The Swansea rape case that has unleashed this latest uproar was, in legal terms, pretty straightforward. Once the girl who was the alleged victim said she “could not remember” whether she had given her consent to sex, the case quite rightly collapsed. The degree of reasonable doubt that this admission automatically introduced made the charge unprosecutable. This much, in itself, is not contentious.

What produced the controversy was the prosecuting counsel’s more generalised remark that “drunken consent is still consent”. Contrary to much of the excitable reaction to this comment, the prosecutor did not say that committing a sexual act on an unconscious woman should be legally acceptable: nobody has made what would certainly be the morally outrageous claim that being unconscious constitutes de facto consent to sex. The fatal point was that the girl could not recall the circumstances or even her own degree of conscious involvement. The judge, who agreed with the prosecution, instructed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty.

But even the prosecutor’s statement is considered by many vociferous women’s lobbies to be unacceptable, which strikes me as rather strange. Substitute for “consent” a word that applies to circumstances in which those lobbies’ sympathies might be different. Suppose that a man defended his brutal attack on his wife by saying he was so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing — and the prosecuting counsel remarked: “Drunken assault is still assault.” Any objections?

Anyway, since when do we permit people to say that they are not responsible for what they do when they are inebriated? Unless you are tied down and have alcohol poured down your throat, getting drunk is generally regarded as a matter of choice and you are expected, as an adult, to understand the consequences that might follow from it. In most contexts young women are considered to be more mature and responsible than young men, so why should we cut them far more slack than we would, for example, a male drunk driver who loses his judgment?

The protesters argue that the Sexual Offences Act 2003 put a new onus on the alleged attacker in rape cases to show that consent had not been refused, which the Swansea prosecutor seemed to be flouting. Well, maybe. But I thought it was an accepted principle of law that you cannot prove a negative. Demonstrating beyond doubt that someone did not refuse consent seems to me pretty much logically impossible. And we are now deeply into the territory of “he said, she said” contradictory evidence of the two parties concerned that bedevils the majority of rape cases.

What constitutes consent is itself a subjective judgment, let alone what constitutes a state of drunkenness so disabling that apparent consent does not count. (After all, many of the stages of drunkenness simply involve being disinhibited.) There is altogether too much scope for ambiguity here to make good law.

So what then? Are women and girls always to be constrained in ways that men are not? It used to be thought that women did have, if not a legal obligation, then at least a commonsense responsibility to keep themselves out of dangerous situations.

Oddly, feminism urged women to throw out all the old limitations on their behaviour, while at the same time it claimed all men were potential rapists. Whichever end of that argument you buy into, it is true that, the mechanics of the sex act being what they are, women can have it forced on them in a way that men cannot (except in cases of homosexual rape). That’s life. Perhaps being an adult female involves accepting responsibility for your safety rather than demanding a right to behave as irresponsibly as a young man.

There is still deep confusion, which is often compounded by female lobbies, about how to give women the sort of advantages that men are seen to have. And it is not only the courts that are adrift in it. Last week women made news as prospective politicians as well as potential rape victims. The Conservative party is much exercised about its lack of women MPs and its failure to attract female voters. (It seems to assume that the latter is directly caused by the former, which I doubt.)

So, inevitably, there comes a campaign group — Women2Win — for equal representation for women in the parliamentary party. David Cameron, who is most likely to be the next party leader, is entertaining strong measures to guarantee that more women are chosen for winnable Tory seats. He has suggested scrapping the requirement for women candidates to give a setpiece speech to the assembled constituency organisation since (apparently) many women find this too daunting.

Kindly meant, I daresay. But what use is a prospective politician who quakes at the thought of speaking before an audience of her own party members? How effective is she likely to be addressing a noisy Commons? Speaking in public is a critical requirement for a politician. Why should women be excused from it at the audition? Does anyone suggest that we should make it easier for women to become surgeons by making special allowances for those who faint at the sight of blood?

In fact the simplest solution to the shortage of Tory women MPs would be to fight the prejudice against older candidates. Women in their fifties and even sixties who have raised families and had careers are far more ready to cope with the demands of parliamentary life than the young hopefuls of child-bearing age who now (perhaps justifiably) alarm constituencies.

Mature women — who don’t need to be patronised or protected — could be the answer to the party’s quandary. But Cameron and his modernising friends seem to think that everybody in the party over 55 is part of the enemy within. So, ironically, the most helpful step they could make for women is unlikely to be taken. Once again condescension will win over common sense.

Minette Marrin is away