It is common sense, and there is an intelligent way to have the discussion. Any caring parent would offer their children the same advice/information, as there are a host of dangers involved with drinking too much. I don’t quite follow how some people make the mental leap, where in this context, calling for precaution somehow means you’re advocating the perpetrator. It’s absurd with any other type of crime, and while we understand the unique sensitivity with rape cases, we can’t be naive and assume the worlds bad people will listen or even fix themselves. And so in the meantime, there is still validity in discussing precautionary behavior (as opposed to an angle of addressing behavior in hindsight, which would more fall in line with blaming the victim-- this wasn’t the tone of the material).
The thing is, her article addressed a host of other related issues, from campus drinking culture, to predators who do and don’t use alcohol as an excuse, to the sensitivity of victim-blaming and an honest attempt to try and avoid it, in tandem with her original idea surrounding precautionary behavior. At worst, I’d say very poor choice in title, but it’s disingenuous to accuse her of blaming the victim, given she clearly spoke against it and had a number of ideas to support her original point.
She could have certainly gone into more detail about any of the particular sub-topics, and could have focused more on those responsible for sexual crimes, etc, but she didn’t. Thus, reading what she did have to offer, it was well-intentioned and good advice. One of the outraged people should put together their own article, acknowledge what Yoffe has stated, and expand on the areas of importance they think need focus. That would be way more productive and a better use of their energy, as opposed to shouting these ideas down and promoting misguided outrage. Too many people expect everyone else to fix the problem, so much so, that they won’t produce content, but they sure feel fine consuming and then tearing down anything they disagree with. To me, that inflammatory (in)action is worse than anything Yoffe has presented. Go figure.
I think we all have a great ability to delude ourselves about our own actions. I would bet you that noone reading this sees themselves as potential rapist, its always about other people.
So any social message directed at men regarding drinking and rape needs to include some direction for everyone to engage in some self reflection about their own behavior, otherwise it is dismissed as being not relevant to me.
I have to go with Mrs Smith here. I grew up in the 60’s and was still actively partying in the 70’s. I saw a lot more than I would have preffered to have seen. I know of groups of guys who took advantage of very drunk or drugged up girls and look back on those days with a lot of shame, but the fact is they still did it. It happened all the time back then and I assume it hasn’t changed much. Young men who have no previous history of rape, assault or othe violent behavior have been known to get caught up in alchohol fueled situations that should have been avoided. Bottom line getting to loaded leads to bad behavior and risky behavior for both sexes.
That’s my standard when your advice is targeted to a specific demographic. It implies that this demographic needs to be told not to do something more than other demographics.
Rather than that the demographic faces more danger than others? Not everyone needs to be told to be careful about walking thru Bridgeport in Chicago, but keeping your guard up is good advice if you’re black.
What’s the value in viewing it this way, instead of recognizing it for what it is (advice)? Honest question.
If advice is targeted towards a specific demographic, I logically assume it’s because they are most likely affected, possess some degree of control over that specific information, and/or have some self-motivated interest.
To tell a woman who has been raped that it would have been better if she had not gotten drunk is not pointing out her faults. In fact, is it suggesting how she might have stayed in control of the situation (by not getting drunk) instead of dulling her good judgment with alcohol, so that she would not have become the victim of a criminal asshole who was totally in the wrong and didn’t care.
I don’t understand the whole idea of “victim-shaming.” I think it’s a bogus concept. When something in my life goes terribly wrong, I look back over the steps that led to the mess and ask myself, “Is there something I could have done or avoided doing that might have changed the outcome?” I don’t blame or shame myself. I just ask myself if I made good decisions or if I might have made better ones, given what I knew at the time.
Sometimes I conclude that I made a bad decision (but I don’t *shame *myself; I just file it under Lessons Learned), and sometimes I conclude that I made either a good decision or a neutral one and circumstances came about (“shit happened”) that I could not have foreseen or controlled.
To look at a “victim” and ask, “How might this <rape/bicycle accident> have been avoided?” is the OPPOSITE of shaming; it is, in fact, empowering. It is asking, “How might I have stayed in control and taken better care of myself in the face of other people’s stupidity, carelessness, or intended malice, over which I didn’t have/don’t have/never will have any control.”
Some of it is Yoffe’s tone and there’s the broader context of the advice. Women already get told it’s a bad idea to drink too much because some guy might rape them. That’s nothing new. Women are well aware of the equation here. Nobody should binge drink, period. Since women already get this lecture all the time, perhaps at some point maybe people should look into other factors instead of treating drunken campus rape as a fact of life.
My old boss, who graduated from college in 1972, said he once woke up in a ditch. :eek: He had absolutely no idea how he got there or what had happened to him in the meantime. You’d never guess he ever did anything like that if you knew him now, but hey, we all have a past.
When I was much younger, I hung out with a woman (she turned out not to be my friend; let’s not go there) who went to a small-town liberal arts college for a year or so, and even though it was church-affiliated, it turned out to be a big party school (which was what she was looking for, to be honest :rolleyes:). Anyway, there was a guys’ dorm that was notorious for their parties, and that if a girl passed out at these parties, the boys who lived there would gang-rape her and shave her pubic hair. :eek: The thing was, the women who went to this school KNEW this and went to these parties anyway, and considered this a badge of honor and would do things like come out of the shower naked in front of other girls, things like that. More than one person has told me that this sounds like an urban legend, and wondered how many of those girls shaved themselves. There was also a poster on another board who said something like, “As the survivor of a kidnapping and rape, the idea that a woman would offer herself for sexual assault boggles my mind.”
I’ll say what the college is if you PM me. I later worked with a woman who graduated from that college, and while she wasn’t there at the same time as this woman, she said she had never heard of such a thing.
I think this is key, there is a sublte but important distinction between advice before versus after the fact. I think saying to women that if they drink to much they may be putting themselves in danger is different from saying “she shouldn’t have been drinking” after a rape has occurred.
The former is sensible, truthful, safety advice, while the latter is dismissive and incompassionate and give the impression of blaming the victim. The problem is its often hard to tell which way the advice is being presented, and often the speaker and the recipient hear things differently.
So? I don’t see why advice should be denigrated because it only covers one aspect of a topic. When someone tells a woman not to drink and drive, do you kvetch because it doesn’t address the problem of other people drinking and driving?
I find it hard to disagree with the rest of your post, but I want to disagree slightly with the above.
No one is telling a woman who has been raped that it would have been better if she had not gotten drunk. The author of the article is telling women who have not been raped that it is better not to get drunk because it reduces your chances of being raped.
The distinction is not great, but I think it is important. No one is blaming the victim, because there is no victim (yet).
Also, not drinking excessively makes you less likely to get into fights, or to stumble over a sidewalk and break your arm, or a host of other unpleasant things. Not drinking excessively is just good advice
And to reiterate my point, for the person herself to ask herself after the fact, “Based on this experience, what different decision might I make in the future to ensure (as far as possible) that this won’t happen again.” THAT, to me, is taking control, not victim-shaming.
I don’t understand the resistance to asking the woman, or to her asking herself how she might have avoided the event, so that she can be pro-active about her own safety and not count on others (especially drunk others) to do right by her.
The fact is, you can’t protect yourself from every bad thing that might happen. And sometimes the risk is worth it. As I often ask myself when making a decision, “What are the consequences of a miscalculation/wrong decision?” If they’re minor, then full speed ahead. If they’re potentially devastating, then think carefully about taking the risk.
I think I already explained that, and so did the writers I linked to. The advice is not bad on its own, but it does not address in any way the people who are most responsible for this problem. And if that’s the only advice that is ever offered is in the way of mitigating risks to potential victims, it lets the perpetrators off the hook and gives a distorted view of the problem. In the long run that does tend to blame the victims. “Don’t binge drink” is good advice for everybody, full stop. And I’m all for making women aware of this - the strange part is that an advice columnist thought she was breaking ground here. This just isn’t advice that should be given in a vacuum.
This is another one of those accidentally revealing analogies: you just compared a woman drinking too much at a party to someone committing a crime.
Thanks, while I understand what you’re saying, I don’t feel it really addresses the idea surrounding my question, if I mayelaborate. Extending advice to a given demographic is an isolated focus; it’s another thing entirely to assume that it simultaneously shifts responsibility away from another demographic, without explicitly saying so. While Lakai said it implies as much, to the contrary, the author spoke out quite directly, against actual perpetrators of sexual crimes. Thus, I don’t see how that mode of thinking is even reached, much less valuable or beneficial in terms of reasoning. I was aiming for clarification on that.
To touch on your comment about the author’s tone, Yoffe cited the increase in binge drinking among women, so despite the claim that women have long been told this, if the author’s research has shown a growing trend, it may warrant repeating for seemingly obvious reasons.
“Most sexual assaults occur after voluntary consumption of alcohol by the victim and assailant,” the report states. 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.”
I’m not going to determine how valid the above is, but if that quote represents the motivation for writing her article, I see little reason to be outraged. If people feel more attention should be forwarded to other issues, I’d argue that they should produce the content, not detract from sense and well-meaning advice.
I doubt that Marley is really outraged. I think what he’s pointing out is that, to the extent that the advice is a general “don’t get super-fucked-up or who knows what can happen” with an emphasis on the fact that lots of campus assaults arise in a party context (and I do think that was the primary intent of the author), everyone agrees with that and people don’t really object to it and also, it isn’t really true that we aren’t teaching that. We are teaching that. It’s a mandatory part of freshman year at the universities whose policies I’m familiar with.
What we aren’t teaching is “The Best Rape Prevention: Tell College Women to Stop Getting So Wasted,” which I know you’ve acknowledged is problematic. We’re not teaching “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk” as a solution to the problem of sexual assault. Because it isn’t one. So I mean, it’s fair enough that a lot of the posters here have read the entire piece from the OP and deemed the content unobjectionable, because I think in a vacuum, the actual message is unobjectionable, but let’s at least recognize that the content is sort of a sheep in wolf’s clothing as far as taking on this issue. The people who see this piece as a continuation of the long and storied tradition of inappropriately focusing responsibility for sexual assault prevention on potential victims aren’t pulling that out of thin air. I’m sure the headline writers were aware of this when they chose how to frame the piece.
It’s not an assumption, though. It’s a comment on the tone of the advice - again, the writers I linked to discussed this - and the fact that this part of the issue is overemphasized.
She spent all of one sentence on the “actual perpetrators.” That kind of reflects the problem people are talking about.
When I said “tone” I was talking about her use of the passive voice in reference to rape and her concern for her imaginary son being accused of rape rather than being concerned he might actually do something wrong.
But that’s the problem right there: if the both the assailant and the victim are drinking, why is she only giving advice to the potential victims? That does indeed shift the burden of responsibility the wrong way.
I’m not the least bit outraged. I think that binge drinking is a very stupid thing to do for everybody, but the complaints about Yoffe’s focus are entirely reasonable.
We tell my Asian son to remember he is not white and in encounters with the cops (St. Paul has a Hmong gang issue, so our Asian population is not perceived by the cops as the “model minority” that is is in some other places) he should not expect the advantages his white friends get. Its discrimination on the other side, the reality is that its our job to give our son the tools he needs to get by in the real world, where cops have been known to discriminate based on race.
Its stupid for anyone to bait a cop. Its stupider for my Asian son than for my white daughter, and stupider still for his friend Isaiah who is African American. Its stupid for anyone to get drunk in a place and around people you don’t know or don’t trust. Its stupider for for me than it is for my husband. Its stupider still for my 22 year old cousin.