Rape has always depressed me, because it's something people like me do to people I care about.

Painful to read, isn't it? It was painful to write. Lots of things are like that: important, but unpleasant.

So, the other day I was walking across campus when I saw a group of women protesting at College Gate. Feeling disinclined to stand in for the "Oppressor" that day, I skirted the rally and kept going. I read later it was the Swarm of Dykes, protesting a letter to the editor. I have several problems with the letter, but I'll get to them in a moment.

The writer started with the reasonable-yet-unpleasant observation that self-defense courses are unlikely to teach women how to fend off rapists. Rapists have the element of surprise and rarely attack women larger or more fearsome than themselves.

His suggestion was for women to stay out of dangerous situations, saying women do not have the same rights to safety men have. This is my first argument. Women have the same rights; we just haven't found any way to ensure those rights yet.

He further states women will always be in danger on this campus, as it features 9,000 men at their sexual peaks. This is another unpleasant observation, but one I don't accept easily. The only way to settle it would be to look at the trend of rapes on campus over the last few decades to see if the problem has gotten worse or better. Unfortunately, statistics from the past aren't thorough enough to compare with the ones we have now.

I like to take this as a good sign. It shows people are taking rape more seriously, and, theoretically, this means more of us men on the street are, too. Hopefully, more of us are realizing "No means no."

Some days this is a hard view to hold. A friend of mine was nearly assaulted a few months ago, and the only reason I haven't paid the guy a visit yet is because she made me promise not to. Actually, I'd prefer if she paid him a visit herself, marched in Take Back the Night Thursday or at least went out and ate some fire with the Swarm of Dykes.

To my memory, the Swarm of Dykes last appeared on this page a few months ago, responding to a series of letters to the editor. The authors were fed up with dyke propaganda on the walls, on bulletin boards and in the men's rooms in Baker Center. (How did y'all pull that one off?)

Swarm members fired back they weren't going to go stand in the corner, and if they have to watch straights kissing on TV, we can stand stickers in the bathroom about our girlfriends running off with other women. There's good reasoning there, but you can see it better once we've cleared off some of the rhetoric.

First, straight people kissing most closely equals gay people kissing. Swarm tactics are more like a group of guys screaming "nice tits" off the back of a pickup truck, except the Swarm has a political message.

As near as I can tell, the message is "Dykes exist." Not that it's not an important message. Ellen is going to be just reruns on Lifetime ("Television for Women") soon, and we'll all be tempted to forget about lesbians again, at least, until the next time we see Basic Instinct.

Aren't I politically correct? Sort of. While I cherish my right to offend anyone I choose, I try not to exercise that right unless I have to. My thoughts really are this ambiguous.

Anyway, I noticed all the people who wrote in complaining about the Swarm began by protesting their political correctness as well. While I'm sure they're not conscious of having anything against lesbians, I wonder why they were compelled to write. No one writes in about guys in the backs of trucks. Until obnoxious gay people are treated the same as obnoxious straight people, I have to conclude there's something about lesbians that makes us uncomfortable, no matter how much we protest there isn't.

The Swarm has the added burden of being activists in the Age of That's Just Your Opinion. The 19th century was all about crusading, but by now we've seen every social remedy has unforeseen side effects.

We've seen corruption in the labor movement and racism in the civil rights movement. People of faith have been killing each other since time immemorial, but in this century godless communists got into the act; in China, Cambodia and the former Soviet Union. Communism fell in 1991, capitalism fell in 1929, and the latter only survives when heavily cut with the former.

I'm too much a product of this time to be a zealot myself, but I have a warm spot in my heart for them. They're like society's nagging mother; they remind us what we're working for, no matter how much we'd like to forget it.

So next time a message irritates you, look for the kernel of truth - and that goes for letters to the editor, noisy disturbances or Post columnists.

Goins reminds you to vote in tomorrow's Student Senate elections.