Who Will Tell The Children? I'm Tired Of College Age Kids Acting Like They're 12 And Being Told That's Adulthood

Unless the people who use the term make a serious effort to save it from the kind of destructive misuse of it that has gained currency, the phrase "victim blaming" should be dropped.   There is a world of difference between blaming the victims of crimes or wrongs for what was done to them and discouraging the behavior that contributed to the criminals taking advantage of them.  That was brought to mind, again, by this rather lop-sided piece on today's Morning Edition.  As is so often the case with this problem, it centers around rape, specifically on college campuses.  And, as is so often the case, it mentions the resentment of college aged adults being told that they are putting themselves at risk by getting drunk.

"It's a tough line to tread because the blame should still be on the perpetrator, but you also want to protect these people," sighs sophomore and student activist Larkin Sayre.

Telling women to not get too drunk or wear too short a skirt, she says, feels wrong.

"That's not society I wanna live in, where I have to look out for what I wear. I think that's a basic human right, " she says. "And we don't tell men to not get blackout drunk."

But, Sayre says, not warning women feels wrong, too. Her mom warned her.

"It is so hard and honestly, I haven't figured out my full feelings about the whole idea," she says.

We don't tell men not to get blackout drunk?   We don't?  WELL IF WE'RE NOT WE SHOULD BE BECAUSE MEN ARE RAPED, ROBBED, ATTACKED, PRONE TO GETTING INTO FIGHTS, ATTACKING OTHER MEN AND WOMEN WHEN THE ARE DRUNK.  NOT TO MENTION MANY TIMES MORE VULNERABLE TO DYING IN ACCIDENTS SOMETIMES CAUSED BY DOING STUPID STUNTS WHILE DRUNK.  NOT TO MENTION GETING "BLACKOUT DRUNK" CAN KILL YOU THROUGH ALCOHOL POISONING. 

If no one is sharing that level of reality with, not only college aged women but also men, then someone should be even if the dim young things don't like that basic biological and social reality being thrust upon them to that extent.

As to the fact that people dress in sexy clothes to look sexy and to allure people sexually and, especially in such venues as bars, as an invitation to ask for sex, the negotiation of that will be a lot less clear and frank if one or both parties are drunk.  Is that really news to people who dress in sexy clothes?  Certainly it's not just gay men who realize that's what they're doing in that situation.

The piece continues:

Grad student Brendon Smith, who signed the bystander pledge, says it's not an either/or question. Of course, students should take precautions, he says. As one law enforcement official put it, you wouldn't park your Lexus with the windows open and leave jewelry on the front seat. That would be foolish.

Actually, no, in the context of the story that would be like a young man getting drunk and getting raped.  I know it's news to many straight folk but men who get drunk are making themselves targets for men who prey on men in other than fully functioning condition.  For sex as well as for rolling.   The issue of men getting drunk and raped among gay men is a real one and it is one that isn't helped by asserting some lame-brained "right to get blind drunk" which only provides predators with more targets to choose from.

In the same way, Smith says, students should also be advised to use common sense.

"People don't like to hear that. Like, if I tell my friend like, 'Oh, I think you are drinking too much, like you should probably slow down,' I might get some crap for it, but I think it's a risk you have to take. I mean, they possibly could be a victim of some kind of assault," he says.

Oh dear, we can't have COLLEGE STUDENTS being told things they don't like to hear, it might damage their self-esteem.   I remember, back when the age of adulthood was 21 and college wasn't about pleasing the customer* but TELLING YOUNG FOLK LOTS OF THINGS THEY DIDN'T WANT TO HAVE TO HEAR AND REQUIRING THEM TO TRY TO PASS THEMSELVES OFF AS RESPONSIBLE ADULTS that we were advised against getting plastered.   Some of us also learned that getting drunk was a voluntary suspension of the ability to think an act responsibly, you know, like an adult is supposed to act.  The association of getting plastered with being an adult is one of the stupider aspects of popular culture, one that the entertainment industry has had a big hand in furthering because it's such a useful lubricant to moving along an unskillfully written story.

Mixing in the incredibly stupid idea that advising immature, naive, innocent kids that they are putting themselves at risk for all of that list I made above by getting drunk is some violation of the rights of women is mindbogglingly stupid.  If feminism has devolved from the demand that women be given all of the rights, responsibilities and privileges of adulthood to a weak system of telling young girls that they will attain that status by doing stupid stuff like getting blindingly drunk, feminism needs to regain its adult status, as it aspired to forty years ago.  The key to the problem isn't for women to act as stupidly as young men have been allowed to but in removing the approval for young men to be stupid and do stupid and even criminal stuff with impunity.

So, what would I say?  If you think you can square the knot of dressing up like an open invitation for sex, get drunk and that drunk men on the make won't try to take advantage of that, you are a stupid young man or woman.   If you think the police or prosecutors are going to be able to make a case to prosecute that scenario - generally played out in private, with no witnesses to actual consent being given or refused - you are being entirely unrealistic.  They won't be able to produce a sufficient level of evidence to guarantee a conviction.  They weren't there, you were and you can't do it.   Your only protection IS to avoid getting in that predicament.  That's just the way it is and when it's sex it always will be.  I think it's time an adult told you that.

* Or perhaps expecting college students to take responsibility for themselves and their actions was more common at public universities which served a less affluent clientele.