The Alcohol Blackout In the war against campus sexual assault, why are we not talking about drinking

Parents Forum
1

http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/the-alcohol-blackout/

I thought this was a very interesting article about drinking and blackouts specifically. The author is a woman who drank to blackout many many times and had sex while blacked out many times as well (in college and after). She also talks about feeling conflicted on whether or not that means she was raped (she seems to feel mostly no, though others disagree with her). She is about 20 years out of college.

Some quotes:

"But as the debate around alcohol and consent unfolded, I also felt caught in the vortex of messaging. On one hand, I was glad to see a younger generation refuse to cede their seat at the bar and put the onus on men to change. On the other hand, I didn’t think anyone could drink without consequence, ever. I was glad to hear some feminists address alcohol, calling it “the number one date-rape drug,” explaining how predators will get you drunk to take advantage of you, and yet the language made my forehead crinkle. Get you drunk? I’d gotten myself drunk just fine, thank you very much. Inside this vortex was a person very torn on the issues of empowerment, alcohol, and consent—a confusion clearly shared by others. "

“This blank space in one’s story makes blackouts slippery from a criminal perspective. If you can’t remember a thing, are you still responsible? The court system usually says so… A 2013 article in the Journal of Forensic Science determined that people in a blackout are conscious and know what they’re doing. The blackout may disable memory, but it has no effect on a person’s sense of right and wrong.”

“Consent and alcohol make tricky bedfellows. The reason I liked getting drunk was because it altered my consent: it changed what I would say yes to. Not just in the bedroom but in every room and corridor that led into the squinting light. Say yes to adventure, say yes to risk, say yes to karaoke and pool parties and arguments with men, say yes to a life without fear, even though such a life is never possible. Still, there is a point at which someone who has drunk too much cannot, legally, consent to sex. So what is that line, exactly? And if your partner has been drinking all night too, how can he or she detect it? For that matter, has your partner passed the point of consent too?”

I also liked the suggestion at the end given at one of the programs that if your friend is too drunk to drive, s/he is too drunk to have sex. Bystander intervention again.

2

Thank you for posting this. I do think people are talking about alcohol issues on college campuses. But there is a fine line between personal responsibility and blaming the victim that is hard to navigate when connecting alcohol and sexual assault.

3

Are you kidding me?!
That’s all many people talk about when campus sexual assaults come up.

4

@romanigypsyeyes , I think the author author of the article is referring to issues like this:

"In September 2014, when President Obama released his extensive guidelines on how to address campus sexual assault, the section on prevention never even mentioned the word “alcohol.” "

And throughout the article she mentions activists who take the stance that a woman’s choice to drink to oblivion is not related to their sexual assault.

I see the author’s point but don’t know what the answer is.

5

^^^I agree. Many of these cases that come to light involve alcohol. I think the author was more trying to show how difficult it is to know when someone is too drunk to consent, especially if you have been drinking yourself, and I for one was surprised to see how many drinkers have experienced a blackout (20% of UT freshmen, for example).

I think she was also commenting on the idea that a woman should be able to drink however much she wants and not be attacked. This is true. But I think in the author’s case, when she was blacked out, she was doing things and saying things she never would have done sober, including having sex with random people.

" But the way alcohol can give a person power in the first half of the evening only to rob them of it in the second, that was the part no one mentioned… I never wondered if I’d consented. I wondered if he would text me, or if I wanted him to. I wondered if we’d used a condom.

…the ultimate takeaway is this: men and women should be more aware of valid consent when they’re drinking. In my many years of blackouts, I feel certain I’ve displayed multiple visible signs of incapacitation in the company of men I tumbled into bed with. I fell in their living room, almost slicing my head open. I slipped off my barstool. I tripped going up stairs. So did they. And we often laughed about this, as drunk people do, because drunk people are stupid, and then we tumbled into bed for sex that might or might not have been good, but I wouldn’t know, because my long-term memory was disabled.

Whether this sounds like delicious freedom or reckless danger probably depends a lot on your own experience with these situations. But is such sex rape? I wouldn’t say so, but I’m aware other people disagree, and at the rate this conversation is shape-shifting, upturning old assumptions and placing them in a new light, I wouldn’t be surprised if I disagreed with me too somewhere down the line."

The information on blackouts, and what people are capable of during them (driving, doing complex tasks) yet having no memory of the activity, all while friends have no clue you are not aware of what is going on, is frightening.

"Men often talked about unremembered fights, violence, aggression. Women talked far more frequently about unremembered sex. As blackout expert Aaron White, a senior scientific adviser to the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, told me when I interviewed him for my book: “When men are in a blackout, they do things to the world. When women are in a blackout, things are done to them.”

I know it is probably a great impossibility, but everyone would be better served if drinking on college campuses would lose its allure.

6

That is true. But I took away something different from the article. The author says that both genders behave differently when blacked-out drunk than when sober. (No duh.) In particular, some men while very drunk don’t even care about getting consent, and when sober, they won’t remember their blacked-out drunk behavior and will deny that they would behave that way.

It’s not that while blacked-out drunk they’re having difficulty knowing whether the woman consents. Rather, they don’t even try to determine whether she consents; it’s not on their radar. She gives three examples, two lurid and one commonplace. The Savannah Dietrich rapists and the Vanderbilt rapists, both caught on video, didn’t care whether their victim consented. And more prosaically, the drunk young man who accosts the author in a bar pays no attention to her obvious signs of lack of interest. He persists in pursuing her even after shifts uncomfortably, says no and walks away. If he were alone in a room with a very drunk young woman who didn’t want to have sex with him, do you think he’d pay any attention to the fact that she didn’t consent?

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Alcohol lowers inhibitions and impairs higher brain regulation. It let’s the baser instincts come to the fore. It is not surprising that drunk males get more aggressive in seeking sex when drunk. Their increased aggression also gets them into a lot of stupid bar fights. Also not surprising that drunk females may be more willing to seek out questionable sex and/or more vulnerable to being victimized by a male (drunk or not).

One of the Vandy football players testified he had between 14-22 drinks on the night in question. As the video shows, he was an outrageous rapist at 0.3 BAC. Would he have acted like that at a BAC of 0.2 or 0.1? Possible but pretty unlikely.

That kid’s frontal lobe was close to inoperable. The part of the brain that would perceive and reflect upon issues of consent had long since given way to more primal instincts. But that’s an explanation, not a legal defense.

With enough impairment we all will eventually do things we would never do while sober or lightly buzzed.

8

Yeah, this girl at my school was almost raped a week ago.

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I have a friend who is a lawyer, and I can’t remember the exact terminology that he used when we were talking about the campus rape issues, but he said there is a move toward something like “continuous enthusiastic participation,” when it comes to consent and the influence of mind altering substances that leave the victim (and often perpetrator) in and out of consciousness after a night of binge drinking (and sometimes using other substances) and questionable sexual activity comes into play. Not sure that’s any less slippery or how you prove that either.

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“I think she was also commenting on the idea that a woman should be able to drink however much she wants and not be attacked. This is true.”

Of course she should. But even if we eliminated sexual assault from the world, it will never be safe to drink yourself into oblivion. People get alcohol poisoning; they get hit by cars; they fall down stairs. They die. Getting so drunk that you lose the ability to look out for your own safety is always a bad idea, and we shouldn’t be afraid to say so.

11

Agree, it’s not safe for anyone to drink to excess and generally individuals drink themselves to excess as the article’s author points out.

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Do we have a legal limit for “consent”, yet?

What if you are at a party and you realize “Oh, no, I had 6 drinks (inadvertently, of course); now I can’t drive. I’m going to have to get a ride home somehow - bummer”.

But, if you had 6 drinks, do people think “Bummer - I can’t have consensual sex because I had too many drinks”?

How about “Bummer - now I’m going to make that cute person who’s making eyes at me a rapist if something fun happens.”

Confusing.

??

13

We had a kid here at a local college, freshman athlete, who was killed because he passed out on a major 4-lane highway near campus. The first car approaching him was able to swerve out of the way, but the second wasn’t. Toxicology isn’t back yet, but this seems to be another one of those.

14

What exactly is the appeal of getting so drunk that one is either prone to criminal or otherwise dangerous actions and/or easily victimized by criminals, and is unlikely to remember what happened?

15

Apparently, you have more “fun” when you’re drunk.

16

Count me as one who required social lubrication back in the single days. Without it, I would not have danced, interacted with other people, met any females or had any fun. We had a hell of a good time at spring break in the 1980s, behaving pretty much like the author describes, only one arrest from our group (not me) for an open container violation.

My wife, on the other hand, is perfectly social without but is prone to blackouts when she drinks. It’s not something she plans. She has a few drinks, is having fun, has another drink and the memory goes out. It wasn’t necessarily after a predictable quantity of alcohol. She was lucky she had good friends who would not leave her alone when she was drinking.

Now that we are older, and I have developed adequate social skills, there is not nearly the same desire to drink more than one or two drinks in a night.

S1 (yes, he is 21), unfortunately, inherited that blackout gene and really needs to regulate his intake on the few occasions he drinks. Luckily he gets happy with alcohol and not combative. Men who get aggressive should not drink at all.

17

I don’t want to belabor the point too much, but I drank a lot when I was in high school and college, at least the first couple of years (and occasionally thereafter), and so did most of my friends. It was common for everyone to drink to impairment, to drink to nausea, to drink to passing out. It was common for everyone to drink to lower their inhibitions, so they would be more likely to propose and/or to accept sex. In my personal case, it was sometimes also true that I drank to incapacitation in order to avoid outright rejection of someone who wanted to have sex with me.

In years of heavy drinking on a regular basis with lots of people, I never knew a single person who had to go to the hospital for “alcohol poisoning” (as opposed to sleeping it off and feeling like stuff the next day). I did know one person who had memory blackouts, but he was something of a special case. He was a severe alcoholic (never completed college, spent several years as a street person) with juvenile diabetes. He would often lose his Coke-bottle glasses in the middle of a bender, and his other friends and I figured out fairly quickly that losing the glasses and memory loss were closely related and that, indeed, one could invariably find his glasses at the last place he remembered being the night before.

Anyway, my point is: What’s up with this sudden plague of blackout memory loss? That sounds like complete crap to me. I understand that you might prefer to tell your mother that you don’t remember what you did last night than to tell her what you do remember. But that’s tactical, not medical. With that one exception, no one I knew ever had any trouble remembering the stupid, inappropriate, sometimes hurtful things they did while crazy drunk.

18

I think they’re drinking more and faster than your generation did. Did young women routinely drink five shots before going to a party in your day? Maybe I’d have been oblivious anyway, because I didn’t drink in college, but I don’t remember even hearing about young women drinking five shots of vodka before going to a party, and then continuing to drink through the evening. More young women are drinking now, and the ones who drink are drinking more.

19

My understanding from some dead tree articles and from recollections from older relatives and friends who grew up and attended HS/college in the US is that while drinking across US society…including the 18-22 set overall has remained constant or even dropped, the ones who drink frequently are much more likely to binge drink at higher levels and at greater frequency than older generations.

20

This generation has certainly intensified many of their experiences. While, I may have taken a swig of my best friend’s father stash of Early Times (nasty nasty stuff) in HS, the routines and what is de rigueur for younger people have dramatically changed.

By way of example, middle D was attending a house party, in which she made the mistake of asking me to drop her off, when she was a senior. Well, she knows, I’m not the type of parent to stand pat, if things look out of the ordinary. So, I pull up, at her friend’s place, and it is obvious that there is no parental supervision. Kids making out in the yard, music way too loud for this neighborhood–and I tell her, I’m coming in. She knows better than to dissuade me. I knock on the door, and it is meet with an " who the eff is knocking"–I reply in my fairly deep bass voice, that accompanies a man over 250 pounds and well over six feet—“its blanks-blanks father, open the effing door”. Wide eyes and open mouths of about 30 inebriated HS kids follow. Moreover, they had a liquor spread that would make any bachelor party proud. Cases and cases of beer, with no less than 7-8 bottles of various hard liquors. One damn girl was dancing on these people’s dining room table…

I knew the parents, but as it turns out, they were gone for 2 days, and so, without too much hesitation, I said, we can do this two way" clean up all this sh*t right now, or I can call the cops". Place was clean in like 25 minutes. I wasn’t too popular in my house for a week, but I did get about a dozen calls from parents thanking me. Long story short, they don’t party and drink like we once did…