(The bottom line: is there a moral double-standard at work in telling women not to drink?)
Really, this is fascinating. Emily Yoffe wrote a piece in Slate on women’s drinking at college, and you can just watch the number of comments grow in front of your eyes. 3000 since I started typing this.
The article itself is remarkable only in that it’s sad that it’s necessary for someone to write this. Yes, according to the law, if a woman is drunk and has sex, it’s considered rape, whether her sexual partner was stone cold sober and targeting her, or equally drunk. (I don’t know how often a young man goes to a party, gets drunk, and finds himself accused of rape in the morning, and that’s not really her concern, except for a brief comment that she’d warn her son not to get himself into any situation in which he could be accused of rape, however falsely.) But, Yoffe says, the desire to avoid “blaming the victim” has led to a lot of time spent telling men, “don’t be rapists” without telling women, “don’t binge-drink.”
3046 comments.
Apparently, women tend to believe that these post-party and post-bar rapes are the result of a “date rape” drug, but that claim has been proven false; she cites the “Campus Sexual Assault Study” of 2007, undertaken for the Department of Justice. The plain reality is that binge drinking is a serious problem on campus, and that girls have gotten the idea that keeping up with the men in their level of drinking is a “feminist” thing to do.
What have administrators done? On the one hand, they’ve launched crackdowns on in-dorm drinking starting in the 90s, which drove drinking off-campus. (I remember this — a change from open drinking on the dorm floor as a freshman/sophomore to a closed-door/guess-where-the-party-is rule afterwards; and our dorm floor, the “honors floor,” was fairly tame — though even nerds drink in college.) On the other hand, they’ve conceded that weekends begin on Thursday by declining to schedule classes on Friday. (Is this really true? I hope not — it’s a waste of classroom space, if nothing else.)
3063 comments.
The comments are the most instructive thing about this article. Mostly, they’re very negative. More than a few of them insist that post-party/post-bar rapes are due to date rape drugs, so a woman is at risk even if she sticks to coke all night. The others defend the right of women to get fall-on-your-face drunk with no harm befalling her, and bring up various surveys indicating that a significant minority of men have admitted to having sex with women too drunk to consent, to remind us all that Men are the bad guys.
The commenters generally reject the assertion that “we” are afraid to tell women to be safe and stay sober — and maybe that’s true, if college women are in fact being told to stay safe, but some of these claims are more of the “we’ve been telling women to be ‘good girls’ for generations!” rather than addressing recent college attitudes.
HAZELNUTS GOD DAMMIT says,
“Maybe it’s time to pause the unending stream of advice to women on how to avoid the risk of rape (especially since most of it’s advice that doesn’t apply to the great majority of rapes) and focus for a bit on trying to educate men and shift the social norms that make rape acceptable in so many groups. “
Dani Unterreiner says,
“Man, if women would just stop leaving the house, they would get raped way less often. Has anyone considered telling them that they should stop participating in society altogether to minimize their risks?”
But, on the other hand, here’s a sensible exchange:
Sluggo:
The real reason everyone here keeps talking past each other is that “blame” and “responsibility” are moral categories. They don’t belong in the conversation about *why* things happen. We all get it; rapists are solely responsible for rape. But, like it or not, sometimes people contribute to their own victimization, which is why criminologists can conceive of something like “victim-precipitated homicide.” Some people don’t drink, and get raped. Other people drink, but don’t get raped. None of that changes the fact that excessive alcohol consumption contributes to a significant percentage of sexual assault.HappyNat:
Given the choice, wouldn’t you like to lower the probability of a bad outcome?Sluggo:
And we do by making what they do a felony, incarcerating them, even putting anyone merely accused of the crime (regardless of conviction) into the public eye.I fail to see why, in addition, asking young women not to get ragingly drunk in certain scenarios for their own protection is so problematic. We ask people to protect themselves from minor crimes such as pickpocketing on train station platforms — that doesn’t implictly excuse pickpocketing.
Which I endorse whole-heartedly. And yet — no one perceives warning travelers to be careful of their wallets, or avoid scams, or the like, as a contentious issue. Is the “don’t binge-drink” warning so poorly-received because it’s targeted at women, rather than both sexes equally? And there are plenty of reasons to tell men the same thing — but this is, generally, a women-specific risk. Or is it because warnings of excessive drinking are seen as accusing women of a moral failing, and thus a further double-standard, in seeming to say that it’s morally wrong for women to drink excessively, but not men?
(3090 comments!)
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