It’s closing time downtown. You and a special someone you met and made out with on the dance floor of the Rat head back to campus. You’re both all over each other, and you’re both very drunk. You get back to your room, and you’ve both got the prophylactics handy. You have sex.

You wake up the next morning to see your partner from the night before confused, upset. You ask what’s wrong and the answer, often a bad punch line but devastating today, is a groggy “What did we do last night?” Your partner has no recollection of actively seeking out sex with you just hours earlier.

According to campus policy, you’re now potentially a rapist, be you male or female, straight or queer. The only thing determining whether you’ve committed a crime in the eyes of Binghamton University is whether your partner reports it that way, regardless of what transpired between the two of you the night before. If they deem it harmless and write it off as part of learning about life, you’re in the clear. If they decide they’ve been raped, though, you’re a rapist.

So say the University judicial office’s sanctioning guidelines: “Sexual assault is defined as sexual acts, which include but are not limited to unwanted [sexual acts] where the victim is temporarily incapable of appraising or controlling his or her conduct owing to the influence of alcohol or other drugs he or she consumed or to any other act committed upon him or her without his or her consent.”

The University police pamphlet “Rape and sexual assault: what you should know,” meanwhile, complicates matters further. “Being drunk does not mean someone cannot be accused of and convicted of rape,” it says.

The message, then, is that if you choose to drink and that drinking leads you to commit a sexual assault — as police reports say may have been the case last week in Dickinson Community — you’re responsible for your actions. The alcohol is no excuse; you still had your faculties.

This is fair. Rape is an abominable crime and there’s no excusing the harm it does to another human being, as the female third of our editorial board was quick to point out.

But by the same administration’s rules, if you choose to drink and drinking leads to consensual sex, you are not responsible for that sex. The other person, they say, must have been taking advantage of you, even if you were the more sober of the two. So, as illustrated above, if there’s even a small amount of alcohol involved, the accusation of rape can be leveled and sustained by the University, if not a court of law — a nonsensical proposition, also pointed out by the female staffers who contributed to this essay.

How, though, is anyone — especially a University official, after the fact — supposed to determine who’s the more intoxicated? Do we have to bring Breathalyzer kits to State Street to avoid being accused of rape? And if you’re drunk, how good a judge of somebody else’s intoxication are you likely to be? The concept of predetermining “who’s drunker,” or trying to see if a potential partner has even had a drink, is as ridiculous as the “Chapelle’s Show” skit that features a pre-sex contract detailing what’s permissible in the bedroom and what’s off limits.

When distilled to its most basic meaning, this standard of responsibility means that according to Binghamton University, there is no such thing as consensual sex if there’s any alcohol involved whatsoever. The University, paternalistically, is trying to tell us that we can’t consent to sex if we’re drunk. But the reality of the situation is that a good portion of college sex does take place under the influence of alcohol or some other drug.

Which is more likely: that everybody who drinks has no control, and is being raped? Or that the University might be wrong?

The message of “if you drink, you can’t have sex” is being shoved down the throats of new fraternity pledges — some of the most likely to be put in situations that straddle the line of consent and rape — and interwoven with legitimate rape-avoidance education. But it poisons the rest of what’s being taught: when a pledge is told that there’s no such thing as consensual sex with alcohol involved, and then goes out and watches as that lesson is negated by real life every night at parties, bars, clubs and friends’ houses, the “no-means-no” message that it’s bundled with looks just as unrealistic.

But the message that rape is wrong, a crime, something that’s acceptable under no circumstances, is the most important one that can be taught to college men and especially frat brothers-to be. Its potential negation by unrealistic definitions of consent, rape and intoxication is just as serious a transgression as what the University is trying to prevent.