The Rape Debate : Is there an epidemic of sexual assaults? Or just a wave of politicized hysteria? From bedroom to courtroom, the rules are changing.

The scene is eerily reminiscent of what they used to call Auditorium, the place third-graders were sent--girls at one time, boys at another--to see those giggly How Babies Are Made films. The lesson for the day is the care and feeding of the sexually mature adult.

But, perhaps proving just how difficult that lesson is, it’s now a dozen years since these students were learning to write in cursive, and the bards of higher education are rolling out the sequel: How to Do It II. Despite countless homework drills, something is off. Everyone may have mastered the ABCs, but not necessarily the emotions that go with them.

The film about to be shown at this University of Southern California seminar is a student-made affair from Chapman University called “Without Consent.” It’s a ragged-edged attempt to grapple with a phenomenon that is unnerving campuses across the country--the specter of date rape. The issue has roiled to a boil in recent years, riveting many women who confront their fears in Take Back the Night rallies and rape-education seminars.

The anti-rape movement’s growing prominence has sparked a debate of visceral force, touching on not only the definition of rape but on relations between the sexes at their most fundamental level. The latest salvos come from both ends of the spectrum--Antioch College’s new policy requiring explicit consent for arrival at every station along the sexual journey and Katie Roiphe’s highly controversial new book, “The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus,” which accuses women of confusing lousy sex with rape and reveling in victimhood.

Perhaps the only uncontested fact is that the debate is spilling over onto everyone, men and women, and it’s altering the dialogue, the transition, if you will, between the Boys Will Be Boys days, which had no words for date rape, and an uncertain future.

“It’s such a tremendous change from where things were when I was an undergraduate and graduate student,” says a 50ish, white-bearded man sitting in a circle at the Topping Student Center at USC. Nine men and twice as many women are at this session of the school’s 6-year-old voluntary rape-education seminars, dubbed CARE (Creating Attitudes for Rape-free Environments). Today, the group will watch “Without Consent” and discuss it.

“I’m really struggling with it,” the man continues. “How in the world did we get into this situation? It’s just astonishing to me.”

The mostly younger people in the circle are watching him, and a couple are smiling. A young woman in a braid and sweat shirt speaks up and her response underscores just how far things have come.

“It’s hard for me to imagine that you can’t imagine it any other way,” she says.

This story begins 20 years ago, when the feminist movement was starting to chip away at ancient ideas about the crime of rape. It was rare for a victim to report even incidents of stranger rape, much less acquaintance rape.

And rape is still unique among violent crimes. “Rape remains the only crime in which the victims--most often women, but frequently men and children--are stigmatized by others for their victimization and blamed for their participation in an act committed by forcible compulsion,” writes Linda Fairstein, head of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, in her new book, “Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape.”

Before the 1970s, the law effectively conspired to keep victims silent. In 1969, the New York Times reported that only 18 men were convicted of rape in New York that year--despite 1,000 arrests.

Rape was particularly hard to prosecute partly because of law requiring corroboration of a victim’s testimony. Mimicking 17th-Century English law, the requirement was essentially based on the assumption that women lie--a false assumption in the overwhelming majority of cases, Fairstein says.

“Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in England, Sir Matthew Hale . . . articulated the notion (in 1671) that because rape is a charge so easily made and so difficult for a man to defend against . . . it must be examined with greater caution than any other crime,” writes Fairstein, who successfully campaigned for reform.

“Even in 1972, when the (New York) legislature was moving to eliminate that archaic requirement, a New York Times editorial called it ‘abhorrent’ that any man could be convicted of rape solely on the unsupported charge of a woman.”

Few rapists do the deed with an audience, so requiring a witness’s testimony unhinged many cases. Ironically, the word of a woman who was robbed and raped could send a man to jail for grabbing her purse, but not for sexually assaulting her.

Another legal reform from that period--a new rape shield law--placed sharp limits on testimony about a victim’s sexual history. The old defense strategy of tarring the victim’s reputation--in effect, placing her on trial--had prevented many women from agreeing to suffer the slings and arrows of the courtroom.

A Los Angeles-area journalist is typical of rape victims who never report the crime. She recalls her sexual assault 35 years ago by “one of those Wall Street Ivy League guys.” It happened during an apartment hunt in New York. The would-be neighbor invited her to dinner at a snazzy restaurant, then insisted on showing her how to operate the air-conditioner in her new apartment.

“He literally back-walked me to the bed and pushed me down and got on top of me and pushed himself in,” she says. “I hit him in the face and tried to push him up and off me and it was done. Finished. . . . It doesn’t have anything to do with all men being pigs or beasts, but most men are stronger than most women, physically stronger.”

When she reported the rape to the landlady, the other woman didn’t believe her. She didn’t tell anyone else.

“I just knew no matter who I told, from police on, the (response) would be, ‘It was your own fault. You went there with him.’ But you can’t expect to be raped every time you step into a room with a man.”

The story points to persistent myths about rape that still tax a prosecutor’s best efforts, according to Fairstein. They include the notion that acquaintance and date rape aren’t “real” rape, that it’s somehow less serious than stranger rape. In fact, Fairstein writes, more than half of reported rapes are committed by men who know their victims.

“It is real rape,” she writes. “And to the millions of women who have been victimized by a known, trusted assailant, it is every bit as traumatic as an attack by a stranger. Yet rarely is the support offered to survivors, even by family and friends, the equivalent of that in other rapes. . . . Tragically, an acquaintance-rape victim’s self-blame all too frequently is mirrored by public perception that the woman has done something to occasion the attack--with the odious result being the tendency of others to blame the victim for the occurrence of the crime--something that rarely happens with stranger assault.”

A corollary problem is the misconception that rapists look squirrely and unwholesome, that their unseemly inner drive is somehow reflected in an equally disturbing exterior. Jurors in acquaintance rape cases commonly believe that an attractive, well-heeled defendant--and many are--couldn’t be a rapist because “he wouldn’t need to force a woman to have sex with him,” Fairstein writes.

“This reflects widespread ignorance of the nature of rape--an act of violence, power, humiliation, and control, rather than sexual coupling,” she writes.

Nonetheless, legal reform has made it easier for women to come forward, boosting the numbers of rapes reported. In 1972, there were 22.5 reports of forcible rape per 100,000 population, according to national FBI statistics. In 1982, that number had increased 50% to 34, and in 1992 it jumped again, to 42.8.

Although women are more likely to report crime, there is also more crime to report.

“Even when you control for increased awareness and reporting by women, you still get an increase (in rape) that cannot be explained away by women’s sensitivity to the issue,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and “Backlash” author Susan Faludi.

In the growing glare of ‘80s media attention, those trends crystallized on campus--often society’s laboratory where new ideas find fertile soil--in the burgeoning Take Back the Night movement, which pledged to counter sexual violence against women. Many of the students chanting slogans at marches and rallies were from the first generation weaned on contemporary feminism.

In a radical twist on the silence into which victims have historically retreated in shame, the rallies have been marked by deeply personal confessions before a multitude. Last month, Jody Muller, Sacramento National Organization for Women treasurer and a rally organizer, told a local newspaper: “Last year, we had a 5-year-old girl step up to the microphone and the only thing she said was, ‘I hate my grandfather for what he did to me.’ ”

While participants call such confessions cathartic and empowering, the furor surrounding such a volatile issue has incited a backlash. The pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that the testimony and motives of women are again being questioned.

In January, 1991, the provocative neo-feminist writer Camille Paglia sparked an uproar when she wrote an article that attacked women for rallying around the date-rape issue:

“A girl who lets herself get dead drunk at a fraternity party is a fool. A girl who goes upstairs alone with a brother at a fraternity party is an idiot. Feminists call this ‘blaming the victim.’ I call it common sense.”

Paglia, who came of age during the sexual revolution of the 1960s, accused feminists of seeking a return to the demure ‘50s, when colleges cloistered students. “Academic feminists(‘) . . . view of sex is naive and prudish. Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.”

A few months after that article appeared in Newsday, Harper’s magazine also scrutinized sexual politics on campus. Its piece focused on a Dartmouth student, Kevin Acker, who became a flash point for debate after allegedly kissing a recoiling woman so hard on the neck that he left a hickey. Although the school forbade the woman from identifying Acker during a rally, posters appeared on campus with his picture and this legend: “A warning to all dartmouth womyn: beware this man.”

Harper’s Philip Weiss wrote: “Sensational and anonymous accusation is a hallmark of the sexual-abuse movement on campuses . . . Respect for students’ civil rights does not seem to be of primary concern to the activists, not when they see human rights being abused. The literature of the campus brigades contains definitions of proper and improper speech that smack of thought control by the politically correct.”

The scarlet letter has been pinned on the reputations of alleged sex offenders at other schools as well. At Brown University, women unhappy with the school’s laxity in dealing with date rape posted a list of men’s names in bathroom stalls. A similar roster at Carleton College is called a “castration list.”

In November, 1991, Katie Roiphe, a Paglia disciple, Harvard alum and Princeton graduate student in English literature, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times, blasting not just the excesses, but the entire anti-rape movement. Calling “certain feminists” “paranoid” and rape “a cliche,” Roiphe debunked their views by invoking Henry Fielding: “These words of exclamation (murder! robbery! rape!) are used by ladies in a fright, as fa-la-la . . . are in music, only as vehicles of sound and without any fixed idea.”

The reaction was swift and fierce.

“This is a highly emotionally charged issue,” Roiphe says. “The thing about the response against me is that it’s passionate, it’s personal. It’s not at my ideas, but at me. I’m used to hatred being directed against me . . . The fringe is letters saying, ‘I hope you get raped.’ ”

Some of Roiphe’s Princeton peers refused to speak to her and petitioned against her views, and the New York Times received a blizzard of anti-Roiphe mail. She later expanded the piece into her book, partly to clarify her views, which she says are widely misread. “I’ve found this a disturbing premise--that you shouldn’t say these things even though you think them because you’re betraying the cause or giving fodder to the enemy,” Roiphe says. “I’ve been called a conservative or anti-feminist or part of the backlash. These names are ways of not letting you speak, of casting out any dissenting voice. To be a vital movement, feminism should be able to sustain critique.”

In fact, underlying the rape debate is another one questioning the seemliness of the debate itself.

“The danger here is we’re finally beginning to address the problem, only to have a few people trying to put an entire effort on the defensive,” says USC law professor Susan Estrich, who examined rape law in her 1987 book, “Real Rape.”

“It’s a minority viewpoint that’s getting a great deal of attention because the media enjoys a cat fight. It would be unfortunate if colleges and universities that have been lax in recognizing this problem would take this as an excuse for stepping back again.”

The grande dame of rape politics, Susan Brownmiller, agrees that Roiphe, like Paglia, gets more than her share of attention because “she’s a contrarian and people in this country adore contrarians.”

But Brownmiller identifies with Roiphe in that she has also come under fire “for just not hewing to the line” ever since her reform-spurring 1975 book, “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape” made her a celebrity.

“I do feel they (the politically correct) try to exercise thought control,” she says. “It doesn’t work with me. It made me have no doubt where I stood on the PC debate. I’m more afraid of the chilling effect on thought than I am on anything else.”

Particularly galling to Roiphe’s opponents is her claim that rape statistics have been grossly exaggerated for political reasons. She focuses on and dismisses a study published in Ms. magazine in 1985 stating that one in four college women have been victims of rape or attempted rape. “If I was really standing in the middle of an epidemic, a crisis, if 25% of my female friends were really being raped, wouldn’t I know it?”

The answer, activists say, is no.

“This woman (Roiphe) is so hostile, would you think someone would confide in her?” says Hillary Super, a USC senior in charge of CARE for fraternities and sororities. “Because it’s out of the realm of her experience, it doesn’t exist. That’s a weak argument.”

While a sharp discrepancy exists between similar studies and university rape statistics--USC, for example, reports a handful of rapes a year for its population of 27,000--rape educators say many women still won’t report the crime to authorities.

“A lot of people think it’s not worth it,” Super says. “They think they won’t be believed.”

But, studies aside, there’s another reason rape seems to be affecting more students. Some people are using the word “rape” to describe abuses beyond its legal definition--in California, forcible rape is sexual penetration by means of force or fear of injury.

Expanding the meaning of rape echoes the teachings of feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon who has said: “Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated. You might think that’s too broad. I’m not talking about sending all of you men to jail for that. I’m thinking about attempting to change the nature of the relations between women and men by having women ask ourselves . . . did I feel violated?”

Some people use “rape” to describe sex that would not have occurred without drugs or alcohol. (Under certain circumstances, that can be considered rape under California law if the accused has gotten the victim intoxicated, although such cases are rarely filed.) It’s also used to describe manipulative sex.

Mark Stevens, director of USC’s student counseling services, says he poses this example in CARE seminars:

“A woman is very interested in this guy and he knows he’s not as interested in her. He knows that the only way she’ll be intimate with him is if she believes it will be a monogamous long-term relationship and he has doubts about that. If he tells her, ‘I love you,’ without telling her the whole truth and they decide to have sexual intercourse, is that rape?

“Is it legal rape? No.

“Is it moral rape? Yes.”

Roiphe attacks such a broadened definition, calling it “rape hype” and arguing that it trivializes the trauma experienced by victims of rape as defined by law.

Brownmiller agrees that “rape” is being tossed around: “I remember once attending an academic discussion. Someone lit a cigarette. Someone else said, ‘You’re raping my lungs,’ ” she says with a hoot. “I’ve always avoided using ‘rape’ as a metaphor. It bothers me.”

But Estrich, who was raped by a stranger in 1974, says semantics are beside the point. “I think all women are demeaned when we deny the injuries that large numbers of women suffer. I have no ownership in the word ‘rape’ just because it happened to me.”

Roiphe, on the other hand, argues that “rape hype” is promoting a climate of fear on campus, rewarding women for their suffering and encouraging them to forge a cult of victimhood.

But as essayist Katha Pollitt points out in the New Yorker, “It is the humiliation and stigmatization and disbelief reported by many rape victims, and documented in many studies, that have helped to produce the campus climate of fear and credulity she deplores.”

Pollitt goes on to question Roiphe’s contention that focusing on ‘victimhood’ reduces women to passivity. If that were so, she says, “the experience of Anita Hill would have sent feminists off weeping, en masse, to a separatist commune. Instead, it sparked a wave of activism that revitalized street-level feminism and swept unprecedented numbers of women into Congress.”

At the core of the issue is the genderspeak static influenced by media images of what it means to be men and women. Rape educators speak of deprogramming men weaned on “the ‘Gone With the Wind’ syndrome.”

“Their image is it (sex) has to be spontaneous--you have to push through the resistance and, finally, the woman will give in if you push hard enough,” USC’s Stevens says.

“Most guys know when it’s a red light, and most guys know when it’s a green light, but we really have a hard time with the yellow light. Instead of slowing down and checking things out, most guys wish it was green and they run right through it.”

But that kind of thinking “denies men their complexity,” says English journalist David Thomas, author of “Not Guilty: The Case in Defense of Men.”

“With all the confused messages both sexes are getting from MTV and advertisements and movies and the tremendous contradictions swirling around in our society, the tremendous tensions between the forces of puritanism and the forces of license, how come with all that complexity we’re trying to reduce it to a simple black-and-white thing as Good Girl-Bad Boy? . . .

“For all the groups in the world that literally can’t afford not to get on with one another, it’s men and women. As a matter of survival, we have to find a modus operandi. We simply have to find a way.”