That feeling of utter shock doesn’t quite go away. I’m not sure when I first heard it. Perhaps you never really are. Perhaps after a while it’s just a myriad number of women saying the same things over and over again, in different voices, with different faces, in different dimly lit rooms — telling you stories of other dimly lit rooms. Rooms where they were sexually assaulted.
Someone once told me how it had happened on a Tinder date. Twice. I wondered how she’d had the guts to go on a second one, after it happened the first time; feeling ashamed a second later for thinking it.
Someone told me how they’d been felt up by an ex-boyfriend, after a night of failed talks to renew an awful relationship — waking up to alcohol-fuelled bewilderment and diffidence.
I wonder all of this as two pieces of information filter down, almost successively. One, that Stanford University, in the light of the Brock Turner-related outrage on campus (and the general alcohol discourse all over campuses) brought out a ‘manifesto’ entitled, “Female Bodies and Alcohol”. (It begins with the beautifully sanctimonious “We like to think men and women are equal in all things, right?”).
This followed by the latest, yesterday. Mr Turner himself, prize winner of all things white, male and cretin, will be released from prison Friday — after serving only three months of his original ridiculous six-month sentence.
Because Policing Women’s Bodies is the Way to Go
Let’s look at this, one gutter ball at a time.
First, the college’s new alcohol advisory. Stanford, in the light of the Brock Turner-shaped cannonball that hit them, has disallowed “hard liquor” from its campus, for all students under the age of 21. Beer and wine are still allowed.
Individual students over the ages of 21 can drink in dorms, however, but only in bottles/containers of “smaller than 750 ml”. This, as one very precocious Stanford professor puts it, is to ensure that alcohol is in a bottle “small enough so that you can use it secretly just so Stanford isn’t blamed when you rape someone”.
A new webpage also popped up, following last Monday’s announcement, entitled “Female Bodies and Alcohol”. Apart from reading like it had been dictated by somebody’s grandpa, the beautifully evocative page proceeded to explain at painstaking detail the many ways in which men and women were “not equal, when it comes to alcohol”.
The differences encapsulate a whole range of bodily differences — such as “larger and smaller body frames” and “hormonal changes in menstruating women”. Why one would be fishing out a body index calculator hastily, right before heading to a frat party, is of course, not something Stanford chooses to explain.
Other gems abound such as – “Research tells us that women who are seen drinking alcohol are perceived to be more sexually available than they may actually be.” No references, of course, to the heftier, non-menstruating, non-hormonal man, who may drink just as much — or — without fears of any such misconceptions (heaven forbid) being attached to him.
“Other research studies have shown that men who think they have been drinking alcohol… feel sexually aroused and are more responsive to erotic stimuli, including rape scenarios.”
Stanford was soon reeling from the shit storm that hit right after the webpage saw the light of day, and quickly amended the page to call it “Alcohol Metabolism” instead. They also led with a commiserating, “We would like to apologise for an outdated and insensitive article on women and alcohol that was here. The content of the article did not reflect the values of our office. We are sorry for the harm that the article may have caused people who read it.”
Alcohol Does NOT ‘Cause’ Rape
Funnily enough there are no webpages to actually deal with sexual assault, in case it does happen — despite all the throwing around of BAC (Blood Alcohol Concentration), et al.
So, dear Stanford, what you’re really saying is that if men and women (mostly women, not really men) on your campuses were to drink less, sexual assault the kind Mr Turner were guilty of, would automatically vanish? Funny, but that’s kind of what the convict himself said in court, when he opined :
“I’ve been shattered by the party culture and risk taking behavior that I briefly experienced in my four months at school… I drank too much, and my decisions hurt someone.”
The Stanford ruling is an eerie echo of Turner’s line of thought — this, while it is yet to apologise to the survivor herself, offer therapy or as another professor so eloquently puts it — “put a light over that dumpster”.
They seemed to have turned tone deaf when the survivor responded in her own letter in court,
“… You were not wrong for drinking. Everyone around you was not sexually assaulting me. You were wrong for doing what nobody else was doing.”
By all of this logic, the assailant who felt up my friend on their Tinder date should probably have been able to use “I had liquor above the limit of 750 ml” to quell her dismay.
The friend whose ex felt her up should probably have felt reassured once he let her know he’d consumed hard liquor that night instead of the beer he was supposed to.
Yes, Stanford needs to combat — and put an end to — rape culture on its campus. Yes, it needs a magic hat right about now. But it is completely reprehensible that it is using alcohol consumption — the same excuse that its sexual assailant used — to do so.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)