It gets worse. Women are also increasingly drinking wine and spirits, which raise blood-alcohol levels much faster than beer. “Women are also more likely to skip meals when they drink than men,” White says.
Having a meal in your stomach when you drink reduces your peak BAC [blood-alcohol concentration] by about a third. In other words, if you drink on an empty stomach you’re going to reach a much higher BAC and you’re going to do it much more quickly, and if you’re drinking spirits and wine while you’re drinking on an empty stomach, again higher BAC much more quickly. And if you’re a woman, less body water [yields] higher BAC much more quickly.
And what is the consequence of being blacked out? It means that women are put in a position of vulnerability. Our memory, in any interaction with a stranger, is our first line of defense. We talk to someone at a party for half an hour and weigh what we learned. We use our memory to make sense of who the other person is. We collect things they’ve told us, and done, and those shape our response. That is not an error-free exercise in the best of times. But it is a necessary exercise, particularly if the issue at hand is whether you are going to go home with the person. Yet if you can’t remember anything you’ve just learned, you are necessarily not making the same-quality decision you would have if your hippocampus were still working. You have ceded control of the situation.
“Let’s be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice,” critic Emily Yoffe writes in Slate:
But we are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. 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, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.
And what of the stranger talking to you? He may not know you are blacked out. Maybe he leans in and tries to touch you, and you stiffen. Then ten minutes later he circles back, a little more artfully. Normally you would stiffen again, because you would recognize the stranger’s pattern. But you don’t this second time, because you don’t remember the first time. And the fact that you don’t stiffen in quite the same way makes the stranger think, under the assumption of transparency, that you are welcoming his advances. Normally he would be cautious in acting on that assumption: friendliness is not the same thing as an invitation to intimacy. But he’s drunk too. He’s in the grip of alcohol myopia, and the kind of longer-term considerations that might otherwise constrain his behavior (what happens to me tomorrow if I have misread this situation?) have faded from view.
Does alcohol turn every man into a monster? Of course not. Myopia resolves high conflict: it removes the higher-order constraints on our behavior. The reserved man, normally too shy to profess his feelings, might blurt out some intimacy. The unfunny man, normally aware that the world does not find his jokes funny, might start playing comedian. Those are harmless. But what of the sexually aggressive teenager—whose impulses are normally kept in check by an understanding of how inappropriate those behaviors are? A version of the same admonition that Emily Yoffe gave to women can also be given to men:
But we are failing to let men know that when they render themselves myopic, they can do terrible things. Young men are getting a distorted message that drinking to excess is a harmless social exercise. The real message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will commit a sexual crime. Acknowledging the role of alcohol is not excusing the behavior of perpetrators. It’s trying to prevent more young men from becoming perpetrators.
It is striking how underappreciated the power of myopia is. In the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation study, students were asked to list the measures they thought would be most effective in reducing sexual assault. At the top of that list they put harsher punishment for aggressors, self-defense training for victims, and teaching men to respect women more. How many thought it would be “very effective” if they drank less? Thirty-three percent. How many thought stronger restrictions on alcohol on campus would be very effective? Fifteen percent.7
These are contradictory positions. Students think it is a good idea to be trained in self-defense, and not such a good idea to clamp down on drinking. But what good is knowing the techniques of self-defense if you’re blind drunk? Students think it’s a really good idea if men respect women more. But the issue is not how men behave around women when they are sober. It is how they behave around women when they are drunk, and have been transformed by alcohol into a person who makes sense of the world around them very differently. Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them. And that is exactly what the myopia that comes with drunkenness makes it so hard to do.
The lesson of myopia is really very simple. If you want people to be themselves in a social encounter with a stranger—to represent their own desires honestly and clearly—they cannot be blind drunk. And if they are blind drunk, and therefore at the mercy of their environment, the worst possible place to be is an environment where men and women are grinding on the dance floor and jumping on the tables. A Kappa Alpha fraternity party is not a Camban drinking circle.
“Persons learn about drunkenness what their societies import to them, and comporting themselves in consonance with these understandings, they become living confirmations of their society’s teachings,” Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton conclude in their classic 1969 work Drunken Comportment. “Since societies, like individuals, get the sorts of drunken comportment that they allow, they deserve what they get.”
8.
So: At the Kappa Alpha party at Stanford, sometime just after midnight, Emily Doe suffered a blackout. That’s what happens when you begin your evening with a light dinner and four quick shots of whiskey and a glass of champagne—followed by three or four shots of vodka in a red Solo cup.
P: And at some point, do you recall your sister leaving the party?
Doe: I do not.
P: What is your next memory after going to the bathroom outside, coming back to the patio, having the beers, and seeing some of the guys shotgun some beers?
Doe: I woke up in the hospital.
Emily Doe has no memory of meeting Brock Turner, no memory of whether she did or didn’t dance with him, no memory of whether she did or didn’t kiss him, did or didn’t agree to go back to his dorm, and no memory of whether she was a willing or unwilling participant in their sexual activity. Did she resist when they left the party? Did she struggle? Did she flirt with him? Did she just stumble, blindly, after him? We’ll never know. After the fact, when she was sober, Doe was adamant that she would never have willingly left the party with another man. She was in a committed relationship. But it wasn’t the real Emily Doe who met Brock Turner. It was drunk and blacked-out Emily Doe, and our drunken, blacked-out selves are not the same as our sober selves.