{"id":782,"date":"2013-10-16T22:05:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-16T22:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/10\/2941-comments-on-a-slate-piece-on-drinking-2945-2946-2947.html"},"modified":"2013-10-16T22:05:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-16T22:05:00","slug":"2941-comments-on-a-slate-piece-on-drinking-2945-2946-2947","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/10\/2941-comments-on-a-slate-piece-on-drinking-2945-2946-2947.html","title":{"rendered":"2941 comments on a Slate piece on drinking . . . 2945, 2946, 2947"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

(The bottom line:\u00a0 is there a moral double-standard at work in telling women not to drink?)<\/p>\n

Really, this is fascinating.\u00a0 Emily Yoffe wrote a piece in Slate<\/a> on women\u2019s drinking at college, and you can just watch the number of comments grow in front of your eyes.\u00a0 3000 since I started typing this.<\/p>\n

The article itself is remarkable only in that it\u2019s sad that it\u2019s necessary for someone to write this.\u00a0 Yes, according to the law, if a woman is drunk and has sex, it\u2019s considered rape, whether her sexual partner was stone cold sober and targeting her, or equally drunk.\u00a0 (I don\u2019t know how often a young man goes to a party, gets drunk, and finds himself accused of rape in the morning, and that\u2019s not really her concern, except for a brief comment that she\u2019d warn her son not to get himself into any situation in which he could be accused of rape, however falsely.)\u00a0 But, Yoffe says, the desire to avoid \u201cblaming the victim\u201d has led to a lot of time spent telling men, \u201cdon\u2019t be rapists\u201d without telling women, \u201cdon\u2019t binge-drink.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n

3046 comments.<\/p>\n

Apparently, women tend to believe that these post-party and post-bar rapes are the result of a \u201cdate rape\u201d drug, but that claim has been proven false; she cites the \u201cCampus Sexual Assault Study<\/a>\u201d of 2007, undertaken for the Department of Justice.\u00a0 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 \u201cfeminist\u201d thing to do.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

What have administrators done?\u00a0 On the one hand, they\u2019ve launched crackdowns on in-dorm drinking starting in the 90s, which drove drinking off-campus.\u00a0 (I remember this \u2014 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 \u201chonors floor,\u201d was fairly tame \u2014 though even nerds drink in college.)\u00a0 On the other hand, they\u2019ve conceded that weekends begin on Thursday by declining to schedule classes on Friday.\u00a0 (Is this really true?\u00a0 I hope not \u2014 it\u2019s a waste of classroom space, if nothing else.)<\/p>\n

3063 comments.<\/p>\n

The comments are the most instructive thing about this article.\u00a0 Mostly, they\u2019re very negative.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The commenters generally reject the assertion that \u201cwe\u201d are afraid to tell women to be safe and stay sober \u2014 and maybe that\u2019s true, if college women are in fact being told to stay safe, but some of these claims are more of the \u201cwe\u2019ve been telling women to be \u2018good girls\u2019 for generations!\u201d rather than addressing recent college attitudes.<\/p>\n

HAZELNUTS GOD DAMMIT\u00a0 says, <\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe it\u2019s time to pause the unending stream of advice to women on how to avoid the risk of rape (especially since most of it\u2019s advice that doesn\u2019t 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. \u201c<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dani Unterreiner says, <\/p>\n

\u201cMan, 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?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But, on the other hand, here\u2019s a sensible exchange:<\/p>\n

Sluggo:\u00a0
The real reason everyone here keeps talking past each other is that \u201cblame\u201d and \u201cresponsibility\u201d are moral categories.\u00a0 They don\u2019t belong in the conversation about *why* things happen.\u00a0 We all get it; rapists are solely responsible for rape.\u00a0 But, like it or not,\u00a0 sometimes people contribute to their own victimization, which is why criminologists can conceive of something like \u201cvictim-precipitated homicide.\u201d\u00a0 Some people don\u2019t drink, and get raped.\u00a0 Other people drink, but don\u2019t get raped.\u00a0 None of that changes the fact that excessive alcohol consumption contributes to a significant percentage of sexual assault.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

HappyNat:
Given the choice, wouldn\u2019t you like to lower the probability of a bad outcome?\u00a0 <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0We ask people to protect themselves from minor crimes such as pickpocketing on train station platforms \u2014 that doesn\u2019t implictly excuse pickpocketing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which I\u00a0endorse whole-heartedly.\u00a0 And yet \u2014 no one perceives warning travelers to be careful of their wallets, or avoid scams, or the like, as a contentious issue.\u00a0\u00a0Is\u00a0the \u201cdon\u2019t binge-drink\u201d warning so poorly-received because it\u2019s targeted at women, rather than both sexes equally?\u00a0 And there are plenty of reasons to tell men the same thing \u2014 but this is, generally, a women-specific risk.\u00a0 Or is it because warnings of excessive drinking are seen as accusing women of a moral<\/em> failing, and thus a further double-standard, in seeming to say that it\u2019s morally <\/em>wrong for women to drink excessively, but not men?\u00a0 <\/p>\n

(3090 comments!)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(The bottom line:\u00a0 is there a moral double-standard at work in telling women not to drink?) Really, this is fascinating.\u00a0 Emily Yoffe wrote a piece in Slate on women\u2019s drinking at college, and you can just watch the number of comments grow in front of your eyes.\u00a0 3000 since I started typing this. 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