Last Thursday, about one hundred students and faculty gathered on the steps of Memorial Church for a candlelight vigil for the victims of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence. It was a wonderfully crisp spring evening, and the lamps were just beginning to come on around the Yard. In the breezy twilight air, the old brick and stone of the Yard glowed with a tranquil warmth as students hurried back from dinner to their rooms in Weld or Thayer, Canaday or Grays. Across Tercentenary Theater, the steps of Widener rolled up to the imposing facade of the library - a stately symbol of the University at its finest. 

Amid the April glow, a succession of women stepped to a microphone to recount their own and others' experiences of rape. Some of the victims had seen the perpetrator brought to some kind of justice - some had never reported the incident - some had been too drunk or drugged to even remember their attacker's face - but in the flickering candlelight and the falling dark; the details of the individual cases seemed to matter less than the sense of loss and outrage each provoked. 

There is a tendency among those on the political Right to lump righteous anger about rape in with the general hysteria that so often surrounds left-wing causes. And rape survivors are done no favors by the stridency of the protesters at the "Rally for Justice," whose demands seemed to imply that all male students be treated as potential rapists, or the misguided designers of the TBTN handbook, whose image of a female hand grasping a sickle-like moon seemed to promise castration. 

But the evils of strident feminism notwithstanding, rape remains qualitatively different from other crimes. The rapist perverts the most intimate of acts, he dehumanizes his victim, and his act violates not only her body and her dignity, but also every day of the rest of her life. Events like Take Back the Night are right and necessary - as long as they serve as a time to recognize that rape does happen at Harvard, that victims and perpetrators alike live with us, and that acts of sexual violence are an absolute evil. 

But that is only part of what Take Back the Night has come to mean. As the vigil at Mem Church wound to a close, Assistant Professor of English Ann Pellegrini - one of Harvard's poster faculty for anti-establishment outrage - mounted the steps and complained for a few minutes about how 1) she doesn't see enough ads for contraceptives on TV; and 2) her spell-checker didn't have the word "matriarchy." These two gripes somehow related to the fact that the "patriarchy," that all-purpose bogeyman, is to blame for every rape and act of male-female violence, which in turn means that what rape victims need is political activism. If only a few more leather-lunged leftists had screamed themselves hoarse at the Rally for Justice, Ms. Pellegrini seemed to imply, rape (and patriarchy) would go the way of the dodo. 

Her pleas for protest politics seemed an inappropriate but harmless coda to the vigil. But as the procession wended its way through the River Houses, my mind turned to the previous evening at Radcliffe Yard, and the other face of Take Back the Night. 

The Lyman Common Room of Agassiz House is a carpeted and low-ceilinged space, pleasantly scented in the oppressive way of so many airtight modern rooms. The decor is brutally pink, and the walls are festooned with enough bulletin boards and artwork to make me imagine, for a moment, that I had wandered into a child's nursery or poorly decorated daycare center. 

The Lyman Common Room is not about children, however. The bulletin boards are plastered with images of supermodels juxtaposed with angry attacks on the beauty industry; the tables are littered with progressive magazines and the occasional lesbian journals (My personal favorite had a picture of a pretty, evidently heterosexual woman being ogled by a butch waitress, and the headline "Can She Be Saved?") Against one wall, the aptly-titled "boob board" was festooned with brassieres and brief musings on the subject of, yes, the importance of the breast. 

I have a hard time imagining a male equivalent of the LCR being permitted to exist on the Harvard campus. What would administrators say to a room littered with Maxims, Playboys, and copies of Iron John, with bulletin boards belittling Leo and Brad and Keanu, and perhaps a wall devoted to the importance of the male buttocks or the male reproductive organ? More importantly, what would Ann Pellegrini think? 

But if the Lyman Common Room is an amusingly disturbing place, the panel that convened to lecture earnestly on the subject of "Strengthening the Pro-Choice Side" was anything but. For an hour and a half, a handful of pro-lifers and a slightly larger handful of pro-choicers listened as Carol Mason and Eileen McDonagh (of the Bunting and Murray Institutes, respectively) lectured them on how best to keep abortion legal and combat the "anti's" - their charmingly Orwellian term for pro-lifers. 

Mason, a strident woman with short-cropped blond hair, spent most of her allotted time discussing the links between anti-abortion violence, white supremacists, and the militia movement, with some digs at conservatives in general for wanting to "lock up pregnant black women." McDonagh, with her gray hair and grandmotherly features, presented a softer image, but her pet legal theory on abortion rights was, if anything, more frightening than Mason's sociological maunderings. 

According to McDonagh, the fetus' humanity is immaterial to the abortion debate. What is important is the fact that in an unwanted pregnancy, fetal life is an invader, whose presence in the womb causes physical harm to the woman through the chemical changes associated with pregnancy. Therefore, just as the law permits a woman to defend herself against an attacker (McDonagh likened the unborn to a Central Park rapist), so too should it permit abortion as a form of self-defense against the aggressive fetus. 

"The aggressive fetus" and the "pro-life assassin," I realized as the evening went on, are two sides of the same coin in pro-choice rhetoric. Defenders of abortion have the burden of justifying a violent, almost barbaric procedure - so they attempt to shift the violence elsewhere, to a few murderous extremists and (of course) their real enemy, the unborn child. With McDonagh's argument, the murderous logic of abortion rights has reached its logical conclusion: the demonization of the fetus. Logical, but terrifying. 

In the minds of McDonagh, Mason, Pellegrini and company, then, being stridently pro-choice fits right in with vigils for rape victims, because unwanted pregnancy is just rape by another name. 

Maybe I'm the only one who finds this somewhat frightening, who wants to separate the pastel radicalism of the Lyman Common Room from the vigil at Memorial Church, who thinks that pro-abortion militancy has no place in a week intended to raise awareness about rape. Maybe I'm the only one who finds the politicization of sexual crime offensive and the grim logic of Eileen McDonagh frighteningly inhuman. 

But I hope not. If Take  Back the Night means justifying abortion-on-demand, then there is nothing to take back. They own the darkness already - the rapists, the wife-beaters, and yes, the little old lady from the Murray Institute, sitting in a pink room in Radcliffe and teaching young women that the real enemy will one day be inside them.