I can imagine, particularly about women and sexual assault.
But this also illustrates why it’s not the same for men and women, save the comparatively rare cases where drunk men are sexually assaulted. A male friend got so blasted he passed out in a doorway in NY, now a pretty low crime city but still: robbers took his wallet, figured out too-easy debit card password and cleared out his bank account. Of course he was able to get back the money eventually, all’s well that ended well except disturbing IMO situation of anyone getting that drunk in public, but he also subsequently seemed to clean up his act on that score. The ‘it’s the same, only mention people or you’re a sexist!’ view would seem to say he shouldn’t be blamed for that event at all. Why the hell not? Of course he bore some responsibility for that fairly minor, in the big picture, misfortune.
But in case something more serious had happened, naturally the recovery process and appropriate sensitivity to it would dictate not saying that to the victim. Sexual victimization is extremely serious, and skewed toward women as victims. But how is it fundamentally logically different than the first case? It’s not.
Again, when logic is thrown out and replaced by the fixation on gaining the supposed moral high ground of not being -ist/-phobe but accusing others of it, everything becomes nonsense in the limit.
According to CDC, men not only are more likely to abuse alcohol, but when they abuse alcohol, they are also more likely be injured or killed.
The same fact sheet points out drunk men are also more likely to engage in risky sex activity. I’m thinking rape would be one of those activities.
We can rationalize all day why we more talk more about women than men, but ultimately that’s all it is. Rationalization. If a quarter of the hot air devoted to women’s drinking habits were shifted to men’s, instead of just preventing rapes we could actually prevent deaths and rapes.
Getting rolled or smacked around vs getting raped while BO drunk may not be “logically” different in abstract terms but operationally it’s different because there needs to be a therapeutic mechanism for people to haul themselves back up and repair the impact of the sexual assault and realistically that’s going to be more complicated and fraught on multiple levels for a woman who was raped than for a man who got beat up and rolled while drunk.
If the story is abroad in his social circles about what happened the man can blame himself for being a drunk jackass, stop drinking, straighten up and even view the incident as an extreme wake up call. If he does that he may even be admired for getting himself on the right path. Whatever shame he felt can usually be left in the past.
In the woman’s case even if the incidents are “logically” similar she not only gets covered with the “Stupid jackass” blanket that was thrown over the man, but also gets covered with the “Stupid drunk slut, what the hell did you expect?” blanket. There is little to no social “atta girl” or applause lines for her if she stops BO drinking. It is unlikely she will reference her assault as a wake up call in conversations with friends. There are few socially acceptable purchases she has to get back her feet, so either she is mentally tough enough to file it away and move on or there has to be a mechanism to allow her to get back on her feet and out from under the 'drunk slut" shame blanket. Making the responsibility for the assault unilateral and removing any imputed blame is that mechanism and it works in many cases to get a leg up on moving forward .
“But in case something more serious had happened, naturally the recovery process and appropriate sensitivity to it would dictate not saying that to the victim. Sexual victimization is extremely serious, and skewed toward women as victims.”
What do you know, I actually said that too!
The fact remains that if you follow logic, out of earshot of the victim so to speak, and not related to what you say to them, getting really drunk and having something bad happen to you as result is partly your fault, doesn’t become not at all your fault because the outcome is worse. Not in terms of what you say to somebody, but in terms of just what is.
As for women being called worse things (slut is worse than jackass, yeah OK in a typical general societal weighting of insults), I’m not calling anybody a slut or a jackass. Just base lining it to a logical starting point. We all recognize by common sense the not super serious ‘jackass’ case is partly that person’s fault. There’s just no logic to say that being blitzed (voluntarily, being drugged without knowledge or forced is a whole different story) becomes not the person’s fault at all just because the outcome is worse (sexual assault, or it could be going to sleep on a busy railroad track).
Everyone in this thread is ignoring the real danger of getting blackout drunk, and that is to wake up with penises drawn all over your face in permanent marker.
Yeah … but … it’s a slippery slope. I think real world if a woman becomes BO drunk and she gets sexually assaulted while incapacitated many of her friends and acquaintances (male and female) will impute some level of personal responsibility to her for what occurred even if they think it was horrible. Getting sloppy drunk and getting sexually assaulted is (IMO) harder for women to get past socially than men getting BO drunk and getting beaten and robbed. The onus and stigma lingers for a woman in that scenario far more than it does for a man.
There is a generalized social expectation that women should “know better” than to put themselves in harm’s way, That’s one reason there is such desperate ass covering if women get very sloppy drunk, even if not assaulted, the to go to is that they must have been “roofied” vs simply drinking to quickly or to excess when in fact being roofied is extraordinarily rare.
In any case you aren’t going be to predicate mental recovery therapies from sexual assault on the basis of “We’ll you were kinda-sorta partially to blame you know” the stigma of shame in that context hobbles any attempt at getting past the fact of the assault and into a better place. Black and white clarity of the unilateral responsibility for the assault by the perpetrator is that is needed to get forward in those scenarios.
I don’t see any ‘slippery slope’. I just see a basic world view difference. In mine, you can be sensitive to a victim’s recovery process, but still recognize the objective fact that voluntarily getting BO drunk makes you in part responsible for the results. In another now common view, which I think includes you, objective logic like this is just banned when it doesn’t result in comforting outcomes. It would be painful for the victim to consider their own responsibility, thus this element of responsibility just couldn’t exist.
But it obviously does. We again see this in how our common sense treats the situation where the outcome isn’t so horrible (the drunk is robbed, the drunk breaks his or her ankle falling down the stairs, etc). Of course the drunk has some responsibility in those cases. And again the logic is lacking as to why a worse outcome removes this element of responsibility, beside ‘feelings’. Which are important in human interaction, but again IMO it comes down to whether you recognize a concept of objective truth or not. In a conversation the victim could never hear, that would never result in an ‘expectation’ placed on them, IOW in the realm of objective truth, are they partly responsible? Obviously, or else why would we say the drunk falling down otherwise safe stairs was responsible, or you really wouldn’t?
And another way to confuse ourselves is to bring in the responsibility of the agent of harm to the BO drunk person. That’s irrelevant. If you get BO drunk and fall down otherwise safe stairs, you have some responsibility for your injuries, and it’s not a matter of distributing the blame between you and the stairs. Same even in a more horrible case, you fall asleep drunk on the train tracks, say the train crew does all they reasonably can to stop but can’t. Again we don’t divide blame between the drunk and the train. Likewise if the harm that befalls the drunk is the conscious criminal act of other people, those acts are purely the criminals’ responsibility and not in any way mitigated because their target was drunk. But the drunk has a separate responsibility just like they would if the harm came from an accident avoidable by not being BO drunk. Two separate blames, not one blame to be apportioned between the drunk and the agent of harm.
You can say to yourself that attaching some degree of agency and personal responsibility for her safety to a BO drunk woman who got sexually assaulted is logical and to do otherwise defies common sense but … the problem is that society offers few practical ways for a woman who has been sexaully assaulted while impaired to climb out of and overcome that mental state of being violated and vulnerable. Outside of immediate relatives and counselors there is limited real world empathy for a woman who was sexually violated while drunk. The “careless drunk idiot” stigma needs to be removed from the equation before healing can progress. You can say “but she was a careless drunk idiot” and be right in the abstract sense but utterly wrong in practical ways for the person to get over the assault.
I don’t know your personal details or even your gender but let’s say you had a sister who drank too much at a college mixer in a frat house and was raped by a male student while passed out. She’s now mortally embarrassed, withdrawn and vulnerable and is on the verge of quitting college. What’s your therapeutic game plan to help her get back on her feet? How much do you think she needs to “own” regarding what happened?
Plus … and this is more of a general societal issue. If a man is faced with a drunk, vulnerable woman and he knows that “but she was drunk and did not resist” is not going to be viewed by the law as an excuse for, but rather an indictment of his actions he may be less willing to pursue her in that state.
I’m asking this because I can’t tell from your posts: Do you dispute the idea that women more than men are told they shouldn’t get blackout drunk?
If you agree with this, are you saying there’s a good reason for this disparity? Or what?
If you disagree with this, are you saying that men are also told not to get BO drunk? Because I barely see you even gesturing in the direction of saying this yourself, even in a thread that practically begs for it.
I guess I’m confused because this thread ostensibly is about a male student who has ended up dead because of binge drinking. I also cited evidence that men are more likely to be victims of “drinking gone wrong” than women as well. But you wouldn’t be able to tell that from your posts, since they are largely concerned with women getting raped and the responsibility they have for that.
What you say applies to an individual victim but there’s more to it than just that, we should be able to learn from other people’s mistakes, and yes putting oneself into a vulnerable position is a mistake if that becomes a contributing factor to an incident.
If we would completely eliminate this meme, that women shouldn’t get BO drunk at risk of being more likely to end up raped, do you think statistically rapes would go down, stay the same or increase?
The fact is that memes like that may be harsh on a victim, but serves as a cautionary tale; we are all raised with cautionary tales that help us deal with the imperfect world around us, for example children being taught not to get in a car with a stranger.
It can be cruel to specifically go to the family of a child that was abducted and tell them that the child shouldn’t have got in that stranger’s car, but at a society level we benefit from maintaining such memes as a way of reducing the incidence of, in this case, child abduction.
It’s good to care about the feelings of a victim, but if doing so arguably increases the changes of there being more victims then it becomes less clear.
Besides, whenever something bad has happened to me I’ve always found it good to look at what my own actions were that contributed to that outcome, the opposite of that would lead to feelings of powerlessness and fear, I don’t see how that route would help a victim recover from an ordeal.
All in all I find the knee jerk reaction of “victim blaming!” rather toxic and counterproductive.
If it ended at a “cautionary tale” as it would for man who got beaten and robbed while BO drunk and said that was his wake up call that would be one thing, but if a woman gave a similar tale where she related how she drank way too much and was sexually assaulted the reactions would, I think be somewhat different.
In the man’s case the social circle reaction will generally be “Glad he got himself back on track” and people will let him move on with few lingering judgements other than possibly keeping an eye on his alcohol intake. In the woman’s case even if she has stopped drinking she will held to a higher standard as “she was an idiot and should have known better” and they will not move past her BO drinking and bad decisions nearly as quickly as they would for a man. For many people her public shaming will never cease and there is no way for her to climb out of that pit unless you disconnect any responsibility for being violated and make it a unilateral assault. It’s a social mechanism to heal and get better it does not need to be logically and philosophically perfect.
Um, yeah. There are contests to see how much you can put back, and those were, until recently, primarily for men. There is pride in being able to “hold your liquor,” which requires you to increase over time to get better tolerance. It’s big in fraternities and seen as a right of passage to pass out and get doodled on.
And that’s just the stuff I know about by osmosis. I’m sure a lot of people have actual experiences with drinking (which I can never do).
There is a lot of social pressure for men to drink to point of drunkenness and beyond.
Haven’t we done this forever? Normally some female posters will drop by to explain how much shaming of the victim has traditionally been part of rape, and certain male posters keep searching for ways of insisting that blaming women is a good idea.
Or these posters will try to draw a false equivalence in that there isn’t a history of shaming men for doing stupid things so therefore it shouldn’t a big deal to point out a woman’s “responsibility” in her getting raped.
It’s 2017 and we’re still getting stuff like this.
From what woman have said countless times on this board, they get warned again and again about the dangers of being raped.
Why is it so important to feel like you need to point this out?
If you’d criticize a man for the same stupidity, then you can criticize a woman. When that NBA player got piss drunk and brought home two strange ladies and they robbed him blind, that wasn’t his “fault” but that didn’t make him any less a damn fool. Getting really, really drunk and bringing strangers home, or worse, going to their place, is very risky behavior and there’s nothing wrong with pointing it out as such.
