Defenders of “men’s rights” like to say that “Believe women” violates the presumption of innocence. But this is a category error. The presumption of innocence is a legal principle: it answers to our sense that it is worse, all else being equal, for the law to wrongly punish than to wrongly exonerate. It is for this reason that in most legal systems the burden of proof rests with the accuser, not the accused. “Believe women” is not an injunction to abandon this legal principle, at least in most cases, but a political response to what we suspect will be its uneven application. Under the law, people accused of crimes are presumed innocent, but some—we know— are presumed more innocent than others. Against this prejudicial enforcement of the presumption of innocence, “Believe women” operates as a corrective norm, a gesture of support for those people—women—whom the law tends to treat as if they were lying.

But by presenting what happened at UMass as a case of “ordinary” sex—sex that is merely “ambivalent, undesirable, unpleasant, unsober, or regretted”74—the critics of Title IX make things too easy for themselves. The woman who gave Bonsu a handjob didn’t really want to—or, she wanted to at first, and then she stopped wanting to. She kept going for the reason that so many girls and women keep going: because women who sexually excite men are supposed to finish the job. It doesn’t matter whether Bonsu himself had this expectation, because it is an expectation already internalized by many women. A woman going on with a sex act she no longer wants to perform, knowing she can get up and walk away but knowing at the same time that this will make her a blue-balling tease, an object of male contempt: there is more going on here than mere ambivalence, unpleasantness and regret. There is also a kind of coercion: not directly by Bonsu, perhaps, but by the informal regulatory system of gendered sexual expectations. Sometimes the price for violating these expectations is steep, even fatal. That is why there is a connection between these episodes of “ordinary” sex and the “actual wrongs and harms” of sexual assault. What happened at UMass may well be “ordinary” in the statistical sense—as in what happens every day—but it isn’t “ordinary” in the ethical sense, as in what we should pass over without comment. In that sense it is an extraordinary phenomenon with which we are all too familiar.

I am not saying that feminism has no business asking better of men—indeed, asking them to be better men. But a feminism worth having must find ways of doing so that avoid rote reenactment of the old form of crime and punishment, with its fleeting satisfactions and predictable costs. I am saying that a feminism worth having must, not for the first time, expect women to be better—not just fairer, but more imaginative—than men have been.