Thanks to Wikimedia for the image.
This controversial essay addresses the question of whether the concept of date rape under the influence exists in a double standard with the notion that people under the influence of alcohol should be responsible for their own actions. Consent where alcohol is involved is a tangled issue, as I’ve discussed previously, because of how social pressures to drink interact with social pressures to have sex. Add in the altered state that alcohol induces, and it can be a recipe for disaster.
Consider this point from the essay:
If you’re blacked-out drunk, but still capable of talking, walking and doing things, you’re still responsible for your actions and your decisions. … in almost every aspect of life, being blacked-out, stumbling drunk does not relieve you of responsibility for the actions you take or the decisions you make; except in this ridiculous double standard of sexual consent.
On the one hand, this makes a lot of sense: why treat sex as its own sphere, as something different? How is choosing to have sex under the influence different than choosing to get into a car, or swim in a river, or do any number of spontaneous and possibly stupid things while drunk? From this point, one could argue that any decision to imbibe and then act is the responsibility of the person acting, and should not be seen in a questionable light the same way date rape is.
On the other hand, sex in our society is patterned; sexual assault is predominantly carried out by men against women, often with the use of intoxicants. To ignore this information is naive at best. Drinking behavior doesn’t happen in a vacuum: there’s often a gendered component to who is buying the drinks, who is pressuring the other one to drink, and who is initiating sex when one or both parties are drunk. Yes, it is possible to consent to sex while drunk… but that doesn’t meant that the social factors influencing the majority of these cases should be ignored.
The only other possibility, of course, is to say that a woman is never responsible for the sexual choices she makes while drunk, and hey, why not extend that to any choices she makes while drunk? In fact, why let women drink at all? As the author sarcastically writes, “If women aren’t to be held responsible for decisions they make while drunk, then they shouldn’t be allowed to reach that level of diminished responsibility in the first place. That’s an absolutely ridiculous notion — but one that highlights the double standard we have regarding women, alcohol and personal responsibility.”
Obviously, the debate on how alcohol affects consent, and whether the two concepts are at odds, will keep going. And it should. But we should acknowledge two things: that rape is rape, whether alcohol was involved or not, and that these discussions are not taking place in a vacuum. It’s not as though talking about alcohol and sex is happening in a culture where sexism isn’t present, where the majority of sexual violence isn’t male against female, and where intoxicants aren’t used to mute consent. If such a place existed, well, you’d find me there, probably with a piña colada.
Follow us on Twitter @mysexprofessor. Follow Jeana, the author of this post, @foxyfolklorist.
