Today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed (may be gated) has a long piece on the connection between student alcohol use and campus sexual assault.  Those of us in the trenches, especially with first-year students, are very well aware of how many sexual assault cases, especially the he said-she said ones that get so much attention, involve people who have over indulged, often to the point of semi-consciousness. The Chronicle piece focuses on the question of why this connection isn’t talked about, attributing it to a combination of a fear of victim blaming women who drink and are then assaulted, and federal grant regulations that make such conversations out of bounds.

As someone who was an administrator of a first-year seminar program for six years (and has taught in it since 1990), I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with this set of issues and working with my colleagues in Student Life in addressing it. I also have a daughter starting college this month, so this is personal.  I want to make two points about this whole issue.

First, to say that it would be wise for women to not get so drunk that they lose track of what’s happening to them is not, in my book, victim blaming.  Saying that doesn’t make men any less responsible for their actions. By analogy:  if I go to the grocery store and leave the car unlocked and running and it gets stolen, the person who stole it is still 100% morally and legally responsible.  I am not. My friends might say that I didn’t make a wise choice, and they would be right, but that doesn’t mean I am to blame for what happened.  If we believed that, we should be all upset at people who remind others to lock their cars. So the idea that talking about the alcohol-sexual assault connection is somehow such an example of victim blaming that we can’t bring it up strikes me as not only silly but putting more young women in danger. If the goal is really to reduce the number of sexual assaults, we should be having these conversations openly and candidly, along with discussions of the importance of consent and the responsibilty of men to make sure it is obtained.

And that leads to my problem with the Chronicle piece. It focuses almost exclusively on women’s alcohol consumption.  That’s a mistake. We should also be talking about the effects of excessive alcohol use on men in the context of sexual assault. I’ve preached this to first year male students for years. If you are male and drunk, you are less able to ask clearly for consent, you are less able to recognize whether consent has been given, and you are also less in control of your judgment and your body.  If you are male and you drink too much, you may well cross lines you wouldn’t when sober.  So if we’re going to talk about reducing sexual assault by reducing excessive alcohol consumption, we need to be talking about male alcohol consumption as well as female alcohol consumption.

I’m a huge fan of consensual sex. I want more of the sex that college students have to be clearly consensual. Educating men on what consent means and why it matters is really important. Reminding women to guard their drinks and to be mindful of how drunk they are getting is really important.  And it is just as important to remind young men that excessive alcohol use means that even if they understand the need to obtain consent, they will be less able to ask for it clearly or determine if it has clearly been given.

If we want to avoid the charge of victim blaming by bringing up the alcohol-sexual assault nexus, one way to do that is to insist that avoiding excessive alcohol use as a way to prevent sexual assault is not just women’s responsibility but men’s as well.

I told my daughter to guard her drinks and watch her level of drunkenness.  But five years earlier I told my son: “I don’t ever want a phone call from you or your Dean of Students telling me you’ve been accused of sexual assult, so you better be damn sure you have consent and that you’re lucid enough to recognize it.”  Both messages have to be sent and if fears of political incorrectness or federal grant regulations are preventing it from happening, those fears and regulations are increasing rather than reducing the number of sexual assaults.

False fears of victim blaming are creating more victims.