As California's colleges and universities adjust to a new state law mandating a standard of "affirmative consent" in sexual assault and rape cases—as well as campus judicial proceedings with a "preponderance of the evidence" standard of guilt—observers are trying to anticipate how these policy changes will affect the lived culture of sexual acts among students, most in their late teens or early 20s. The law's effect on campus culture will determine whether it advances the ends sought by supporters, who hope to reduce the incidence of sex crimes. Yet there is broad disagreement about whether and how sexual culture will adapt to the new regime. Even those who agree that the law is good or bad disagree about its likely effects.

What follows are some of the wildly divergent forecasts, some hopeful, others cautionary. Taken together, they illuminate different notions of human nature, the reach of public policy, and what life on California's many college campuses is actually like. The scenarios that they anticipate are not always mutually exclusive.

It Will Be Harder to Get Away With Rape

In the 2008 essay collection Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, contributor Jill Filipovic captured something very much like what supporters of California law hope sex on campus will look like in the near future.

"Plenty of men are able to grasp the idea that sex should be entered into joyfully and enthusiastically by both partners, and that an absence of 'no' isn't enough—'yes' should be the baseline requirement," she wrote. "And women are not empty vessels to be fucked or not fucked; we're sexual actors who should absolutely have the ability to say yes when we want it, just like men, and should feel safe saying no—even if we've been drinking, even if we've slept with you before, even if we're wearing tight jeans, even if we're naked in bed with you. Anti-rape activists further understand that men need to feel empowered to say no also. If women have the ability to fully and freely say yes, and if we establish a model of enthusiastic consent instead of just 'no means no,' it would be a lot harder for men to get away with rape. It would be a lot harder to argue that there's a 'gray area.' It would be a lot harder to push the idea that 'date rape' is less serious than 'real' rape, that women who are assaulted by acquaintances were probably teases, that what is now called 'date rape' used to just be called seduction."

Sex Will Be Hotter and More Enjoyable

There is a long history, Ann Friedman writes in New York, of young women having sex "that’s consensual but not really much fun," and as long a history "of their male partners walking home the next morning thinking, 'Nailed it.'” She believes that "these droves of sexually dissatisfied young women will be unwitting beneficiaries" of California's new law, because "confirming consent leads to much hotter sex." She doesn't anticipate that the law will thwart rapists, "who clearly don’t care about consent, be it verbal or nonverbal." But she believes that "most young men ... are worried about inadvertently doing something in bed that their partner doesn’t welcome" and "actively thinking about whether their partner is enjoying herself." As a result, they'll now find life "easier for both them and the women they sleep with," because the law "creates a compelling reason for both parties to speak up and talk about what they like. In essence, the new law forces universities—and the rest of us—to acknowledge that women like sex. Especially sex with a partner who wants to talk about what turns them on."

Sex Will Be Scary and Anxiety-Inducing

If implemented as intended, California's affirmative-consent law will intrude on "the most private and intimate of adult acts," Ezra Klein posits. It will settle "like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt," creating "a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent" and causing men "to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter." Meanwhile, "colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) ... for genuinely ambiguous situations" in case that "feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair." Klein is a supporter of the law. His followup article on the culture of affirmative consent is worth your while.

Hookup Culture Will Wither Under Neo-Victorianism

Heather MacDonald describes affirmative-consent laws and the activist movement that produced them as "a bizarre hybrid of liberationist and traditionalist values" that "carefully preserves the prerogative of no-strings-attached sex" but adds "legalistic caveats that allow females to revert at will to a stance of offended virtue." She regards the "assumption of transparent contractual intention" to be "laughably out of touch with reality," and believes it implicitly treats women as "so helpless and passive that they should not even be assumed to have the strength or capacity to say 'no'" to stop unwanted sexual encounters, ushering in "a neo-Victorian ethos which makes the male the sole guardian of female safety."

Judging that the policies ushered in by this neo-Victorian ethos misunderstand sex and will take the fun out of it, she tells her fellow conservatives, "What’s not to like? Leave laments about the inhibition of campus sex to Reason magazine." As she sees it, "If one-sided litigation risk results in boys taking a vow of celibacy until graduation, there is simply no loss whatsoever to society and only gain to individual character. Such efforts at self-control were made before, and can be made again."