Harmony is the name of a $15,000 silicon doll that winks, smiles, laughs at your jokes, chats about your day and can quote William Shakespeare. Japanese variations will sing to you. Harmony will also join you in the sack and she has a frigid setting for blokes who enjoy fantasies about women who resist.

Compared with the murky world of sexual politics, inflated definitions of sexual harassment, overblown accounts of rapists waiting around every campus corner, the politics of sex robots are delightfully simple. Harmony has an on-off button, after all.

In recent weeks women have been busily debating the ethics of the sex robot, first on Slate's Double X podcast, then on Mamamia a few days after. Is it dehumanising women? (It's a doll. Does that mean porn is off bounds too, girls?) Isn't it just an efficient way of ­deriving sexual pleasure? (Yes.) Does it take rape fantasy over the line? (No, it's a doll. She's not real. There is no consent or lack of consent.) All heady stuff if you're caught up on how sex with a silicon doll is going to change men.

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Here's another way of looking at it: ask not how a silicon sex robot will change men but how real-life women are doing that ­already with their vivisection of men, dissecting what's bad about them, depicting them as vessels of white, male privilege and likely sexual predators.

Released this week, the Australian Human Rights Commission's Changing the Course report into sexual assault and sexual harassment at Australian universities is a textbook case of the intersection between the foggy world of sexual politics and the crystal-clear aim of activists to propagate hysteria ­despite the facts. The data from the report simply does not support the existence of a rape culture on campus.

That's the case even with dodgy methodology aimed at boosting the numbers. Ninety per cent of people did not respond to the survey and the report admits the 10 per cent of self-selecting students who did respond were ­"motivated" to do so.

The finding that 1.6 per cent of students were sexually assaulted was taken over a two-year period and included ­assault in "university settings" such as travelling to and from campus. Even the definition of sexual ­assault was expanded to inflate numbers, yet still the data doesn't support hyperbole that there is a rape epidemic on Australian campuses.

When it comes to episodes of campus sexual harassment, the devil is in the detail. The report ­defines sexual harassment as ­staring or leering, suggestive comments or jokes, or intrusive questions about someone's private life or physical appearance. That settles it then. We have surely all been perpetrators of sexual harassment.

In the deliciously confusing, often exhilarating yet frustrating flirtations between the sexes, scrutinising a sexual advance is no easy thing. Some stares, jokes, suggestive comments and questions as to whether you're single will be welcome sexual banter. In which case, enjoy the evening. Some will be misfired sexual advances, an ­inchoate flirtation that simply wasn't reciprocated. In which case, no harm done and adieu.

How else does a relationship, let alone a casual hook-up, start if not with a lingering look, a suggestive joke, a question about your private life. Human interactions don't happen in a sterile test-tube laboratory setting. They occur ­between people seeking sex, love, laughs, people full of flaws and emotions where mixed messages are not uncommon. And as sex therapist and author Esther Perel pointed out in a TED talk a few years ago: "Most of us get turned on at night by the very same things we might demonstrate against during the day. The erotic mind is not very politically correct."

In short, sexual politics are far more complicated than the simplistic findings of the commission's report and its nine-point plan to stamp out wicked sexual practices on campus. For every claim of sexual harassment and sexual assault, there may be ­another side to the story. If that other side is not sought out or even mentioned as a caveat to the "data", it exposes the report as propaganda rather than a search for truth.

The collection of the commission's data was inseparable from the politics of the rape-culture ­activists. Nina Funnell, an advocate for rape victims, claimed that "now we have the data to back up our ­assertions". And this from ­Sophie Johnston of the National Union of Students: "It broke my heart to read this report … this is a cultural battle we are fighting everywhere."

Johnston is right that there is a cultural battle under way across society but not in the way she has imagined. This report is more ­evidence that the gathering of knowledge has been bumped aside in favour of the accumulation of power. Here is postmodernism