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Dawn loves Court TV, but a recent show on the same-sex sexual harassment suit before the US Supreme Court provoked howls of laughter rather than thoughtful legal musings.

CTV analysts described the allegations of a male oil rig worker: that four or five (male) colleagues regularly made sexually provocative remarks, that they held him down in the communal showers and soaped him up where he "rather not" be soaped, that they rubbed themselves against him and threatened to rape him, and that such treatment created the "hostile work environment" needed to invoke federal laws against sexual harassment. The commentator then volunteered that he-- the commentator-- "wanted to stress" that no "actual homosexuality" was alleged (!), and that all the men involved were married. Later, another blathermouth suggested that the case meant judging where to site the allegations along a spectrum ranging from "homosexual rape" to "fraternity hijinks."

While not all of Dawn's high-school geometry can be recalled, it seems that this rape-to-hijinks formula may describe not a line, but rather a point....