eye twitch You’re. You’re.
You’re.
Where were you when I was doing the bar scene?
Hell, where are you now? Buy each other a drink? 
I normally don’t stray from Cafe Society.
…But I have been accused of attempting to rape a girl. Only by the girl… luckily. There were a few people who knew about the situation, her family most notably, (luckily, I think they took my word over hers). It’s funny because I’m not at all like that, and I have the virginity to prove it! I’m 27, and I’m not saying I had loads of opportunities to clean the pipes, but none of the opportunities I had were ones I wanted to take up. The same applied to her.
I did make a mistake. I let her smoke pot with me for her first time, and should have guessed she would be the type to freak out on it. Totally to blame for that. I never introduced pot to ‘first-timers’ after that.
It was a horrible few days. If you’re a man in a situation like that… you get scared that other people wont give you the benefit of the doubt. You get mad at the girl for carelessly throwing around accusations, (even though in my case, she was under the influence by my own offerings), you feel dirty even though you know you didn’t do or attempt to do anything in that regard.
All kidding aside, I’m sorry you had to deal with that, Influential Panda.
Sure Zeriel, thanks! But PunditLisa has a point, unfortunately; you don’t want to risk making a drunk guy angry.
Actually, I think this custom is even worse when considered from that viewpoint. On the one hand, you’ve got nice guys feeling obligated to spend money on drinks for women who may be completely uninterested in them. On the other hand, you’ve got not-nice guys who will get hostile if a woman turns down his offer to spend money on her.
In either case, the woman has a choice between looking like a freeloader (if she accepts a drink from a guy she’s not interested in) and looking like a dismissive bitch (if she turns down a drink from a guy she’s not interested in). How is this anything but shitty? Yeah, I understand that we’re all just supposed to treat it as a lighthearted arbitrary social ritual and not scrutinize the fairness issues too closely. But underneath the casual veneer of “have a drink, honey!” “thanks, bud!”, it’s kind of a nasty setup.
I wish it were just generally accepted that we’re all grownups here, goddamn it (after all, we have to be at least 21 to be drinking in a bar in the first place), and grownups don’t mooch off of strangers. If that makes me a feminist partypooper, all right, so be it. I actually think we’d have a better time drinking with strangers if we kept the cash nexus out of it (or at least limited it to the Dutch-style practice of taking turns to buy a round for everyone).
It’s not a matter of being a grownup, it’s that gift-giving and reciprocation are standard social behavior. You can watch the same thing in monkeys.
Nastier still when rufies enter the equation. And they do. I can’t count on both hands how many women I know who’ve had their drinks drugged, and not a single one had a drink bought for her (though one was a bartender working at the time). Oddly enough, many of them can’t hazard a guess as to who did it and went home alone (or with a girlfriend), so chances are some guy tried his ‘luck’ with several patrons. Not sure if the woman in the OP was actually drugged or if it was just some overblown misunderstanding (sounds like you only made out…?), but chances are it was some skeeze back in the bar. Or one of the large male friends. Shitty situation all around.
Do you have any way of proving that they were actually drugged, or is this based entirely on subjective self-reporting of how they felt after consuming the alcohol?
It’s my understanding that while ‘roofies’ (and other drugs that have similar effects) are sometimes slipped into the drinks of unsuspecting victims, I have never actually seen any data on how common the problem is, but it is my understanding that most of the people who are taking Rohypnol, GHB and ketamine are doing it intentionally to get high.
Exactly how common is the practice of putting GHB/Rohypnol/Ketamine in an unsuspecting person’s drink?
Anecdote only–I bounced at my fraternity’s house parties. In five years of minimum once every two weeks bashes, where a lot of idiots who weren’t people we knew got in the front door while I watched the inside bar area, we had exactly one roofies incident. Fortunately for the girl in question, the guy did it right under my nose. (in what was at the time my proudest moment but now makes me thankful I avoided assault charges, I made HIM drink it and left his semi-conscious ass on the front lawn.)
Honestly, I think you’re in the right–plus it gives the guy an obvious, clear signal–I was never sure, in my buying-a-drink-for days, if a chick who accepted a drink was interested or a freeloader–and unsurprisingly in a college town, usually the latter. Reciprocation would have been a welcome sign of interest for THIS has-trouble-approaching-women guy.
That…is AWESOME. You truly deserved that award!!
I’m trying to find the actual study that I found a reference to earlier today that said in half of all sexual assault cases where the victim believed they had been drugged no evidence of drugs was found in the blood.
I read an article that quotes this, but I have not found online the study that this comes from.