Governor Brown has just signed a piece of ill-considered legislation. Under this law it seems to me that if two people, one male and one female, more-or-less equally intoxicated, should happen to fall into bed with one another, it is vanishingly unlikely that any buyer's remorse on the male's part would be considered actionable, whereas the female has every opportunity to cry "rape." Sorry, but I don't buy it.

In my salad days, I was sitting upright in my dorm room bed one evening reading The Wind in the Willows, of all things, when there was an insistent knock on my door. This proved to be a young woman from down the hall, whom I then scarcely knew, returned from a party in downtown Santa Cruz celebrating her twenty-first birthday. She was somewhat the worse for strong drink. She was accompanied by a companion from her party. I was wearing a caftan with enormous access under the arms, and the young woman slipped her hand through the left access to fondle my bare bum. The companion being dismissed, she kicked the door closed and announced that twenty-one years were quite long enough to have remained unpenetrated.

I did her, my auditors, drunk as she was. Under current California law, I could be prosecuted. Was I wrong? We're still in occasional contact, and she does not fault my conduct in this episode. But suppose she had?

cordially,