Ace has a nice good long post (which are always the best posts at Ace) on the staggering inanity of deciding that this:

is sexual assault. His response, appropriately, is to troll the trollers:

Many movements or eras — most, probably — enter a decadent phase at some point. I don’t know of a textbook definition of a decadent phase, but my off-the-cuff attempt is this:

a period marked by extremely minor variations on art or thought that has gone before, of recycling, of re-using old tropes rather than creating new ideas;

a period marked not by accumulation or creation of capital, whether monetary capital or capital of another kind, such as intellectual or influential or philosophical, but instead marked by the use/spending of previously acquired capital without replenishing same;

a period of sloth, whether sloth in intellect or sloth in industriousness, and a concomitant lowering of standards so that what little new work is done can be credited as good, important, or noble, albeit by a greatly reduced standard;

It is one thing to argue that a woman can and must enjoy the same public rights as a man, to vote, to engage in business, to work in trades and corporations, to pursue scholarly research. It is another to go around naming as rape or assault things which meet no known definition of these terms.

Rape is, as feminists tell us, and act of violence. In order for violence to be violence, it must be well, violent. Surprise is not violence. Spontaneity is not violence. Violence requires that harm should occur. No harm, no foul.

Claiming “sexual assault” is not “rape” as some do, doesn’t save the classification. Sexual Assault serves as the misdemeanor to Rape’s felony. It’s a way of making a rape accusation without actual rape occurring (or, dealing with a sexual crime other than rape). The nature of the accusation is the same. And an assault, to be an assault, requires violence, and violence requires harm. This did not happen.

Obviously, under normal circumstances a man who went about kissing random women on the street, without their consent, would find himself in trouble. But there are circumstances, certain exponentially joyful occasions, when such activities are seen as a natural irruption of said joy. It takes a particular kind of inhuman joylessness to insist upon malicious intent, absent any evidence, and in the face of the actual woman’s remembrance of the event.

And that’s the point. This is not the attempt to rescue an give voice to a silent victim. The “victim” in this case is studiously ignored, encased in a bubble of “rape culture” so that nothing she says needs be given any credence. The point is for we, the Modern, to invent New and Exciting Understandings, Attack Archaic Formulations, Provoke Significant Dialogue. It is a parlor game for parlor stakes, which exists to prick the vanity of its participants, and no other reason. What was actually going on in Times Square on V-J Day matters not at all; what matters is how We Conceptualize it According to Our Own Dogma.

Which is what you do when you’ve run out of ideas.