Denouncing binge drinking is not victim-blaming

[question everything]

By Ruth Marcus in WaPo

The message of Emily Yoffe’s Slate article about binge drinking and sexual assault on college campuses was as important as it was obvious: The best step that young women can take to protect themselves is to stop drinking to excess. Young women everywhere — not to mention their mothers — ought to be thanking Yoffe. Instead, she’s being pilloried.. Argued Yoffe’s Slate colleague Amanda Hess, “We can prevent the most rapes on campus by putting our efforts toward finding and punishing those perpetrators, not by warning their huge number of potential victims to skip out on parties.”

Excuse me, but no one’s suggesting that our daughters should be holed up in the library studying every night, forswearing any semblance of a social life. Yoffe (disclosure: she’s a close friend) is saying that the responsible advice is the one that I’ve been trying to impart for years to my now-teenage daughters: When you drink (because, let’s be serious, they’re not waiting until 21), don’t drink too much. Consider the female Naval Academy midshipman who started with seven shots of coconut rum and woke up in an off-campus “football house” wondering what had happened. (Answer: Sexual encounters with three midshipmen, two of whom are being court-martialed.)

None of this — none of it — excuses men, sober or drunk, who prey on women, sober or drunk, to have sex without giving consent. Men who behave that way ought to be punished. Parents should warn their sons: Not only does “no mean no,” being too incapacitated to say “yes” also mean “no.”

(snip)

“A misplaced fear of blaming the victim has made it somehow unacceptable to warn inexperienced young women that when they get wasted, they are putting themselves in potential peril,” Yoffe wrote. “Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who . . . don’t have your best interest at heart.”

(snip)

Yale law student Alexandra Brodsky, co-founder of a campaign against campus sexual violence, said suggesting that women drink less “preserves the power structures that perpetuate violence” and demands “that the victimized sacrifice their freedom . . . so we don’t have to disturb the status quo.” University of Massachusetts philosophy professor Louise Antony likewise warned that it sends the message “that we have chosen to regard misogyny as inevitable.”

Oh please. This isn’t a gender studies class; it’s the real world. In which Yoffe’s piece ought to be required reading for every college student, male and female.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-missing-the-point-on-binge-drinking/2013/10/24/56c8a70a-3ce0-11e3-a94f-b58017bfee6c_story.html



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Several weeks ago, on a different forum here I was lamenting young women who go to meet their abusive boyfriends "just one more time" and end up being killed. And I was denounced for "blaming the victim."