Blame the drinker or blame the sexual predator?
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The monster in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Freddy Krueger, kills his victims in their dreams. So long as you can stay awake, so long as you can refrain from sleeping, you’re safe. But, as you might expect, the young people that Krueger stalks can only stay up for so long. Eventually they fall asleep. And when they do, as they all eventually do, he uses a glove armed with razors to slice his victims into pieces.
The monster in Emily Yoffe’s recent Slate article on sexual assault
“lurks where women drink like a lion at a watering hole.”
Though mitigated with caveat after caveat, Yoffe’s advice to young women is about as stupid as that given to the young people in A Nightmare on Elm Street. So long as you can stay sober, so long as you can refrain from drinking, you’re safe. What’s ironic is that Yoffe clearly views her advice as pragmatic. It is, in fact, quite idealistic. It’s also unrealistic.
Drinking has been a central part of youth culture for thousands of years. There are plenty of good and bad reasons for this. But that’s another conversation for another day. What matters here is that we pragmatically acknowledge one simple fact: partying is a central feature of college life, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. As such, asking young women to avoid it—for their own good—is profoundly unfair. Why should they have to miss out on a big part of the college experience? Is it any wonder that they ignore us? I would.
The nightmare on Elm Street is caused by Freddy Krueger. He’s the problem. Not the young people who keeping falling asleep. Likewise, the nightmare on College Street is caused by sexual predators. They’re the problem. Not the young women who keep drinking.
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2015)
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Photo: Double Feature Podcast/Flickr
How dare any of you think that the person doing the drinking has any sort of responsibility here…
What are these women, adults?
How DARE you…
If someone gets drunk and gets behind the wheel of a car, they are still held accountable for their poor decision.
I’ve always wondered why getting drunk and then making a poor decision to sleep with someone isn’t on the person that made that poor choice.
That gets into No means No, but Yes can mean Yes and it can mean No in certain situations. That can lead to tricky situations, especially if both people have been drinking.
The obvious problems with your post is that sometimes it’s hard to determine who the sexual predator is and sometimes there may not be a sexual predator at all. There was a very famous rape case, which I won’t link to because reading the entire case will confuse the point I want to make. I will though provide the details concerning the case of the first man who had sex with her. (There were multiple men involved and she was definitely raped at some point, but if the witness accounts are true, it’s my opinion and the jury agreed that… Read more »