 Photo by Corepics VOF/Shutterstock 
 
 
 
 My colleague Emily Yoffe wrote in Slate on Tuesday about the alarming frequency of a certain sad news story: “a young woman, sometimes only a girl, who goes to a party and ends up being raped.” Yoffe goes on to argue that parents, schools, and sexual assault prevention experts can help bring down the number of those incidents by telling young women to stop drinking so much. "We are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them," Yoffe frets. Young men are getting a distorted message that having sex with any woman they want -- regardless of whether the woman consents -- is their right. Wayne State University psychologist Antonia Abbey notes that one study of college date rapists found that 62 percent “felt they had committed rape because of their alcohol consumption.” They “believed that their intoxicated condition caused them to initially misperceive their partner’s degree of sexual interest and later allowed them to feel comfortable using force when the women’s lack of consent finally became clear to them.” Importantly, the rapists “did not see themselves as ‘real’ criminals because real criminals used weapons to assault strangers.” 
 
 This belief isn’t just shared among perpetrators; when you tweet that you are “warning young women that there are rapists who use alcohol, not violence,” you reinforce the idea that rape does not constitute a violent crime if alcohol is involved. But the researchers noted that this crucial point is not being articulated to young and naïve women: “Despite the link between substance abuse and sexual assault it appears that few sexual assault and/or risk reduction programs address the relationship between substance use and sexual assault.” The report added, somewhat plaintively, “Students may also be unaware of the image of vulnerability projected by a visibly intoxicated individual.” 
 
 “I’m not saying a woman is responsible for being sexually victimized,” says Christopher Krebs, one of the authors of that study and others on campus sexual assault. No joke.” I guess I’m supposed to be reassured to read that at the University of Idaho, “Not everyone is an alcoholic.” 
 
 “High-risk alcohol use is the one thing connected to all, and I mean all, the negative impacts in higher education,” says Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law and author of The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University. Let’s get this out of the way: If you get really drunk, and someone uses that to take advantage of you (or perhaps feeds you the drinks first), that doesn’t mean that you did anything morally wrong. I tell her I know alcohol will be widely available (even though it’s illegal for most college students) but that she’ll have a good chance of knowing what’s going on around her if she limits herself to no more than two drinks, sipped slowly—no shots!—and stays away from notorious punch bowls. Actually, she also counsels men not to drink themselves to the point of insensibility: “If I had a son, I would tell him that it’s in his self-interest not to be the drunken frat boy who finds himself accused of raping a drunken classmate.” But it’s true, the article focuses on pointing out to women that drinking a lot is extra-risky for them, so they probably shouldn’t do it. Surely this University of Richmond student, acquitted in one of the extremely rare cases in which a campus rape accusation led to a criminal trial, would confirm that. Not how to stay sober enough to remain vigilant and interfere with potentially alcohol-fueled rape situations, or how it's not okay to have sex with a woman who is too drunk to consent. The 2009 campus sexual assault study, co-authored by Krebs, found campus alcohol education programs “seldom emphasize the important link” between women’s voluntary alcohol and drug use “and becoming a victim of sexual assault.” It goes on to say students must get the explicit message that limiting alcohol intake and avoiding drugs “are important sexual assault sex protection strategies.” I think it would be beneficial for younger students to hear accounts of alcohol-facilitated sexual assault from female juniors and seniors who’ve lived through it. Advertisement 
 
 
 
 Of course, perpetrators should be caught and punished. According to “Prosecuting Alcohol-Facilitated Sexual Assault,” a study by the National District Attorneys Association: “Generally, there is not a bright-line test for showing that the victim was too intoxicated to consent, thereby distinguishing sexual assault from drunken sex.” Bringing these cases is, the study notes, “an extreme challenge.” And college student victims rarely turn to law enforcement. Then she was raped by this “friend.” Only one, Laura Dunn, reported to authorities what happened, more than a year after the fact. Not because it’s wrong, but because they could end up getting sexually assaulted while they’re not really in control. As public policy researchers Amy Farmer and Jill Tiefenthaler note, intimate partner violence declines “as women’s alternatives outside their relationships improve” and they’re “able to achieve self-sufficiency in the long-run.”* Interpreting Title IX to include sexual violence on campus as a form of discrimination against women didn’t hurt. So I will present myself as an example that it's possible to get drunk without being raped.
– Slate columnist Emily Yoffe is taking a lot of heat for yesterday's column imploring women not to get wasted, lest they "end up being raped," with other writers pointing out that it smacks of victim blaming. (You can read our summary of the original here.) Here's what people are saying: "This is the very definition of rape culture. And it is so completely tired," writes Katie McDonough at Salon. "Let's start with this: Our culture is not, and never has been, 'reluctant' to tell women to stop doing things. In fact, people build entire careers around it." "If alcohol plays a role in so many rapes, then ostensibly encouraging men to stop drinking excessively would prevent rapists," points out Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel. "If you locked me in a room with a handle of vodka ... at no point would a rapist materialize from the ether to sexually assault me. Drunk potential victims don't make rapists appear." Yet Yoffe's piece only focuses on the role of alcohol in creating victims. Katarina Gligorijevic took this concept and ran with it, rewriting Yoffe's piece in a Rabble.ca post by changing the references to gender. Example: "We are failing to let men know that when they drink to excess, they can end up becoming these very perpetrators. … That's not villainizing men; that's trying to prevent them from becoming rapists." "Rape is a societal problem, not a self-help issue," writes fellow Slate writer Amanda Hess. "Rape has been a popular tool for subjugating women long before they joined in the 'butt-chugging' craze." Yoffe tweeted that she wanted to warn women "that there are rapists who use alcohol, not violence." But that just reinforces "the idea that rape does not constitute a violent crime if alcohol is involved." But Megan McArdle at Bloomberg comes to Yoffe's defense, writing that when people come to visit her, she warns them not to go down streets where people tend to get robbed. "That doesn't mean that I'm saying mugging is OK, much less that I'm somehow in league with mugging culture."