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That part of the male brain that is not fastidious about the U.S. Constitution and its phrase about "cruel and unusual punishment" produces this (typically male, violent) solution: a perfect retribution for the rapist, a condign mutilation. Let one-third of his instrument of crime be removed surgically. If he rapes again, let one-third of what remains be removed. This is a sort of pre-emptive judicial Bobbitt-lopping. Let the justice system and its surgeons play Zeno's Paradox on the rapist's johnson and see how many offenses he is equipped for. (Zeno's Paradox, of course, states that a traveler going from, say, New York to San Francisco must first travel half the distance between the two cities, and then must go half the distance between that point and the destination, then half the distance again, so that, by this logic, he will never arrive where he wanted to go. One-half, one-third, any fraction will do. At a guess, rape would drop by 90% if such a punishment were enforced.
The approach would not pass muster as law, of course, but it should be installed in the male psyche as attitude: American men should build a culture of profound intolerance for violence against women, an almost (no condescension intended) knightly solicitude for the sake of women's safety (we know, we know, they can take care of themselves) and men's honor. Every rape and every battering of women is, among other things, a dishonor to men, and men should see it as such.
Aside from dramatic mutilations, the problem probably must be solved by rebuilding in the young, both men and women, a structure of self-discipline and self-possession that collapsed years ago, during the youths of the baby boomers who are now the parents of college students.
The many deconstructions that occurred in the '60s have profound reverberations now. The baby boomers a quarter of a century ago assaulted the Fathers (Lyndon Johnson and the rest) and in doing so turned upside down the American idea of male power -- that is, the idea of the legitimacy of male power. Vietnam was the funeral of the myth of admirable and legitimate male power.
When the Antioch rules went into effect last year, they provoked a week or two of whooping and snorting among columnists. Sexual Stalinism! How ridiculous for Antioch College, that flawless little jewel of the correctness culture, to mandate that the boy must ask permission before touching the girl, and then before advancing to a further stage of intimacy (the buttons, say, and all that lies beyond).
But the rules are an intelligent idea -- a necessary first step in the rebuilding of a sexual self-discipline that was hit by a nuclear device a generation ago, during the '60s. The smoking ruins of the '90s (the epidemic of date rape, for example) are the legacy of the "sexual revolution" 30 years ago.