If I were a young man, I’d go to college in some other state.
Related: The truth about campus “rape culture.” Which is that there isn’t one.
If I were a young man, I’d go to college in some other state.
Related: The truth about campus “rape culture.” Which is that there isn’t one.
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I’ve long thought that most of the college acquaintance rape and date rape problem grows out of the fundamentally dysfunctional drinking culture in our colleges and universities. And that dysfunction grows out of the “forbidden fruit” mentality about alcohol which makes it desirable in disproportion to the actual pleasure of consuming it.
So we end up with patterns of binge drinking where students drink large amounts of alcohol very quickly, and often drink with the deliberate intention of becoming not just pleasantly inebriated, but falling-down drunk. Parties are seen as boring unless they’re wild and out of control (“Lampshade’s on Fire” by Modest Mouse is a perfect example of this mindset).
Combine this level of intoxication with casual sex and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. One of the first parts of the brain that alcohol shuts down is the area responsible for judgment. That means neither partner is going to be thinking straight about what they’re doing, and pretty much ensures bad outcomes.
But fixing a dysfunctional drinking culture is a lot harder than just handing out punishments.
Step one would be lowering the drinking age back to eighteen, so it doesn’t happen so much at parties.
Yes, that would go a long way to bury the aura of “forbidden fruit” around alcohol. If almost every college student arrives on campus legally able to drink, it’s no longer a big deal to do so, and it’s very probable that drinking will decline markedly. Less drinking, and especially less binge drinking and drunkenness, will probably lead to fewer morning-after regrets.
Meanwhile the rape of young girls continues in the Middle East and the Feministas do nothing. Where is Obama? Where are Valorie Jarrett and Debbie Wasserman Schultz?