There are quite a few ways to ignite a scandal on college campuses these days. You could invite David Horowitz to speak out against slavery reparations, for example. Or write a letter to the editor of the campus paper criticizing anti-war activism. Sometimes merely offering a conservative opinion in the classroom is enough.

The most reliable way to stir up a hornet’s nest of hostility, though, is to take on the radical feminist lobby. Dawn Scheirer and Bryanna Hocking found this out several years ago at Georgetown University, when they founded a conservative women’s group which aimed to promote a less confrontational approach to relations between the sexes. After they distributed a pamphlet debunking bogus statistics about rape and anorexia, Scheirer and Hocking were harassed so atrociously that their plight was even reported in liberal organs like The Washington Post. Feminist activists labeled them as “dangerous reactionaries,” “racists,” “homophobes,” and “handmaidens of the patriarchy,” among other choice epithets.

This scenario has since been repeated at a number of other schools, most recently at Penn State. Again and again, insults and character attacks have greeted any attempts by women to break through the feminist orthodoxy on campus. Just what are these uppity activists getting so angry about?

A hint that goes some way towards explaining this mystery was provided this past Valentine’s Day, when an intriguing battle developed at college campuses across the country between the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and supporters of Eve Ensler, the performance artist who created the vulgar off-Broadway smash, The Vagina Monologues.

Never have the goals of radical feminists been exposed in all their ludicrous fury as in the nationwide campaign, led by Ensler and supported by the Ms. Foundation, Planned Parenthood, and the National Organization for Women, to rename the romantic Feb. 14 holiday “V-day.” If you’re lucky enough not to attend one of the 500-plus colleges that signed on to this year’s biggest ever V-day initiative, you may be forgiven for wondering what that “V” stands for (a hint: not St. Valentine).

The centerpiece of the V-day program is, of course, a mandatory performance of Ensler’s play, presumably to raise money for radical feminist causes. And this in and of itself is fairly significant. Whereas, you see, Valentine’s Day traditionally encouraged mutual gestures of romantic affection between men and women, this performance piece is all about — ahem — going it alone. As one critic pointed out in a letter to her campus paper, Ensler’s diatribes about you-know-what are not called “dialogues” — which might imply male-and-female give-and-take — but “monologues,” clearly a code word for “masturbation.”

It takes a leap of imagination to understand just how demented this V-day ideology is. You have to start, it seems, with that ubiquitous Valentine’s Day symbol, the heart itself. According to the Monologues (which merely repeats a myth first propagated by Gloria Steinem), the heart in fact once represented women’s nether regions but was “reduced from power to romance by centuries of male dominance.” So the “V-Day” project is meant to overturn centuries of patriarchal propaganda — which created the fiction of “romance” — in order to restore woman’s singular power. To show young women they don’t need men, that is. If you have an all-empowering vagina, what need have you for chivalry or gifts or love poems or little hearts or sweet gestures of affection?

As it turns out, though, there are plenty of young women who still like those things. And this past Valentine’s Day, they responded to the radical feminist onslaught by taking out an IWF-sponsored ad in 10 college newspapers which depicted poor Cupid chained down by a heavy wrecking ball, his efforts to spear romantic hopefuls crushed by Ensler’s tasteless agitprop extravaganza. The ad demanded that women “free Cupid” by boycotting the Vagina Monologues to restore “mutual respect and a dash of romance” to their campus.

As Amber Pawlik, an undergraduate at Penn State who supported the “free Cupid” ad, explained in a letter to her campus paper, “The Vagina Monologues, which try to co-opt Valentine’s Day by celebrating genitalia as opposed to love, are the epitome of the misguided sexual/romantic leadership permeating campuses today.” Instead of “advocating love and intimacy,” feminist “shock-jock events” like Ensler’s V-day “encourage raunchy, loveless sex.” Wouldn’t you prefer, Pawlik asked her classmates, “to have courtship return to Penn State?”

Needless to say, Pawlik’s commonsensical critique of “V-Day” nonsense prompted a flurry of insulting rejoinders from campus feminists. She was accused of being insensitive to rape victims, sexually repressed and prudish — all the cardinal sins of political incorrectness on “gender” issues.

But Pawlik also received quite a few e-mails supporting her position, not least from men frustrated by the contradictory demands of contemporary feminism. It made no sense, many remarked, for Eve Ensler to encourage women to be sexually assertive, while demonizing assertive men as potential rapists: Shouldn’t men be the ones taking the initiative in these areas, anyway?

Men aren’t the only ones bewildered by the mixed messages of feminist ideology, of course. Last summer, the IWF completed an exhaustive 18-month study of “the attitudes and values of today’s college women regarding sexuality, dating, courtship, and marriage,” which made painfully clear just how dramatic the gap was between young college women’s romantic aspirations and their experiences.

Among the more discouraging findings was the following: “College women say it is rare for college men to ask them on dates, or to acknowledge when they have become a couple.” Men only do this, it appears, when, after “hooking up or hanging out” with a girl for a while, she finally asks him for a commitment.

In other words, women are — just as Eve Ensler wishes — the ones taking the initiative. Men are simply going along, because, hey, why not? Casual sex, cohabitation with shared expenses and full sexual privileges, whatever — it’s all a heck of a lot cheaper than dating. Widespread male passivity, though pleasing to radical feminists, is clearly not a recipe for mature sexual behavior by either sex.

Nor is it an encouraging sign, of course, for the nearly two-thirds of women students who, according to one of the IWF’s most arresting statistical findings, hope to meet a future spouse while at college. With traditional male-initiated dating all but dead, women are left with “few opportunities to explore the marriage worthiness of a variety of men.” Instead, they are offered casual, drunken sexual “hook-ups” — or premature kinds of steady sexual relations or outright cohabitation, usually initiated by a women’s demand that a man offer her some kind of commitment, without any thought of marriage. This is the brave new sexual world wrought by Ensler-style female aggressiveness.

And this is the sexual world which, against impressive odds, a number of traditional-minded women are now trying to overturn. The IWF, buoyed by the largely positive press which greeted last year’s study, has launched a campus-oriented “Take Back the Date!” campaign, of which the “free Cupid” ad was meant to be the clarion call. As yet this initiative seems to be mainly in the planning stages, but the plans themselves are intriguing. My favorite idea is the “romantic acts of chivalry” day, where, in the fanciful imagination of IWF visionaries, “certain people around campus will be watching out for [spontaneous chivalrous acts] and handing out prizes.” This I would love to see. But will it ever happen?

I have to confess I’m a bit skeptical. The contrarian nature of IWF’s schemes is itself evidence of a serious decline in young Americans’ romantic literacy. It’s kind of sad that prizes may need to be awarded to encourage everyday male kindnesses (opening doors, buying flowers, etc.) that should be practiced as a matter of course.

The very titles of IWF’s various campus-projects initiatives suggest a rearguard action, in which reasonable-minded women are trying to regain territory long controlled by radical feminists: “take back the campus”; “operation restoring common sense”; “take back the date,” etc. I am reminded of Whittaker Chambers’ remark that he was not a “conservative,” but a “counter-revolutionary”: There is very little left in contemporary dating culture to conserve. Since the most rudimentary elements of courtship have been forgotten, you have to start with the basics.

And the widespread positive publicity accorded the utterly tasteless “V-day” initiative confirms that such remedial courses of action are urgently needed, before Ensler’s minions destroy dating and courtship on college campuses altogether. “Eve Ensler wants to save the world, and don’t even try to get in her way” crowed The New York Times magazine on the eve of “V-day.” HBO went even further, televising the first ever filmed version of the “Vagina Monologues” on Feb. 14. Against these media monoliths, IWF will have an uphill struggle (so far only the Weekly Standard and USA Today have even picked up the story of the “free Cupid” ad).

But I applaud Amber Pawlik and the other women who have taken up the cause, risking ostracism by feminist groups to try to restore a sense of civility between the sexes and a “dash of romance” to their campuses. It’s not easy being a voice of common sense in on campus these days. Still, the sheer emptiness of the hook-up culture is bound to wear thin, and I think there’s a broad “silent majority” of men and women who may be receptive to your efforts. Why not give it a try?