Ugh. The “elephant in the room” isn’t drunk girls. The elephant in the room is boys using drunk girls for sex without the girls’ consent.
awcntdb, you accused the rest of us of living in lala land repeatedly, but what kind of lala land do you live in where you imagine college-age women aren’t going to get themselves intoxicated with some regularity, whether their moms tell them it’s OK or not? In my world, a large number of kids that age like to get drunk, or high, or both, or several other variants, and it’s pretty hard to keep them from doing it. Eventually, they figure out what’s fun and what’s not, and they regulate themselves. Boys and girls, both. In the meantime, they are engaging in risky behavior, absolutely. I with they weren’t, but that wish ain’t coming true.
So what rules should we have about sex in those years? If, as you say repeatedly, a big part of the problem is that drunk boys can’t tell if a drunk girl isn’t consenting, why isn’t the solution to tell boys that if they are drunk and have sex it’s strict liability: their partner says she didn’t consent, they go to jail (or get expelled, or something like that)? Why must girls be responsible for self-restraint, but not boys? Why can’t girls be wild, and let boys maintain decorum?
Of course, the reality is that girls and boys, straight and gay, all use Dutch courage to overcome their inhibitions and to get down. Getting drunk and having sex is pretty close to a universal experience for college-age kids. (Apologies here to the many of you whose exceptional children don’t do either, or don’t do them at the same time. And of course to you Dutch, too.) It happens thousands of times a night – well, maybe a Thursday-Friday-Saturday night – on most college campuses, and only a teensy-tiny percentage of those encounters ever involves a rape accusation, or even for that matter a feeling of maybe having been raped. Which doesn’t mean that it’s all joyful, healthy sex. I bet there’s lots of regret, and feeling that I made a mistake, and what would my mother think, and maybe I shouldn’t get that ****-faced next time, etc. There’s a fog of guilt hanging over every campus. But it’s still unusual for anyone to accuse anyone else of rape, given the high number of opportunities.
You believe that there is a high volume of rape accusations that are really sex-regret. I would love to see evidence of that. On the men’s rights website that collected all the suits against universities, there was a handful of cases that looked like that was what was going on, but at most it was a handful. I believe the vast majority of rape accusations is coming from women (and a few men) who know they have been raped, not from people who don’t want to admit that they got drunk to get laid.
The possibility that some accusations are false is why a significant degree of due process in necessary in college proceedings. But no one should assume that false accusations are most of what there are, and that there isn’t really a problem to be solved.