Garance Franke-Ruta provoked a spectacular display of progressive unity a few weeks back when she suggested, in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, that the age of consent for women participating in porn be raised to 21. Basically everyone agreed that this was a horrendous idea that both infantilized women and—since even Garance agreed that, to be practical in a world of ubiquitous digital cameras, it would have to be “honored more in the breach than the observance”—an offense to the rule of law. It was, in fact, eerily reminiscent of the Lewis Carroll–worthy arguments of South Dakota pro-lifers who sought to show that women were “empowered” by denying them control over their own bodies.

Well, Garance has a rejoinder to her critics today, and has taken the near-unanimous condemnation of her original proposal as evidence, not that she had come up with an uncharacteristically silly idea, but that progressives are just obsessed with barely legal porn. It’s also supposed to be relevant—though I’m not entirely sure why—that Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild fame is a scumbag who’s done a slew of other already illegal things, for which he’s being punished. In fact, Garance cites a whole batch of cases where people taped nude or semi-nude women either without their consent or while they were under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and then (appropriately enough) had to pay out huge amounts to the unwitting performers for their misbehavior.

The whole piece is such a farrago that I wonder whether some exploitative person at Campus Progress didn’t get her drunk and then pressure her into writing it. She cites one case after another where the disturbing part of an anecdote is either the inebriation of total lack of consent of he participant, but declines to explain why the answer isn’t to crackdown on this, protecting women of any age without limiting the freedom of sober 20-year-olds. She avers that this “issue is only partially about consent, or even impaired consent,” but then declines to explain why changing the age of consent is a coherent solution to that problem. Perhaps most jaw-dropping, she considers Matt Yglesias’ observation that treating 18-20 year olds as adults means recognizing their right to make all sorts of choices they might later come to regret, then asserts that getting photographed nude is somehow uniquely harmful, uniquely damaging. This, apparently, in contrast to trivial choices like whether to bear a child or drop out of school or join the Army.

Frankly, I worry for Garance. In our modern age, this silly article is now forever archived on the Internet, winding its way to tens of thousands of potential viewers. God knows what some future potential employer might make of it. Perhaps we’d better bump the age of consent for op-ed writing to 35 or so.