Kirsten Clodfelter was one of those girls who was raped after being plied with drinks by her rapist, and she has a message for Emily Yoffe.
Last week, Emily Yoffe wrote an article urging young women, especially those on college campuses, to stop getting so drunk if they’d like to reduce their risk of being sexually assaulted or raped. Yoffe writes Slate’s popular advice column “Dear Prudence,” of which I am an avid reader. Traditionally, much of Yoffe’s writing has offered at least a thoughtful perspective on issues that are complicated or don’t always have a clear answer, but this piece is not one of them. “College Women: Stop Drinking” is disappointing and dangerous.
As many other writers and bloggers have aptly discussed already, teaching men not to engage in risk-taking behavior that has the potential to hurt or victimize others—educating men not to rape—is the fundamental, and most important, part of abdicating rape culture. In her piece, Yoffe uses Antonia Abbey’s research (some of which, by the way, is more than twenty years old) to note that “more than 80 percent of campus sexual assaults involve alcohol,” though she fails to make clear that the perpetrators of sexual assault are often more likely than the victims to be intoxicated. And even if this weren’t the case, how can it seem acceptable to put the onus of risk avoidance squarely on the shoulders of college-aged girls when the reality is that ALL college students would be safer and better off if they drank responsibly?
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As an undergraduate, I was not quite a prime example of the young women Yoffe addresses in her article. I didn’t drink often, and despite what Yoffe claims, when I did choose to drink or party with my friends, these actions were not the product of a post-feminist society in which I was brought up being told that I have every right to match men drink for drink without somehow asking for it (though girls do have this right and are not asking for it). Conversely, I was not any more deterred from drinking by the anxious “advice” I received from my father, a single dad who, as I was growing up, echoed many of the warnings Yoffe offers in her piece.
The summer after my freshman year of college, I traveled with two close male friends whom I’d known for years to Montreal. Our first night there, we were chatted up by Jerimiah, an affable bartender in his early thirties who bought us a round in celebration of our arrival and offered to take us out the first evening he had off work.
When that night came, he escorted us to an impressively popular bar in the city, the line to get in stretching down the block in that forever-long way in which all things are exaggerated when you’re still a teenager. He walked us smugly ahead of everyone else, nodded to the bouncer, generously paid our cover fee, and led us through the door like he owned the place. It’s so mortifyingly obvious now, as an adult, to see how we were targeted. Once inside, he made sure the three of us had drinks in our hands at all times.
As Yoffe’s article suggests, like most victims, I didn’t need anything slipped to me — I took each drink willingly. Despite the dangers of being in an unfamiliar city in another country, I was with two friends whom I trusted. Everyone we had met thus far on our short trip had been extraordinarily friendly. And anyway, I rarely partied. A society full of misinformed, well-meaning grown-ups just like Yoffe had, consciously or otherwise, made me think that rape was something that happened to other girls—ones who were far more reckless and irresponsible and slutty than I was. I felt safe.
I started to black out before the night was over, so getting me out of there was easy. Though my memory of that night is only in pieces, I was told later that Jerimiah asked my friends if they would be able to get home okay on their own and then told them he was taking me to his house. Plenty drunk themselves, they didn’t argue. And why should they have? When we propagate the idea that victims are responsible for their own safety, or even when we target messages about consent only to the men who are themselves engaging in sexual behavior, we fail to encourage (or even acknowledge) the importance of bystander prevention or social responsibility.
But instead of going to Jerimiah’s home as he’d told my friends, I was taken to a hotel. Here, my credit card was used to pay for the room—something I can’t imagine offering on the tip money I made waitressing when I wasn’t in class. At one point as we kissed on the bed, I made it clear that I was not going to have sex with him. I had only slept with one other person in my life, news I delivered half-proudly, half-sheepishly: my high school boyfriend of three years with whom I had recently broken up. I distinctly remember feeling self-consciously young as I offered this explanation. I was interested in some type of hook-up (whether genuinely or because of all the alcohol I had been plied with, I can’t be sure), but for nineteen-year-old me, that kind of intimacy wasn’t going to come in the form of intercourse.
I expected his disappointment, but Jeremiah seemed unfazed. Maybe he responded with, “Sure,” and a shrug of his shoulders; or maybe he said nothing at all and kissed me in a way I might have found, at the time, to be romantic. Maybe his eyes lit with the sudden understanding that this was going to be even easier than he’d thought. We kept kissing. He took off my panties. Then he kissed me some more. When his pants came off and he climbed on top of me, I told him again, “Hey, no sex.” Then I came to with him inside of me.
I panicked, but I didn’t fight him. I’d like to think that I was beginning to realize, finally, that I might be in very real danger, alone in a foreign city with a complete stranger, separated from my friends who would have no idea where to even look for me. More likely, I was probably still too drunk to think rationally and coherently about what to do next. Finally, he stopped having sex with me and passed out on the bed. I waited until I heard snoring, managed—still stunned—to quietly dress and quickly gather my things, and fled.
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The part of our brains that helps with sound judgment and realistically processing long-term consequences doesn’t fully develop until our mid-twenties. However naively, I thought that the fun, cool person my friends and I met at the bar on the first night of our summer vacation had a genuine interest in showing us a good time. And though Yoffe warns of predators who act just like this, some with even less obvious warning signs, I have a hard time believing I would have acted differently even if I’d read Yoffe’s article days before our trip. I’m too smart for that kind of manipulation, I surely would have thought, much in the same way that teenagers and young adults often feel inappropriately invincible.
When we fail to account for these relevant factors, articles like Yoffe’s reinforce the terrible idea that if girls didn’t actually want it, they shouldn’t have been out drinking in the first place. In the wake of the horrific news out of Steubenville last year, I came across an article comment from a man who expressed dismay that a teenage girl would dare to feel victimized by the boys who assaulted her while she was intoxicated. When a girl goes to a party with the guys and gets wasted, “this is just the price of admission,” he said, and the casual insistence of his statement, the way in which this seemed so obvious to him, has been impossible for me to forget.
Speaking to this, Andrew Smiler writes for the Good Men Project in “It Takes a Village to Raise These Rapists” that many people within a community (parents, teachers, coaches, peers, the media) contribute to the kind of entitlement that drives teens and young men to target and assault girls, particularly when they’re compromised in some way. Though it’s evident that Yoffe finds such behavior rightfully appalling, she doesn’t spend much time in her piece taking those who participate in it or enable it to task.
In a culture of partying that the author herself admits is not going away any time soon, Yoffe would have done better to take a page from the Amanda Hess Playbook and discuss the more practical and meaningful ways in which we should shift victim blaming to outreach and advocacy instead. The foci of more inclusive social responsibility are many: Reminding young, inexperienced drinkers to keep an eye out for each other; implementing K-12 programs that more fully teach students about consent alongside how to intervene when someone appears unable to give it; a push for policy changes that force universities and communities at large to do better in not failing victims of rape or assault; encouraging professors to use teachable moments to engage students in an honest dialogue about how pervasive our rape culture is; reinforcing the reality that one’s gender does not determine their value, that women are not objects, and that the responsibility for prevention falls on the shoulders of many people long, long before the first drink is ordered at the bar.
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In a response to her critics, Yoffe acknowledges that other action needs to be taken too, particularly in how we educate men about consent, but that “[i]n the meantime, this weekend, some young, intoxicated women will wake up next to guys they never wanted to sleep with.” To warn people (and not just women, but everyone) that predators find drunk, vulnerable girls to be easy targets is not irrelevant to rape prevention. But in the way Yoffe elects to address it, she perpetuates the idea that the women who fall outside of the safest or most conservative standards are, in fact, asking for it, that rape is still just a women’s problem. (Though Yoffe does state emphatically that “perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crime,” in a piece that talks almost exclusively about how the best way to prevent rape is for girls to get less drunk, what else can we expect the take-home message to be?) Even worse, to the most twisted and predatory young perpetrators, Yoffe’s sentiments can easily be misinterpreted as yet another justification for these crimes, empowering rapists who seek out and prey on victims who are too drunk to say no.
Not long ago, one of the friends who accompanied me on that trip to Montreal (perhaps forgetting in the intervening decade what happened to me there) casually mentioned that he feels the media makes too big a deal out of rape culture, that although things are surely bad for women in some parts of our country and elsewhere in the world, the hysterical, hypersensitive concerns over objectification, sexism, or victimization don’t very accurately reflect what he’s witnessed or experienced, that rape culture in America hasn’t been his reality. I think articles like Emily Yoffe’s, and the ideas they condone, are likely a big part of the reason why.
Originally appeared at As It Ought To Be
Photo: Flickr/GermanDragon
Human bodies have more moving parts than an auto and are certainly more dangerous than heavy equipment; maybe they shouldn’t be operated intoxicated…
The awful fact of the matter is that remarkably how often people who drink like they want to F a stranger end up getting just that.
I emailed Emily Yoffe about her article and of course I never got an answer back. I’m glad someone is publicly critisizing it
In the past month, three sexual assaults have occurred at night at my university. None of the women assaulted were drunk, they were just trying to get home. Emily Yoffe is missing the point that lots of women can be raped even if they are not drunk and therefore more vulnerable.
I suspect if you divided rape into different categories, The violent type assault you’ve mentioned would be the classification that has had the most reduction since the 80’s. That may be the lowhanging fruit that can be pushed to even lower numbers by the explosion of CCTV, security DVR, Car Cam’s and smartphones. The type of criminal that commits those rapes tends to repeat it. Heck some of the latest smartphones can be set with a “phrase” that start recordings or with a little help from app-developers could call for help and give gps location update continuously to the police/911/999.… Read more »
that was a very real sexual assualt as honestly spoken as possible. 20 years ago that would not be considered as ugly as it appears now. I pretty much just puke when I start to black out. no one bothers me. and it still works today.
There is nothing wrong with telling people to lock there doors so they don’t get robed. The issue is in assuming that if you did not lock your doors you wanted to be robed.
“educating men not to rape” yah I have zero faith in that ever working unless your arguing that rape is done on accident.
“Bystander prevention” …”Social responsibility”….vs. a psychopath wearing a sheep’s mask….
Horrific story…I am so sorry that happened to you, Kirsten….
I hear stories about the teens around here in our affluent suburb getting blasted every weekend and hanging out on the beach….any one of them could become vulnerable to something as horrible as what happened to you….
I’m pretty suspicious of “predator-speak” as well. I do think that alcohol empowers both parties to make bad judgments, and is an efficient thing to be critiqued, if we want to prevent sexual assaults, things that are defined “post facto” as sexual assaults, or iffy sex in general. Even if that flies in the face of current ideology. The business reifying men as “rapists” much of the time is misandric and depends on stereotypes as much as anything. Many of the tactics mentioned on this page are great, too.
I think there needs to be messaging to both sides of the equation. Messaging to all people not to take advantage of others who have had too much to drink and teach those that are going to drink how to set up a system so that everyone is safe. And dealing with excessive drinking is about a lot more than sexual assault. We read stories all too often about how excessive alcohol consumption has led to a college student’s death. Just like we teach young kids about the buddy system to protect them from predators, college students need to learn… Read more »
I wonder whether Emily Yoffe’s piece is being judged unfairly here. One cannot say everything at once. Giving a message to college women concerning their own safety doesn’t mean that there are no messages for potential perpetrators, bystanders, or college men concerning their safety. It just means that, in that particular piece, at that particular time, she was addressing college women. I also wonder whether, in the necessary effort to overcome the impression that the rape victim brought the rape upon themselves somehow, many have gone to the extreme of treating the rape victim as if they had no agency,… Read more »
We certainly need a holistic approach to ending rape. We definitely need to empower women (and men) to be as safe as possible, because we know predators are out there. But that’s not new news. My mom told me, and her mom told her, that you have to keep your wits about you and not drink alcohol (or wear slutty clothes) “Because boys will take advantage of you”. But that message, as enduring as it has been, isn’t ending rape. And it CERTAINLY isn’t ending female-perpetrated rape! As I said above, we definitely need to teach young people self-defense and… Read more »
I don’t see Yoffe claiming that the problem of rape would be solved if we just warned young women more. Rather, I see her saying that it is an important message in its place, a message that is under threat from the messages from certain quarters of feminism that have surrounded the subject and from the way that such groups have framed the discussion. These messages and their related sensitivities tend to resist any appeal to the agency of women (who are perceived as potential victims of rape, rather than potential persons who escape being raped) lest we appear to… Read more »
“But my issue with Yoffe’s piece is that her warning isn’t for young people, it’s for young *women,*” Maybe that’s because young men and men in general in this culture are always supposed to “Want It”. One hell of an amount of guys have a “beer goggles” or worse story about the women whom they woke up with, Whom they never would have slept with sober or without extremely large amounts of alcohol. As a culture we assume men are the sexual aggressors…….but we all should all by now know that is not always the case. Women take advantage of… Read more »
Sleeping with someone you’re not attracted to and sleeping with someone against their will are two ENTIRELY different things. It seems like you’re saying that “unattractive” women prey on drunk men, as if it’s the only way they’ll ever have sex. When you voluntarily go home with someone, with the intention of sleeping with them, you can’t cry wolf just because they aren’t “hot enough” for you. While I’m not saying this doesn’t happen, because, well sure, but don’t try to act like unattractive men don’t do this too. There are entire movies dedicated to this conquest…
If you’re using consent as a guideline, once a person is too intoxicated to consent, if you choose to have sex with them it’s rape. It shouldn’t matter if the victim is male or female, it is simply wrong. One of the cultural “conversations” that is need is about this point…….it can’t be chosen as applying to men or women only……..It needs to be clearly delineated and disseminated publicly.
I definitely agree with your second, follow-up comment. This is why an approach that focuses simultaneously on education about what consent truly is (and how and when people — any person, regardless of their gender — can give it), bystander prevention, AND responsible behavior feels so important to me; rape culture needs to be combated from all of these angles in order to be the most effective. I tried to leave plenty of room in this piece for acknowledgement that of course perpetrators of rape can be male or female, as can victims, though in places this did (unfortunately, yes)… Read more »
Sorry dude, but there’s a difference in waking up and feeling embarrassed versus waking up and feeling violated. Yes, men can get raped. But sleeping with “an ugly chick” is NOT rape. To think that it is, or to even compare the two events is pathetic.
Guys that are black-out drunk and taken advantage of are no different than women that have had the same happen to them. Both are wrong….stop…period. Making a exception because they are men is sexist……bad things happen to men too.
I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I think it might be the context in which you’ve framed your otherwise important point that people may find off-putting. Of course rape is rape regardless of gender, and of course that’s a hugely significant, valuable, necessary part of this conversation. But when you say something like this: “One hell of an amount of guys have a “beer goggles” or worse story about the women whom they woke up with, Whom they never would have slept with sober or without extremely large amounts of alcohol,” it sounds an awful lot like… Read more »
@ Kirstensara
I agree. I think it can’t be overstated that many men actually rationalize reasons why they weren’t raped. One is I would have slept with her anyway. It’s not about what you might have done. It’s about what you never consented to.
I have to agree with ATypical, Trey. It seems your issue is the level of looks in the woman (you make no mention of the level of looks in the man which further points to your prejudice.) That seems to be your main point. Not the actual act of rape itself. If you focused on the actual act of rape and left out the level of looks in the women specifically, you’d have a much stronger case. When talking about rape, looks shouldn’t even be mentioned! Both attractive and unattractive people rape. However, you seem to be saying that it’s… Read more »
“There are entire movies dedicated to this conquest…”
“Birth of a nation” was also a movie…..so movies don’t promote wrong evil behavior?
We need to accept that at times 2 drunk people having sex is a form of mutual assault, same as how we would see 2 drunk drivers crashing their cars into each other. It doesn’t remove liability from either one that the other was drinking too.
I’m sorry that happened to you. For me, I was at a bar with friends. I was approached by two women who bought me food and drinks. It was sexually charged. I would mention a drink with a sexual name and she’d buy it for me. Each drink she would order from the waitress. After I ran out of sex related drinks, she suggested a drink, which I never heard of. She went to the bar to get it. In hindsight I should have suspected something since she didn’t order it from the waitress like the other drinks. She came… Read more »
Thanks for lending your voice to this discussion, and I’m so sorry that you experienced something so malicious. Yes, predators are EVERYWHERE, and it’s definitely good practice to warn others about them. There are many, many, many good reasons that we should better educate young people about how to drink/party safely, about the dangers of overindulgence, and about the risks/possibilities of date-rape drugs. Informing youth about these risks works best when, like sex education, awareness campaigns the form of comprehensive education rather than an unrealistic push for abstinence. But my issue with Yoffe’s piece is that her warning isn’t for… Read more »
I agree with Kirsten, here, John. You ABSOLUTELY need to warn young men not to take drinks from people that they haven’t had eyes on the entire time. The issues with Yoffe’s article were so much deeper than that. We know that we need to be as safe as possible, but taking the drink did NOT make it your fault in any way. You had zero responsibility in her drugging and potentially raping you (I don’t remember for sure if you know that you were raped, but I’m not saying you weren’t – I just don’t want to presume that).… Read more »
Wow, I don’t know what to say. I’ve very rarely been triggered by a comment. Hope I’m not typing anything too incoherent. I just fon’t like to think about it. I sometimes use my lack of memory to cnvicne myself nothing happened. That’s why I don’t like talking about the days right after. That’s why I never use the word.
@ Joanna
Sorry for the reaction. I’m just not used to discussing it directly. Thanks for the kind words about it not being my fault.