The Alcohol Blackout
November 11, 2015 8:05 AM Subscribe

In the war against campus sexual assault, why are we not talking about drinking? "It bothers me that the conversation about alcohol and consent seems to be debated mostly by women—fought by women, argued about by women, the emotional burden carried by women. I’m ready to see more focus on how drinking changes men: how sex and aggression can get cross-wired, or the frightening way alcohol can smear their good sense away. Not “how much did she drink” but how much did he?" (slTexasMonthly)

Sarah Hepola previously on the Blue.

posted by Kitteh (58 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite

This is framed very much as an American problem -- I note that Americans have a weird, and somewhat toxic relationship with alcohol, which I put down to them not learning how to drink at a sensible age under adult supervision. Instead of being eased in to alcohol by their parents during their teens, they suddenly hit 21 and wham! full access.
posted by cstross at 8:31 AM on November 11, 2015 [44 favorites]

I liked this piece, but I found myself a bit disappointed that, aside from a paragraph or two around the pullquote you grabbed, most of the article was about drinking in general, and how alcohol affects women. Chalk it up to that being her experience as a woman drinking, but I was hoping for a bit more about alcohol and men and sexual assault.
posted by likeatoaster at 8:38 AM on November 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

I personally found the latter half of the article where she describes being hit on by a pair of drunk students depressingly recognizable and horrifying.
posted by Kitteh at 8:40 AM on November 11, 2015 [3 favorites]

Instead of being eased in to alcohol by their parents during their teens, they suddenly hit 21 and wham! full access.

Or suddenly they move away from home for college and wham! full access -- except that A) they can't learn how to handle alcohol in a responsible manner because it isn't legal for them to be drinking at all, and B) if something happens to them (alcohol poisoning, falling down a flight of stairs, being raped, etc.), they have an incentive not to seek help for fear of getting in trouble for drinking in the first place.
posted by Etrigan at 8:42 AM on November 11, 2015 [36 favorites]

One of the things that I noted in college was that the students for whom alcohol was treated as taboo were the ones diving headfirst into binge drinking, whereas those of us who had our families be more open about it were less likely to do so.

But getting back to the article, the reason nobody is talking about alcohol is because it doesn't absolve you of what you do to other people while drunk. If you find out that you become a belligerent asshole that attacks others if you drink too much, then you should be actively limiting your alcohol consumption.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:46 AM on November 11, 2015 [11 favorites]

The problem is people still think it is OK to drink like an alcoholic in college, to drink to get wasted. As long as this behavior continues these problems will continue. Wasted people can't give consent or judge whether someone else is really consenting. Changing behavioral norms about seeking consent and what is appropriate sexual behavior with a drunken partner can help, but when people get wasted they will make poor judgments. This is not about where blame gets placed, but on addressing a huge social factor in this very large problem.
posted by caddis at 8:47 AM on November 11, 2015 [8 favorites]

Pope Guilty: yeah, Scotland has an alcohol problem. But it's a different one -- we all drink a lot, not just late teens/young adults binging and acting out. But we also have huge pockets of social deprivation in some communities (remember: drink is an anaesthetic) and an issue of long, dark nights in winter (around midwinter we get less than 7 hours of daylight and the sun never gets more than 13 degrees above the horizon: that'll drive anyone to drink).

And Scotland doesn't seem to have as high a level of alcohol-fueled sexual abuse among students that's being complained about here.
posted by cstross at 8:50 AM on November 11, 2015 [8 favorites]

i don't think it's a misunderstanding consent issue. men will admit to being rapists if you don't call it rape. i don't even think it's a men getting too drunk issue, as many of the serial rapists don't get that drunk so they can better spot women who would be easy to pull away from the crowd. the problem is now and will unfortunately always probably be that men feel entitled to women and our society enforces this by pretty much always blaming the women. drinking culture is a red herring that serves to absolve men and blame women.
posted by nadawi at 8:55 AM on November 11, 2015 [66 favorites]

I was not especially happy with this piece. As the story of her drinking, sure, it's fine. But it seems to suggest that the primary issue with sexual assault and alcohol is "we are not allowed to tell young women not to get drunk or they'll get raped". The article mentions but does not really discuss, like, telling dudes not to get so drunk that their judgment disappears, or telling dudes that if someone has been drinking all night, maybe it's not such a good idea to assume consent.
posted by Frowner at 9:03 AM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah weirdly the article says it wants to talk about what alcohol does to men and then hardly discusses it at all. It'd make a good topic!
posted by ead at 9:04 AM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

Many Canadian unis have public service messages to the effect of "alcohol can lead to bad choices" aimed at everyone. The copy comes with photos of young boys and girls.

It is important to not make drinking or not the sole responsibility of women, for sure. And this is the common dialogue around campus sexual assault.

But local uni has made it clear men make bad choices while drunk, as well, and they need to police themselves. Which is a good thing, I think.

Jesus, I'd hate to be a teen in today's world. What a fucking mess.
posted by clvrmnky at 9:12 AM on November 11, 2015 [5 favorites]

Apparently, there's no end to the number of things we will talk about being involved in sexual assault before we'll talk about men deciding to rape women.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:27 AM on November 11, 2015 [29 favorites]

Blackouts were long misunderstood in the medical community as a symptom of alcoholism, but recent science proves how common they are. In a 2002 study of drinkers at Duke University, more than half had experienced a blackout, and a UT survey given each year to freshmen shows that in spring 2015 more than 20 percent reported having a blackout in the previous twelve months—and that’s before the first year of college had even wrapped

Wow, that number is way too high.

Drinking to get drunk is really fun most of the time for me. Getting blackout drunk was basically the least fun experience of my life. Boy do I wish "Beer Pong" wasn't a thing. When you are blacked out you are basically an animal or a baby as far as decision making goes and your body is close to being poisoned to death. Don't let that happen to anyone if you can prevent it and do what you can to help someone in that state, you may be saving a life. This is an extremely strong, dangerous, easily overdoseable, physically addictive drug. Even before blackout, judgement can be extremely compromised.

Fostering a truly educated and responsible drinking culture in young people (if they are going to drink at all) is a very important part of raising young people right and I think there is a good chance it could reduce some of the sexual assault on college campuses.

I don't know if it will solve as much as some people seem to think though. I'm kind of reminded of campaigners for prohibition pointing out the monstrous levels of domestic violence at the time and blaming it largely on alcohol. (as tfa mentions) The alcohol certainly contributed, but it became clear there were many other causes as well. I think alcohol tends to intensify a lot of problems, but usually isn't the main root cause.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:30 AM on November 11, 2015 [4 favorites]

a really huge chunk of things sarah hepola has written (including her best selling book) is about her own alcoholism. some of this strikes me the same way that recent comments by chrissie hynde strike me - as someone who blames themselves for the trauma they've been a victim of and then extrapolating that out to anyone who they see acting like they did. i understand the impulse, but i reject it.
posted by nadawi at 9:30 AM on November 11, 2015 [12 favorites]

Guys I lived in a college town in New Zealand. I can assure you both statistically and anecdotally - a drinking age of 18 is not a panacea for responsible alcohol consumption. It's more I think to do with the drinking culture than the legal age.

I agree that the drinking thing is a red herring. There's still a narrative around what are essentially good kids who got drunk and made mistakes, rather than around the fact that there is a small group of predatory men who look for vulnerable people to exploit.
posted by supercrayon at 9:39 AM on November 11, 2015 [18 favorites]

Instead of being eased in to alcohol by their parents during their teens, they suddenly hit 21 and wham! full access.

Germany, 1995. I'm attending a barbecue at a friend's parents place, lots of extended family, a nice big yard. The adults were hanging out close to the house, drinking cocktails or whatever. Meanwhile, over a little knoll (out of sight but not earshot), the teenagers had their own keg of beer. Some weren't drinking at all, some were. A few were getting drunk. Little kids were hanging around laughing at him. Occasionally, an uncle or aunt would wander over and give them a little schooling -- how to keep track of your drinks, making fun of the drunker kids, etc.

That's how you do it. Before they're on their own. Before they get their driver's licenses. How we do it here in the Americas is just plain stupid.
posted by philip-random at 9:48 AM on November 11, 2015 [12 favorites]

I find that I appreciate first-person narratives about women and alcohol, mostly because we still don't take it very seriously as a culture, and mostly because hindsight is always 20/20 and I recognize too much of my late teens and pretty much the entirety of my 20s in feeling guilty, feeling awful, feeling ashamed, and having absolutely no way to gauge if the blackouts/binge drinking were happening to everyone else or just me. I agree with other posters in that Hepola puts way too much of her own personal experience in the article, but women and drinking and how it affects our lives is still worth discussing. Too many times I feel like people lambaste the discussion because it feels overly confessional, overly "trainwreck." But then are tons of women out there who were/are alcoholics that don't crash their cars/forget their kids. Most of them have their health and their time bleed away in a more quiet desperate fashion, but those stories aren't nearly as interesting for folks.

Tl;DR: this might not have been the best FPP about this subject I could have found. Sorry!
posted by Kitteh at 9:51 AM on November 11, 2015 [4 favorites]

I knew a lot of hard drinking guys in college and they would have sometimes have blackouts. Those experiences were often what was described in the article - peeing, vomiting, eating weird things etc but there were also a good number of regretted sexual encounters where both parties were drunk.

I'd guess that men are less willing to talk about the negative effects of such experiences because they will be seen as less masculine for not always loving sex but the friends who confided in me were definitely unhappy about waking up next to a woman that they didn't even remember meeting.
posted by nolnacs at 9:53 AM on November 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

The other thing about the age issue is that it largely pushes freshmen campus drinking out of places where there are any responsible adults around to keep an eye on things. We don't want people under 21 to drink but maybe it's time to acknowledge that they will anyway and work openly with them for harm reduction.

The suggestion to make sure food is available when drinks are is a really good one, and probably would have prevented my blackout episode.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:55 AM on November 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

I know a fair number of alcoholics who are very negative about alcohol in general -- not entirely understandably, especially where it's a family problem as well, but it seems to lead to a generalizing from their own problem to the entire population.

I was a little puzzled by the claim that people in blackout only suffer from memory loss, not other cognitive functioning. The article she's citing is behind a paywall, but the conclusion is:

In summary, there is no objective or scientific method to verify the presence of an alcoholic blackout while it is occurring or to confirm its presence retrospectively. Even if such a method were available, valid, and reliable, an alcoholic blackout would not negate mens rea as the experimental studies reviewed here report that only short-term memory is impaired and other cognitive functions—planning, attention, long-term memory required to form criminal intent—are not impaired. This should disqualify a claim of alcohol blackout under Daubert and FRE 702. Its qualification under Frye is more difficult and depends on how “general acceptance” is defined, but there is no consensus in the field supporting a claim of automatism or unconsciousness. In light of these findings, expert scientific testimony on alcoholic blackouts would not appear to meet standards for scientific evidence set by Frye or Daubert.

However, the rest of the article is full of examples of people doing things out of character -- apparently men in blackout tend to urinate indiscriminately which, despite the somewhat appalling bathroom behavior it's been my misfortune to witness (especially on college campuses), isn't how pretty much any men behave while unimpaired by alcohol. Similarly, since the article is brimming with stories of impaired sexual encounters regretted later, it's hard to get away from the idea that higher functions are impaired (unless the point is to separate the blackout effect from the impairment effect which seems extremely hard to determine, especially given the limits on research).
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:56 AM on November 11, 2015 [4 favorites]

Blackouts are terrifying. There are legitimately tons of missing time for me in my 20s. It makes me very sad.
posted by Kitteh at 10:03 AM on November 11, 2015 [5 favorites]

Now that I am done complaining about the reference list for the article, I am pretty uncomfortable with linking drinking and sexual assault for a couple of reasons:

While there may be connections, they aren't clear or uniform -- heavy alcohol use may be a related factor in sexual assault, but there many others, and untangling cause and effect is tricky

A lot more importantly, this approach tends to put the onus on women to avoid sexual assault, with the attendant slide into victim-blaming and guilt. "The woman brought this on by drinking irresponsibly" rather than "the man committed sexual assault."

Furthermore, , it seems to me that it gives sexual assaulters cover by setting up "what if" scenarios that can't be verified (possibly even inside the minds of the people involved." In a sexist society, the blame for "murky scenarios" are always going to fall on the woman involved.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:15 AM on November 11, 2015 [3 favorites]

Not "how much did she drink" but how much did he?

I think that's an excellent point, but how do you disincentivize/discourage excessive drinking for someone who is more likely to be a perpetrator than a victim? Especially when so many sexual assaults still go unreported and unprosecuted? I mean, if you're in that mindset -- if you're thinking about how you might get laid instead of how you might assault someone or be assaulted yourself -- there's somewhat less incentive to moderate.

oh, and

He immediately re-upped, asking me to kiss him on his lips now, one finger pressed against his wet mouth. "No, thanks," I said, starting to gather my things... "You’re hurting my self-esteem," he said.

wow..... wow dude.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 10:17 AM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

i totally agree that women writing and talking about drinking affects us is a good thing and something i'm deeply interested in as someone who spent a fair amount of time from stumbling to blacked out in my late teens to mid 20s. i just wish the focus wasn't so often about the crimes done to us with the back hand suggestion that we're at fault. blacking out was terrible for me for a lot of reasons and i regret much of what i did but i don't combine that with the time i was raped when i was blacked out.

the fact of the matter is that we're raped when we're sober, when we're drunk, when we wear short skirts or baggy jeans, when we're too nice or too mean, when we stay in or go out. examining what we're doing or not doing while being victimized is never going to solve the problem. we don't cause it. we can't stop it.
posted by nadawi at 10:19 AM on November 11, 2015 [26 favorites]

i totally agree that women writing and talking about drinking affects us is a good thing and something i'm deeply interested in

I should clarify that I am uncomfortable with these ideas as a basis for administrative or legal considerations/policies/regulations/etc as opposed to the ideas as a subject for conversation.

I wish there was more discussion among young men on campuses about how to moderate their drinking and behavior to prevent bad events (rape, obviously, but also assaults, self-injury, property damage) instead of trying to cover them up after the fact. As long as young men have any hope of using impairment as an escape from charges of assault, rape, vandalism, and so on, they won't have much incentive to moderate their behavior beyond, you know, basic decency and respect -- which isn't entirely absent but is easily overwhelmed, especially in a population that is still developing an understanding of consequence and long-term planning.

I'd like to see an approach where men are expected to watch out for themselves and other men rather than forcing women to do all the heavy lifting all the time.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:40 AM on November 11, 2015 [4 favorites]

And Scotland doesn't seem to have as high a level of alcohol-fueled sexual abuse among students that's being complained about here.

Some research suggests that culture (via expectations) influences the kind and level of intoxication experienced, what kinds of behaviours emerge with it, how, when, etc. No surprise that a culture that treats men and women the way America does contributes to these problems. (Not just the US, obviously, but the FPP is about the US.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:48 AM on November 11, 2015

For the record, the drink age was 18 when I started getting served at bars when I was 16. The legal age went up to 21 when I was still under 21, but people who were legal when the law went into effect were grandfathered in, so I was able to keep my job as a bartender. I worked as a bartender all the way through college and grad school, and in between career jobs, and I don't think the 21 law made a damn bit of difference on campuses or anywhere else.

Not too long ago one of my friends had to rescue a young cousin from a frat party. The vast majority of the passed out bodies, and throwing up kids were freshman. This is what...30 years after the law went into effect?

The thing is, America has this absurd puritanical streak that says "intoxicants are bad, mmkay," rather than having a conversation about them, or exposing kids to healthy habits about drugs and alcohol. That said, I've let my kid have a glass of wine at big dinners since he was probably 7 or 8. Watered down mostly, and in an aperitif glass rather than a full goblet glass, but what I was trying to avoid was the mythologizing of the product, making it a forbidden fruit. Also, he's learning how to appreciate a good glass of wine, rather than thinking it's something one slams to get fucked up.

I dunno man, I grew up with a lot drinkers, back when everyone had "toter" glasses of booze they carried with them in the car while driving places. I cannot recall a single memory of my grandfather that doesn't include a glass of scotch. To me, drinking was a mystical part of adult rites, and I don't want my kid to think he has to be a drinker just to be a grown up.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 10:56 AM on November 11, 2015 [7 favorites]

Her citing the fact that "Columbia’s 'Mattress Girl,' Emma Sulkowicz, was sober on the night that changed her life, but her alleged attacker, Peter Nungesser, had been drinking" is pretty barf-worthy considering that the piece proceeds to spend most of its word count tsk-tsking at women.

Women get "But I couldn’t help wondering: in our rush to hold institutions and perpetrators accountable, were we inadvertently removing some key element of personal agency?"

Men get "Should I be angry at the guy, or was he simply acting according to the script he’d been given? Bag the chick. Hit it, dude. I felt sad for the whole sordid mess of it . . ."

Well, I'm certainly glad we're focusing on personal agency here.
posted by ostro at 11:07 AM on November 11, 2015

Which is not to say that her stories about her own experience aren't insightful. But taken as a whole, this piece reads as "C'mon, let's get back to the real problem here: women!"
posted by ostro at 11:12 AM on November 11, 2015

But taken as a whole, this piece reads as "C'mon, let's get back to the real problem here: women!"

I don't get that from this piece at all. It's a story about culture, specifically about the intersection of alcohol, sex, and rape for young people at college in America, and about the author's own experiences at that intersection. It's a story that's about rape culture, not about individual instances. Personal agency is not the only driver of human behaviour. We shape our culture and our society in some ways. Maybe we could shape our culture differently.

It's interesting how people can read the same text in entirely different ways.
posted by ssg at 11:34 AM on November 11, 2015 [6 favorites]

The problem is people still think it is OK to drink like an alcoholic in college, to drink to get wasted. As long as this behavior continues these problems will continue.

I don't know what you're talking about. Our business school refuses to hold Friday classes specifically because of Thirsty Thursdays, and the Night Owl service bus starts on Thursday nights. If people think it's okay to drink like an alcoholic, they've been given lots of encouragement to that effect.
posted by pwnguin at 12:10 PM on November 11, 2015

As far as I am concerned a failure to strongly link alcohol with consent/abuse/rape (men and women) is a bit like saying guns don't kill, people do. Sure you can make the case either way but it is much safer without guns.
posted by rmhsinc at 12:23 PM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

if it were alcohol then communities like, say, the mormons would have incredibly low rates of sexual assault, but that's not the way it works out.
posted by nadawi at 12:28 PM on November 11, 2015 [16 favorites]

I dunno. I grew up in a little town where teen drinking was totally NBD. All the stores sold to kids when the lone cop wasn;t looking. All the parents had that "Rarrrr havvumm doooiii wharrr I can seeum steddaa skeakinn roun'" attidude. Every weekend was a kegger in somebody's cornfield, and every year at least one kid walked through graduation on crutches or with a bandaged head or in a wheelchair. And most of them *still* went off to college excited that that they didn't have to confine the shitfacedness to the weekends anymore.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:33 PM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

The mentality of it being taboo was still there, though. I think that's the key takeaway.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:39 PM on November 11, 2015

The mentality of it being taboo was still there, though.

It honestly didn't seem that way to me, but MMV.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:46 PM on November 11, 2015

I don't get that from this piece at all. It's a story about culture, specifically about the intersection of alcohol, sex, and rape for young people at college in America, and about the author's own experiences at that intersection. It's a story that's about rape culture, not about individual instances. Personal agency is not the only driver of human behaviour. We shape our culture and our society in some ways. Maybe we could shape our culture differently.

Sure, you can see plenty of cultural stuff in these stories -- I would! -- but isn't the author explicitly choosing to present it as being about personal agency and personal choices?

"But I couldn’t help wondering: in our rush to hold institutions and perpetrators accountable, were we inadvertently removing some key element of personal agency?"

"Society will give you all sorts of messages, other adults will ply you with all kinds of well-intentioned advice, but ultimately you get to decide: Is this risk worth it? How do I want to behave? Who do I want to be? You could call that owning your choices. You could also call it valid consent."

Responsibility as a general principle is one thing. But is the phrase "owning your choices" in reference to women who are raped anything but a dogwhistle?

And the more I read that last sentence, "You could also call it valid consent," the more it creeps me out. The referent of the "it," as far as I can tell -- that which constitutes valid consent -- is making the decisions vis-a-vis drinking discussed in the previous sentence. So . . . what, if you make the decision to drink knowing that it means being more vulnerable to rape, and then someone rapes you, you consented? I don't think that Hepola actually meant to say that, but that's how the logic breaks down.
posted by ostro at 12:59 PM on November 11, 2015

Well, the second quote is explicitly about men and women and it definitely isn't exclusively about rape. I think your reading of "owning your choices" being in reference to women who are raped is probably not what most people are reading.

And the last sentence is a little bit of cleverness, moving the word consent from the context of sex to the broader context of drinking and becoming an adult who makes choices in the world. I can see how it is a little opaque, but I really don't think there is any logic that gets you from what Hepola wrote to drinking equals consent. Sure, if you just read the last few sentences and ignore the rest of piece, you might be able to squint and see that, but the context clearly does not support that conclusion. Just a few paragraphs up, Hepola writes about the need to discuss men drinking instead of women!
posted by ssg at 1:36 PM on November 11, 2015

It's really hard to imagine a scenario where a rapist has less agency over the action of raping than the victim of the rape. Yet, somehow, with every rape, there is at least one person willing to ague that this is that scenario.

Whether the man is drunk or not, blacked out or not, he's still responsible. We regard drunk drivers with considerable distaste and disgust, but, drunk rapists? Eh, it's just what guys are like. Whatta ya gonna do?
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:30 PM on November 11, 2015 [16 favorites]

We regard drunk drivers with considerable distaste and disgust, but, drunk rapists? Eh, it's just what guys are like. Whatta ya gonna do?

Regarding drunk drivers as anything worse than "Some people just can't hold their liquor, amirite?" is a relatively recent social construction. Sexual assault is slooowly moving in that direction too.
posted by Etrigan at 2:39 PM on November 11, 2015 [3 favorites]

@philip-random has it, I think. At least in terms of learning how to get your drink in safely.

Having local heads teach you, in the purest sense of the word "teach", how to get high is a good thing. And let's face it: drinking is about getting high. Even a few drinks at the end of the day is one person's third of a joint.
posted by clvrmnky at 4:48 PM on November 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

Then there's how colleges give fraternities a de facto monopoly on the serving of alcohol at parties, and then they wonder why fraternities have a reputation as rape factories (e.g., Sigma Alpha Epsilon's nickname as Sexual Assault Expected).
posted by jonp72 at 5:33 PM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

fraternities have a reputation as rape factories because there are a lot of rapists there. a keg doesn't cause rape.
posted by nadawi at 5:37 PM on November 11, 2015 [9 favorites]

Nadawi, a keg doesn't cause drunk driving accidents either, but it would be absurd not to link them. We need to be emphasizing to men that hooking up while extremely drunk, esp with someone you don't know, is fucking dangerous for the other party, in the same way we have emphasized this about driving in the past 40 years.
posted by goodnight to the rock n roll era at 7:25 PM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

Nadawi, I see what you are saying, but as I get older and think about both of my experiences of rape, they are vastly different.
In both encounters, we'd both been drinking. The first, not so heavily on my part, very heavily on his, and it was my first time having sex ( "lost virginity" is a horrible way to describe sex for the the first time for either party, either sex, no matter the configuration, ever...yuck...just, ewwwww) We were really young, and as I look back on it as an adult, I know this guy is not a sexual predator, he didn't know I was a virgin (again, yuck) and I hated him for so many years and thought he was a devil and whatever but now I just think...Jesus, kids are idiots. I yelled stop for sure, but I still can't help think being high as hell makes everything very hard to gauge. In conclusion, I think he's fucking horrified that he raped me. In no way do I think he meant to. ( Not "felt" raped. Fuck that. He raped me and he knows it. But I really think he had no idea that was what was happening at the time, honestly. He was just all, " You hate this? Ill get done faster. I'm so high. ")

My second rape was administered (what is the word, here?) by a very famous guy who was 20 years older than me and was waiting until I was drunk enough before he assaulted me. He knew better and he planned it. I became easy pickin's and I know it now. That guy is a fucked up, evil fuck. Just...a total fuck predator and his brutality was stunning, along with his utterly stunned face when I called the police...from his "visiting professor" room at fancy college.

While I still obviously view them both as rape, I'm stunned by my own ability to downplay the first. I hadn't even really ever "made-out" with a guy, a thing I was pretty sure I was down for....and it went sideways so hard, I'm just still not sure he had the capacity to know how serious I was because BOOZE.

The second, we had hung out a couple times, I was in my early 20's, I absolutely thought we were going to have sex YAY and BAM there is no condom so instead of a myriad of options, I'm going to violently rape your ass (won't get pregnant!) and call you a child and pussy and whatever else for not having planned for this option and not liking it (to put it mildly.)

Being raped is as complicated as anything, and this article was weirdly lacking on the point it was trying to make.

I dunno. Thanks for sharing, though. Food for thought.
posted by metasav at 7:25 PM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is framed very much as an American problem -- I note that Americans have a weird, and somewhat toxic relationship with alcohol, which I put down to them not learning how to drink at a sensible age under adult supervision. Instead of being eased in to alcohol by their parents during their teens, they suddenly hit 21 and wham! full access.

This is, unfortunately, not well borne out by evidence. There are lots of studies around the world (including Europe and the UK) that show that the earlier an adolescent starts to drink, the more likely they are to develop alcohol problems later in life. The role of family in mitigating this effect is not what we would like it to be. There's a nice health columnist-lay review of relevant data here.
The data also suggest that the most critical roles parents play in children's alcohol use is to monitor their kids' drinking and to set a good example of moderation (formal UK policy guidance document here - warning, giant pdf).
posted by gingerest at 7:40 PM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

fraternities have a reputation as rape factories because there are a lot of rapists there. a keg doesn't cause rape.

But frats providing the alcohol is part and parcel of how sexual assault functions there and there's a more complicated dynamic going on.

The piece was interesting, but I thought she struggled to connect the specifics of her personal rather extreme experience with alcohol to the more general interplay of alcohol with sexual assault, though there were points in the article (like the gross encounter in the diner) where the two parts connected perfectly.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:46 PM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

Instead of being eased in to alcohol by their parents during their teens, they suddenly hit 21 and wham! full access.

See, i disagree with the premise of this somewhat. I started drinking in high school, and probably 99% of my friends did as well. It was ubiquitously accessible, and there were even many stores i could go into and just buy beer/wine/whatever pretty much around when i was 16(liquor was a different story, but that didn't stop us from much). We were drinking every weekend, and several times a week.

I grew up with, and still know a lot of hard partying drunks.

I've also, unfortunately, ended up having quite a few(which to me, is more than like 1-2) people whom i thought i could call friends turn out to be rapists.

They were invariably the least drunk ones, every time. They were the ones who bided their time and waited for everyone else to get wasted. This has already been covered in the thread, but seriously, it bears repeating.

I know it's anecdotal, or whatever, but everything i've experienced and the depressingly many stories i've heard passed on from friends... in all of them that involved alcohol where anyone was paying attention to the rapist involved, they were just nursing their second beer all night.

If they got busted or fought off before they assaulted someone(but when it was 100% obvious they were trying to) they were always "omg i was so drunk i'm sorry" and people knew that was bullshit.

In no way am i saying there aren't drunk rapists out there, but from what i've seen the relationship alcohol has to them is as a smokescreen, and as something for everyone else to heavily imbibe while they touch it just enough to give themselves cover of "drinking" just like everyone else in whatever social situation is involved.

There's a separate discussion to be had about american binge drinking culture, but i'm firmly on the side of nadawi and others here that i just can't get behind this approach. Everything i've seen, heard, and learned tells me it's wrong a huge majority of the time.
posted by emptythought at 9:58 PM on November 11, 2015 [7 favorites]

It's probably inevitable given the damage caused and the emotional stakes, but the whole "risky choices vs. victim blaming" thing seems to get the causal chain confused with culpability. In other arenas we're able to separate these. Not to compare the crimes, but by way of metaphor it's my understanding that in car accidents alcohol is often listed as a related cause even for drivers that ultimately aren't found responsible for the accident itself. In other words, you may be the victim of a horrific crash, found criminally not responsible for it and yet have your alcohol consumption noted as a related cause - contributing causes are acknowledged but separated from proximate causes and ultimate responsibility.

So I think it's possible to talk about the alcohol consumption of both parties - and even address that of the victim - without resorting to blame shifting. There are proximate causes, the aggressor's behavior, and contributory causes. To pretend that the latter category doesn't even exist and then focus solely on the behaviors of others seems counterproductive.
posted by SoFlo1 at 6:31 AM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

"In other arenas we're able to separate these."

That's not really true. There is a psychological bias toward victim blaming, all else being equal, because in general people like to feel like they have control over their lives and so people who have experienced any sort of misfortune or trauma tend to frame things in terms of "I should have made different choices".

But with sexual violence against women, all things are not equal and this preexisting bias is leveraged and encouraged and amplified a hundredfold. Our cultural approach to male sexual violence is to almost think of it as some fact of nature. For example, when people hike into the wilderness and are caught by an unexpected winter storm, the presumption of responsibility and fault is almost entirely on the hiker because we accept as a premise that you can't blame nature. This is how we tend to approach male sexual violence and so all the focus is placed on women, as if they were hikers making foolish decisions.

This isn't some idiosyncratic accident of culture, it's functional, it's a core part of rape culture. And it's pretty absurd to contest this point when you only have to look to the very recent past to find ubiquitous arguments made that are what most of us now would see as egregious and hateful victim blaming. You only have to look at the way that victims are placed under scrutiny, both legal and in the media. You only have to look at the low rate of rape prosecutions and the low rate of convictions. And, while I know I've written this repeatedly here over the years but I'm going to continue to do so, you only have to have experience in rape crisis, as I have, and have personally witnessed rape survivors being interrogated about their choices by law enforcement, medical professionals, their friends and family, and their partners.

Everything is arrayed in our culture towards placing all the responsibility not on the men who commit sexual violence, but on the women who are their victims. Public discussion and effort is heavily tilted toward avoidance and self-defense -- where women should and shouldn't go, what things they should or shouldn't do, how they are expected to fight back when attacked -- and, when they are assaulted, it finds them at fault for failing to do all those things they were expected to do. If not simply labeling them as liars. Public discussion of male assailants is all about the mixed messages in culture, about the ambiguities of socializing and negotiating sex, about impaired judgment such as in this post, or about highly stylized male predators that can safely be regarded as nothing at all like any man anyone actually knows.

In that context, it's not only not counterproductive to spend time talking about these contributory causes of sexual violence, it's actively harmful and reinforces its prevalence. This kind of discussion is a function of rape culture and despite appearances, it serves the purposes of rapists.

Despite whatever problems American culture has with drinking, you know what, in the end, has been truly effective in reducing drunk driving and the injuries and fatalities that drunk drivers cause? Aggressive criminal enforcement of drunk driving laws and aggressive prosecution of drunk drivers. When our society exerts a similar amount of effort on enforcing laws against sexual assault and on prosecuting rapists, then it will be time for discussion and effort to address these contributory factors. Until then, it's a destructive diversion.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:02 AM on November 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

The problem is people still think it is OK to drink like an alcoholic in college, to drink to get wasted.

This is not remotely the only way to "drink like an alcoholic," as alcoholics use their intoxicant in all sorts of ways. If you accept and perpetuate the image of Dudley Moore as Arthur or Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas as the only ways alcoholics behave you are doing yourself and others a disservice. The term you want is "binge drinking" and it may or may not be connected with or a precursor to alcoholism.
posted by phearlez at 8:26 AM on November 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

"This is not remotely the only way to 'drink like an alcoholic,' as alcoholics use their intoxicant in all sorts of ways."

I don't really understand that whole framing, really. Not only are you correct that alcoholics vary in their drinking habits, I'm having a lot of trouble with the assumption that somehow binge-drinking, blackout consumption of alcohol is the locus in which all or most of this alcohol-related sexual violence exists. It's not.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:55 AM on November 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

And let's point out that Bloomingdale's just got caught out for having an ad that makes light of the abuse of alcohol to make people easier to victimize. The sad part is that I really doubt the ad writer did it intentionally - they probably thought it was a bit of a funny prank to pull.

Which illustrates why it's so problematic to argue about what the victim was drinking.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:55 AM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

In that context, it's not only not counterproductive to spend time talking about these contributory causes of sexual violence, it's actively harmful and reinforces its prevalence. This kind of discussion is a function of rape culture and despite appearances, it serves the purposes of rapists.

I reject the idea that as a father I am contributing to rape culture by having conversations with my daughters about how to look out for themselves. Why should the cultural context you reference force us to frame this crime any differently than murder or violence in general? Do I not discuss the prudence of travelling in a group when visiting downtown because that serves mugger culture? Does telling them to be observant of cars that follow them back to their driveway contribute to car jacking culture?

Perhaps they are the exception, but my daughters seem perfectly capable of simultaneously holding in their head the truths that criminals are responsible for their behavior, people can take steps to lower the risks of violent crime and victims of crimes do not deserve to have their choices second guessed after the fact. Maybe they're just more sophisticated than the average adult?
posted by SoFlo1 at 10:01 AM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Why should the cultural context you reference force us to frame this crime any differently than murder or violence in general? Do I not discuss the prudence of travelling in a group when visiting downtown because that serves mugger culture? Does telling them to be observant of cars that follow them back to their driveway contribute to car jacking culture?

Because you don't see a consistent societal message holding the victims of muggings or carjackings accountable for their victimization. Whereas when it comes to rape, you have a judge outright ask a rape victim why she didn't fight harder, and used her asking her rapist to use a condom as a sign of consent.

The cultural context is different, which is why we have to approach it differently.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:32 AM on November 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

And with relatively few exceptions, the actual discussions about women's safety don't increase women's safety. When women talk amongst themselves, and especially when they are survivors, the discussions of personal safety tend to reflect actual, real-world experience and risk. When authorities and men in our culture, including fathers, discuss women's safety, they tend to focus on the less likely risks and tend to ignore the more likely in ways that reinforce patriarchal themes of limiting women's practical autonomy while implicitly encouraging women to feel safe among the kinds of men that are actually most likely to sexually assault them.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:54 AM on November 12, 2015 [5 favorites]

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