To a certain extent, it’s been a thing for as long as there’s been a legal drinking age. There was a fairly depressing episode of This American Life about the heavy drinking culture at Penn State, and it was such a big deal (particularly in the wake of the Paterno/Sandusky scandal) that they revisited Penn State two years later.
Earlier this week, Emily Yoffe at Slate posted an article that tried to make the case that college-age women might improve their chances of avoiding rape by easing off on the drinking and partying. Predictably enough, Yoffe promptly got lambasted as a victim-blamer, both at Slate itself as well as elsewhere. And that kind of bummed me out. Yoffe kinda bent over backwards to reiterate time and again that victims aren’t to blame, but rapists are. And yet it comes across to me that some people are so invested in their freedom to drink themselves into oblivion that anyone who points out that Risky Behavior Is Risky gets painted as a rape apologist, no matter how much condemnation that person pours on the heads of rapists and would-be rapists and generally creepy opportunists who are careful to stay on the right side of the law, if only by a hair’s breadth.
It’s weird. Telling your kid “if you drink and drive you might kill or maim someone” is apparently sound advice, but if you tell your kid “if you drink too much, someone might take advantage of you (or you might lose enough inhibition to do something to someone else that you otherwise wouldn’t), so know your limit and don’t go impairing your judgment at parties,” you’re apparently sending the message that rape is a natural phenomenon as common and blameless and unavoidable as being caught out in the rain or stuck in traffic.
Of course, now this argument has been brought over here. Sorry about that, folks. Drink on.
