed to get a date with a mental case. And yet this is apparently the new reality on campus. So with that, I offer my thanks to the Washington Post for producing this short special. I already thought things were going off the beam in terms of political correctness in our colleges, but now I know it’s even worse than I’d imagined.