THE POLITICALLY CORRECT toss around serious charges like "racist!" and "sexist!" so often to promote conformity that actual incidents of racism and sexism are often written off as wolf-crying.

The most dangerous of these fashionable charges is "rapist!"--or "acquaintance rapist!"

Rape is ugly, violent and dehumanizing. It makes its victims fear their communities, and is a painful reminder to all civilized people of the results of not respecting the sovereignty of an individual. Rape is a crime, and rapists belong in prison. Sadly, rape has become an Orwellian political weapon with no fixed definition.

WHEN I FIRST heard the term acquaintance rape, I imagined the following: A man and a woman are on a date. After a movie, he walks her home and asks if he can come in. She's tired, but she lets him in to be polite. He enters. He forces her down, amid screams, resistance and protest, and has intercourse with her.

Imagine my surprise when I found out otherwise. That was just plain rape.

What exactly is date rape? Well, it all depends on whom you ask. According to a Swarthmore College training manual, "acquaintance rape...spans a spectrum of incidents and behaviors ranging from crimes legally defined as rape to verbal harassment and inappropriate innuendo." The new rape does not necessarily involve force or intercourse. The new rape does not even require the victim's verbal or physical resistance.

A recent What Is To Be Done? article took the issue to self-parody. A woman who had not seen her ex-boyfriend for two years--except briefly at a party at which she avoided him--recognizes his car coming up her driveway. She informs us she has no desire to see him. Hears his footsteps coming toward her house. Leaves her window wide open and pretends to be asleep. He enters her bed. She greets him with a kiss. They have intercourse. No scream, no protest. No "no." In retrospect, she concludes, she has been raped.

In Spike Lee's movie She's Gotta Have It a female is at home, depressed after breaking up with her boyfriend. She calls him and begs him to come see her. He says "No." After pleading, he agrees to go to her apartment to discuss the issue. When he arrives, she's all over him. He says "No." She pleads some more. He pushes her on the bed and says, "You want it? You've got it!" She says, "What are you doing?" and they have intercourse. Columbia University uses this scene to "illustrate the dynamics of date rape."

These situations aren't ideal. But they aren't rape.

"NO" IS THE BARE minimum statement to constitute resistance. Preferably an emphatic, unambiguous "No" that leaves no question that you want to be left alone. This is to separate it from the other uses of "no."

"Yes means Yes, and No means No" is the PC battle cry. Last year, a few Kirkland House men stood in their entry way and yelled, "Yes means Yes, and No means Yes." Which group is right? Both of them.

The reality is that courtship involves a series of verbal and non-verbal games and "No" does not always mean "No." "No" can mean "convince me," "not here," "later," "yes, but I need another drink," "it's that time of the month" or "not in a million years, jerk."

It is time to face the unpleasant fact that the language of courtship is not clear. It never was and it never will be. It is the nature of the game, but this does not mean that its participants are not responsible for making themselves properly understood.

Regardless of the intentions of those who want us to believe that "43 percent of rape victims don't actually realize they have been raped," their hysterics will eventually discredit the seriousness of the charge of rape, until it means as little as the watered-down charges of "racist," "sexist" and "McCarthyite."

The dogmatists on the left use terms like "self-hating Jew," "Oreo," "banana," "coconut," "racist" and other labels designed to put people in line, to make them conform to established expectations. This damages democracy, and wreaks havoc on the idea of liberal education.

They silence students, deans and professors. Ask youself about the smear job done to Dean Jewett's relatively mild observation about date rape. Can anyone wonder why Professor Stephan Thernstrom and Professor Bernard Bailyn don't teach the "Peopling of America" any more?

To the PC, conformity is paramount. It's all about the crushing of independent thought, the silencing of dissent. Inquiry is viewed as disruptived and or insensitive.

If a woman is raped, she should go to the police--not the Ad Board. If a man is a rapist, he should be sent to jail--not just expelled from college. Rape is horrible and all too prevelant. It should not be the subject of political power games.