Nothing Liberating About Being Wasted

Submitted by Mastodon on Fri, 2013-10-25 22:11

Article here. Excerpt:

'Alcohol is the No. 1 date-rape drug. That’s not victim-blaming, or anti-women (let the record show a large portion of male victims have been drinking at the time of their sexual assaults too). It’s simply a fact. The vast majority of campus rapes happen when the rapist, the victim or both are drunk.

And so alcohol education is essential for students of every gender.

Even when willing partners are sober, communication about sex can be fuzzy. We don’t sit down and make a Venn diagram of what we want and don’t want. Once heavy drinking enters the picture, all nuance disappears. Smashed people converse without any give and take and precious little listening, shouting toward each other as if on separate mountaintops in a heavy fog.
...
Binge drinking, whether we’re male, female, straight, gay or one of many shades of gray, dulls our senses and slows reaction times, making it harder to identify our comfort zones until we’re frightfully outside of them.'

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... in an actual, real case of sexual assault wherein a victim says 'no' (albeit in a slurred way or just through attempts to push the other person away), or when it's an assault based on an inability to give consent (excluding the notion that the victim is a minor, I am referring to when a person is rendered unconscious by something, like too much alcohol), the assailant is not relieved of responsibility for what he (or she) did. It's either a sexual assault or full-on rape (if the definition thereof is met).

However it's true to say that people here in the Real World avoid a lot of problems by not getting loaded or hanging out with those who are. One can get into as much trouble in a bar as a wasted college girl/guy at a basement party yet even after they are past college age if they get drunk and start acting obnoxiously to strangers, or happen to have decided to hang out in the wrong kind of place, say, the kind that one does not "fit into" (e.g.: ordinary guy wearing a necktie decides to kill an evening in a bar frequented by drug-peddling biker gang members).

If the necktie-sporting dude gets beat up in the bar parking lot (or gets used as a bar-top towel prior to said beating up), it's true it wasn't his fault and his assailants are not relieved of moral accountability. What is important though is that the necktie dude needs to be practical and exercise sound discretion-- not just around choice of bars, but around parts of town, dark alleys at night, and so on. In order to avoid injury or possible serious illness (e.g.: alcohol poisoning), no one ought to be overdoing their alcohol intake, risk of "date rape" aside. I would also like to point out that a whole lot of crimes take place when the criminal is stone sober and the victim(s) are as well. In fact, the worst, most disgusting crimes in human history have all been carried out by very sober individuals. Examples: Stalin's many "purges", Hitler's several genocides, Pol Pot's campaign to kill anyone with any kind of education, etc., etc. All these "leaders" and their agents were undoubtedly quite sober when they committed their crimes against humanity. Just something to consider. History seems to tell us that humans are far more dangerous to one another sober rather than drunk.

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2013-10-26 03:58