A Review of Yoffe’s “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk”

Considered by many the single most influential modern philosopher, Kant has an especially cruel view on rape victims; a woman, by being raped, “gives herself up as a thing to the will of another”. Therefore, he wrote, “it is far better to die honored and respected than to prolong one’s life . . . by a disgraceful act.”[1]

If a philosophy titan like Kant had trouble understanding that it’s not the victim’s fault to be raped, then it’s not a surprise that society today is still having the same struggle. A University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill college counselor told a sexual assault victim, “Rape is like football, and you’re the quarterback; when you look back on a game, Annie, how would you have done things differently?” A student from University of Connecticut claimed that a school police officer told her, “Women need to stop spreading their legs like peanut butter or rape is going to keep on happening ‘til the cows come home.” Then we saw Forbes ran a piece written by a former MIT fraternity president, titled “Drunk Female Guests Are the Gravest Threat to Fraternities.” Now Emily Yoffe, a Slate regular contributor, joined the ranks. Her article “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk” urges college women to give up binge drinking so that they don’t get raped. Fraught with inconsistencies and logical failures, “Stop Getting Drunk” is yet another unoriginal attempt to develop bias against women.

At the center of Yoffe’s argument is the link between alcohol and sexual assault. Alcohol has become a common denominator in sexual assault cases, she observes, citing the alarmingly high rate of campus sexual assaults that involve alcohol. Sexual offenders don’t slip date rape drugs into their targets’ drink anymore, despite commonly held belief. Alcohol is their new strategy — legal, popular, and equally effective. Smarter and more aware of how to cover their vicious intentions, sexual offenders have evolved into the campus leader, or the guy in navy blue blazer, the kind of guy that’s hard to link with sexual predators. They prey on drunk women, and they use drinking as an excuse after the crime. Victims, on the other hand, consider drinking as a source of guilt, making them less likely to report sexual assaults to authorities. One of the rape victims told Yoffe she was sickened at herself because she thought she cheated on her boyfriend. “You get embarrassed and ashamed, so you try to make light of it. Then women get violated and degraded, and they accept it,” Yoffe quotes her saying. She never reported the crime. Just like that, college drunk women are exposed to great danger, current victims silenced by shame, and serial predators left unpunished.

The situation doesn’t get any better when surveys report that 40 percent of college students binge drink. To prove just how prevalent binge drinking has become, Yoffe took us to all kinds of college drinking scenes. “College means drinking”, as sociologist Thomas Vander Ven puts it. Gone are the days when students still go to classes on Fridays. Now drinking starts on Thursdays, so professors have given up Fridays for any schoolwork. Drinking has also become increasingly heavy and fast: beer bongs, flip cup, power hours, butt chugging, front-loading, boot and rally are common techniques that are conquering the campus. College guidebooks flaunt this drinking culture loud and proud: “Die-hard gator fans start drinking at 8 am. No joke,” says one; “Not everyone is an alcoholic,” reasons another. As a result, every year 600,000 students are injured by drinking, and 1,800 of them lose their lives. All is a “shit show”, Yoffe quotes Vander Ven saying, and he is not exaggerating.

To stop the shit show, and to retain college women’s ability to protect themselves, Yoffe implores them to stop getting drunk. Her rationale is rather straightforward. If a person often walks across the street on a red light, there’s a higher chance that s/he’ll get hit. If a person likes to play with fire, it’s more likely for him/her to get burnt. As concerned bystanders, we show them that what they do is dangerous and educate them about protecting themselves. Likewise, if we already know that binge drinking renders women defenseless and can be linked with sexual assaults, we bring this message to as many college women as possible. “Yet we’re reluctant to tell women to stop doing it,” she observes indignantly. Fear remains that by telling women to not get drunk, we’re also telling the victims that they shouldn’t have gotten drunk in the first place. That’s not true, according to Yoffe, because the purpose of this message is to protect more women, and silence only leads to more harm. By refusing to draw the link between alcohol and sexual assaults, the society indulges women to not take responsibility for themselves and “infantilizes” them. Colleges will always do a bad job of catching and punishing the criminals, because it’s simply not their main mission. Convicting a suspect will always be challenging, because reconstructing what happened to drunk victims is very difficult. In the end, the uninformed will be the ones to bear the consequences.

Yoffe’s seemingly flawless reasoning first stumbles when she tries to establish the causality between binge drinking and sexual assaults. The high correlation between alcohol consumption and sexual assaults is indeed indisputable. More than 80 percent of campus sexual assaults involve alcohol, one study cited in Yoffe’s article states. But correlation and causality are not the same, and confusing one with another sometimes leads to absurd conclusions. For example, a website called “Spurious Correlations” points out that per capita US consumption of cheese and number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets for the past decade have a perfect correlation. One can hardly agree that one causes another. By the same token, it would be a risky jump to conclude that alcohol causes sexual assault. National Crime Victimization Survey shows that while rape has declined since 1979, female binge drinking is rising during the same period. If we follow Yoffe’s reasoning, we would conclude that binge drinking helps reduce rape. That’s obviously not the case. Furthermore, if Yoffe’s description of the charming, well liked serial offenders is true, then alcohol is simply a tool and an excuse for their crimes. Banning binge drinking won’t necessarily prevent sexual assaults, because sexual predators are still there. Their intentions to rape and inflict pain are still there. If they want, they can simply switch to another tool at their disposal.

Nonetheless, assuming that alcohol causes sexual assault, Yoffe went on to call for a ban on campus binge drinking. That is odd, because Yoffe doesn’t appear to be the biggest believer in rules and the enforcement of rules. In a more recent article titled “The College Rape Overcorrection”, she accuses schools that follow Title IX of “abrogating the civil rights of men”; the same article claims that affirmative consent laws treat students “as a special sexual caste”; in response to a reader’s question about drunk sex, her distrust in law enforcement is obvious when she advises that “turning the guy over to the police would have the potential to unnecessarily ruin his life”. Yoffe’s skepticism in rules is not wrong in itself, because how far society should go to make rules still undergoes hot debate. On one hand, if regulation is pushed to extreme, we risk totalitarianism. On the other hand, if all rules are removed to protect liberty, we indulge criminals. It’s a difficult issue to draw an agreement upon, and I believe different answers can have their legitimate reasons. But Yoffe’s inconsistency makes it difficult to anchor her on this spectrum. She argues against limiting the freedom of potential offenders while advocates for rules to be imposed on potential victims. One has to try really hard to believe that she’s not a rape denialist.

Regarding Yoffe’s defense for herself — “that’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims”, I’m hardly convinced. Do I think this is victim-blaming? I don’t know. There’s no way for me to know because I’m not a sexual assault victim. I can’t imagine what kind of trauma the victims have to go through. I sympathize with them, but I did not suffer what they suffered, and I dare not say that I can feel what they feel. I don’t know if they would feel threatened or accused by Yoffe’s words, or if they would want to spread the “stop getting drunk” message to more women. All I can say is that Yoffe herself wouldn’t know either. How about we stop pretending that we know how the victims will think and react. How about we stop putting words into their mouth, and let them decide how they feel.

Curiously, Yoffe mentioned in “The College Rape Overcorrection” that she was disinvited to give a talk at a West Coast college. Student victims protested against the talk because they say they would feel unsafe. Maybe that gives us some clue.