Let’s look a little closely at the correlation between rape and alcohol, for example. That’s not a correlation between female drinking and rape. It’s a correlation between ALL drinking and rape. In fact, studies have shown that it’s more likely that a male rapist has been drinking than that his female victim has. So if we want to raise awareness about the links between drinking and rape, we should start by getting the word out to men (who are, after all, the overwhelmingly majority of rapists) that alcohol is likely to impair their ability to respond appropriately if a sexual partner says no. (This would, not incidentally, be much easier to do if we taught both women and men to seek enthusiastic consent in their partners, not just the absence of “no”.) When was the last time you read about THAT anywhere? When we discuss drinking and rape and neglect to shine the light on men’s drinking, we play into the same victim blaming that makes it so easy for men to rape women in the first place”.
Jaclyn Friedman, Defense of going wild or: How I stopped worrying and learned to love pleasure (and how you can too) in Yes Means Yes.
